Melissa Senate (7 page)

“Mom,” Rory said in a singsong. “It’s fine.”

Stella’s hand flew to her mouth. “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked on a croak, then raced when Rory pointed down the hall.

“Must have been something she ate,” I said. I was hardly going to announce Stella’s pregnancy and any-time-of-the-day morning sickness to Auntie.

As sounds of Stella’s morning sickness or nerves or bad eggs came from down the hall, Sally said, voice clipped, “If she’s sick and you want to stay the night, you’re welcome to Rory’s room. I was just planning on a simple dinner, so…”

“I’ll cook,” Rory said, smiling so expectantly at me that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I couldn’t wait to get out of his tiny house.

“Great,” I said. “I don’t know if Stella will be able to eat, but I guess that’s what doggie bags are for.”

And that was how—upon Sally’s departure to “freshen up” Rory’s room—we got on the subject of Marco, who I already missed, and how Rory always wanted to adopt a German shepherd from the pound. He thought German shepherds were dogs in their truest form.

Stella emerged from the bathroom looking radiant. Had she been faking? To wrangle an invitation to stay? Even though Sally had made it clear that she wasn’t going to tell us anything? “So what’s your specialty?” Stella asked Rory, and off we went to the kitchen, which was twice the size of the living room.

I’d always envied Stella’s ability to do that, to feel at home with anyone, anywhere. As a child, from my earliest memories, Stella would just run in, jump in. To our preschool, to friends, to teachers. As a child, Stella would go from never having laid eyes on someone to whispering secrets in their ears or painting a cat on the sides of their faces. And there I’d be, standing awkwardly next to the teacher, afraid to move, afraid to speak. How were we so different? How could our personalities be so different?

When it came to puberty and boys, Stella just assumed the boys liked her, wanted her to be their girlfriend. And they did. Where did that self-confidence, that self-esteem come from at that age? And at twelve, no less, when developing identity with mixed messages from society, from the media, from your own father’s abandonment, was supposed to do a number on you. And if she had confidence naturally, why didn’t I? We’d been dealt the same parents, the same home, the same set of circumstances. Our mother loved us both equally, favoring neither. And our father was an equal-opportunity ignorer when he wasn’t chastising us both at five and six for throwing jobs. Either Stella didn’t pop her dimples enough or I wasn’t lifting my chin enough or we were both “not wanting it enough.” Back then, we actually
did
want it. We both loved the attention, especially from our father, but really from everyone. At the studios, we’d hear how absolutely adorable we were, how poised, a hundred times. I couldn’t recall if our father treated us better in the studios than he did at home, but I assumed he was a lot nicer to us when people were looking.

“I make a mean spaghetti and marinara sauce,” Rory said. “I know that sounds simple and boring, but wait until you taste my sauce. I should have my own show on the Food Network.” He glanced at us, standing there staring at him. “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing at the round table and chairs beside the window. “Or you can help if you want. I love having assistants in the kitchen, snapping at people to get me the garam masala.”

“Are you putting garam masala in the sauce?” Stella asked, eyebrow raised.

Rory laughed. “Only if I wanted to make you throw up again, which I don’t. Sometime I’ll make you my Indian specialty. Chicken tikka masala.”

Stella started telling him about her month at the Peter Kumps cooking school. Rory gave us his history in short form: he had just graduated from college, a business major, but if he had it his way, he would have gone to culinary school in Paris. He counted the Pixar film
Ratatouille
among his favorites, right up there with
On the Waterfront.

“Not that I’m a rat,” he said, smiling. “But I do love to cook.”

“So whose way was it?” Stella asked.

Rory peered into the big pot on the stove. Not boiling yet. “My dad. He worked for the same company for thirty-five years. You know the drill. The idea of his son going to cooking school almost gave him a heart attack. So I majored in business and minored in restaurant management. I’ll get to culinary school one day. Anyway, I’ll know how to open my own restaurant and run it, so that’ll be cool.”

The water began boiling. Rory put me on breaking-the-spaghetti duty. It snapped with a satisfying crackle.

“You did that like a true chef,” he said to me. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a teacher. At a private school.”

“She teaches at the same school she graduated from,” Stella said, slathering two sides of Italian bread with butter. “How’s that for stable?”

Rory was peeling a clove of garlic. “Stable’s good,” he said, winking at me. “And I assume from the ring on your finger that you’re engaged?”

I smiled. “To a fellow teacher.”

“If she marries him, her name will be Ruby Truby,” Stella informed.

“Ruby Truby. I like it,” he said. “It’s a good rhyme.” He set aside the garlic and started chopping tomatoes. “I couldn’t help but catch the
if,
though.”

“Don’t mind her,” I said. “She has a problem with nice, stable people with nine-to-five jobs and retirement plans. Nine to three, I should say. Tom is a great guy.”

“He wears tightie whities,” Stella whispered to Rory. “I peeked in his side of the dresser. And all his clothes are neatly folded like he works in the Gap. And he has twenty pairs of khaki pants and a hundred sweater-vests.”

“He’s a Milton scholar!” I said in defense.

Rory laughed. “So what about you, Stella? What do you do from nine to five?”

“From nine to about noon I’m usually still sleeping,” she said. “The rest of the time I’m a professional muse and face reader,” she added as though she’d said “bank teller” or “lawyer.”

“That sounds cool,” Rory said. “Can you read—”

A discreet cough announced Sally standing in the doorway. She looked mighty uncomfortable. She clasped her hands in front of her, then behind her, then straightened the trivet, twice, on the stove. “Well, I do have some additional housework to attend to—your visit was unexpected—so…”

So she left, practically running to get away. Rory and his mother were case number two of how different close family members could be.

“Dinner in twenty, Mom,” he called after her with a devilish smile at us.

Rory was true to his word. Time wise and his specialty. Delicious. Too bad I couldn’t bring some home to Tom. He especially loved good garlic bread, even the kind you bought frozen from the supermarket. Every time he tried to make it fresh, the smoke detectors went off.

We sat in the small dining room, each of us with a glass of red wine in front of our plates, which were heaped with spaghetti and garlic bread. I glanced around the room, trying to get a better sense of Sally, a sense of her personality. I caught Stella doing the same. But there was nothing to glean from the off-white walls or furnishings, which were neither traditional nor modern, neither country nor not. There was some basic wood furniture, a matching sofa and love seat in a natural color. A framed needlepoint of a sailboat hung over the sofa, but I doubted Sally wanted me to ask if she created it or not.

What a difference from my mother’s house! The home we grew up in in Maine was so warm and welcoming, so cozy and comfy. There, walls were soft yellows and the palest of blues, the couches and chairs plush with vibrant pillows, the artwork mostly homemade by the three of us over the years. And photographs, big and small, on the walls, the tables, every surface. As I looked around Sally’s house, I realized there weren’t any photographs, except two graduation shots of Rory behind glass in a hutch.

“So do you have any old photo albums?” Stella asked Sally. “I’d love to see our dad when he was a kid. Our mom said he took all his stuff with him when he left.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to look,” Sally said, twirling pasta that never seemed to make it to her mouth.

We weren’t going to crack her. Stella seemed to accept it, and we got through dinner—all ten minutes of it—without another personal question. Her gaze had drifted to my ring a few times, but she never commented on it or said congratulations or asked when the wedding was.

“Well, you girls must be exhausted from all your traveling,” Sally said. “There are fresh linens in Rory’s room. It’s a double bed, but I guess as twins you’re used to sharing.”

“I definitely am exhausted,” Stella said.

“You’ll clean up, won’t you, Rory?” Sally said. “I have my book club.” At Rory’s
of course,
Sally stood, blotted her lips for the twentieth time, and said, “It was nice to meet you girls. You take care.” And then she and her purse and hardcover of one of the Harry Potters were gone.

“I guess we made her uncomfortable,” I said to Rory. “Was it a mistake that we came?”

Rory shook his head. “She needed it. People who are stuck need to get shaken. And you guys shook her.”

I smiled at him, appreciative of how kind he was and how insightful. “Besides, if we hadn’t come, if Stella hadn’t insisted on knocking on the door, we wouldn’t have met you.”

He held up his wineglass, and we both clinked.

“So, Rory, about this dad of yours,” Stella said as she carried plates to the kitchen. “Where is he? Lodge meeting?”

“He left a few months ago,” Rory said. “For a waitress older than my mom at the diner he always went to for practically every meal.”

“Oh,” Stella and I said in unison. “Well no wonder she’s so crabby.”

“She was always crabby,” Rory said as we all loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the counters and wrapped up the leftovers. “She was crabby on her wedding day—I saw the video. So you guys want to rent a movie?” he asked. “Play Scrabble? You’d probably beat the hell out of me, though. I suck at Scrabble. Do you believe that a girlfriend once dumped me because I was so bad?”

I laughed. “You couldn’t be worse than Stella.”

“Hey!” she said, waving half a loaf of garlic bread at me.

And so we spent the next two hours playing Scrabble, then charades, but Stella fell asleep on the couch right in the middle of my miming second word, one syllable. Rory scooped her up and carried her up the stairs and put her down on the bed.

“I’ll wake you for breakfast,” he said on his way out. “Just leave your suitcases by the door and I’ll put them in the trunk for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for making us feel so welcome.”

He nodded. “’Night, cuz.”

As he shut the door, I smiled. It was nice to have a cousin. Not so nice was having to share a bed with the snoring bed hog. She’d moved from one side of the bed to right in the middle, an arm extended one way, her face turned the other way.

I changed into pajamas, just a T-shirt and my old pink sweats that reminded me of home (because of the UMaine on the butt), and slid in next to Stella, placing her arm at her side. I took my phone from my bag to check for messages. There was just one, a text message from Tom.

Thinking about you.
I texted back a
Me Too.

And then I lay there thinking about how it was that people could just up and leave, though if Aunt Sally was generally such a porcupine and not so kind to long-lost nieces who wanted absolutely nothing from her but a bit of warmth and a little history, I could possibly understand why she might be difficult to live with. My mother wasn’t difficult, though. She was so easygoing, so funny and charming. And such a good cook! So what was my father’s excuse?

I tried to imagine Tom, twenty-five years from now, telling me he was leaving me, a suitcase in his hand and a photo of our four kids in the other. I couldn’t imagine it, though. Nick, on the other hand, I didn’t see sticking around past the next conquest. But then again, who knew how love worked or what moved people? People were shocked by betrayal all the time. Tom could leave and Nick could stick by me for the next fifty years. I tried to envision Nick as an eighty-year-old, but I couldn’t.

My cell phone beeped. Another text message. Tom again.

Thinking about meeting you in Las Vegas. Even drive-through chapel would be okay if I get you in the end…

Whoa.

I didn’t know what to text back, so I closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, a sliver of sunlight was peeking through the blue curtains on the window and Stella’s arm was across my neck, and Rory was knocking on the door and saying, “Good morning, sleepyheads. Breakfast in twenty.”

My mother always liked me and Stella to come to the breakfast table in our pajamas, fresh-rolled out of bed. She thought the preshowered, pre-get-ready-for-the-outside-world person offered them as they really were. But the idea of going downstairs in our jammies with bed head and bare feet didn’t seem quite appropriate here.

When Stella and I came downstairs, showered and dressed and even wearing shoes and carrying our tote bags, Sally was coiffed and lipsticked and sipping coffee from a china cup, one pinky up in the air. She stiffened at the sight of us. Which was really too bad. We
were
relatives. Her brother’s daughters, who she’d never met, never seen, outside of images of us as infants and toddlers on baby products.

“Good morning,” she said in her clipped voice. She really did remind me of one of those guests desperately in need of Dr. Phil’s sixty-minute wisdom. She seemed to have a broken spirit, the kind that had been barely held together all her life, but then smashed with one betrayal. I hoped she had a good friend.

“Ooh, muffins,” Stella said, eyeing the basket on the table. “Are those chocolate chips or berries of some kind?”

“Mixed berry,” Sally said. “I picked them up at the bakery in town. They’re quite good. Rory ran off to the supermarket. We’re out of eggs and pancake mix, and he wanted to make something filling to see you off. You
are
leaving this morning, right?”