Step-Ball-Change (14 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
K
AY
called. “I talked to Mrs. Bennett,” she said. “She just loves you.”

“She loves me?”

“She talked a lot about your posture. She said you were very elegant. She said she wishes she had been taking dance classes all these years.”

“Well, I guess it’s never too late to start.”

“Are you all right?”

“Sure I’m all right, why?”

“I don’t know. I guess you just sound tired.”

“It was a long day.”

“Well,” Kay said. “I really just wanted to call and thank you.”

“For going to lunch?”

“I know that sounds crazy, but she can be a little overwhelming.”

“I was happy to do it. I wanted to.” I waited for a minute. I wasn’t sure if I should ask her at all. Maybe I should wait and ask her when my voice wasn’t shaking. “Kay, you know all those things we were talking about in the kitchen the other night?”

“Don’t worry about that. I was just being emotional. Seeing Jack threw me off course for a minute, but I’m fine now.”

“So you’re feeling better … about marrying Trey?”

“I feel great about it,” she said. “I think this is going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“That’s great. That’s all I wanted to know. But if anything changes, you’ll tell me?”

“Of course I’ll tell you,” Kay said, her voice reminding me of the little girl she had once been. “I tell you everything.”

T
OM AND
I lay in bed in the dark, my shoulder pressed against his shoulder.

“Is that a crack in the ceiling?” he said.

Maybe. Maybe it was just a shadow. “I can’t tell. It’s too dark.”

“I’m going to turn the light on for a minute.”

I grabbed his arm. If there was a new crack in the ceiling, I absolutely did not want to know about it until morning. “Don’t you dare.”

He settled back down next to me and let out a sigh. I think he was relieved that I had stopped him. “What are we going to do about all of this?” he said.

“I don’t know. I feel like my brain is spinning. I can’t even think anymore. All I know is that we shouldn’t turn the light on.”

Now we were both staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was slowly splitting in half.

“Did you ever think about getting a divorce?” I asked him.

“Divorcing you?”

“Unless you were married to somebody else.”

He waited a beat. “Maybe,” he said, “just for a minute when it’s pouring down rain and I realize you’ve taken the umbrella out of the car again.”

“I’m serious.”

“I’m serious, too.” We were quiet for a while. We watched the ceiling. “Did you ever think about divorcing me?”

I had and he knew it. There had been a time. The boys were seven and nine, Kay was almost five. Things had been going along okay and then one day Tom and I were like two people who had never even met before. I don’t know what happened. Everything
that passed between us took the most unbelievable amount of effort. Every conversation, every arrangement, even handing him a cup of coffee in the morning felt nearly impossible. It was as if we had wandered into a darkness that we couldn’t find our way out of, and at the time I had thought, This is it. This is over. The word
divorce
set up camp in my brain. But then one day we woke up and we could see a little bit of light and we just kept moving toward it. Just as fast as things had gone bad, we turned another corner and found our way out. Who knows how these things work? When we came out of that slump, it was like we had found each other again. I was so happy. There was a long period of giddiness, and it was in that time that we wound up with George. I don’t know why we fell apart or how we fell back together, but after that we were always more careful with each other. We taught ourselves to be kinder, more patient. We had seen what we stood to lose and it scared the hell out of us.

There was moonlight coming in through the window now and it might have been enough to see the ceiling, but I didn’t look in that direction. I looked at my husband. “No,” I said, kissing the curve of his neck. “I’d never divorce you.”

chapter nine

F
OUR DAYS LATER
, S
TAMP WAS OFF THE LEASH
. Woodrow had brought over a little dog bed for him that was kept beneath the kitchen table, and on the morning of his liberation, Tom and I came into the kitchen and didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Woodrow had made the coffee and was reading the paper before descending into the basement. There was no barking, no growling. As soon as we sat down, Stamp got out of bed and walked over to sniff Tom’s leg. Tom put down his coffee and looked under the table.

“It’s all right,” Woodrow said. “He’s just checking things out.”

When Stamp was finished surveying whatever damage he had done to Tom, he came over to me and I scratched his head. Then he lay down on the floor beside Woodrow’s feet.

“What did you do to the dog?” Tom said.

“I just gave him a few boundaries. Everybody needs boundaries.”

“So is he finished?” Tom asked. “Is this a reliable dog?”

Woodrow looked at Stamp, who seemed to know we were talking about him and began to thump his stumpy tail without opening his eyes. “I would hope that Stamp would stay around for a while. He is a better dog, but I wouldn’t call him reliable quite yet.”

Tom suggested that maybe he could finish up with a correspondence course from Atlanta.

Woodrow nodded and picked up the paper again. “It’s possible. But it takes so long to teach them to read.”

If Stamp stayed, Taffy stayed. Or maybe it was the other way around. She took her empty suitcases across the hall to Henry and Charlie’s room and stored them there. I did not ask her how long she planned to live in Kay’s old bedroom and she did not volunteer the information. After the first week had passed, all she would say was that she thought that Stamp was learning a great deal and that she was looking on the whole experience as a kind of dog college. “Maybe this is what was supposed to come out of my marriage,” she said. “Maybe Neddy was supposed to leave me so that I could come up here and Stamp could get some help. Woodrow said that the first step was for me to admit that Stamp needed help.”

“You don’t actually believe that, do you?”

“God, Minnie, have a sense of humor.”

Most nights Neddy called.

“Car-o-line-a,” Neddy said, putting the original
a
back on the end of my name so as to get out the full four syllables. Neddy loved syllables. It was how he had always said my name. I had never particularly liked it, but now that he was planning to extricate himself from the family, it seemed almost unbearable to the ear.

“Ned.”

“How are things going up there in Ra-leigh, North Car-o-line-a?”

“Is there something you need, Ned?”

“I was calling to speak to Taffy, but I’m always glad to have the chance to talk to my favorite sister-in-law.” Fave-or-right.

Did he think I didn’t know? I suppose it was possible that he thought Taffy wouldn’t tell me and that I would assume that this was simply the first long visit of our lives. The complete nondisclosure of personal information would have been in keeping with our relationship up until this point. “I’ll get her,” I said, and dropped the phone onto the table.

Whenever Neddy called, I reminded Taffy that she was under no obligation to come to the phone and that I would be more than happy to lie to him on her behalf, but she always shrugged me off. She came into the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

“Hmm?” she said, and spread out her fingers to study the coat of polish she had just finished applying. She pressed the phone between her shoulder and her ear and listened. From time to time she rolled her eyes. “Um-hmm. Right.” She blew on her fingers. “Third drawer in the bathroom. No, on your side.” She waited. “Your side. Well, look again. No, I didn’t take them. No. Go look.” She waited for a minute and then looked up at me. I’ll admit it, I found the whole thing strangely fascinating. “I’m on hold,” she said.

“You have hold in your house?”

Taffy nodded and then held up her hand. Ned was back on the line. “There. Exactly. What did I tell you?” She waited. “That’s right. Okay. Okay, bye.” She hung up the phone and shook her head in disgust. “He thought I had taken his toenail clippers. As if I have ever used toenail clippers in my life.”

“Why do you tell him where they are? Why do you even talk to him?” Every night Neddy called looking for the extra set of car keys or wanting to know if there was something in the freezer he could eat for dinner. Sometimes he’d call back five minutes later asking how he was supposed to heat it up. Taffy always told him.

“Why isn’t the junior executive finding the toenail clippers?”

“I told him she wasn’t allowed in the house. Anyway, Neddy hasn’t mentioned her again.”

“Why don’t you ask him? You don’t seem to talk about the divorce or what’s going to happen.”

“It’s too depressing.”

“So why talk to him at all?”

“He doesn’t know where anything is.”

“So what? Why shouldn’t he have to look for things?”

Taffy didn’t like to talk about Neddy. The subject made her weepy and she hated to cry about as much as most fully dressed adults hated to be thrown into swimming pools, but she took a deep breath and tried to explain it to me in terms I could understand. “You always had a job,” she said patiently. “You had the studio. You had four kids and the house and Tom to look after. Well, my job was to take care of Neddy. He was always adamant that we hire people to help with Holden because he didn’t want anything to distract me from my job, even if it was our daughter. And I went right along with it because I figured that’s just the way things were.” She stopped for a minute. I must have been staring at her with blank disbelief, so she tried again. “What would you do if someone came in and told you you weren’t allowed to teach dance anymore? Wouldn’t you have days when you still felt like you were supposed to go to work? If the studio called and asked you how to turn on the heat and where the tax records were kept, wouldn’t you tell them?”

“Not if they tossed me out on the street after a lifetime of loyal service.”

“Well, all that means is that you’re smarter than I am, and we’ve both always known that.”