Step-Ball-Change (16 page)

Taffy picked up the fabric and got serious. If she decided not to teach tap at the studio, then maybe we could give her Mrs. Carlson’s job and save some money, except that the idea of having Taffy around for that long was a little overwhelming.

I kept myself on a slow boil for the rest of the evening while I nodded my head in all the right places and agreed with every dress Kay pointed to in the magazines. At half past nine the doorbell rang. Kay shot out of her chair like a jackrabbit, clutching at her watch. “What time is it?”

“Expecting somebody?”

She started madly shoving her books and magazines back into her briefcase. There was a flutter of photographs, white dresses and satin shoes flipping between wedding cakes and sunny shots of Tahiti. “I’ll get the door!”

But Kay wasn’t having much luck with the door these days.

“Jack Carroll.” We heard from the dining room.

“I remember you, Jack,” Taffy said. “I remember all of Kay’s friends.”

Kay hoisted up her briefcase under one arm and suddenly Jack was there to take it from her. He had shaken off whatever grimness had weighed on him before and had reverted to his easy, charming self. “You were going to meet me,” she said.

“Half an hour ago I was going to meet you,” Jack said. I believe he had on exactly the same outfit he had worn the last time we
saw him: the suit, the shirt, the tie—everything about Jack was wrinkled and familiar.

“Well, we should get going. Jack was going to go over a case with me. We should get to work.” She patted her briefcase as if it were full of legal briefs.

“I thought you said you were at the D.A.’s office,” Taffy said.

“Cross-pollination,” Jack says. “It keeps us healthy.”

“You should keep your voice down,” I said to Kay. “Your father’s in the other room.”

Kay nodded and looked at the door. Jack checked out the room like someone who was hoping to find a plate of food. “Are you having a good visit?” he asked Taffy.

“A great visit,” Kay said, and took the sleeve of his jacket firmly in one hand. “Let’s go.”

Jack picked up a rogue copy of
Bride’s
and headed toward the door. “Good to see you both again,” he said.

Taffy and I waved and said our good nights. Mercifully, Tom missed the whole party.

“That one worries me a little,” Taffy said.

She was right. Kay making plans with Jack was more than a little suspicious at this point, but in my book it was nowhere near as serious as what Taffy had done. “She might have eloped,” I said. “I could have talked her into it.”

“Impossible,” Taffy said. “Any woman who’s bought that many bridal magazines has no intentions of eloping.”

“She’s the one who brought it up!”

Taffy shook her head. “And I always thought you were a better mother than I was. Don’t you get it? It was all a test. She wants to know if you’re really happy about this. You have to tell her that this wedding is important to you.”

“It’s only important to me insofar as it’s going to destroy me.”

“Look, Minnie, Kay is going to marry a Bennett, and it’s going to be the biggest send-off since poor, unfortunate Diana landed the prince. Do you think she’s going to cash that in for a trip to the courthouse where she works? You can’t deal with this wedding by trying to stop it.”

“I’m not trying to stop it,” I said. “I just want her to know she has options.”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

I folded my arms on the dining-room table and made a cradle for my head. “Did you really care that I eloped?”

Taffy sat down next to me and for a split second she put her hand on my shoulder. “For about five minutes. You know how I hate to miss a party.”

chapter ten

W
E LAID IT ALL OUT FOR
A
NNETTE, OUR ACCOUNTANT
. We told her the truth. Usually when we came in to tell her the truth about something, she wrote down numbers or tapped things out on her calculator. She would have all of our files spread out across her desk and would sift through them while we explained things. But this time she just listened. She folded her hands on the desk, leaned forward, and let us talk. We didn’t have to give her the history. Annette had been doing our taxes and badgering us to save for our retirement since long before we could ever have imagined we would one day retire. She had been my student in ballet when she was in junior high, though she didn’t go all the way with it. Annette’s heart had always been in numbers. She had known Kay all her life, and while she didn’t know Trey Bennett, she, like every other citizen of Raleigh, knew just about everything about him. Annette was probably forty-five. She wasn’t inclined toward exercise and she smoked. I knew her well enough to nag her about it from time to time. After all, she was familiar with every detail of my checking account. She had seen me through my most private moments of being overdrawn. It was very important to me to think that Annette was always going to be there.

Tom was nervous. Thinking about money always made him nervous, and thinking about the wedding made him a wreck. There was a light sheen of perspiration on his forehead and he was talking very fast. “We’re guessing at the money in the first place. We’ve called some people, people whose children had big weddings, blowouts, and then we doubled it. If they’re talking nine hundred guests—”

“It could be a thousand,” I interjected. We might as well get it all out on the table.

Tom swallowed. That particular number was chilling. “Could be. A thousand. So we’re guessing the total, and this is with the flowers and the band, I’m assuming a very fancy sit-down dinner for everyone, maybe seven hundred fifty thousand dollars? That’s what people are telling us. I can’t imagine that myself.”

“My sister says it could go as high as a million.”

“Her sister is from Atlanta,” Tom said, as if the exchange rates were different in Atlanta and you just had to figure everything there was going to be 25 percent more expensive. “I’m not asking for us to come up with five hundred thousand dollars. But the way I see it, we have to do something. We can’t ask to do nothing. To not contribute. That wouldn’t be right. Would that be right?” He turned to me and I shrugged.

“What’s your best-case scenario?” Annette asked.

“Best case?” Tom mulled this one over. “Excluding elopement, excluding her suddenly falling in love with a poor guy who wants a reception in the church basement, excluding the chance that they decide to invite blood relatives only, I guess the best case is that the thing costs seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and we find a way to come up with half. So, best case, you help us find three hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.”

Annette looked at Tom and looked at me. I thought she was going to say something, but when she opened her mouth, an enormous laugh escaped. She looked as surprised by it as we were, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, but she was still laughing, her chest was convulsing. She couldn’t pull it together. Annette excused herself, went out into the hallway, and closed her door. Tom and I sat in our matching chairs on the other side of the desk and looked at each other. We could still hear Annette in the hall. Everything would be quiet for a second and then she would have another flare-up. It was as if she were trying to stamp down a bunch of small fires.

“Well, I guess we have a better idea of where we stand now,” Tom said.

Annette came back holding several Kleenex and sat down at her desk. “Wow,
that
was unprofessional. I mean, if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened in front of the two of you, but still.” She shook her head. “I mean, whew. It just came out of nowhere.”

“Has it been happening a lot?” I asked.

“Well, I have the impulse all the time. People come in here and they say the most insane things—’I’m just going to ask the IRS if I can take this year off,’ that kind of craziness. I used to feel really concerned for them, but now it all just seems hysterical to me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s hormonal.”

“So what you’re telling us through your hysteria is that we aren’t going to be able to get three hundred seventy-five thousand from the bank,” Tom said.

“I’m sure it’s there,” Annette said. “But you’ll have to go in with a ski mask and a gun to get it out, and that’s not what I ever
recommend to my clients, especially my favorite clients.” Another little chortle escaped her but she got right on top of it.

“Realistically, then,” I said.

“Realistically.” She pulled over her little adding machine and a sheet of numbers. Annette’s fingers could really fly, and I thought that if she had learned how to do that with her feet in junior high, she would have been a star on Broadway. I liked the steady tap and then the mechanical expulsion of the paper. It always felt so promising, like the lottery numbers were coming down the chute. “Now, this is a ballpark, this is rounded. For something more exact I’m going to need a little time.”

“Just tell us,” Tom said.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

We looked at her. Ten thousand dollars? “That would cover the rice they throw as the couple is getting into the car.” Assuming they planned on using some sort of pearl-grain rice hand-grown by Tibetan monks.

“That’s all we’ve got?” Tom said.

“Oh, no,” Annette said. “You don’t even have that. You had the fund for the Florida room and the fund for the retirement trip to Italy, but we’re assuming that both of those things are going into the foundation of your house at the moment. Then you’re going to need to pay off the addition, unless you decide to scrap it, which may cost you almost as much as finishing it at this point. You’ve got a little money for your share of George’s law school and you’re not throwing that away on a wedding. So the ten thousand is going to be another home equity loan. The only other place it could come from would be your retirement account, and that’s not happening.”

“But it could,” Tom said.

“No, it could not,” Annette said. She leaned back in her chair and looked at us with a great deal of compassion. She had two girls who were teenagers now. She knew that sooner or later this would be happening to her, too. “Listen, the rich aren’t like you and me. They forget things, like the fact that everybody else isn’t rich. Sometimes they even forget that they have an enormous amount of money themselves. So they asked you to pay for half of this thing and you can’t. Just own up to it. I know it’s humiliating, but it’s a fact. The numbers don’t lie. You can’t pay for the kind of wedding they’re talking about. What you have to remember is that ten thousand dollars is a lot of money, and there are a whole lot of people out there who would fall over dead from a heart attack if you said you could spend ten thousand on your daughter’s wedding. You’ve got to keep it in perspective.”

She gave us each a peppermint from the bowl she kept on the desk and she sent us on our way.

When we left we were broken, defeated. We sat in the parking lot behind her office in the cold car, but Tom didn’t make a move to turn it on.

“If I had stayed corporate …” Tom started.

He did this every now and then. I will admit that a couple of times over the years I had done it myself but always silently. It was the kind of game that was best not to play. “You would be a full partner, your name on the stationery. You would be making a fortune and you would be miserable, so none of it would be worthwhile.” I reached out and squeezed his hand. “You can’t call your whole life into question just because we can’t pay for Kay to have a wedding with nine hundred people she doesn’t even know. Those
are not the standards by which we’re going to judge ourselves. I refuse to.”

Tom looked at me. His eyes were tired behind his glasses and his skin was pale. When did we get to be so old? “I could have done everything another way. There was a fork in the road and I went left. For a long time I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I’m not so sure.”

“You did the right thing, and anyway, you can’t go back to that fork. It isn’t an option to change everything now.”

“I wanted to be in the courtroom. I wanted to defend people. What was the point of being a lawyer if you couldn’t defend people? It was the only thing that made sense to me.”