Step-Ball-Change (2 page)

“Do you want to come over?” I said to Kay. I looked at Tom, mouthed the word “Sorry.”

He shook his head. “No, no,” he mouthed back, and then he made a beckoning gesture with his hand for her to come on over. Tom was a good father.

On the other end of the line I could hear Kay put down the phone and blow her nose, which was a sign that she was in the first stages of pulling it together. Then she picked up the receiver and inhaled hugely. I didn’t make a sound for fear of distracting her. “Married,” she said, and then began to cry again.

“Trey’s getting married!” I said. Tom leaned over the table. “I can’t believe that. Oh, sweetheart, that’s awful. That’s too much.”

“Me-e-e-e-e,” she wailed. “Marry me!”

I stopped and cocked my head toward my shoulder as if this might make me hear better. “He married you?” I asked quietly.

Cry, cry, cry. “Asked,” she managed to gasp out. “Asked me.”

I clamped my hand down over the mouthpiece. “Mother of God,” I said to Tom. “He’s asked her to marry him.”

The blood slipped away from Tom’s face. Who knew where it was going. We saw it all in an instant, the way they say you review your life as a milk truck swerves into your lane of traffic. But in
this case what flashed before our eyes was the future: anniversary dances at the country club, invitations to sail in the Caribbean, severe pressure to attend fund-raising dinners for senators who opposed school lunches and gun control. The phone rang.

It was George’s phone, what we still referred to as the children’s line even though three of our children were grown and gone and George was twenty-five years old, in his first year of law school, and less of a child than Tom or I had ever been. Under normal circumstances we would have let the machine pick up, but these were not normal circumstances. Tom rose, pale as Banquo’s ghost, and floated down the hall toward the ringing.

“Kay,” I said sweetly, trying to make my voice that same voice that had soothed her as a baby. “Are you going to marry Trey?” For some reason all I could think about were their names, Kay and Trey, Trey and Kay. Marriage was hard enough without rhyming.

The crying stopped abruptly and I could hear the scratchy brush of Kay wiping the phone with a Kleenex. “Of course I’m going to marry Trey.”

“Caroline,” Tom called from down the hall.

“One second, baby. Yes?”

“Minnie, it’s your sister on the other line.”

The statement was redundant, since my sister was the only person who called me Minnie and the very word, like my sister herself, brought up a sharp, prickling sweat on the back of my neck. I didn’t know why Taffy would be calling without a birthday or holiday to pin it on, and I didn’t know why she was calling on George’s phone. I didn’t care. “Tell her I’ll call her back.”

There was a long pause, Tom was saying something I couldn’t hear, and then he called out to me again, “I can’t get her to understand me. She’s crying too hard.”

That didn’t make any sense at all. I hadn’t seen Taffy cry since we were in high school and our mother machine washed her white angora sweater that was clearly labeled
Dry Clean Only
.

“Kay,” I said, “there’s something going on. Taffy’s on the other line.”

“Call her back,” Kay said, the last vestiges of snuffle clearing from her voice. “I’m getting married.”

“Your father says there’s something wrong.” Tom was back in the kitchen now, working a thumb over one shoulder, which meant that I had responsibilities on the phone that was behind him. “Here, tell Dad about what happened. I’ll be right back.” I handed Tom the phone and hustled down the hall to George’s room.

Dear George. Everything was so neat, the picture frames were dusted, no shoes on the floor. Even the papers on the desk were perfectly stacked. He had felt guilty about moving back home to go to law school, but I knew for a fact that he raised our standards. I sat down on the edge of his twin bed. “Taffy?”

On the line there was crying, and suddenly I could see from the vantage point of close comparison that there was in fact a huge difference between the crying done by a broken heart and the crying done by a heart that cannot believe its own good fortune. “Taffy,” I said, “what is it?”

“Holden is in Cannes,” she said, gasping like a trout that had just been thrown from the lake. “I can’t find her.”

My niece, Taffy’s daughter, was an agent for movie stars in Hollywood and no one could ever find her. The best anyone could hope for was to locate her secretary, and even that was something of a trick. “Why do you need Holden?”

There was more crying, crying so real and deep that I felt for the first time in so long I can’t remember a stirring of genuine love
for my sister. I wanted to be there with her and fold her in my arms. Kay cried at everything, but if Taffy was given to crying, I would be the last person to know it. I could only imagine how bad things must have been for her at that moment if I was the one she was turning to. “Is it Neddy? Is Neddy all right?”

She put the phone down. Far in the distance of Atlanta I heard my sister blowing her nose. “Neddy left me.” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “There. What do you think of that?”

I didn’t like Neddy, but that was hardly the point. I only saw him once a year. Taffy saw him every day. “What happened?”

She sighed, which I read as her being bored by such an obvious question. “What always happens: He took up with some junior executive. It isn’t even a secretary they leave you for these days. Neddy has to tell me she’s a junior executive. She’s thirty-four years old. Do you know what that means? Holden is thirty-six.”

I closed my eyes tightly, remembering Holden’s second birthday party. Holden in a white linen dress with yellow daisies embroidered across the front, blowing out two candles stuck on top of something that looked like Queen Elizabeth’s wedding cake. Taffy was wearing sling-backs and diamond studs with her Lilly Pulitzer, making sure everybody had champagne. Neddy was talking too loudly about golf and forgot to take the pictures, which had been his assignment. On the day of Holden’s second birthday, the junior executive, my sister’s rival for her husband’s affections, had yet to be born.

“Oh, Taffy.”

“The stupid son of a bitch. I always thought I’d leave him someday. I never thought he would leave me.” She stopped and gave herself over to crying again and my heart wrenched in my chest. “I need to get away. I tried to find Holden. I could go to
Canyon Ranch for a while, but I just don’t want—” Her sentence simply ended. Taffy always got what she wanted, but she didn’t like to ask for it.

“You’ll come here,” I said. “You know that’s what you have to do. Maybe you can talk it over with Tom. He could give you advice.”

“I’m not trying to beat a drug rap,” Taffy said. “I’m getting divorced. I called the best divorce lawyer in Atlanta. When Neddy was telling me about the junior executive, I told him I needed to use the bathroom and I went into the other room and called Buddy Lewis. Whoever calls him first is the one who gets him, that’s the way it works. It’s proof enough that Neddy doesn’t have a brain in his head that he didn’t call Buddy Lewis the second he knew he was going to divorce me. They call him the Piranha.”

She was still crying a little and her voice was muddy with tears. At first I thought she said they called him the Pariah, which was not such a good nickname for a divorce lawyer. Divorce. Divorce, which comes from marriage. “Oh, God, Taffy, I forgot. I’ve got Kay on the other line and she’s frantic.”

“What’s wrong with Kay?”

I knew that she’d find out soon enough, but I thought this would be a tasteless moment to tell her. “I don’t know yet. I just gave Tom the phone.”

“Well, tell her Aunt Taffy is …” She looked for a word and then started crying hard.

“Just come,” I said, looking down the hall as if Kay might be standing there. “Do you want me to drive down and get you?”

“No, no,” she said. “I need to pack. I’ll come in the morning. Neddy is staying at a hotel tonight. At least he says that’s where he’s staying.”

“Call me before you leave.”

“I can’t go to my friends,” she said. “At least not yet. I don’t know what they would say.”

“So you come here. That’s why people have families.”

“I owe you, Minnie,” she said heavily. She was clearly sorry about this. She didn’t want to owe me. We said our good-byes and then hung up.

I
WAS BORN
Carolina Margaret Woods, called Caroline, named by my father for the wondrous joy that was University of North Carolina basketball. I realized at a very early age that I was lucky he had not named me Tar Heel. My sister came two years after me (she would later revise this to four) and was named Henrietta by my father. He believed that large families were unseemly, the product of poverty, carelessness, or Catholicism. When he committed to having two children, it never occurred to him that one of those children might not be a boy, so he christened my sister with a version of his own name and then started calling her Henry. My mother rectified this through the Southern tradition of nicknames and called her second daughter Taffy (Taffy: see childhood photos, Taffy’s hair gleaming yellow-white with the individual strands resembling nothing so much as spun sugar). For a while everyone thought that Henrietta would grow up with a multiple personality disorder, what with a father calling her Henry, a mother calling her Taffy, and a sister who called her by her name. But it was no contest. My mother prevailed. She put a lace canopy over Taffy’s little bed and bought her a flock of pink dresses and did everything in her power to make her feel as little like a Henry as possible. And it would have been fine if the story had ended there, with me being
Caroline and my sister being Taffy, but once my sister mastered language, she seemed to feel self-conscious being the only member of the family to be living under an assumed name. As soon as she was old enough to screw up my life, she began calling me Minnie, not because there was any connection to my name or my appearance, but because she had a crush on a certain cartoon mouse.

“It’s sweet,” my mother said. “It’s her pet name for you.”

“I’m not her pet,” I said.

“Minnie, Minnie, Minnie,” my sister said.

“Make her stop,” I said.

“I like it,” my mother said, and scooped up Taffy in her arms. “Minnie. Sister Minnie.”

And so my mother began to call me Minnie to make Taffy feel better about her own treacly name. When Taffy started school she was quick to tell the other children that my real name was Minnie, and that Caroline was just something I had made up for myself. Boys especially liked to call me Minnie. They liked to shout it from cars as I was walking home from school.

B
UT THAT WAS
a long time ago. It was ridiculous for me to have such petty thoughts now. Neddy was leaving my sister, and on the phone in the other room, my daughter was explaining the details of her engagement.

When I came back to the kitchen, Tom brightened up. “Kay,” he said, “your mother is back. Do you want to tell her this? She’s off the phone.”

Tom handed me the phone and I slumped down in my chair. My dinner had gone rubbery, I could tell just by looking at it. It had acquired a shine.

“What’s wrong with Taffy?” Kay said.

There was no point in telling her the truth either, not at this exact moment. “Nothing. She’s just coming to visit.”

“Visit us? Why would Taffy visit us?”

It was good to hear her voice sound so clear. She could always cry on her mother’s shoulder, but she was more likely to pull herself together for her father. They were both public defenders, after all, and when they were together they liked to act like a couple of tough guys, rhapsodizing over drug busts in which no one had been read their Miranda rights. “Let’s not talk about Taffy. Tell me what happened.”

“We’re going to come over,” Kay said. “I wanted to just come over and tell you but I couldn’t wait. I haven’t stopped crying since Trey asked me. I told him I needed to come home and get fixed up a little. We’re going over to tell his parents and then we’re coming by to see you and Dad.”

“And you’re happy,” I said.

“Oh, Mom, the happiest.” Her voice was dreamy and distracted, as if all the crying had made her drunk.

After I hung up the phone, Tom and I just sat there for a while, staring at our plates. “What happened to Taffy?” he said finally. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

“Neddy left her.”

Tom slid his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I suppose that handwriting was on the wall.”

I figured I might as well get it all out in the open. I was always of the belief that it was kinder to rip off a Band-Aid all at once. “She’s coming here.”

“For how long?”

“I didn’t think I could ask.”

He nodded slowly. I called it his courtroom nod. It gave the illusion that he was really thinking things over, but I could tell at this point his mind was completely blank.

“Should I put dinner in the microwave? Do you want to try to eat something before the kids get here?”

“No,” Tom said sadly. “I think we’re finished with all that.”

chapter two