The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (10 page)

My hand fluttered up. “No, it’s okay. In fact, Richard just called it a bribe too.” I didn’t quite understand. If Bjorn and Trish were now speaking to each other, wasn’t that a good thing?

Fleur read my thoughts. “The roses were a nice gesture, really. But they need to talk about how they’re going to make decisions when they don’t agree.”

Then lilies, I thought, even though they’re not a cliché, would have been a bribe too. They just would have been in better taste (according to Mother). Love was confusing. Even dangerous. I had sensed this when the roses arrived and Trish had forgiven Bjorn so easily.
I believed Fleur, but I couldn’t help thinking that I would like a dozen roses or lilies from Richard. Or just a nod.

“Maybe they need marriage counseling,” I said. Depressing to think about.

“Years of it,” Fleur said. “Come on, let’s go. They’ll be waiting.”

Downstairs Ashley had returned with a thermos of hot chocolate, and we were on our way, finally. Fleur, Ashley, and I shared the middle seat this time, because Richard had offered to sit in the very back. I saw Ashley struggling with the notion of getting in the back with him, but she sat with us girls.

Even though it was well below zero, the weather was perfect: blue sky and no wind. Pristine white snow crystallized the trees, which glinted in the sun. The ice rink was jammed with people, all of them well muffled against the cold.

“Looks like everybody in St. Paul had the same idea today,” Richard said as we entered the warming house. We changed into our skates and headed for the ice. Trish knew how to skate, and she and Bjorn sped into the crowd holding hands.

“I think I’m going to regret this,” Fleur said. She walked stiffly, elbows out.

“Come on,” Richard said, taking her hand. “Just keep your ankles vertical.” They stepped onto the ice.

Richard laughed quietly. “You have to move your feet, Fleur!”

She stood rigid. A tiny kid, almost a toddler, whizzed past her on miniature skates.

“Why?” Fleur demanded.

“Otherwise it’s not skating.” He tugged at her arm. “Relax,” he said.

She grasped Richard’s arm with both hands, and he more or less pulled her around the ice like a tugboat pulling the dead weight of an ocean liner. “Move your feet!” he yelled and then laughed.

Ashley stood by me, squinting in the bright sun, watching the two of them.

“What exactly is their relationship, I wonder.” She looked at me.

“They’re secretly married, I think.” I shoved off onto the ice.

“Very funny,” she called after me.

It looked like an ordinary friendship to me, but it baffled me. Fleur was the most beautiful and likable girl I’d ever met and Richard was—well, he was Richard. How could they resist each other? I didn’t know anything.

I skated alone mostly. Ashley found Mike Nelson, a guy from school, and skated with him for a long while. She was animated and sexy—I could see it. She kept glancing at Richard to see if he noticed her with Mike, but he never did.

Trish and Bjorn were completely enchanted with each other—the magic of roses and all. Fleur was right. No decision had been made about future Christmas tree purchases. The roses seemed like a cheap reconciliation. Bah humbug.

“Why so grim?” Richard came out of nowhere and took my arm.

“I don’t ever want roses to soothe over a fight.” I said it out loud. I hadn’t meant to.

His eyebrows rose and he looked at me in “amused wonder,” as the phrase book says. “I’ll just include that on my list,” he said, a smile edging his lips.

“I mean—”
What do you mean, birdbrain?
“I mean I would prefer directness.” Brilliant.

“It takes two people to be direct.”

“I always am.” Was that self-righteous tone coming from
my
mouth? I hoped he hadn’t noticed.

He smirked. “Were you being direct yesterday when you walked blindly about without your glasses?” He pulled me aside a little to keep a kid from skating into me.

I felt my face flush. That’s what I got for listening to someone as transparent as Ashley.

I attacked him with both fists. “You don’t know anything,
Mr. Man
!”

He warded off my blows, laughing, and, finally catching my fists, held them. “Did I say something wrong,
Ms. Woman?
Tell me I’m wrong. Come on,” he said, pulling me along the ice. “Everyone’s in the warming house having cocoa.”

We held hands as we headed across the rink. I thought I would explode with joy.

“I think we should come skating early tomorrow morning before breakfast,” he said.

“Christmas morning?”

“No one will be here; we’ll have the place to ourselves. Might be nice, don’t you think?”

Did he mean just the two of us? My pulse quickened. “Sure,” I said.

“Good. I’ll ask everyone.”

I smiled secretly at my foolishness.

We joined the others in a corner of the warming house.

“Here’s yours.” Ashley was quick to hand Richard his mug. “It has amaretto in it.” Had she always been so transparent, or had I been brain-dead these past ten years?

Fleur handed me a mug and made room for me on the bench.

“How do you like ice-skating?” I asked her.

“Frankly, I hate it,” she said. She reached down and rubbed one of her ankles.

“Boo and I were thinking—” Richard began.

“We were just talking about Aunt Eve’s dinner-dance,” Ashley cut in.

I knew what was coming. Ashley was going to go for the jugular right now, here in the warming house, and it would work for her as it always did. I knew what was coming even before she invited Richard out for New Year’s Eve.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” She was speaking to Bjorn.

He nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it. I want Trish to see the Pink Palace—the Hearst Castle of Lake Minnetonka.” He grinned.

“Fantasyland,” Richard agreed.

“I’d really like you to be my partner,” Ashley said to Richard.

Richard spilled cocoa on himself.
“Uh,”
he said. He looked at me for help.

“I think Mother was expecting Rich to take Fleur,” I said.

“Fleur is flying home
before
New Year’s Eve,” Ashley announced grandly.

I looked at Fleur. “I decided to go to the wedding after all.”

“Good,” Richard and I said together.

“I thought you asked Kirk,” I said to Ashley.

“He can’t go,” Ashley said quickly. “Will you go with me?” she asked Richard again, keeping her voice light.

I don’t know why, but Richard looked at me again. “Are you going?” he asked.

“She’s going with Helmut Weiss, so they can discuss transformational grammar.” Satisfaction on her smug face.

I sighed. “Helmut is good company, Ashley.” Which was more than I could say for her.

“You will go, won’t you?” Ashley fluttered the eyelashes. Gag, gag, and throw up.

“Well.” Richard recovered himself. “Sure,” he said to Ashley. “That’ll be fun.”

“Oh good,” she said. “Have some more cocoa.” She poured some from the thermos into his cup. “Do you want more, Kate?”

Pushing my glasses back on my nose, I shook my head. I’d had enough poison for one day.

* * *

I
N THE AFTERNOON
, Fleur and Richard went shopping. Bjorn took Trish to meet some of his old friends.

I helped Mother set the table for dinner in the dining room and then, turning on the tree lights, lay wrapped in a Christmas quilt, which my mother brought out every year, on the sofa in the living room. From Dad’s study came the strains of “All We like Sheep” from the
Messiah
. I hummed softly along, while “a bitter cold despair dwelt in the caves of my lonely soul.” A quote from
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
. Really! Does anyone in America talk that way? Caves of my lonely soul?

But I was sad about the disparity between reality and fantasy where Richard was concerned. “Am I wrong?” he had asked, teasing me on the stairs that morning. Am I wrong to think you like me? That’s what he was asking.

Does it make a difference?

I felt sad that my friendship with Ashley was over. I had been an expendable sidekick to her. Me Tonto.

Mother stood in the archway. “Tea?”

I nodded.

She left and returned with a steaming cup on a saucer—the good china—and a red linen napkin. I sat up, my legs still stretched out on the sofa. She sat by my feet, rubbing them through the wool socks. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Merry Christmas, best mother of mine.” I smiled. The steam from the tea fogged my glasses. “I need windshield wipers,” I said, looking at her through the mist.

She nodded.

The tea, hot and strong, along with my mother massaging my feet and Handel’s music wafting from Dad’s
study, loosened something in me. Something that had been tight. Something I had kept hidden but that now surfaced. Tears unexpectedly burned at the edges of my eyelids. I blinked them back. The tree lights blurred. It’s funny how sometimes the smallest unexpected kindness—my mother rubbing my feet, for example—can call forth the most hidden sadness.

I sipped the hot tea. “I wish I were beautiful,” I said.

Mother smoothed the corduroy against my leg. I loved her for not trying to argue me out of anything. She pulled on the hem of the slacks.

“I just wish I were beautiful.”

She sat with me until the afternoon turned gray, until the oven timer went off and she had to finish the Christmas Eve dinner in the kitchen.

T
HE TRADITIONAL
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE
dinner at our house is an authentic Swedish smorgasbord that my mother spreads out across the buffet in silver and fine china. There are, of course, meatballs made with sausage and ham, cheese, at least three kinds of pickled herring, a pork roast, lutefisk with white sauce, and saffron buns. The dining room is lit with candles only—candles on the buffet and on the table, and candles in a spectacular wreath of greens, especially mistletoe, that my father suspends over the dining room table from the ceiling with wide red ribbon just before dinner. It is our family’s nod to the Festival of Lights. The wreath is the width of the dining table—my mother’s design. Fleur and Trish oohed and aahed when they saw it for the first time. They had come
down the stairs dressed to the teeth. I didn’t look bad either. Mother had said earlier, “Wear what makes you comfortable,” but Bjorn had interpreted: “She likes us dressed up.”

“But not uncomfortably dressed up,” Mother had said.

“No formal wear,” Bjorn had interpreted.

Mother had turned from the kitchen sink, where she was washing her hands, and, purposely splattering water on Bjorn, said, “Am I not speaking English?”

All the men wore jackets and ties. My stomach curled when I saw Richard in a charcoal-tweed coat with a crisp blue oxford shirt. Silent sighing and accelerated pulse all over the place.

“When did that gorgeous wreath go up?” Trish wanted to know.

“Don’t know,” Dad said. “Keebler elves.” He kissed her cheek. “Mistletoe.” He pointed at the wreath.

Soon everyone was kissing. Trish and Fleur kissed Dad on each cheek at the same time. “Merry Christmas, Professor Bjorkman,” Fleur said, grinning. His ears colored shamelessly. Mother passed out drinks and received kisses from all the men.

Bjorn smacked a wet one on my nose, followed by another wet one on my cheek. “Like being kissed by a Saint Bernard.” I laughed and, turning, faced Richard.

He raised his glass to mine. “Merry Christmas, Kate,” he said, using my name for the first time. He kissed me lightly, gently, on the lips. Our eyes held.

“Merry Christmas, Richard,” I said and, catching myself, said, “I mean Rich.”

“I like Richard,” he said.

“I like Kate.”

He smiled. “I’ll try to remember,” he said, and he kissed me ever so lightly again. “Kate.”

I thought I would melt into the carpet.

Mother encouraged us to try everything. Trish passed up all three varieties of herring, but Bjorn spooned some on her plate along with chopped onions. “The Swedes call it sill,” he said. He also spooned a little lutefisk on her plate. “Cod,” he said. He didn’t say anything about the lye marinade. “You’ll love it.”

Fleur was interested in all the food, asking Mother if various dishes were hard to make, if she’d thought of writing a Christmas cookbook.

“I’m sure it’s all been done,” Mother said.

“No,” Fleur said. “Not just food recipes, but directions for making the wreath, for all the homemade things you have to decorate the house—all of it.”

“You think it would work?” Mother asked.

Dad and Richard talked graduate schools. “You want to continue in comp. lit.?” Dad asked.

Richard shook his head. “American studies,” he said, ladling Swedish meatballs from the chafing dish.

“Well then, Minnesota ought to be a consideration.”

“It is.”

“Good,” Dad said.

The thought that Richard might move back to Minnesota raised powerful emotions in me. I had not even thought about going to the University of Minnesota. I wanted to go to school in the East, but if Richard was coming home, then I was staying here for school. Only
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
could describe my feelings in the chapter on emotions, under the subheading “Happiness, Joy.” Here’s a list: (1)
Joy bubbled in her laugh and shone in her eyes
. (2)
She felt a bottomless peace and satisfaction
. (3)
Tonight there were no shadows across her heart
. (4)
Her heart sang with delight
. (5)
She was blissfully happy, fully alive
. And my favorite: (6)
She was wrapped in a silken cocoon of euphoria
.

We had the traditional rice pudding for dessert, and Fleur almost broke a tooth on the almond hidden in her serving.

“Oh, I forgot to warn you!” Mother looked truly sorry. “There’s always an almond hidden in the pudding, and whoever gets it will be married in the next year.”

Fleur removed the almond from her mouth and set it delicately on the edge of her plate. “No way,” she said.

“Take it home to your mother,” I said.

“She must run into almonds in everything she eats,” Fleur said.