Dedication (27 page)

“Ma’am?” A woman in a crisp gray uniform pushes open the swinging door. “The roast’ll be ready in a few minutes if you want to make your way to the table. The bisque is served.”

“Thank you, Mary.”

“Who wants their gifts?” Jake asks, hopping off the ladder.

“Jake, the bisque is served.” Susan smoothes her nubby tweed skirt.

“I know, but I can’t wait. You go to the table. I’ll be right down.” He bounds up the stairs, leaving us to each other.

“You have such a beautiful home,” I say, joining her at the threshold of the French doors that lead to the dining room.

She looks around, her eyes landing on the MTV-gouged wood paneling, her lips pursing, rose lipstick feathering into the deep smoker’s creases. “You have no idea what it took to get all of this installed properly up here. I had a whole team from Boston round the clock.”

“Well, it’s always been beautiful,” I say, taking a seat opposite her place at the grand table. We sit in silence beneath the crystal chandelier throwing stripes across the brown jacquard wallpaper. “In high school. I always remember how well-appointed everything was.” She allows a thin smile.

We both lift our heads at the clomp of Jake’s feet taking the stairs two at a time. He tears in and, tossing a small robin’s egg blue box to me, rounds the table to his mother, handing her a large glossy brown package with
J. MENDEL
printed on top. He pulls in the chair closest to her as she empties her flute and reaches for the decanter of red.

“Well?” He looks from her to me. “Open them!” He hops his chair one inch closer to his mother’s side.

Taken aback, I look down at the ring-size box. “Jake? How did you?”

“Had one of my people there at ten
A.M.
when they opened and in a car on the way here by ten fifteen.” He beams. In the absence of any motion from Susan I untie the red ribbon and lift the lid. Inside is a small velvet box in the same blue. I look at him questioningly. He smiles back, but he’s not leaping to his knee, so I exhale and crack the lid. Inside is a square-cut sapphire the size of a Scrabble tile framed by two diamond baguettes.

“Jake,” I say, floored. “Oh my God.”

Susan drains her glass.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

“It’s gorgeous.” I tilt the box so the sapphire can catch the light. “But I can’t accept it.”

“It’s just a promise ring. For your right hand. I figure I’ve asked you to say yes to enough for one day. But I want you to have it. Think of it as a corsage, thirteen birthday presents, thirteen Christmas presents and three graduation gifts rolled into one.”

“Okay,” I laugh, slipping the heavy platinum on my finger, feeling the groundedness of the cool weight. “When you put it that way, where’re the matching earrings?”

“Mom?” he prompts, leaning forward.

“Who wants to say grace?”

“Mom?” he repeats, elbows extended like bent wings as he grips the chair arms.

“Oh, dear, of course. Everything on your clock.” One tug at the brown and white grosgrain ribbon and it falls away. Lifting the lid, she unfurls the brown and white tissue paper while Jake looks on expectantly. Breath held, we both watch her draw out a gorgeous horizontally pieced mink pullover.

“It’s stunning,” I say in the absence of any response from Susan. “Very Audrey Hepburn.”

“Catherine Zeta-Jones was wearing one, and I asked her where she got it. You like it, Mom?”

“It’s lovely, dear. Thank you.” She brushes his proferred cheek with her lips. “Do you want to take your seat so we can start? There is nothing to be said for lukewarm bisque.”

He gets up, returning the chair he’d slid over, and moves to his assigned place diagonally across from her. “If it doesn’t fit you can exchange it the next time you come to New York.”

“No, it’s fine. Not sure where I’ll wear it, though…” She dips her spoon into the pink.

“Well, when you go back to Vail,” he tries valiantly. “And when you visit your friends in Boston and in Paris—it’ll look great in Paris.”

“I have so many clothes I never get around to wearing.” She takes another spoonful. “But I’m sure I’ll find a use for it. I can always donate it.”

His face slackening, he reaches for a hunk of bread hiding beneath the damask in the sterling lattice bowl.

“I love this ring, Jake,” I rush in. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

“You do?” He smiles. “I picked it out. I didn’t go in person, but I selected it online.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Jake’s phone rings and he pulls it from his pocket to glance at the number. “Jesus,” he mutters. “I’ve gotta take this. Tokyo is not having Christmas.” He pushes back from the table and stands up. “Yeah. Hit me,” he says as he walks with the call out to the living room. I stare past his retreating torso to the tree, whose bare base only now strikes me.

“This soup is delicious,” I say.

“Mary’s recipe.” She reflexively touches her velvet headband. “I shall pass on your compliments.”

“Did you get Jake anything?” I ask.

“What?” she asks in turn.

“For Christmas? Did you get him anything?”

“Oh,” she tuts, fingering her glasses chain. “For the man who has everything? What could he want for?”

I picture my spoon hitting her forehead, leaving a creamy pink circle above her stunned expression.

Jake sticks his head in, still on the call, and presses his hand over the mouthpiece. “Actually, Mom, looks like we have to fly back tonight,” he whispers. Relieved, I nod supportively. He retreats back into the living room.

Holding my gaze, she clinks her crystal glass with her fork.

The door swings open. “Yes, ma’am?”

“You can clear, Mary.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

As Mary circles the table there is a pause that even the Vienna Boys Choir and Jake’s low murmur of assent from the other room cannot fill. Susan stares, her gaze starting to cross as she bores into me. Finally, her eyes descending to her gilt charger, she speaks, “I have a beautiful home. You have a beautiful ring.”

I lean back so Mary can take my bowl. “Sorry?”

“Jake’s father was in Saskatchewan when I was in labor. Not quite Asia. But still, not with me.”

“I don’t see—”

“Ask yourself, where is he on my birthday? Where is he on my child’s birthday?” She takes another sip. “Then admire your beautiful ring.”

Jake leans across me and presses
PH
on the brushed steel panel. He squeezes my hand as the industrial-style elevator slowly glides up the concrete chute, the locked doors to each passing apartment visible through the burnished slats. “God, it’s so late. Thanks for doing this,” he says the thousandth time since we got in the car for the airport. “Do you hate me? I just couldn’t take…” he trails off.

“Jake, it’s
fine
,” I repeat. “The thought of spending the night under the same roof as your mother was not thrilling me, either. It’s all good. Really, truly, I mean it.”

“Good.” He smiles, seemingly finally able to take in my stream of enticed reassurances as we slow our ascent, strips of light sweeping over us from the first open door. The gate slides aside.

“This is us.” He beams welcome, guiding me into a vast loft ringed by spectacular twinkling views of Tribeca and the New Jersey shoreline beyond. “Pretty great, huh?”

“Wow. Yes.” I let my fingers slip from his to walk to the windows and rest my forehead against the frosted glass. I look down to the winsome cobbled street, its margins covered with days-old mounds of snow that look from here like cappuccino froth dotted with a liberal sprinkling of cocoa powder. I turn my gaze up to the avenue and recognize the awning of the restaurant that guy took me to last fall during our romantic-oh-wow-we’re-really-not-right-for-each-other weekend. If I’d had any idea, as I endured his pontification about the advantages of tax cuts for the top one percent, that all this was possible only a few feet, a few floors away, I’d have scaled the building.

I feel Jake behind me, his hands sliding under my hoodie, fanning across my back. “It’s after midnight,” he whispers. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” I twist my head to the side, our mouths connecting as his fingers slip around to my breasts.

“I want you to like it here.”

“I do,” I say, replying to his touch. He takes my hand again and leads me past the lustrous David Smith sculptures hazily reflecting the collage of Eames and early American furniture, down a hallway that seems to run the length of the block.

“Here.” He smiles as he opens the last door into a lacquered rust red room, and we both look to the bed, piled invitingly with plush gray flannel and black silk. He picks a remote off the bedside table and points it at a panel in the wall and then at the curtains, which commence jerking open and closed, drowning out the sound of a CD starting to whir.

“No music,” I preempt.

“Sure?” he asks, remote poised.

“Not even ‘Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.’”

As he zaps the device again, silencing the panel, I walk around the room, peering at the personal effects on the bookshelves and mantel—a small soapstone polar bear, a mosaic dish, a souvenir shot glass from Perth.

“Come on,”
he begs the renegade curtains.

I bend to get a closer look at the bottom shelf of the closest bookcase, where a few framed photographs sit in the shadows—his father feeding a radiant Susan wedding cake in sepia tone, Jake in a cowboy hat, his cheeks puffed out as he blows out a melting 3 candle on a cake bigger than him, a lithe Jake cannonballing off the dock, and then, tucked behind all of them—a small heart-shaped frame that I remember picking out with Laura. And there I am in his basement, cracking up at something with Sam right when Jake snapped the picture.

“Thank you,” he says, and I look up to see the fabric finally sliding closed with a contented sigh.

I cross to him, take his face, and kiss him deeply, last reservations gone.