Step-Ball-Change (6 page)

chapter four

T
HE VACUUM NEEDED TO BE REPLACED
. I
T STILL MANAGED
to suck up a certain amount of dirt, but for the past year it had made, simultaneously, a horrible, high-pitched whine and a loud clacking that no amount of repair could get rid of. I could hear it before I even opened the door. There were no signs that my sister had arrived. It was only Woodrow and Kay sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of magazines between them.

“Who’s vacuuming?” I said, raising my voice over the roaring that seemed to be coming from down the hall.

“Mr. Kelly,” Woodrow said. Mr. Kelly was the plumber who had been brought over to assess how much pressure the crumbling foundation was putting on our pipes. “He’s almost finished.”

“George told me one of your guys was going to vacuum.”

“Kevin was all set to go, he was plugged in and everything, but Mr. Kelly just took over. He says he loves to vacuum.” Woodrow was practically having to scream. I hadn’t thought about it before the vacuum was on, but he was a soft-spoken man. He waved me over to come and sit down at the table.

“I was showing Woodrow a few dresses,” Kay said. She held up a picture in a magazine. It looked like a costume for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, a blond nymphet tied up in panels of lace.
There were a dozen different kinds of flowers woven into her hair. The dress seemed more appropriate for an ascension than for a marriage.

“I think she can go either way on the sleeves,” Woodrow said.

“What do you think of sleeves?” my daughter asked me.

I didn’t have a quick answer. I was still reviewing the questions: Why was someone who charged thirty dollars an hour for plumbing running my vacuum? Why was the contractor hashing out the issue of sleeves for a wedding dress that wasn’t making an appearance for at least another six months? And, on behalf of my husband, why wasn’t Kay at work? “Why aren’t you at work?” I said.

“Markus Jones came in first thing this morning. It was like a miracle. I walked into the office and there he was, waiting for me. I ran him through his testimony, passed off some paperwork, picked up a stack of magazines, and here I am.”

“Then help me get ready for Taffy.”

Kay looked puzzled, almost hurt but not quite. “Don’t you want to see which dresses I like?” She ran her finger over another page. The picture reminded me of Glinda the Good Witch in the scene where she shows up in Oz to tell Dorothy it’s time to go home. It was a dress that cried out for a wand.

“Has the wedding been moved up? Are you getting married this weekend?” It was something about the sound of the vacuum. It made my nerves feel raw. Coupled with my impending company, I wasn’t so interested in anyone else’s problems. Suddenly Kay looked fifteen to me and I wanted to know why her room wasn’t clean.

She slapped the pages closed. “If you’re not interested.”

“Taffy’s going to be walking through the door”—I looked at my watch, hoping to say, In half an hour from now, but no such luck—“any minute. I’m going to need some help here.”

“This is my
wedding
. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life. Would it be so terrible to sit down and talk to me about it for a minute? Woodrow was talking to me.”

“I came in to get the paint cans,” Woodrow said in his own defense. He pointed out the row of paint cans that lined my kitchen counters just in case I hadn’t noticed them. “I was going to put them out in the garage.”

“Why does Taffy have to come now, anyway?” Kay’s voice was a knot of petulance. “Can’t you call and tell her this isn’t a good time? We have so much planning to do.”

“Not unless I call her on her cell phone as she’s driving up the driveway.”

“You don’t even
like
Taffy. You like her even less than the rest of us do. I don’t see why it would be so hard to tell her no.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. It was her way of saying that she was completely right and I was completely wrong. I know. I’d been watching her do it since she was three.

If I had been the kind of mother who recorded all the golden moments of her children’s lives with a camcorder, I would take this opportunity to premiere the montage of Kay’s finest moments. I would show what kind of person my daughter had been before the five-and-a-half-carat diamond was implanted on her left hand: Look, there is Kay at four, giving her bucket and shovel to the kid in the sandbox who doesn’t have one. There is Kay at seven, reviving the starling that thunked itself cold against the living-room
window (a lice-infested starling, mind you, not a cute little chickadee). There is Kay at every year of her life bringing home some animal that had been left mangled or abandoned by the side of the road. Kay at eleven giving all of her allowance to the Haitian relief fund after the priest’s Sunday sermon about the suffering in Haiti. Kay at fourteen using her baby-sitting money to buy George the iguana that he wanted and I refused to pay for. Kay at thirty working in the public defender’s office, for God’s sake—what more proof did a person need than that? Is it possible that an engagement ring could change a person’s brain chemistry?

“Listen,” I said. “Give Taffy a break. She’s having a very hard time right now.” I wasn’t being coy. I had every intention of telling them the nature of her hard time, but as soon as I said it, the vacuum was turned off and the doorbell rang and the three of us were suspended in a sudden void of silence.

“I’ll get that,” I said.

There stood my sister at the front door with a small red leather suitcase at her feet and a white wire-haired terrier named Stamp in her arms. Even though she had been the bane of my childhood, even though we had never been close as adults, my blood recognized her blood and I remembered what my mother worked tirelessly to drill into us: that a sister was a valuable thing to have in this world.

“Welcome home,” I said.

“I look like hell,” she said.

Taffy didn’t know the first thing about looking like hell. Despite having found out that her husband was leaving her yesterday, despite driving since the crack of dawn to get here, she was still nothing short of radiant. If the only thing Taffy had going for her was the hand that nature dealt her at birth, she would have
been a beautiful woman. But she had more than that. She had taste. She had a personal trainer and a brilliant colorist she saw every six weeks. She had good jewelry, flashy Italian shoes, and a very, very subtle plastic surgeon of whom she did not speak. Because we had grown up in the same house, I knew that in a couple of weeks she would be turning sixty (she would swear to fifty-eight if anyone could get that much out of her), but time seemed to leave her alone. If she had been crying half the night, there would be no telling it. She looked like she was on her way to lunch at the polo club. She was wearing soft camel pants that matched her camel sweater set in silk, which matched the small brown ring around her dog’s left eye. I leaned over to give her a hug, but her dog flashed his teeth at me and made a quick lunge in the general direction of my throat, which made me jump back.

“What’s Stamp’s problem?” I’d never particularly liked Stamp, but it wasn’t as if we were strangers. He had no reason to want to take a piece out of me.

She put one hand over the dog’s eyes to make a temporary blindfold and then she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Stamp is very protective of me if anyone gets too close. It’s gotten worse as he’s gotten older. I don’t know how well he sees. He bites Neddy all the time now.”

“Good boy, Stamp.” I was glad to think that something in this life had bitten Neddy. It made me wish I had a box of biscuits.

“Everybody needs something that loves them best.” Taffy gave Stamp a kiss on his forehead, leaving a little lipstick stain on his wiry white fur. “At twenty I was hoping for more than a dog, but at this point in my life a dog doesn’t seem so bad.”

I thought about Tom. I needed to call him. I leaned over and picked up the suitcase, which the dog didn’t seem to mind at all.
I guess he didn’t feel protective about the luggage. Taffy put Stamp down and he immediately raced off into the house. A second later we heard a round of unrepentantly vicious barking. When I got to the kitchen, Kay was yelling at Stamp, who had stopped about six inches from Woodrow’s shoes. Every bark was a small explosion that momentarily forced all four of the dog’s feet off the floor. The bark was so high, so nerve-shattering, that I felt as if it was reprogramming the regular beating of my heart. Woodrow, on the other hand, never flinched, even though he was the one who was about to be swallowed whole by a twenty-pound fox terrier. He simply sat at the kitchen table and continued to drink his coffee, which in turn drove the dog to new levels of hysteria. Kay scooped Stamp up and, without thinking, tossed him out the back door, at which point he immediately charged at the four men who were unloading cement from a truck. In one balletic gesture the four leapt up and into the flatbed while the dog jumped up and up and up, every time almost reaching the back of the truck and every time crashing back into the driveway undeterred. The very hound from hell.

“Jesus,” Kay said. “Why don’t you keep that thing on a leash?”

Taffy seemed to be completely unaffected by the display and I had to wonder if it was a constant event at her house, if all across Atlanta the UPS men were drawing straws to see who would take the heinous job of delivering her packages. “No one keeps a dog on a leash inside. Besides, he’s never bitten anyone except my husband. He looks like he’s going to bite, but he never actually does.”

“You should tell that to the men in the truck,” Woodrow said.

“Is that yard completely fenced in?” Taffy asked. “I don’t think I could take Stamp running off right now.”

The chances of Stamp leaving that truck were about as great as the earth disengaging from its orbit, but it was true, he needed to be relocated. Kay opened up the back door again. “Sorry,” she said to the four grown men who were inching back toward the cab of the truck. “My aunt says it doesn’t bite.”

“Everyone says that,” one of the men in the truck said. “And then after that they say, ‘Look at that. You’re the first person that dog’s ever bitten.’ ”

Kay nodded and picked up the dog around the middle. She carried it with her arms stretched out in front of her as if it was something she was in a hurry to get into the wash. Stamp seemed to have no sense that he was off the ground. His legs still pulsed as if he were hopping. He barked at the men in the truck until Woodrow came into view, and then he barked at Woodrow again briefly until Kay took him down the hall, at which point he started barking at Mr. Kelly, who was just coming in with the vacuum. Mr. Kelly, a short, heavyset man in his fifties, pressed himself hard against the wall to give Kay and the dog as wide a passage as was possible. Kay opened the door to her old bedroom, where Taffy would be staying, pitched in the dog, and slammed the door.

“You don’t have to throw him,” Taffy said to Kay. “It works perfectly well to just set him down on the floor.”

Kay was a lawyer. She was capable of controlling herself when she had to, but I could see the muscles working in her jaw, a gene she had picked up from her father. “Mr. Kelly, Mr. Woodrow, this is my aunt, Taffy Bishop from Atlanta.”

“I thought that dog was from Atlanta,” Woodrow said.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Mr. Kelly said in a weak voice.

“Pleased to meet you,” Woodrow said.

Taffy nodded at them and then turned to me. “Are you adding on to the house?”

“Well, that’s how it started.”

“I’m going to go on down to the basement and have a look at those pipes,” Mr. Kelly said, taking a red bandanna out of his pocket and wiping down his large expanse of forehead. “That dog doesn’t go down to the basement, does he?”

“Never,” Taffy said.

Mr. Kelly left the vacuum in the middle of the hall and made a quick exit. He wanted to get away from us, all of us. He would clearly be more comfortable underground.

“I suppose I should be getting back to work myself,” Woodrow said. He turned to Kay. He was hoping to calm her down. “We’ll talk more about the dresses later. I just want you to be sure and pick something before I finish the job.”

“Mother’s right. We’ve got plenty of time.”

Woodrow nodded and left the kitchen. He was so tall and thin, so graceful that I always thought he could have been a dancer. He had once confided in me that even in his early sixties he was still plagued by people asking him if he had ever thought of playing professional basketball.

“The workmen are helping you pick out dresses?” Taffy said.

“It’s not the workmen,” Kay said, her voice breaking slightly. “It’s Woodrow. Woodrow has very good taste.”

“He has four daughters,” I said. “He knows a lot about clothes.”

“There’s something here I’m not getting,” Taffy said.

“Do you have more luggage?” Kay said. “I could go out and get it for you.”

“Isn’t George here? There’s too much for you to carry in.”

How much luggage could there be? “George isn’t going to be home for a while. He’s over at the school.”