40. Zelda
ZELDA
Suri looks up and smiles when she sees me.
“You came.”
“I promised you I would try the food.”
“And tell me if it’s good.”
“I always do.”
Dax is carrying chairs from the side room. He stops when I approach and says hello without adding a remark about Jeremiah. Suri has told him what Candace threatened. For today that is enough.
I take my place near the window and talk to Suri’s cousin about the library. She wants books for a child who has decided stories about ordinary families are suspicious. I promise to make a list.
The woman on my other side has a daughter with a birthday in November. Candace is arranging it; she has already taken the booking and asked for family photographs to make the place cards. I do not tell the woman whom to hire while we are eating Suri’s food.
Jeremiah arrives alone. He sees me, comes over, and asks whether I would like water before he sits. I touch his hand briefly, just because I can, and watch his eyes soften. He stays there for a moment, then goes to greet Suri and Dax.
The first hour is good. Suri tells the story of meeting Dax while both of them insisted they did not want to be introduced. Dax corrects her details and then admits he remembers them exactly as she does. People laugh.
I am glad I came.
At dessert I hear someone say, “You can’t go through there.”
I look up with my fork in my hand. Candace steps out of the staff passage behind a server carrying water. The server turns, startled, and calls back down the passage for the manager.
Candace congratulates Suri in a clear voice and holds out an envelope. She is already looking past her, toward our table.
“I called you,” Suri says, standing. “I told you not to come.”
“I brought a gift.” She lays the envelope on the table beside the door.
Dax gets up so quickly his chair strikes the wall. The server moves the tray out of his way. Suri is already between Candace and the table.
“Leave,” Suri says. “Now.”
Candace raises her phone. “Then hear this first.”
“No,” Suri says. She steps around the server. Candace has already tapped the screen. My own voice comes out of the phone, tired and clear. Sometimes I wish I’d never married him.
Suri grabs the hand Candace has stretched toward the table and taps pause, a second too late. Dax stands beside her, close enough to make the way out clear without touching her.
My fork is still in my hand. I set it down, miss the plate, and hear it hit the table.
That is my voice.
I knew what she had, and I knew what she threatened, but I had forgotten the little break before married. I remember trying the sentence again, trying to make it sound less like crying before I sent it to my friend.
Everyone is looking at me. My mouth has gone dry.
Dax points toward the door. “Come on. You’ve been told. You’re not supposed to be here.”
Candace pulls her arm against her body, clutching the phone. “Don’t touch me.”
He hasn’t. He drops his hand and waits beside the doorway.
I look for Jeremiah before I can stop myself. He is standing beside his chair. His face is pale. He knew what I’d said, but hearing my voice say it in front of all these people might be different. I cannot tell whether he is angry with me.
The old impulse rises so quickly that I almost say I’m sorry.
I press my feet against the floor. I told him in July. We sat in my kitchen, and he asked me whether I’d meant it. I didn’t lie to him then. I don’t want to lie now.
“I sent that to my friend,” I say, but the first words are too quiet. I swallow and try again.
“I said I sometimes wished I hadn’t married Jeremiah. I meant it.”
Candace turns toward the guests. “He should be allowed to hear how she talked about him.”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “I told him myself in July.”
She looks at Jeremiah. “You heard her,” she says. “You don’t have to keep pretending she’s the only one who was hurt in all of this.”
He comes around the table and stops beside my chair. I look up at him.
“It hurt,” he says. “When she told me, and again just now.”
My fingers tighten against my skirt.
“But Zelda had tried to tell me she was unhappy long before she said that to you. I didn’t listen to her. Then I resented her for telling someone else.”
“You can’t blame me for that,” Candace snaps.
“I’m telling them what I did.”
He turns to the table.
“Zelda never slapped Candace. Candace admitted that to me eight days before our anniversary. I still demanded that Zelda apologize again, in front of everyone.”
A chair creaks. One of Jeremiah’s colleagues looks at me, then lowers his eyes.
“Candace also told me she wanted me,” Jeremiah says. “I told her I was married. Then I let her keep coming to my office to talk about my wife.”
He pauses. I watch him look from one face to the next.
“I hid that from Zelda too. I liked having someone on my side. Even after I knew she’d lied about my wife.”
I want to reach for him. I want to get out of this chair and away from everyone who now knows how little I knew about my own marriage.
Suri remains between Candace and the table. When Candace shifts toward me, Suri stays where she is.
My knee is shaking beneath the table. I push my heel down harder.
“She was my friend,” I say. Then I look at Candace. “You were my friend. I thought I could tell you when I was unhappy.”
Candace lifts the phone again, though she does not start the recording again. “You think I wanted you to be unhappy?”
“You knew I was. You heard me crying.”
I see her sitting on my bed with soup in her lap when I was sick, years ago, waiting for me to stop coughing so I can swallow a spoonful.
I trusted that woman with the recording. She had stroked my hair out of my face.
I look down at the table because I cannot bear to see this person holding the phone anymore.
Suri picks up the envelope Candace tried to give her and puts it back in her hand. “I told you before. I told you again this week. You don’t get to come here and do this.”
“We’ve been friends for years.”
“I know.” Suri pushes the envelope against her hand. “We’re finished, Candace.”
“I knew you before either of them,” Candace pleads. “We were all friends.”
Suri’s face crumples for an instant. “We were.” Then she steps aside, leaving the way to the door clear. “You need to go now.”
The woman beside me sets down her water. “You have my daughter’s photographs for November,” she tells Candace. “I trusted you to use them for her birthday. Please return them. I’m canceling.” Candace turns toward her eyes wide. “That’s a professional booking. I have never?—”
The woman looks at the phone still in Candace’s hand until she lowers it.
“There’s something else,” the woman says.
She turns in her chair to look at me. “In February I was copied on an email about you. It had the film of you apologizing, and no name on it. It came to the address I gave Candace two years ago, for my daughter’s party invitations.
I have never given that address to anyone else. ”
My face goes hot to the ears. “That email went to my director,” I say. “I was taken off the library’s children’s table because of it.”
“I didn’t know that. I deleted it.” Her voice drops. “I should have told you in February. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t send that email,” Candace says.
The woman’s email address is not proof. I have no message to put beside it, no name I can give my director with certainty.
Still, I am back in the supervisor’s office, looking through the glass at the paper footprints, hearing that I cannot read to the children on Saturday.
Jeremiah’s fingers touch the back of my chair. He does not answer the denial for me.
“Please send me whatever you still have,” I tell the woman. She nods, although she has already said she deleted it.
The manager arrives through the passage and holds the door to the public dining room open. “Now, Candace.”
Candace looks around the table. “My clients know me. I’ve never let any of you down.”
Suri’s cousin has been sitting with one hand over her mouth. She lowers it. “I don’t want you planning my parents’ anniversary in April. I’ll write to you about the deposit.”
“That has nothing to do with Zelda.”
“It has something to do with trusting you.”
Candace turns toward the man from Suri’s building. He looks away from her, then back. “We’ll make other arrangements for the christening in January too.”
Candace turns from one to the other. In July she told me she had one booking left. That was the birthday in November.
“You did this.” She says it to me. Her voice has gone high and thin. “You stood in that study and asked whether I wanted your husband, and now you’ve taken every client I had. I should have let you hit me. Then one thing I said would have been true.”
No one answers her.
I stand up. My chair scrapes, and Candace looks at my hands. I want to hurt her. I remember the mug trembling in my hand while she waited for me to apologize, and I can barely get a breath past it.
“You let me beg him,” I say. “You stood there and watched.”
“Zelda, I?—”
“You knew I hadn’t touched you.”
She looks toward Suri. Suri takes the rejected envelope from her and puts it on the table beside the door.
“We all heard you, Candace,” she says. “You lied. You’re leaving.”
The restaurant manager steps into the space Dax has cleared. She is the woman who used to book Candace for this room.
“The side door was open for a delivery,” she says. “It was not an invitation. You do not have permission to use my staff passage, now or for future work.”
She waits while Candace picks up the envelope. This time Candace goes with her. Through the open doorway I see a man in the public dining room turn in his chair. The woman beside him stops with her glass halfway to her mouth.
Then Candace is past them and I cannot see her anymore.
I am still standing. My chair is too far behind me to find with my knees, and I look down as if I have forgotten how to sit. Jeremiah moves it nearer. I lower myself into it and put both hands in my lap.
Nobody asks me to apologize.
I wait anyway. There is a scrape of cutlery at the other end of the table. Someone says something too quietly for me to hear. Nobody asks.
Jeremiah bends beside me. “Would you like to go outside?”
I shake my head, then say, “I don’t know.”
Suri crouches on my other side, trying to hide her tears from me.
“You can go,” she says. “You don’t have to stay for me.”
On the table in front of me is a little yellow plate with the cake she chose instead of Dax’s choice. A smear of cream has tipped against the edge. I wanted that cake when I came in. I wanted to hear her story.
“Just a minute,” I say.
They give me one. Suri stands and asks the server for more water. Jeremiah sits down. The woman beside me passes my fork back without touching my hand or asking anything. I am grateful enough for that small kindness that my eyes fill.
I take a mouthful of cake. It might as well be paper.
Conversation starts at the far end of the table, stops, then starts again. Someone asks about Suri and Dax’s first apartment. He says the kitchen was perfectly adequate. She turns around.
“You opened the oven and trapped me behind the refrigerator.”
“That happened once.”
“Because I refused to go back into the kitchen with you there.”
I laugh. It hurts my throat a little. Suri looks toward me, and I lift the fork to show her I am still eating.
The next mouthful tastes of lemon. I take another before I tell her it is good.
Afterward in the garden, Jeremiah asks whether he said more than I wanted. “You told them what you did,” I say. “You didn’t tell them I didn’t mean what I said.”
Suri comes out with two napkins and the piece of cake I said I was too full to finish.
“You weren’t,” she says. I thank her for going for the phone.
She says she was too slow, and she should never have let Candace get through the door.
“You told her not to come, and you went for her,” I tell her. “I saw.”
She gives me the cake and goes back to her guests.
I look at Jeremiah after she has gone. “For a second I nearly apologized.”
His face tightens. “I’m sorry.”
My chin lifts. “I didn’t.”
“No. You never needed to.”
I take his hand. My fingers are still unsteady, and he feels it; his thumb moves once over my knuckles, then rests.
We stand there while I finish the extra cake. When I am ready, we go back inside to thank Suri before leaving in our own cars. Somebody has started arguing about music for the wedding. Suri is laughing, flushed and tired, with the rejected envelope nowhere in sight.
I stay in the doorway for a moment to listen. Then I say goodbye.