24 - EATING EMOTIONS
Lacey
I'd arrived twenty minutes early. I hadn't been able to sit at home one more minute, and being early at a restaurant gave me actual tasks. Order water. Fold the napkin.
I'm too old to have a stepmother.
It was unfair, and it was uncharitable, and it was the most honest thought I'd had since the email came in.
I heard the door, the bright voice of the hostess, and I turned.
Dad was beaming.
I hadn't seen my father's face do whatever it was doing in twenty years, maybe twenty-five.
He was holding the door with one hand and gesturing the woman with him through with the other, looking at her sideways like a man who couldn't quite believe he'd been allowed to walk in next to this person.
Chin up, shoulders down. He was wearing a tie.
Dad didn't wear ties to lunch on a weekday.
Then I saw her.
Carol was much younger than I'd been ready for.
Dad was pushing sixty. Carol couldn't have been more than forty-five.
She was a woman with a figure, and the wrap dress knew it.
Stockings in September. Pumps. Hair fully done.
A full face of makeup put on by a woman who'd been doing her own since she was sixteen and had never stopped.
Tasteful by a margin so narrow my father would have made me change clothes in high school if I'd tried to leave the house in it.
My mother had worn clothes like that.
Dad was opening his mouth to introduce us. He didn't get there.
Carol crossed the last three feet with the brisk warmth of a woman who'd decided what was going to happen.
She opened her arms and hugged me before I'd stood up properly.
Both arms around my shoulders, cheek beside mine, a count of three.
The competence of a woman who'd been hugging strangers her whole adult life and had worked out exactly how long.
She stepped back, hands still on my upper arms, and looked at my face.
Then she let go too quickly, half a step back, the expression dialing down a notch. The correction was instant and fully under control, and if I hadn't been looking right at her I'd have missed it. Behind her, Dad's smile faltered for half a second. He'd seen it too.
She'd read dislike on my face, or thought she had, and decided she'd come in too warm.
Oh, I thought. She was paying attention.
"It's wonderful to meet you, Carol," I said. "Dad hasn't stopped talking about you."
Carol's face came back up to full brightness in real time.
"Oh," she said, and turned to my father. "Bob. You undersold her."
Dad was still beaming. It had gotten worse. He looked, frankly, drunk on it.
"I told you," he said.
"You did not tell me. You said pretty. Pretty is what you say about a niece. This is your daughter, honey." She squeezed my arms once more. "Hi, sweetheart. I am so happy to finally meet you. He hasn't stopped talking about you. I feel like I already know you!"
She sat down across from me before I'd spoken again. Dad slid in beside her. The whole choreography of their arrival had taken about ninety seconds, and Carol had filled it with conversation that hadn't required any from me.
Carol was the kind of woman I'd always liked to be around. Confident, talkative, the kind who carried the room. Janice was one of those women.
I'd walked into this lunch ready to resent the woman who'd be sleeping with my father.
The woman I'd met instead was making it considerably harder.
Carol opened her menu. Then she looked over at Dad's, then at mine, then back at hers. She was scanning hers but checking ours, the way you scan a menu when you aren't sure what's safe to want.
"What looks good, Lacey?"
"The roasted chicken's good. The salad with the goat cheese. I haven't had the special."
"Bob, what did you have last time?"
"The Reuben."
"Oh, the Reuben." Carol looked at the menu again, her finger traveling down the page.
"I'm having the chicken." A pause. She looked up at me.
"I had a Reuben in Pittsburgh once. Big as your head.
Couldn't finish it. Bob says these are smaller, which is probably good.
" A pause. "I should probably not be having a big Reuben in front of my future stepdaughter on the first day. "
She laughed. Dad laughed too. Dad's laugh was a quarter-beat off. It was the laugh of a man who'd heard the joke before it was made and had been hoping she wouldn't make it.
I laughed. I made mine bigger than the situation called for, on purpose, the way I'd laughed last week at the seven-year-old patient who told me a knock-knock joke he'd been working on for three days.
"Carol. You can have whatever you want."
"I want chicken," she said firmly. "I want chicken and I want to be nervous about meeting you. Both. I want both."
She'd said it before she could stop herself. I watched her catch up to having said it about half a second after the rest of us heard it. A small flush moved up her neck. She covered it by looking at the menu again.
I hadn't been ready for that. I looked at her properly for the first time.
Her hand on the menu had a small tremor in it. The makeup was perfect. The dress was perfect. The hair was perfect. The hand was vibrating at the edge of the menu.
There were a few possible readings. Adrenaline. Caffeine. Some nervous-system thing I had no business diagnosing across a restaurant table after five minutes. The one I went with, provisionally, was that this woman had been nervous about lunch considerably longer than I'd been nervous about lunch.
It was the first time all morning I'd considered that I wasn't the only one being assessed.
I looked at Dad.
Dad was watching me with the small attention of a man holding his breath through an outcome he couldn't influence. He looked at me, and he tried to keep his face the face it had been, and for half a second he looked almost afraid.
I'd been planning, in a way I hadn't entirely admitted to myself, to be angry with my father for the rest of my life. An architect of the marriage I'd spent fifteen years not leaving. The version of him sitting across from me now was complicating that plan, and I had no idea what to do about it.
I made my voice warm. I didn't have to decide to. It came out warm.
"Carol. I think the chicken's an excellent choice. You should have whatever you want. Order the Reuben if you want the Reuben, the portion's reasonable. And I'm not your stepdaughter yet."
Carol looked up sharply. Her face went still for a fraction of a second. Then she laughed. It was the first laugh I'd heard from her that was hers and not a social instrument.
"Oh, well." She wiped under one eye with a pinky, careful of the mascara. "You're not, are you? You're not yet. That's good."
She looked at Dad.
"I'm sorry." A small laugh. "I've been calling you that in my head for weeks. Bob told me not to get ahead of myself." She glanced at my father. "I suppose I didn't listen."
I laughed properly this time. The defensive note was new. I hadn't heard her sound like a person who sometimes overrode my father before.
Dad's beaming came back, less performed than it had been since they sat down.
I closed my menu. I didn't need to look at it again. I'd been coming to this restaurant since I was a resident.
"Carol. I'm going to have the chicken too. Dad, get whatever you want. Then I want to hear how you two met."
Carol's whole posture changed when I said her name like that. The shoulders came down. She set her menu on top of mine, neatly, slightly too neatly, how a woman sets a menu down when she puts things in particular places at home. She looked at Dad.
"Did you tell her how we met?"
"Some of it."
"Oh, then I get to tell the rest."
The waitress came. We ordered. Carol had a complicated set of questions about the dressing on the salad, then decided to get the chicken, and apologized after the waitress had walked away.
Sorry. The food's much better here than what I'm used to.
The apology wasn't smooth, and she didn't try to make it smooth.
It sat there, a small bare thing she'd put on the table by accident.
It went past Dad like a wave he didn't notice. I wasn't sure yet whether it was a class signal or one more version of the nervousness she'd been carrying since the parking lot. I'd been jumping to conclusions all morning. This was the one I decided to be slower about.
She told the story of how they'd met instead. At her church. Bob had taken six months to ask her out, in the church parking lot, in a manner Carol described as like a kid asking for a prom date and not sure he should.
Dad turned slightly red.
"That is not how it happened."
"That is exactly how it happened."
"It was a perfectly normal—"
"It was perfectly normal for a fourteen-year-old, Bob."
I laughed. I'd laughed more in the last ten minutes than I'd laughed at lunch in a year.
Over the next fifteen minutes I noticed that Carol touched my father a lot. Her hand kept finding his forearm. It found mine twice, briefly, when she was making a point. She wasn't aware of doing it. It was how her body knew how to talk.
Then Carol made one more too-eager joke, this time about a wedding planner she'd already spoken to, and heard herself doing it.
"Oh, not for us. We're not. We've barely.
Not yet." It came out in pieces, and for once she had no graceful way back from it.
Dad's strained laugh. A silence half a beat too long.
Then she reached over and squeezed his knee under the table, and his laugh turned real.
"He's a sweet sleeper," she said to me a minute later, conversationally, as if it were the next sentence in a conversation we'd been having. "Bob. Did you know that? He sleeps like a dropped coat. I'd never met a man who sleeps like that. I told him I was going to write a poem about it."
Dad turned the color of red wine.
"Carol."
"Sorry. Sorry. I forget. You're right. Sorry."
She caught up to herself a half-beat slower than she had with the stepdaughter joke. She wasn't embarrassed enough. There was about a third of the embarrassment the moment called for, and the missing two-thirds was the first thing about Carol I knew I'd have to live with.
She loved my father.
It leaked out of her in everything, the hand that kept finding his arm, the sentences she finished for him and then made herself stop.
I'd come ready to dislike her. I wasn't going to manage it.
What I was going to do about my father was the harder question.