16. Paige #2
“Okay,” he says at last. Not okay-I-believe-you. Okay-I’ll-wait. The man waited twelve years. He can smell a held breath from across a kitchen.
Saturday arrives dressed in pink and blue.
Tara’s cousin’s backyard has been transformed into a catalog page: white folding chairs in rows, ribbon on everything that holds still, a balloon arch bleeding from rose to navy, and a table stacked with cupcakes iced in question marks.
At the center of the lawn, mounted on a stand with theatrical importance, waits a cardboard cannon the size of a fire extinguisher.
Forty people mill on the grass with lemonade, and every single one of them stops talking when Maria and I come through the side gate.
“Heads up,” I murmur.
“Chins up,” Maria corrects, and takes my arm.
Crossing a lawn takes eleven seconds. These eleven cost more than most. Near the drinks table, two women I’ve never met lean their heads together, and the breeze does me the favor of carrying it over.
“That’s her. The wife.”
“The wife came? Bold.”
“I heard she’s with the brother now. Didn’t even wait for the ink.”
“I heard it started way before the ink.”
Maria’s arm tightens on mine, and her voice comes out at garden-party volume, bright as the balloon arch. “Paige, dear, remind me to introduce you to absolutely no one.”
Melissa is here, and Jennifer, and half the faces from the country club, and their eyes travel between me and the balloon arch doing arithmetic they’ll be trading at brunch for a month.
Near the cupcake table, in a blue button-down with his color back and his lip healed, my husband is playing host at his mistress’s gender reveal.
Cole sees his mother, and his whole face opens for the audience.
“Mom.” Crossing to us, arms out, voice pitched to carry. “You came. You have no idea what this means.”
“I came for the child,” Maria says, and does not lift her arms. “Hello, Cole.”
“And Paige.” His attention swings to me, warm, gracious, absolutely for the cheap seats. “I’m so glad you felt you could be here. Truly. It says everything about who you are.”
“It says I drive your mother places.” Keeping it pleasant costs a molar. “Congratulations on the caterer. Very fast work. The vow renewal took you four months to plan.”
“Some things matter enough to move quickly.” No shame anywhere on him, and this close, freshly shaved and lightly tanned, he looks better than he has any right to look, and the wrongness of it curdles in my stomach.
He leans in, voice dropping for just us two.
“Thank you for coming. Whatever your reasons. It plays well.”
“It plays well.”
“Everything plays, Paige.” A squeeze of my shoulder for the audience, and he’s gone, back toward the drinks table, calling somebody’s name.
Tara finds me by the fence twenty minutes later.
Nearly six months along now and dressed in white, she approaches the way you’d approach a dog that’s bitten you, which is fair, since the last time we stood this close I threw her drink in her face.
“You didn’t have to come,” she says.
“Maria asked.”
“I know. I’m glad. She shouldn’t be alone with this crowd.
” Her hand makes slow circles on the side of her belly, an absent habit she’s picked up since the vineyard.
“For what it’s worth, I told him not to invite you.
Not because you’re not… because it’s cruel, Paige.
Making you stand on a lawn for this is cruel, and he knows it, and that’s why the invitation went out. ”
“He said it plays well.”
“It does. Look around.” Her chin indicates the yard, the phones already angled our way, Jennifer whispering behind a lemonade.
“Wife of honor at the mistress’s party. By Monday, half this town will say you’ve forgiven everyone, and the other half will say you and Wes had your own arrangement all along, so nobody needs to feel bad for you.
He gets both stories for the price of one cannon.
” The circles on her belly stop. “I keep telling you. Rooms he fills with witnesses are rooms he’s rehearsed in. ”
“Then why hand him the room?”
“Because I wanted one nice day.” Her voice comes apart on nice.
“One. Before the custody talk and the paternity paperwork and whatever war he’s planning next.
One day with cupcakes where the worst thing anyone does is guess wrong about a baby.
” A wet laugh. “I should have known better. I helped write the playbook.”
At the center of the lawn, Cole clinks a fork against a glass.
“Everyone! Everyone, gather in.” Sunlight, teeth, open arms, my husband conducting a backyard in four-four time. “Before we fire this thing off, I want to say a few words.”
“Oh no,” Tara says quietly.
“Family,” Cole begins, “has been on my mind a lot this year. I’ve made mistakes.
Everyone here knows it, I own it, I’m not going to stand on this beautiful day and pretend otherwise.
But look around this yard. My mother is here.
” His glass tips toward Maria, and forty heads turn with it.
“My mother, who raised me to believe that family shows up. And she showed up. Even Paige showed up, and if that doesn’t tell you what kind of people I come from, nothing will. ”
Beside me, Maria has gone rigid as fence wire.
“So before we find out who this little person is,” Cole says, hand settling on Tara’s shoulder in a portrait pose, “we want to share who they’ll be named for.
If it’s a girl, and Tara agrees the name is perfect…
” A pause, timed, rehearsed, aimed. “She’ll be Rose.
After my grandmother. Who we laid to rest last month, and who I know is watching. ”
The yard says awww.
Maria makes a sound I have never heard a person make, one syllable, punched out of her, and she is up out of the white folding chair and moving for the gate before the applause finds its rhythm.
Following her takes me past the cupcake table, past Melissa’s frozen face, past Cole, who watches his mother flee the naming of his daughter and, somewhere behind his eyes, checks a box.
Behind me, someone fires the cannon. Pink smoke rolls over the lawn, and the crowd cheers the arrival of a girl.
Rose.
Maria makes it to the passenger seat before she breaks. Both hands over her mouth, shoulders heaving, and I crouch in the open car door in a stranger’s driveway and hold my mother-in-law while forty feet away a party celebrates around a name.
“My mother’s name,” she manages. “He stood at her funeral last month, Paige. He gave nothing. Not a reading, not a tear, he checked his phone during the committal, I saw him. And now he.” Her breath won’t finish it. “He knew I’d be here. He waited until I was sitting in the front row to spend her.”
“I know.”
“You don’t spend the dead.” Her hands come down, and behind the wreckage her eyes have gone somewhere old and hard.
“You honor them or you leave them be. My son just used my dead mother as a down payment on his own forgiveness, in front of forty people, with a caterer.” A long, terrible pause.
“I keep looking for the bottom of him. Every time I think my hand’s touched it, the floor gives. ”
There is nothing to say to that, so I don’t say anything, just hold on until the shaking slows.
We’re pulling away from the curb when the knock comes on my window.
Melissa. Clutching her purse strap with both hands, glancing back toward the gate, lemonade abandoned somewhere behind her.
Rolling the window down is my second mistake of the day.
“Paige, I only have a second.” It all comes out in one breath.
“I know I’m the last person, after the brunch, I know.
But you were my friend for eight years and someone has to tell you before you hear it wrong.
” Another glance at the gate. “Cole’s been making calls.
All week. Jennifer, Brad, the Hendersons, my mother, everyone.
He’s saying you and Wes go back years. That he has proof. Photos.”
The steering wheel is solid under my hands. Ten and two.
“What kind of photos?”
“He won’t show anyone. He just says he has them, and honestly that’s working better than showing them would.
” Her knuckles have gone white on the purse strap.
“I left the group chat. For whatever that’s worth, I left it, and I told Jennifer she should be ashamed, and I’m not here begging a pardon for the brunch, I just.” She runs out of air, starts again.
“You threw a drink in Tara’s face and it was the most honest thing anyone’s done all year.
Okay. That’s all. That’s what I came to say. ”
“Melissa.” Maria leans across the console, tears still wet on her face, voice level as a poured floor. “Thank you. Now go back in there, smile, and count who nods along when my son talks. I’ll want the list.”
Melissa blinks, nods, and goes.
We pull away from the curb, past the balloon arch, past the pink smoke still hanging over the yard, and Maria stares straight ahead with her mother’s name written all over her face.
“He’s telling people he stayed quiet to protect me,” I say. “And they’re starting to believe him.”
“Let them.” Maria’s hands fold in her lap, one over the other, very still. “Believers change churches all the time, sweetheart. What we’re going to need is a pulpit.”