21. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
Kirk moves the same fork a quarter inch to the left, steps back to look at it, then moves it back.
“It’s a handful of people,” I say. “Not a jury.”
“Your sister told me she’d end me in this kitchen.”
“That was months ago. She likes you now.”
“She mailed me a card last week. A sympathy card. There was nothing inside except ‘so far so good.’” He straightens a knife that was already straight. “Tell me that’s not a threat. That’s a threat.”
“That’s her being nice. You’ll know when she’s not.”
He picks up a wine glass, holds it to the light, sets it down. Picks up the next one.
“And my dad’s coming tonight. To this house.” He still won’t look at me. “The last time he came over for dinner, my mother moved everybody around the table twice, and the caterer ended up crying in the kitchen.”
“There’s no caterer tonight.”
“I’m the caterer.”
“Then don’t cry, and we’ve already beat last time.”
He almost laughs. He puts the glass down and finally stops touching the table.
William shows up forty minutes early with two bottles of wine, switching which hand they’re in, standing on the porch like he’s not sure he’s allowed to knock.
“Oh god, I’m early,” he says. “I’m too early. I can drive around the block.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’re not driving around the block. Come in.”
Kirk’s chicken comes out of the oven exactly right.
He learned to make it in the three months I was gone, out of a cookbook, by himself, and it’s almost exactly the one I never got to cook for him the day everything blew up.
Neither of us says that. He just looks at it sitting there in one piece and lets out a breath, and I go up on my toes and kiss the side of his head, and he leans into it for a second before Melissa yells that she can smell rosemary and is anyone planning to feed her.
Daniel’s halfway through telling everyone how he proposed.
“So I get down on one knee-”
“Both knees,” Clarence says. “You tripped.”
“I lowered myself-”
“You tripped over the bocce ball. Other people saw it. Ask Derek.”
“There were other people who saw, it wasn’t just me,” Derek says.
“ - and I open the box, and this man,” Daniel points his fork across the table, “looks at the ring and goes, ‘is that why you’ve been so weird all week?’”
“He’d been pale for days,” Clarence says. “I thought he had the flu.”
“I was nervous.”
“You looked sick, to be honest.”
Kirk and Derek have their heads down over a napkin, arguing about some wall in Derek’s house and whether it holds the roof up. Jenna leans past me and says, loud enough for the table, “Andrea. Did you know your husband and I have a secret?”
“We don’t have a secret,” Kirk says, not looking up from the napkin.
“We do. I watched you two slow dance at my wedding, and honestly, it was a little much. People noticed.”
“We were dancing-”
“You got a room after,” Melissa says. “I’m not guessing. I have the room number.”
The whole table goes up. I put my face in my hands. Kirk, who is a coward, raises his glass.
“To Melissa,” he says. “Who doesn’t miss.”
“I don’t miss.” Melissa clinks glasses with everyone she can reach, and William laughs so hard he has to set his fork down - a real one, loud, out of the chest. I’d put money on nobody at any Graham table ever hearing him laugh like that.
Later, when the plates are gone and the candles are burned low, he stands up. The table quiets, because William doesn’t make toasts.
“I’ve eaten a lot of dinners.” He stops. Starts over. “Fancy ones. Everything in the right spot, everybody polite, and not one true thing said all night. For about forty years.” His voice snags. “This is the best table I’ve ever sat at. Thank you for keeping me a chair. I know it wasn’t easy to.”
“To the hosts,” everyone says, and Kirk finds my hand under the tablecloth and runs his thumb over my knuckles, and that same dumb warmth I get whenever he does that shows up again.
The doorbell rings.
I’m still smiling when I open it, because a doorbell at nine at night is a neighbor or a package. It’s a courier with a clipboard.
“Andrea Graham? Sign here.”
The envelope is thick and legal-sized, with a Palm Beach address and a law firm’s name stamped in the corner. Behind me the table goes quiet a conversation at a time.
Kirk reads it out loud, standing at the head of the table, because we don’t hide envelopes in this house anymore.
It’s from a firm called Whitcomb and Rand, on behalf of Mrs. Ethel Graham, polite and vicious at the same time, listing Graham family things that need to come back where they belong. The silver. The paintings. The crystal.
And then, partway down, plain as anything:
One ring, platinum and diamond, property of the estate of Eleanor Graham, currently in the possession of Mrs. Andrea Graham.
My hand closes over my finger before he finishes the sentence.
“She wants the ring,” I say. “She’s asking for your grandmother’s ring.”
“She can’t have it.” Kirk’s gone quiet, which is the loudest he gets. “I sent her fourteen boxes of her own stuff back, and she reads that as me opening a negotiation.”
“Can she actually take it?” Jenna asks. “Like, legally?”
“She can make it expensive to keep,” Daniel says. “That’s the whole point. She doesn’t care if she wins. She wants you spending a whole day thinking about her from a thousand miles away.”
“Then we don’t give her the day,” Clarence says. “One-line letter back. Let her pay her lawyers to read it.”
“Or we just burn it,” Kirk says, “and don’t-”
“No,” William says.
Everybody looks at him. He hasn’t raised his voice. He’s holding his wine glass very still, and his face has gone into a shape I know from Kirk, and I realize that’s exactly where Kirk gets it.
“My mother gave Kirk that ring when he was nineteen,” William says.
“In my kitchen. I was standing right there. She put it in his hand and she said-” he says it carefully, like he’s carrying it “-’For the girl who makes you laugh, not the girl who makes sense.
’ Ethel was in the next room. She heard every word.
She’s hated that ring for fifteen years, because it’s the one thing in this family she couldn’t pick. ”
He sets the glass down.
“And it’s in the will. By name. Her name, Kirk’s name, right there in the estate papers.
Ethel’s lawyers know that. Which means Ethel knows that.
Which means this letter isn’t a legal document at all.
” He taps the page. “It’s a note. She wanted Andrea to see her own ring typed up on a list of things to give back. ”
Nobody says anything for a second.
“So what do we do,” Melissa says.
“Tomorrow I send Whitcomb and Rand a copy of the will and a bill for my time.” A small, cold smile. “And Ethel finds out the family she’s suing for the silverware talks to each other now.”
The party doesn’t stop there, because we don’t let it. Daniel opens the second bottle. Somebody brings up bocce again. By eleven the letter’s shoved under the fruit bowl and forgotten, and everyone hugs us goodbye out in the porch light.
Melissa’s last. She stops on the step and looks at Kirk for a second.
“Chicken was good,” she says, and she’s down the walk before he can answer.
From Melissa, that’s about the nicest thing she’s said to him since he blew up our lives, and from the look on his face, he knows it.
We do the dishes together. It’s only after, wiping down the counter, that I catch myself turning the ring on my finger, around and around, feeling the little weight of it for the first time in a long time.
Kirk’s hands go still in the sink.
“She’s not done,” I say. It comes out calmer than I feel. “The calls, and now this. She’s a thousand miles away and she’s still not done.”
“No.” He dries his hands and comes up behind me, wraps his arms around me over the bump, rests his chin on my head.
“She’s not. But look at how it keeps going.
She told the lie, and the whole club turned on her.
She sent lawyers, and my own dad showed up on our side.
” His arms tighten. “Every time she reaches for something she ends up with less. So let her reach. We push back now. All of us.”
I lean into him and look at us in the dark kitchen window - the two of us, the bump, the ring right where his grandmother left it.
“She’s going to try something else,” I say.
“Probably.” He kisses the top of my head. “Let her.”