Chapter 4 Darcy
The final planning lunch happened on the Wednesday before the gala, at a restaurant near Claudette's house with white tablecloths and a wine list longer than the menu, a place where the servers seemed to know exactly which Westcott was paying before anyone had said a word.
Claudette had selected the table herself, in the center of the room, and had Felicity seated beside her before I arrived, the two of them already deep in a conversation that stopped just short of including me when I sat down.
"We were just talking about the year your father took us all to the Homestead," Felicity said, by way of greeting, touching Claudette's arm. "Do you remember, Claudette, when Edmund tried to teach us to ski and none of us could stay upright?"
"How could I forget. You were the only one brave enough to keep trying.
" Claudette laughed, a warm, private sound I rarely heard directed at me, and then turned to me with the practiced correction of someone remembering to include a guest. "This was years ago, Darcy, before you and Tyler. Felicity's known this family forever."
"I didn't know you all skied together," I said, keeping my voice light, reaching for the bread basket because it gave my hands something to do.
"Oh, we did everything together," Felicity said. "Claudette practically raised me those summers. My own mother traveled so much." Claudette patted her hand. Neither of them asked about the summers I had spent here since marrying Tyler.
The lunch went on like that, one story after another surfacing from years I hadn't been part of, until I had heard more about those summers than about the party we had come to discuss.
I tried once to offer something of my own, a memory of Tyler teaching me to sail on the Chesapeake the summer we got engaged, the way he'd laughed when he caught the boom with his forehead and insisted it hadn't hurt.
"Oh, Tyler never took to sailing," Claudette said, cutting gently across the story before I'd finished it. "He tried it exactly once, with his father, and hated every minute. You must be thinking of someone else's outing."
"It was definitely him. He still has the scar on his eyebrow from the boom." I kept my tone easy, but I felt the small, specific indignity of being corrected about my own marriage, in front of a woman who knew his childhood better than I did but had never shared our marriage.
"How funny. I suppose people change." Claudette moved on to the next topic without waiting to see whether I agreed.
I glanced at the empty fourth chair Tyler had left unfilled, having claimed a call with Charlotte he couldn't reschedule, and felt the small, familiar sting of noticing, again, that the one person who could have simply confirmed the sailing story wasn't in the room to do it.
Felicity gave me a look that might have been sympathy or might have been amusement, and I couldn't tell which, and that uncertainty was its own small exhaustion.
I asked reasonable questions when I could find an opening, offered what I remembered of Tyler's childhood from things he'd told me, and watched Claudette correct small details of my version with the confidence of someone who had been there.
By the time the entrées arrived I had mostly stopped trying.
I excused myself at one point to call the venue about a last-minute linen substitution, grateful for a legitimate reason to leave the table for a few minutes, and stood in the restaurant's quiet vestibule finishing the call longer than strictly necessary, buying myself a small pocket of air before returning to a conversation that required more performance than substance from me.
When I sat back down, Claudette and Felicity had moved on to discussing a mutual friend's daughter's wedding, and I ate my salad in relative peace for the first time all afternoon, grateful, in a way that embarrassed me slightly, for a few minutes of simply not being spoken to.
It was over coffee that Claudette mentioned the hosting arrangement, almost as an aside, the way she delivered most decisions she didn't want examined too closely.
"Felicity's agreed to help host the receiving line with your father and me.
She has such a natural warmth with people, and she knows nearly every family on the guest list personally.
You'll still be handling everything behind the scenes, of course. We couldn't do this without you."
I set my cup down carefully. "I thought I was hosting the receiving line with Tyler."
"Darling, someone has to keep the evening actually running.
The valet, the kitchen timing, the band's set changes.
You're the only one I trust to manage all of that without it falling apart.
" Claudette seemed to expect me to thank her, her tone perfectly pleasant, and Felicity had the grace to look faintly uncomfortable, which was somehow worse than if she'd looked pleased.
"I can manage the logistics and stand in the receiving line. I've done both before."
"I just think it's more efficient this way." Claudette's smile didn't move. "You're not upset, are you? I'd hate for this to turn into something."
"I'm not upset. I'm asking a question."
"It certainly sounds like you're upset." Claudette glanced at Felicity, a small, complicit look, the kind two people share when they've already decided what story they're going to tell about a conversation before it's finished happening.
"I only want the night to go smoothly, Darcy.
I'd think after everything you've put into this you'd want that too, rather than making it about where you're standing. "
Felicity, to her credit, tried once to smooth it.
"Darcy, I really don't need to host. I'm happy to just help behind the scenes if that would feel better.
" It might have meant something if she'd said it before Claudette had already announced the arrangement to the room as settled, or if she'd said it with any real intention of changing anyone's mind.
Instead it hung there for a moment, a gesture offered and immediately withdrawn, and Claudette waved it off without even looking up from the dessert menu.
"Don't be silly, it's already decided. Darcy doesn't mind, do you, dear. "
I didn't have an answer that wouldn't confirm whatever she'd already decided about me, so I didn't give her one.
I finished my coffee, paid for nothing because Claudette always insisted on the check at these lunches, a habit that had once felt generous and now felt like something closer to control, and left as soon as it was reasonable to leave.
I sat in my car in the restaurant's parking lot for a few minutes before starting the engine, going back over the conversation the way I always did afterward, looking for the exact sentence where I could have said something different and changed the outcome.
There wasn't one. Claudette had decided how the afternoon would go before I'd arrived, the same way she decided most things involving me, and no version of my own responses would have moved her off it.
I called Maxine out of habit, not really expecting her to pick up in the middle of a workday, and left a rambling voicemail about the lunch that I regretted almost as soon as I hung up, because saying it out loud made it sound smaller than it had felt sitting at that table, and larger, somehow, at the same time.
Maxine called back on her drive home an hour later, and I told the story again, more coherently this time, and she was quiet for a moment after I finished.
"Darcy, I need you to hear me say this plainly, because I don't think you'll let yourself think it on your own.
That woman has spent years building a version of your marriage where you're staff with a wedding ring.
I love you, and I've watched you make excuses for it for a decade, and I'm just going to say the thing once and then drop it.
You deserve better than a seat at the valet stand at your own family's parties. "
"I know," I said, and meant it more than I had the last dozen times she'd said some version of the same thing to me. "I don't know what to do with knowing it yet."
"You don't have to do anything with it tonight. Just don't let her talk you out of having noticed it. That's usually the next move, if I know her at all."
I told Tyler that evening, standing in the kitchen while he changed out of his suit, and I watched his face do the thing it did lately, a practiced smoothing, an effort to find the version of events that required the least from him.
"The titles don't matter, Darce. Everyone at that party is going to know exactly what you did to make it happen. That's worth more than standing in a receiving line for two hours shaking hands with people you don't even like."
"That's not the point. The point is that I asked to be included and your mother turned it into me being difficult."
"My mother turns everything into you being difficult if you push back on anything. That's just how she operates. It doesn't mean you have to let it get to you."
"It's not just her, Tyler. It's a pattern.
It's Felicity in the family photo, and Felicity hosting, and me managing the valet.
" I heard my own voice climbing and pulled it back down, not wanting the conversation to turn into one of those fights that ended with both of us apologizing for tone instead of talking about the actual problem.
"I've done twelve of these events. I know how to run a receiving line. This isn't about whether I'm capable."
"Nobody's saying it is."
"Then say the other thing instead. Tell me you'll fix it.
Call your mother tonight and tell her I'm hosting the receiving line, that this isn't up for discussion.
" I watched something shutter behind his eyes at the request, small and immediate, the specific retreat of a man calculating the cost of a phone call he didn't want to make. "You won't, will you."
"It's two days before the gala, Darcy. I'm not going to start a fight with my mother over seating logistics forty-eight hours out. Can we please just get through this one and revisit it after?"
"That's what you said about the family photo. And the toasts. There's always a reason it's not the right moment, Tyler."
"I'm saying we'll talk about it afterward," he said.
"And I'm saying afterward never comes. That's the problem, Tyler.
Your mother doesn't have to tell me I'm unwelcome.
She just quietly arranges things so the answer's already decided by the time anyone would think to ask.
" I felt the old exhaustion of trying to make a pattern visible to someone who'd never once had to notice it living in his own house.
"I know you're capable. Nobody thinks you're not capable.
" He dismissed the question of my competence again, and reached for me, hands settling at my waist, an old gesture meant to soften an argument before it became one.
"Look, I hear you. I do. I'll be right there with you the whole night.
Whatever room you're in, I'm in it too. I promise. "
I let myself believe that, because I wanted to, because it was easier than examining what it meant that I kept needing the promise in the first place. "You'll actually stay with me. Not just for the photos and then off with your father's business friends."
"I'll stay with you." He kissed my forehead, certain, easy, the way he said most things. "Two more days and it's over. Then it's just us again."
I nodded, and let him pull me into a hug, and told myself that whatever had happened at that lunch, whatever Claudette had built into me over twelve years without my quite noticing the architecture of it, none of it would matter once Tyler was standing beside me in that room.
I believed, right up until the night of the gala, that his promise was the one thing in that house I could actually count on.