Chapter 34 Cream
Summer
I drive to the Bennet estate. Colt knows where I'm going.
I told him on the porch last night, and he said he trusted me.
This morning he doesn't ask when or why.
He looks up from the yellow legal pad on his knee, gives me the small assessing look he's learned, and says, "Take the car. There's gas in it."
"I will."
"Anything you need to bring with you?"
I almost laugh. He knows there's nothing to bring.
"No. I have everything."
He nods. Goes back to his pad.
The Bennet estate is fifteen minutes from the B&B.
East Bay Street to Murray Boulevard, the long curve along the seawall where the harbor unrolls on the right side of the car and the old houses sit on the left like a row of women who have been judging me since the day I married into the family.
The light off the water is too bright to look at.
I don't look at the harbor. I look at the road.
I don't rehearse what I'm going to say. I've rehearsed it a hundred times in my head, and the conclusion I've come to, finally, is that the speech isn't the point.
The point is the chair. The point is sitting in a chair across from Vivienne Bennet, in her own house, in the place she has used as a stage for years, and refusing to leave until she has heard me.
I haven't brought anything. No flowers. No envelope.
No piece of paper. I have a pair of jeans, a black turtleneck, and the boots Mama gave me for my twentieth birthday.
I have my hair down because it occurs to me, walking up the brick path to the front door of this antebellum mausoleum, that wearing it up would be a concession to what Vivienne thinks a woman looks like when she's coming for a fight, and I'm not going to give her even that.
I don't knock.
I press the doorbell. The chime is the eight-note thing that has been the soundtrack of every Christmas, dinner party and gala-launch event of my marriage.
It rings twice through the foyer and then I hear the click of heels on hardwood that is the sound Vivienne Bennet makes when she is alive and approaching a door.
She opens it. Cream silk blouse. Linen trousers. Pearls. Her face is the face I have known for five years. The smile assembles in the second she sees me and settles in place and is wrong by exactly the amount it has always been wrong.
"Summer." A tiny inhale. She hasn't seen me since I left. The last time, I was at her dinner table in a black dress at the wrong end. "I wasn't expecting you."
"I know."
"Is Colt with you?"
"No."
She holds the door, still smiling. The split-second of recalibration moves through her shoulders. She's doing the math. She's wondering if I have come to scream at her, negotiate with her or to plead. She is preparing the appropriate response for each branch of the tree.
"Come in, dear."
"Thank you."
I walk past her into the foyer. The chandelier. The portraits. The fountain through the window. The grandfather clock that has been counting down something my whole adult life, possibly me.
"Would you like tea?"
"No."
"Coffee?"
"No."
"Some water, then."
"No, Vivienne. I won't be staying long."
The smile flickers. Almost imperceptibly. She tilts her head a quarter inch, the tilt she does right before the word brave.
"Of course. Shall we sit in the garden?"
"The garden is fine."
She leads me through the dining room where the seating chart put me at the wrong end of the table, past the parlor where she once told a Bennet cousin that I was spirited in a tone of voice that meant unbreakable, through the French doors that open onto the back terrace and down the stone steps to the garden where Colt sat and listened to her tell him I was common.
The roses are in their late fall bloom, the last flush, the deep ones, the color of bruise and blood. The fountain runs over its stones.
We sit on the wrought-iron bench by the fountain. She crosses her legs at the ankle. She arranges her hands in her lap. The cream silk catches the late afternoon light. Pearls.
I sit across from her on the matching bench. The fountain between us. A mockingbird in the magnolia.
"How is Chicago, dear?"
"Lovely. Thank you for asking."
"And the new book?"
"It's with the printer."
"How nice. I will have to send for a copy."
"That won't be necessary, Vivienne. I wouldn't want to put you out."
She blinks once. The first signal that she has heard the tone of my voice. The wide, warm, bulletproof tone. The one she taught me how to wield by example.
"I see you have come to talk."
"I have come to talk."
"About Sonny."
"About a number of things. Sonny is one of them."
"Colt has made his position quite clear. I assume yours aligns with his."
"My position aligns with mine, Vivienne. Colt and I happen to agree on most of it, but I haven't been speaking for him in any room for some time."
She watches me. Her mask is doing more work than it usually does. The corners of her mouth aren't as set as she would like them.
"Then please. Say what you came to say."
I let the silence sit for a moment. Vivienne has used silence as a weapon for as long as I have known her. I'm borrowing it now.
"I want to thank you," I say.
"Pardon?"
"For five years of teaching me how to do this.
The smiles. The compliments with a blade folded inside.
The seating charts. The careful arrangement of who sat where and who wasn't asked.
I was an obvious target the day Colt brought me through your front door, and you have been training me, very patiently, every single Sunday dinner, in the precise art of being polite to a woman who is trying to ruin you.
I want you to know that the training took.
The student has surpassed the master. I want to be specific with you about that, because I don't want you to mistake what's about to happen for an accident. "
She holds very still. The smile isn't moving.
"Summer."
"I'm not finished."
The smile flickers. She closes her mouth.
"You knew, Vivienne. You knew your husband hired a woman to break my marriage.
You didn't know about the drugs. I will give you that.
Colt thinks you didn't know about the drugs and I believe him because he knows you better than anyone alive.
But you knew about Cheyenne. You knew about the dinners.
You knew about the seating. You knew that your son was being walked, slowly, away from his wife, and you watched it happen the way you watch a hydrangea you decided was the wrong color for the bed.
You let it happen because the wife was inconvenient, and the new arrangement would have made it easier for your husband to continue what he'd been doing with the company.
The whole machine depended on a son who would sign whatever was put in front of him, and a son like that requires a wife who won't get in the way. I was in the way."
A muscle ticks in her jaw. I have never seen that on her face. The mask has a crack.
"You watched me at every dinner in this house for years.
You watched me find my own name at the far end of your seating chart.
You watched me stand at the end of your table while a woman my father-in-law was paying three hundred and forty thousand dollars a year sat in the chair next to my husband.
And you said nothing. You served pecan-crusted trout and asked me how the writing was going and you said nothing.
Not because you didn't see. Because you saw and you decided. "
She opens her mouth.
"I haven't gotten to the part I want you to hear."
She closes it.
I let a beat go.
"Your son is going to be fine."
She blinks.
"He's in therapy. He has a company. He has friends who tell him the truth.
He has my parents, who fed him supper and called him son.
He has me, which I won't pretend is a small thing.
He's going to be fine, Vivienne. Without you.
Without your husband. Without the house that has been suffocating him since he was six years old.
He's going to be fine because he finally walked out of this garden and didn't look back, and because the work he's doing is his own. "
She's staring at me now. The mask has cracks in three places.
"And I want you to understand that you won't be beside him for any of it.
You won't be in the room when he and I have a child.
You won't be in there when we buy the first house that's actually ours.
You won't be there when his name finally belongs to him instead of your husband.
You will be in this garden. You will be in this house.
You will be at a dinner table that has fewer people at it every year.
You will be in cream silk and pearls, and you will be brave, Vivienne.
You will be very, very brave. Because that's what the women in this family say to each other when they have nothing else left to offer. "
Her hand goes to her throat. To the pearls. She has done that gesture, that exact gesture, at every dinner I have ever attended in this house. The pearl-touching gesture. What she does when she is about to say something elegantly devastating to someone who hasn't had time to brace.
"Summer."
I wait.
"You're common." The smile is gone now. The voice is thin and shaking and the syllables come up out of her like something has been pulled. "You're a waitress's daughter. A waitress's daughter from a diner that is going to close inside a decade. You aren't. You aren't."
The sentence doesn't finish. She can't make it finish.
I look at her across the fountain. The cream silk. The pearls. The hand at her throat. The mockingbird has stopped singing. The fountain is the only sound in the garden.
I lean forward, just a little.
"Vivienne, darling."
I let the word hang.
"That word." I keep my voice as warm and bright and bulletproof as her own. "Common. You've used it on me for years. I want you to hear me use it back, so you feel it from this side."
She's looking at me. She hasn't moved.