I was relieved. I was still working on my relationship with Dante. It had not started out on the best of terms when he’d dropped out of Haverford College just a semester before graduation to move out west, taking my besotted daughter, who had graduated from Bryn Mawr with honors a year earlier, with him.
“Just look at your grandfather-in-law,” I said at last.
“Who?” Looking puzzled, Dante’s gaze drifted from Chloe’s plump face to the dance floor. After a moment, he chuckled. “Oh, I see.”
Daddy was squiring Darlene around the floor like a pro. Darlene’s skirt swirled away from her body, revealing shapely thighs encased in hot pink panty hose. I willed their label to say Queen Size, Super Support, but there wasn’t a chance of that. Although she must have been well over fifty, Darlene had the legs of a twenty-year-old.
I scowled in my father’s direction. “Acting like a teenager.”
Dante nodded sagely, his ponytail wagging. “Whatever.”
“I think it’s disgusting.” Dante’s head swiveled in my direction and I immediately regretted my candor. “Sorry.” I smiled apologetically. “It seems like just yesterday that Mom…” I took a deep breath and held it, then turned my eyes back to the dance floor where Daddy and Darlene were sharing a sprightly fox-trot. “She’s certainly peppy, I’ll give her that.”
“She’s not so bad.” Dante shifted Chloe to the other hip and repositioned the pacifier, which had fallen into the folds of the hand-smocking on her white piqué dress.
Someone snapped a picture and I flinched at the flash. I squinted up at my son-in-law. “You’ve met her, then?”
“Briefly. Emily and I talked with her for all of two seconds back at the church. She’s a widow living over in Chestertown.”
Chestertown was a community over the Bay Bridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, about an hour’s drive from Annapolis. “Chestertown? How’d Daddy hook up with someone way over there?”
Dante shrugged. “Don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”
I was thinking about this when the music stopped. Paul and Emily reappeared, looking flushed from their efforts at contemporary ballroom. “The musicians are taking a break,” Emily said, sounding disappointed. Too bad. Now that Emily had broken the ice, I was hoping Paul would trip the light fantastic with me while the force was still with him.
Behind Paul’s back I watched Daddy as he led Darlene from the dance floor over to the bar. They picked up refills, then wandered out to the garden. I saw them again briefly, participating with enthusiasm when we toasted the bride and groom with chilled champagne. My backbone stiffened by wine, I was headed in their direction with a million questions on my mind when Paul asked me to dance and everything else flew out of my head.
When I thought about Daddy and Darlene again, it was cake cutting time, but they were nowhere to be seen. I waited until the last notes of “Good Night, Sweetheart” had died away, until the caterers began wrapping up the leftovers in heavy-duty aluminum foil, until the flowers had been loaded into a van headed for the nursing home, but I never got that dance Daddy had promised me.
I emerged from the bathroom with my hair still damp from the shower to find Paul waiting, propped up on two pillows. He whipped the sheet away from my side of the bed and patted the mattress. I smiled, slid in next to him, and snuggled close, my cheek resting comfortably on his chest.
“Sorry it’s so goopy.”
He nuzzled my neck. “What’s goopy?”
“My hair. All that hair spray. I brushed it hard, but…”
“You can wash it in the morning.” His kiss began near my right ear, meandered down my cheek, and finally found my mouth. I wrapped my legs around his and melted into him.
The end of a perfect day.
In the past two years, I’d learned the fine art of appreciating perfect days whenever they came my way. And it was a good thing Connie’s wedding was an eleven on a scale of one to ten, because it was the last perfect day I would see for a good, long time.
2
The telephone rang, jolting me out of a thoroughly satisfying dream, an action/adventure film, as I recall, featuring Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery dueling with spear guns for my attentions. I observed, aloof and amused, from the deck of a luxury yacht, sipping a dry martini-shaken, not stirred-fetchingly clad in a form-fitting black-and-pink skin-diving suit. Me, not the martini.
“Hullo?” I managed, resurfacing so fast I was in danger of getting the bends.
“Hannah, Daddy didn’t come home last night.”
“What?” I groped around on the bedside table until I found the alarm clock. Six-thirty. I groaned.
“His bed hasn’t been slept in.”
Paul turned away from me, burrowing under the covers. “Who the hell is that?” he mumbled.
I covered the receiver with my hand. “Ruth. She’s worried that Daddy isn’t home.”
Paul flipped down the comforter and sat up. “Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out, Watson.”
I laid a hand on his leg and returned my attention to my sister. “Are you sure? Maybe he’s asleep on the sofa. Or in the family room.”
“Nuh-uh. I checked.”
“In the bathroom?”
“Nope.”
“Is there a message on the answering machine?”
“No.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Look, he probably took Darlene home and one thing led to another…”
“Probably, but he could have called me, Hannah.”
“He could have, but that probably wasn’t the first thing on his mind.”
“The stomach turns.”
I flopped back on my pillow, the receiver clamped to my ear. “My feelings, exactly.”
“All I ask is a little common courtesy, Hannah. I cook, I clean, I iron his shirts. The least he could do is let me know when he isn’t coming home so I don’t worry.” She heaved an exasperated sigh. “If it had been me not coming home, he’d’ve had a fit.”
By now, I was wide awake. Paul, listening to my half of the conversation, propped himself up on an elbow and used his free hand to trace little circles on my arm. I crossed my eyes, stuck out my tongue, and playfully swatted at his hand.
Ruth had a point. Although Daddy was doing her a favor by letting her live at home rent free, Ruth more than made up for it by what she contributed to the running of the household. If Daddy had to pay someone-several someones-to cook, clean, wash, iron, pay the bills, and keep up the yard, he’d have to take out a second mortgage. Ruth considered her stay transitional and mutually beneficial. She’d agreed to help get Daddy back on his feet while she saved enough money from Mother Earth, her shop on Main Street, to make a down payment on a home of her own. Lord knows Eric Gannon wasn’t in a position to help her out. Ruth’s ex was throwing all his money at a sweet Gen-Xer named Candee these days.
“Daddy probably thinks that by letting me live here for free and giving me the car he doesn’t owe me anything,” Ruth complained.
When Ruth’s aging VW Golf had died the previous summer in a shuddering heap of cracked windshield, bald tires, and rusting quarter panels, Daddy had signed over the title of Mom’s Corolla to her. With his passion for fairness, I’d received Mother’s emerald engagement ring and he’d given Georgina her beaver coat, but the rest of Mom’s things he’d kept, as if by parting with them he’d be admitting to himself that she was really gone. One day we’d have to go through Mom’s closet and dresser drawers, but not now. The pain was still too fresh and too deep.
“He’s a grown-up, Ruth,” I reminded my sister. “To him, you’re still a kid. He probably doesn’t think he needs to account for his actions to you.”