Now the boys' eyes were open. How sat up. They looked like deer, ears pricked and alert, their noses sniffing the air.
"I said we'd be home by eight." Kitty lifted her wrist towards the man, showing her watch as proof. "We'll be home by eight."
"Well, you said you had company. I thought it would be nice if I came over and met your company." If he had come to see Sabine, he had not yet noticed her. His attention was fixed on his boots, which were miraculously free of snow.
"Then you're not out looking for your family in the cold," Kitty corrected. She held her shoulders back and leaned slightly in towards the man. "Now shut the door."
Mrs. Howard Plate (Kitty), that's what the lawyer's papers had said. Which would make this Mr. Howard Plate. Mr. Howard Plate was big like his sons, with hair that might have been red when he was their age and now was that colorless sandy brown that red hair can become. But it was his face that drew attention, the way it was fine on one side and collapsed on the other, as if he had been hit very hard and the shape of the fist in question was still lodged beneath his left eye. It had the quality of something distinctly broken and poorly repaired. The bad light cast by the living room lamps threw a shadow into the cave of his cheek, where a random interlacing of scars ended and began. He slipped one hand behind his neck and pulled down hard, as if he were trying to make himself smaller. "Do you want me to go?"
"Sabine," Dot said, "before this gets any worse, let me introduce you to my son-in-law. This is Howard Plate. Howard, you've heard all about Sabine, Guy's wife."
"I hear you've got a big house in Los Angeles," Howard Plate said, looking at her. Seen straight on, it was not such a bad face. It was the kind of face that in Los Angeles could make him seem exotic but in Nebraska only made him look poor.
"It's a good-sized house," Sabine said. She held out her hand and he shook it. It was a big hand, rough on the palm and cold as the iron railing around the front porch. Did people have something against gloves?
"Don't bother her about the size of her house," Kitty said. If she had left five minutes before then her car wouldn't have been in the driveway and Howard would have slowed down but not stopped. He would have driven on home when he didn't see her there.
"Well, since Dot and Bertie came back from California that's all I hear about, what a big house she's got. There's no crime in having a nice house, is there?" He looked at Sabine, turning slightly to show her the better-looking part of himself. "I never met Kitty's brother. We all thought he was dead forever-I mean, a long time before he was dead. So it's been a real surprise finding out that he's been alive all this time and doing so well. Most people come and visit their families when they do well. They're proud of what they've got."
Sabine realized that all of this was meant to insult her, that the great wave of awkwardness that came up from every corner of the room, save Howard Plate's, was the embarrassment generated on her behalf. But Sabine herself, still standing after the handshake, didn't feel insulted or embarrassed. She only felt a vaguely tired sort of depression because it wasn't summer, because she wasn't sitting next to the pool underneath the shade of the big red umbrella with Phan while Parsifal brought out three tall Beefeater tonics. How he loved to bring them out with a knife and walk to the lime tree and snap one off, slice through the thin green skin right there on the glass-topped table. "You're really living when you're living off the land," he'd say. He stirred the drink again with the knifepoint, the fuzzy effervescence of very fresh tonic looking celebratory although at the time they'd thought there was nothing in particular to celebrate. What she wanted to say to Howard Plate, what she could not say and he could not possibly understand, was this: If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins out.
"Well, that's it for me," Bertie said, getting up heavily from the couch. "I'm going over to see Haas. You have a good evening." In her voice there was a tremble of barely contained rage. Every muscle in her body strained to keep her from taking on Howard Plate.
"Bertie, don't go," her sister said. She reached up for her wrist, but Bertie deftly moved her hand aside so that even when Kitty stretched, she fell short.
"Take Haas some cookies," Dot said. "There's a bag of them on the kitchen counter."
"I'll be back by twelve." They all watched her go. In the lamplight Bertie's hair seemed like almost too much luxury, all those brown-and-yellow tangled curls. Haas would separate each one, comb it out gently.
"She just can't wait to get married," Howard Plate said to Sabine, as if he were saying something dirty.
"I know," Sabine said. "I remember that feeling exactly."
Howard sat down on the couch in the warm spot that Bertie had left, and Sabine took her place on the other side of Kitty, but the swap of Bertie for Howard Plate had stripped everyone in the room of their language skills. Even Dot seemed at a loss as to how to rally the conversation. "Did you eat?" she asked Howard finally.
"I did."
The room fit them snugly now, three women, two such large boys, a man that none of them wanted to talk to. With all the windows locked tight, storm windows down, window seals caulked, curtains drawn, Sabine became aware of how much oxygen they were all taking in.
"Did you watch the video?" Howard Plate asked his wife.
Kitty nodded without bothering to look over, as if the question had been a particularly boring one.
"Sabine had never seen it," Dot said. "Can you imagine that?"
"You were on television and you never saw it?"
Sabine twisted her wedding ring around and around on her thin finger. "The show wasn't live. They taped in the afternoon, so we were home to watch it that night. I saw it the night it was on." But the night it was on they'd had a party. Not magicians, whose feelings were too easily hurt. They would have said that Carson was trash magic and they had no interest in lowering themselves to it. This was years before Phan. Parsifal lived in that bright apartment in West Hollywood, which on that night was full of rug dealers, architects, neighbors, old boyfriends of Parsifal's, and one or two of Sabine's, people who whistled at the television set and pounded on the floor when their faces filled the screen. That was what Sabine remembered, not how they looked. When she saw the tape tonight there had been no part of it that struck her as familiar.
"How'd you do that trick, anyway?" Howard Plate said.
All this time the boys had stayed quiet, not crossing their legs or shifting their weight. Even their breathing had seemed shallow, like they were balanced on a high and precarious branch of a tree. But at their father's question How laughed, and then Guy laughed with him.
"What?"
"I think we should get these boys home," Kitty said. She looked at her mama's boy, her favorite. "You about ready?"
"Sure," How said, the color up in his face.
"Somebody going to tell me what's funny?"
Kitty reached over and patted her husband on the knee, giving him that small acknowledgment. "We'll tell you on the way home."
"I've barely met your company," Howard Plate said. He had not been in the house long enough to get completely warm, and already it was time to go.
Sabine shrugged and smiled, as if the meeting had been a pleasure, as if she would try and hide her disappointment at this early departure. "I'm not going anywhere for a while."