She might have been aware that her husband had hussies on the side, but I came to the conclusion that she didn’t know that one of them used to be my mother. I don’t care how well you were raised—nobody’s that good at keeping her cool.
“And you remember Veronica and Tammy,” James said. He put his hand on my lower back before saying this and kept it there, like he was bracing me for the introduction.
I had rehearsed this moment in my head and in the mirror several times that morning. I put on Cheery Davie, the fake-but-friendly version of myself that I used whenever I was forced to participate in small talk.
“Sure I do.” I arced both my hands in a double wave as opposed to offering my hand for a shake. High school was a long time ago, but I still wasn’t going to shake either of their hands. “How ya’ll doing?”
They didn’t hold out their hands for shakes, either. “Good!” Tammy answered, her eyes wide and her smile cheerleader bright.
“Good,” Veronica also answered, but her tone was dryer, and the word almost seemed to have two syllables in her mouth, she enunciated the “D” so hard.
James pulled out my chair, which was at the far left corner of the table, diagonal from Veronica. It was also as far as I could be seated from her without putting me at the head of the table, a position which he gave to his father, who sat on one side of me, while James sat on the other, directly across from his sister. I couldn’t help but notice the look of extreme warning that he gave her before he sat down himself.
Dread filled my stomach like a big old ball of lead.
Dinner was a catered five-course affair, served by Mildred and an additional person that they had hired for the night.
It was brought out on elegant silver platters and dished onto delicate china plates, but I couldn’t appreciate the presentation. The food might have been delicious, but I didn’t have any appetite, so I ended up pushing it around on my plate for most the night. To this day, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what we had or what it had tasted like.
We flitted from one safe topic to the next. First comparing East Coast weather to California weather. Apparently the heat was relentless in New York and Washington, D.C., right now, and his mother was surprised by how pleasant it was in California.
They talked a lot about people and incidents I didn’t know. It wasn’t rude, though, just the way of families. Nicky, Mama Jane, and I were the exact same way when we got together with people who didn’t know all three of us.
James’s family didn’t ask me a lot of questions, which should have tipped me off to what would go down a few weeks later, but I didn’t suspect then that the rich were more than just used to getting their way. They were dead set on it.
We talked about Mississippi: how terrible the summers were there, humid, sticky, and mosquito-ridden. And college. Both James and Veronica had gone to Princeton, but Tammy had actually come out here to USC, where she had been a cheerleader (of course). We joked about USC and UCLA being bitter rivals, but we didn’t go into the underlying reason behind the tension. Private vs. public. Rich vs. poor.
Tammy, I would say, was the biggest surprise of the evening. She was open and friendly, and actually seemed to be going out of her way to make me feel comfortable, introducing topics that might interest me, and steering her family back to the present whenever they went too far down memory lane. If we had met after high school, under different circumstances, I realized, we could easily have become friends. But we didn’t, so there you go.
Veronica, for the most part, didn’t talk much. And when she did, she almost never addressed her comments to me, unless it was something like, “Please pass the salt,” in the same imperious tones that she employed with Mildred and the other server. She asked me to pass things even if I was nowhere near them, which forced me to locate the item she wanted and then ask whoever was nearest to it to please pass it on to her.