And whenever I did pass something her way with a Cheery Davie smile and a “Here you go,” she just accepted it with cold silence. If this was Veronica’s best behavior, I was dying to see her act a fool.
The whole situation made me tired. I wished I were somebody different, somebody cooler and deserving of James. Somebody who didn’t have to pretend to be Cheery Davie in order to get through dinner with these people.
The ball of dread just refused to let go of me, no matter how many pleasant conversational passes I made with the rest of her family. I couldn’t relax, because I just knew Evil Veronica was hiding behind Somewhat Polite Veronica, waiting to jump out at me at any second.
And the moment I had been waiting for the entire meal came just after Mildred had served dessert.
Veronica landed her gray eyes on me and asked, “So how’s your mama?” She asked this with a smile, and as if she had been talking pleasantly to me the entire time.
The other Farrells turned to look at us. I’m sure that James had prewarned them that I was estranged from my mother. So everyone else seemed surprised by Veronica’s direct question. Everyone except me.
I laid down my dessert fork. “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in a very long time.”
“If I remember right, she was some sort of hooker, wasn’t she?”
Her mother gasped from the other end of the table. “Veronica Farrell,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” Veronica steepled her hands over her dessert plate. “I thought that was common knowledge. Or maybe I’m wrong. She wasn’t a hooker. She just slept with a lot of people. So she was a whore but not a formal one, correct?”
Everything inside of me had curdled and gone cold. I should have known. I should have known that this was the weapon she would use against me. I hadn’t seen Cora in over fifteen years, but she had still managed to follow me all the way to California.
It took me a second to work up the courage to look over at James to see how he was taking this. And when I did finally cut my eyes toward him, he was staring at Veronica angrily.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked her, his voice calm but hard as steel. “You’re embarrassing me and embarrassing yourself.”
Veronica’s eyes blazed with anger as she pointed to me. “She should be the one who’s embarrassed. I can’t believe that she had the nerve to come here.”
Veronica’s mother look horrified. Her hands fluttered about her face. “This has to stop,” she said in a shaky voice. “Right now. Veronica, get ahold of yourself and act like a lady!”
“Why are you here?” Veronica asked me, pinning me with her gray gaze again.
There was so much hate in her eyes that any possible answer I might have given her froze in my throat on the spot.
“She’s my girlfriend, Ronnie, and I invited her,” James said.
“She’s a liar. You want a liar for a girlfriend? You think she’s appropriate for a Farrell?”
I looked over at the congressman and Tammy Farrell. They were both eating their dessert with such concentrated civility that I wondered if it was just me hearing the argument.
“I love her,” James said, calm as a diplomat. “And you need to start respecting that.”
“So you knew her mother was a slut? And an alcoholic?”
The question was so hard-hitting that everybody went absolutely quiet. Mrs. Farrell didn’t try to protest, and Tammy and the congressman actually looked up from their pretend fascination with their dessert to look from me to Veronica to James, who just sat there, rigid with anger.
“Oh, she didn’t tell you that, either,” Veronica said.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t look anywhere but at my own useless hands, as I waited for James to answer Veronica’s question.
But then his hand wrapped around mine. And suddenly my hands weren’t so useless anymore. I held on to him for dear life.
And when he stood up, I stood up, too.
“Tammy, Daddy, Mama, it was nice to see you again,” he said. “Veronica, I will talk to you when you get some sense.”