My mother was annoyed with me throughout their visit—ostensibly because I wasn’t being a good enough hostess to the cousins, but really because she found it overwhelming to have so many members of my father’s family staying; but they were all so good-natured that she couldn’t show it, or even allow that she was mildly irritable. The cousins were there on my father’s account, and she wanted very much to be a good enough person not to be annoyed, because he himself was that sort of good person, and put up with my mother’s family without ever, apparently, losing his temper. So I was the only person she could lash out at in good conscience. She knew it, and I knew it, and I tried not to take her outbursts to heart.
The three of us went over to the Burneses’ in my mother’s car around six p.m.—“I think you’d better drive, honey,” my father said—and left the cousins to watch Night at the Museum 2, the only film they could agree on.
The Burnes house was lit up like a stage set, all the windows bright, and the Aucoins’ dogs barked when we pulled up. You could smell their fire in the chill night air, and from the houses on either side you could hear vague partyish noises and see moving shadows behind the blinds. In spite of all the lights at the Burneses’, it was quiet and still. When we rang the doorbell, Cassie opened at once as if she’d been standing there, waiting. She had her phone in her hand and quickly stuffed it into her pocket.
Cassie acted with my parents as though everything was normal—best behavior, super polite—and in the flurry got by with a quick “Hey, Juju” to me. She led us into the living room—about three steps to our left—where Bev, in royal-blue chiffon, looking like an opera singer, stood imposingly next to Dr. Anders Shute. I knew straightaway who he was.
Bev introduced us and we sat, as if on cue. They’d pulled in a dining chair ahead of time, to have exactly the right number of seats for the six of us. On the glass coffee table sat a harvest arrangement from the florist in Royston—I’d seen them in the window all week—involving autumn leaves and a warty mini-gourd and an elaborate bow of sparkly russet ribbon. I wondered whether Bev had bought it or Anders Shute had given it as a gift. The gourd resembled an ugly man’s face, and I thought that in a different moment, Cassie and I would have laughed about that.
“You look so familiar . . .” My mother actually clapped her hands. “Of course! Dr. Shute! You patched up poor Cassie at the hospital this summer.”
“That’s right,” he said with a thin sliver of a smile, his voice soft. “We patched her up.”
“The importance of being patient,” my mother went on. “Don’t be the im-patient! Such a good line. Of course.”
He dipped his head, still slightly smiling.
“So is that how you guys met?” My father leaned forward in the La-Z-Boy and his flannel trousers rustled on the leatherette. “Clue me in.”
“No, no.” Bev waved her elegant little hands—she’d painted her nails to match her dress, only a more silvery sort of blue—“We met in church.”
“So you didn’t know—” My mother looked from one to the other.
“Oh, we figured it out pretty quick. Even before Cassie came into the room. Talk about coincidences, right?”
Anders Shute nodded some more. Still the little smile. He looked as though his jacket, shirt, and tie had all been clipped on, the way you clip clothes on paper dolls, and they’re always a little askew. Everything hung a bit wrong: the collar, the sleeves. Maybe he was just too skinny.
“Yeah, crazy, right?” Cassie said. “Like, what are the odds?”
“You have to believe the Lord has a plan for us,” Bev said. “Isn’t it amazing?” She pushed herself up from the sofa in one swift movement. “Now, who-all is ready for a little pie?”
My parents and I made eager noises.
“I’ve laid everything out on the dining table, so let’s all go help ourselves; and then we can sit back down and get to know one another.” She paused in the doorway, flushed and almost pretty for a second. “I’m so pleased that we’re getting together. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
It occurred to me that she was proud not only to have a date—Bev had never had a boyfriend after Clarke, not in all Cassie’s life; she hadn’t wanted to—but also that she was proud to show Dr. Shute that she was friends with my father, the dentist; and that she was proud to show my parents that her beau, worth waiting so long for, was a doctor, which on some invisible scale trumped “dentist” anytime. When Bev said she was so pleased, she really meant it. She had planned for that moment, had probably imagined it a dozen times.
I was waiting for Cassie to signal to me that we could escape upstairs to her room. I couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t, but as we sat pinkening in the too-hot living room, with the fire crackling and the grown-ups droning (“Then seven years in Bangor,” Dr. Shute was saying, “at the hospital there . . .”) and the pecan pie so sweet—sweeter than Nana’s, if that was possible—that it made my back right molar ache and made me aware of a new cavity . . . as this went on and on, I thought with a sudden lurch that maybe I’d been fantasizing, that things between us were even worse than I’d imagined and that the punishment for my newly demoted status was to stay trapped on the puffy chintz for the entire visit. I worried that Cassie would rather suffer the boring adults than hang out with me alone.
But eventually, in a voice so naturally kind that only I could tell she was acting, Cassie offered to make more coffee for everyone, and suggested that I come with her. In the kitchen, things felt strange for a moment, but our familiarity, so deep in our bones, won out; and she hadn’t finished scooping the Starbucks Colombian Dark Roast into the Coffeemaster before I said, “What the fuck, Cassie? How did this happen? Your mom’s been shot by Shute! Why didn’t you say?”
“It’s not a fricking joke, Juju.”
“But how long?”
“He first came home a few weeks ago. Like a horrible Halloween ghost, the morning after. Right after we had the big blow-out about Peter.”
“Was that bad?”
She snorted, fiddling with the water tap and the coffee pot. “ ‘Was that bad?’ It was fucking insane. My mother pulled me up the stairs by my hair. I’m surprised there isn’t a hole in my scalp.”
“For real?”
“For real.” And then: “All we did was make out. For Christ’s sake, it was a party. Delia’s mom and dad were in the next room. But Bev went psycho. Cue the horror music.”
“Shit,” I said.
“She’d been seeing him”—she nodded toward the living room—“for, like, a month before she brought him home. The first time I saw them talking at the church group was the day after Columbus Day.” She didn’t hesitate over the date; she had it firmly recorded. Columbus Day weekend, I’d gone with my parents to New York City, where we’d all stayed in one hotel room and my mother had got tickets to Wicked. Anders Shute—we’d met him together, practically sisters in the ER, hardly four months before.
“What’s he like?”
“Exactly like he seems.”
“Thin?” Hoping for a laugh.
“He wasn’t a church guy. He’d never been to our church even once, and then he shows up, like that, at Bible study. What’s that about?”
“Did someone bring him along?” At our house, we mocked Bev’s Bible study group as an alternative dating site for the socially impaired. But I wouldn’t ever before have shared that with Cassie. “You know, was he with a friend of his?”
“He didn’t know a soul. He made a point of it. He said he read about the meeting on the bulletin board at the Market Basket. Do you believe that?”