…
Kristin asked her mother to make Melissa breakfast and then led her husband back to the guest bedroom, where only a few minutes earlier their daughter had been fast asleep. The only chair in the room was a violin-shaped monster that must have been designed by Torquemada—usually it just held clothes when they were visiting, and sometimes Melissa’s backpack—but this morning Richard sank into it, as if he were shrinking with shame into the seat. But perhaps, Kristin thought as she watched him, she was reading too much into his body language and projecting onto him what she thought he should feel. Maybe he was just hung over. Maybe he was just tired. She noticed that the stubble on his chin was flecked with white. He had bags under his eyes, and her heart opened a little to him. God. What he had seen. There was no eyewash in the world that could make that go away…
“Have you slept?” he asked her, his voice weary.
“Not since you called. I presume you haven’t either.”
He shook his head. “I almost fell asleep on the train. But not really.”
“So, tell me everything,” she said. “I don’t want to know, but I don’t think I have a choice. And maybe it will help you to talk about it.”
“Why don’t you sit down? You look like…”
“I look like what?”
“You look like you’re about to interrogate me.”
His tone surprised her. He probably hadn’t meant to sound hostile, but he had. “Well, you would know what it’s like to be interrogated, wouldn’t you?” she countered.
“Kris, please.”
She sat down on the bed. She rested her hands in her lap, a conscious attempt not to appear adversarial.
“You know how sorry I am,” he said. “I know what a disaster this is. All I thought…all I thought was that I was giving my idiot younger brother a bachelor party. I’m the best man. It’s what you do, right?”
“I know. And he is an idiot.”
“And I thought it would be more…wholesome…having it at home. Our home. I mean, I could have had it at someplace sleazy. But I didn’t.”
“No,” she agreed, “you didn’t”—though inside she was wishing now that he had.
“You know? Home delivery wings? A vat of guac? Beer? It just all went crazy. And it went crazy so weirdly fast.”
“Of course, that is your brother’s modus operandi. If you have a choice between partying like a grown-up and partying like a frat boy on spring break, he will always pick the latter.”
“It’s so true…”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“The beginning of the party? Or when the strippers arrived?”
“Please: stop calling them strippers. They weren’t strippers.”
“Okay.”
She glanced down at her pantyhose and her skirt. It seemed hours ago that she had gotten dressed. In the half darkness, she had put on the skirt and the blouse that she had planned to wear that Saturday anyway. It was a matinee sort of skirt. Broadway pantyhose. Black with little pin dots. She liked it when she spent a day or a night (or a weekend) in Manhattan; she could dress in ways that she never could when she was teaching American history at a suburban high school. Half the time when she went to work, she was dressed as casually as the kids in her class.