Kat went into the kitchen to help Raoul, which primarily consisted of wiping up after him.
“Will she go back to work when the baby’s born?” Kat asked.
“She says no,” Raoul answered.
“Do they know she plans to quit?”
“She says she’s got three months paid maternity leave and just wants to keep her options open.”
“In other words, no.”
Handing her four forks, he said, “Who knows? After a few months at home, she might beg them to take her back.”
Kat pulled out place mats from the drawer and started to put them around, crowding the three into a corner of the large dining room table. “Set for four,” Raoul said. “Jacki insists she’s going to get up, and we have another guest.”
Kat found another mat. “Who’s coming?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“You both know I hate surprises.”
“Somebody Jacki dredged up. I mean, invited.”
“Leigh?”
“No, no. I’m not supposed to say.”
“Tell me or I’m out of here.”
Raoul untied the apron, leaving it in a heap on the floor. Setting candles on the table, he said, “It’s a guy I work with who she wants you to meet.”
“My God, she’s crying all day, wailing all night, and she plans to roll out of bed just to set me up? Call him and cancel. She’s in no shape-”
“She wanted to, Kat.”
“Don’t tell me she enlisted you in this latest campaign to get me settled down.”
“Seriously.” He poured himself a glass of wine and offered her one. She waved it off and sat down at the table. “Have you thought about therapy?”
Kat gave him The Look. “Well, Raoul, this is an ugly turn. I’ve endured your lectures on psychology as a pseudoscience. Yet you feel the need to direct me toward what you called, if I may quote you, Professor, ‘a potion of bull crap and nonsense’? Plus, reports of my mad sex life are greatly exaggerated. I should know. I’m the exaggerator.”
“I’ve known you, what, eight years? Since you were twenty-seven.”
“So?”
“So.” His words measured, his voice gentle, he said, “Jacki’s worried. I want her happy, too.”
Kat took a deep breath. “Tell Jacki to stop interfering.”
“Tell her yourself,” Jacki said, smiling and peach-cheeked again, emerging from the bedroom in a blue princess-style shirred shirt that splayed out alarmingly. She sat down hard next to her husband, took his hand in hers, and kissed it.
“Now you’ve got this sweet and otherwise supremely rational man suggesting witchcraft, you scary
Raoul looked at her, then at his wife.
“It’s not like he’ll tell anyone, Kat. It’s not like he has friends”-Jacki ruffled his hair fondly-“except me, of course.” She checked the clock on the wall. “Before Zak gets here-did you get hold of Leigh?”
Immensely relieved at the change of subject, Raoul excused himself, saying he needed to change and wash up before their guest arrived.
They moved to the couch, where Jacki struggled to find a comfortable spot, failed, and sank back into the cushions with a resigned sigh.
“I’ll help you when you need to get up,” Kat said.
“Fuck. You know?”
“Raoul just made a delicious homemade sauce. Did you even know he could cook?”
“He reads recipes and follows directions exactly. A robot could do what he does in the kitchen.”
“Ah. Like mixing chemicals in a lab.”
“Right,” Jacki said. “He’s creative in his own field, of course. Oh hell, he’s a god. Why not admit it?” Jacki loved her husband too much. Was there a word like “uxorious” which referred to the male part of the couple? “So did you talk to Leigh?”
Kat began with a detailed description of Ray Jackson’s house and finished with the muddled conversation.
“You got too personal too fast,” Jacki said.
“Shut up.”
“He’s good-looking, you say?”
“Give it a rest.”
“You think Leigh walked out on him?”
“What else could it be?”
Jacki stuck out her tongue. “So what next?”
“Nothing much. Leigh’s employee will get paid. I got the impression Ray wants me to think Leigh went on a little vacation without her husband. Women do that, you know. He didn’t go into details. She’s at a resort in Cabo San Lucas or walking on Moonstone Beach in Cambria or in Paris in a lovely pension on the Boul’ Mich, drinking Sancerre, strolling the banks of the Seine, wearing designer heels and not tripping, either. She always liked to travel and she likes Sancerre and high heels and it’s none of my business. She’ll call if she wants to when she gets my note. Or not. Maybe she pulled another Tom. Dumped Ray Jackson and he’s saving face with a little story. Who can blame him for that? I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“You’re kidding. You’d leave things like this?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t like it. Women may walk out on their husbands, but they don’t walk out on businesses they have built over a period of years. The husband is evasive.” Her mouth firmed and she rendered her opinion. “Unh-unh. Something’s wrong.”
“You think something’s happened to her? You’re the one who needs therapy!”
“Think now.”
“You’re an exasperating person, Jacki.”
“You owe it to yourself. And you owe it to Leigh, your best friend ever. Don’t tell Raoul about this superstitious streak of mine-”
“As if he doesn’t know it.”
“But it all happened for a reason, me finding that clipping. Me worrying about you being too lonely. My dream. You’re supposed to find her, if only to make sure she’s taken a runner from a bad scene at home. You may be the only one checking up.”
Jacki sat up straighter, put her hand behind to support her back, and made a face. “Well?” she said.
Kat decided, with a shiver, Jacki was right.
Because she felt nervous about the tone in her son’s voice when he called wanting to come over, Esme decided to make a pineapple upside-down cake, one of Ray’s childhood favorites. She had time to make something relatively complicated.
Leigh didn’t like her pineapple cake. Leigh. She didn’t like thinking about what Ray was going through, and all because of that woman. Well, she had tried to warn him about the heart, and how marriage meant troubles and sorrows. Heartache. She ought to know.
Mixing butter with brown sugar, she considered this thought. She coated a nine-inch-round cake pan with grease and flour. A mother with a child to raise cooked thousands of boring meals, thousands of macaroni casseroles, burritos, and hamburgers. Esme had never enjoyed that kind of cooking, which was such a chore when you worked all day checking out other people’s boring groceries. Ray’s father, Henry, had preferred fast food to her cooking. How had she ever thought to marry such a man?
Such a man. She creamed together butter and sugar until the mixture fluffed up, then added the eggs one at a time, beating them harder than she needed, seeing Henry before her, thinking about life’s turns.
Trying to obliterate the image of him that suddenly hovered before her, she beat in vanilla, and alternated adding the flour and milk, trying not to ruin the dough by thumping away too hard, watching for the smooth, shiny look that meant she had beaten the batter properly. Finished, she took a long knife out of the butcher block holder and set a pineapple on a cutting board, proceeding first to peel it, then cut it into neat half-inch-thick slices.
Halfway through the process, she realized the knife needed sharpening. She slipped it across a ten-inch diamond steel sharpener until when she touched the blade to her finger, the skin didn’t give, but broke.
No blood, fortunately.
Whack. So much better.
The pineapple slices made a pretty layer of circles, and she filled in the holes with chunks arranged in a pattern, then poured the batter gently over it, popped the pan into the old oven, set the timer, and shut the door.
She made a pot of coffee, intending to tidy up before Ray arrived, but settled into the one really comfortable chair in the living room and got lost in an article about the space shuttle.
The doorbell rang.
She rose, folding the newspaper, and put it into the holder by the fireplace. Ray liked the house neat, and she liked pleasing him. Glancing around as she walked toward the entryway, she assured herself that only the kitchen looked bad at the moment, and she’d soon fix that.
How grateful she was that they were still close. The bond between a single mother and an only son outlasted almost everything. Tidying her hair with her hands, she answered the door. “Honey,” she said, hugging him. She still loved the way he smelled.
“Mom.”
But he took no notice of the house, rushing through to the kitchen and plopping down at the kitchen counter on a stool. She had pans to clear, bowls to clean. Since the sink was in the middle of the island, she could work and visit with Ray. She began washing out the cake pans. “You sounded upset on the phone. Is this-something about Leigh?”
He shook his head. “We have to talk, Mom.”
“Sure, honey.” She still had twenty minutes on the timer, so she shrugged a little and went back to her sink. She reached under the sink for bleach. Nothing else cleaned the old almond-colored porcelain sink as well as bleach. She didn’t want him at the sink, checking on that damn persistent leak, getting on her case about it yet again, but he stayed away, tapping his fingers on the counter,
