“You’re the boss,” he said easily. “Don’t be scared, sweet girl.”
“It’s over, everybody,” Patsy said, reaching for the platter of turkey. “Let’s go back to feeling awkward for other reasons.”
Pru looked up and saw John watching her. They exchanged weak, uneasy smiles.
Nadine touched John’s arm. “That looks like a lovely wine. Let’s have some. Let’s all drink a toast to Daddy.”
Suddenly, Pru was overcome with a longing for her father. Leonard, sitting coolly at the kitchen table with his long legs crossed, his fingers steepled, while she and Patsy tore the house apart, looking for some lost piece of jewelry or library book. Steering the car with one knee in heavy summer beach traffic while doing a crossword puzzle that he’d rested on the wheel. Waving his metal detector along the sand, patiently digging until he came up with a quarter. None of this would be happening if Leonard were still here. The last, unshakable stake in the family tent, or so it seemed to Pru.
“To Leonard,” Nadine said.
They drank. Then John said, “Women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.”
Nadine brightened. “So, when she’s weary—”
“Try another shabby dress,” finished Pru.
They were smiling now. Except for Patsy, who muttered, “Idiots.”
AFTER DINNER, PRU CLEARED THE TABLE AND WATCHED Patsy and Jimmy Roy out of the corner of her eye. The rest of the meal had passed in relative peace, with the two of them hardly speaking to each other and Nadine, John, and Pru assuming the conversational responsibilities.
Now, as Pru watched, Jimmy Roy walked up to her sister, who was standing at the counter. He had his hands behind his back. Hearing him come up, she turned, irritated. It was clear that he was waiting for her to choose a hand. At first she didn’t want to, but finally she gave in and pointed to his right side. Pru could see that whatever he was holding behind his back had been in his left hand, but he passed it smoothly to the right, so that Patsy didn’t notice. He brought the hand forward and opened it, palm up. Pru could see that he held a peach. Patsy’s face softened, and she gave him a sort of begrudging half-smile.
Peach, their nickname for Annali. When Patsy was in labor, she wasn’t supposed to eat anything, but Jimmy Roy snuck her a bite of peach, just after she’d gotten the epidural. Pru was collapsed in a chair at the time, exhausted from watching Patsy screaming for the drugs, which she’d refused earlier, and swearing to herself that if she ever had a baby, she’d begin asking for the drugs in about the eighth month. They finally administered the epidural, and as it kicked in, Patsy took the first bite of the peach that she wasn’t supposed to have but Jimmy Roy gave her anyway. Another huge contraction came crawling up on the monitor’s screen, but Patsy seemed unaware of it. She closed her eyes and grinned, fear and tension sliding from her face. Jimmy Roy kissed her forehead, already slick with sweat. As the needle on the monitor continued to chart another one of those killer contractions, Patsy sighed contentedly and said, around the fruit in her mouth, juice dripping down her chin, “Oh my God, that peach.”
Pru brought a stack of dishes into the kitchen, where John was washing up. “Pretty exciting stuff, huh?” she said.
“I’ve seen much worse,” he said. “You should see my sister Emily’s husband’s family. It’s like some kind of bad social experiment. Like they’ve been forced to live in one of those environmental bubbles together and can’t get out. Made me and Lila look pretty good, by comparison.”
Pru smiled. “Were you very sad today?”
“Well, I sure thought about how it was probably a good thing we never had kids. Me and Lila,” he added, hastily.
“And Patsy thinks it’s a good thing they never got married,” Pru said. “But it hasn’t made this any easier, has it?”
“I like your family,” he said. “They explain a lot about you.”
“Like what about me?” she said, trying not to seem as eager as she felt to hear what exactly about her he’d noticed.
He shrugged, scraping turkey bones into the trash. “I knew your sense of humor came from your dad. But now I see where your sweetness comes from—your mother. And you’re the one they count on to keep her head.” He slid a stack of dishes into the soapy water in the sink.
“I’m not that sweet.”
“Yes, you are. I bet you were the kind of kid who went around saving baby birds.”
“Not sweet.” She tapped her head. “Stupid.”
“That’s right. You’re a softie. I’ve got your number, Whistler. You rock.”
He was so sincere that Pru was embarrassed.
“I do,” she said. “I rock and roll.”
ON NADINE AND JIMMY ROY’S LAST DAY IN D.C., PRU looked out the bay window to see Patsy, Annali, and Jimmy Roy walking together down Columbia Road.
They looked like members of the same combat unit, with the matching flyer caps Nadine had knitted for them over the weekend, chin straps flapping on either side. Annali swung between her parents, who at least seemed to be carrying on some kind of conversation.
“I can’t tell if it’s good or bad,” Pru said, when her mother came to the window to look, too.
“It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re talking,” her mother said. “I have hopes for them,” she added. “Jimmy Roy has changed. He’s grown. He was determined to come here, even if it was to find her with someone else. I told him, point blank, ‘There’s someone new, Jimmy Roy. And he’s really got her. You don’t have much of a chance.’ But he came anyway.”
“Well, for Annali.”
Her mother shook her head. “Not just for Annali. Jimmy Roy has qualities, indeed he does. I think Patsy’s sold him a little short.”
“What happened between them, anyway? After Annali was born? The next thing I knew, we couldn’t even mention his name around her.”
“I’m not sure. I think
