A Wife of Noble Character (7 page)

“Because you're killing something. Do you think about it that way?”

“It's sport,” Bucky said. He took his eyes off the road for a moment and gave her a sidelong look. “It's a game.”

Vivienne sat on this for a moment. She couldn't decide whether she agreed with him.

“I caught a fish once and felt bad about it,” she said.

“Was it a big one?”

“No, it was little,” Vivienne said. “It just seemed like it was in pain.”

“Fish don't feel pain,” Bucky said.

“What are y'all talking about?” Karlie interrupted from the back.

“Vivienne feels bad for catching a fish.”

Vivienne sighed. “I was just asking if you think about the fact that you're killing something when you hunt. It's going from alive to dead because of you.”

“Isn't that the point of hunting?” Karlie said.

“But it's an animal,” Bucky said. “It's not like killing a person.”

“I'm not saying it's like killing a person,” Vivienne said.

“God made animals for people to use.”

She turned to the window. The big Gulf clouds were glowing, underlit by the low sun. “You don't know that.”

“People need to eat, Viv,” Karlie said. “And there's too many deers, so it's good for them to be hunted.”

“Deer,” Vivienne said. “And we don't know if God put animals on earth just for us to kill for sport. I don't know if I agree with that.”

“You gonna disagree with Scripture?” Bucky said.

She would have liked some sort of response that indicated he'd at least thought about it for one second. But maybe he was braver than she was. He could face his killing, even in his thoughtless way, and she couldn't. “Scripture doesn't say that we're entitled to kill animals for sport,” she said. “It talks about how we have animals as a resource—”

“I'm not gonna debate Scripture with you,” Bucky said. This sort of holy remark from him meant that he intended to end the conversation.

Timmy was still trailing them. Through the mirror, she watched him tap his hands on the steering wheel and wag his shoulders maladroitly. It was nice to know Timmy danced when he thought no one was watching. She didn't dare betray him to Karlie. She settled back in her seat and crossed her arms tightly, using her fists to lift her breasts, for Bucky.

“Maybe it's healthy to debate Scripture,” she said. “Or at least to interpret it in different ways.” Except for the occasional event at Prayerwood, the Baptist church most of her friends attended, Vivienne didn't attend any church on Sundays. The extent of her worship was personal, and somehow the big sanctuary at Prayerwood, full of dressy, sociable people, made it less personal, less reverent. Sermons always made Vivienne think of questions she wanted to ask, but she hadn't found anyone she could put those questions to who would answer her meaningfully. The pastor reminded her of a businessman, and she didn't share her questions with him, for fear of what he'd think. She couldn't exactly schedule an appointment with his secretary in order to ask him, in all seriousness, “Did Jesus poop?” So she put the question to Jesus directly; this particular question he hadn't answered yet.

She was baptized a Catholic at Gracedale and brought up in their Sunday school, but she'd always found it boring. This was her secret. Church was boring. In her unspooling dreams of life with Bucky, of the proposal, the wedding, the home, the children, this secret made a snag. More lately, he'd been asking her to go to Prayerwood with him, but he'd slept in on the days she agreed to go. It would never have occurred to him she wasn't a Christian in the way he was. If he'd asked her about her faith, she would've struggled to describe it—she kept it tucked away, an unconscious compensation for the loud blatancy of everyone else's faith. She didn't want anyone else to get their hands on it. Hers was a faith in Jesus the man and the Spirit. She loved him like she might have loved her father, if she'd had one on earth.

“You can't just interpret Scripture any way you damn please,” Bucky said. “If God hadn't made animals for us, they wouldn't taste so good.” He reached across the middle console and tickled her arm. “You like steak.”

She caught his hand but didn't know what to do with it. He waited for her, his eyebrows raised. The hand was pale and somehow frail, even though his palm was wide and rough. She kissed his pinky and pushed his hand back.

“I saw that,” Karlie said, scooting forward.

Vivienne smelled Karlie's headache-sweet perfume and turned back to the window. She recognized the country road. The rolling hills were dotted with ash trees and spindly mesquite. At the height of day, these hills were electric green, but in the soft late light they looked like giants tucked in beneath a dark-emerald blanket.

Karlie lifted a chunk of Vivienne's hair and played at braiding it. “You're such a weirdo, Viv,” she said.

Bucky laughed from his nose, then made up for it by laying his hand on Vivienne's thigh. Vivienne closed her eyes.

 

IV

It was blue dusk when they arrived at the gates of the Blank family ranch. A quarter-mile drive down a gravel road to the house and they were in view of Waverly and Clay waiting on the front steps, backlit by warm porch light. It was a three-story ranch house with deep eaves, built of Texas limestone. Vivienne loved the shady porches; Waverly always gave her the room overlooking the backyard and the hills beyond.

She was glad to see Waverly, smiling as wide as she was waving, in a pretty purple strapless cocktail dress and silver heels—she was an overdresser—with Clay at her side, in khakis and a faded green polo, taking a big stance in his shitkickers, ready for the hogs. The girls embraced on the steps. Bucky, Timmy, and Clay carried the bags inside and went off to the garage to get the four-wheelers.

“I love this!” Waverly said, standing back to admire Vivienne's romper. “So cute.”

“This is amazing,” Karlie said, stroking Waverly's dress.

“Purple looks great on you,” Vivienne said.

It did look great on her; Waverly had that effect on things. She was like a beauty queen, or what Vivienne imagined a beauty queen should be. Her flaws only made her more endearing. If she was a contestant in the Miss America pageant, she wouldn't be the most beautiful girl—she was long in the torso—or the most talented—in high school, her cheerleading gymnastics were awkward; she landed her flips in a squat—and she'd probably give a borderline vapid answer to the final question, but she would win. She had a smile like the sun, and her round chestnut eyes looked right at you, and matched her straight, chestnut hair. If Vivienne was the standard by which their friends judged their looks, Waverly was, and had always been, the standard by which their friends judged their goodness. Waverly's very gestures radiated faith that the world was orderly and kind. She possessed no sense of irony and seldom passed judgments. She wanted to be a princess on her coming wedding day, not for the eyes of others or to elevate herself, but because she believed that that's what it meant to be a bride.

Vivienne admired in particular Waverly's ability to love herself. She didn't seem to have an ongoing dialogue in her head. Everything Waverly did, she did absolutely. After college she started an interior design business, and in a year, with the help of her mother's best friends, had a strong client base and her own income. She didn't have any real credentials aside from her parents, but she was a hit because she made every client feel like her best friend. Moneyed middle-aged wives saw in Waverly the young woman they used to be or could have been.

Waverly gave her girlfriends another hug. “So happy y'all are here.” Karlie, always eager to shine in Waverly's eyes, held the embrace longer. The four-wheelers sputtered off into the brush.

Inside, they passed beneath the grand buck-antler chandelier. Waverly and her mother, Sissy, had decorated each step of the main staircase with a menagerie of ranch-animal Beanie Babies in a basket.

“Mommy!” Waverly called out. “Kar and Viv are here!”

“In the kitchen!” came Sissy.

They crossed the adjacent vaulted great room to reach the kitchen, where they found Sissy pouring chardonnay at the marble island. “Just in time,” she said, handing out the glasses. “To the weekend!”

Vivienne held up her glass with the others.

“Just to let everyone know ahead of time, I'm going to drink too much this weekend,” Karlie said, then drank.

“I understand, Karlie,” Sissy said. “The wedding planning has me crazed.”

Waverly, who always drank less than her mother, sat at a barstool and rolled her eyes. “Mommy, you're not getting married.”

“I might as well be,” Sissy said, sipping. She was a harried doughball of a woman, no matter how hard she tried to appear otherwise. She bleached her hair monthly, and Vivienne had never seen her without makeup. She was sure Sissy had had work done over the years. The work was good, but her eyes were still quietly frenzied, eyes that took aim. Sissy was in many ways the opposite of her daughter. She had none of Waverly's composure, but she was proud. Her azaleas were the highlight of the azalea trail four years running, and her accent still hailed from the small East Texas town where she was born and raised. At Texas A&M, she met and married the man who became Bracken Blank, Houston's most prominent residential and commercial real estate developer.

“Being the mother of the bride is more work than being the bride!” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print tunic over black leggings. Her chunky silver charm bracelets clanged as she raised and lowered her glass. “It's giving me fluff!” She slapped her thighs.

“Hey, bitches, I've been a bride,” Karlie said, raising her glass and laughing.

“We remember,” Vivienne said. She and Waverly had been two in Karlie's army of bridesmaids. Reis Hinkle, who'd served Karlie as maid of honor, was somewhere in the dark of Highway 290, en route to the ranch.

“You were beautiful, Kar,” Waverly said.

“Thanks, Wavey,” Karlie said. “Viv, did you think I was beautiful?”

“Of course,” Vivienne said, lying. Karlie just wasn't beautiful, there was no way around it. She was occasionally pretty, but in Vivienne's opinion, a person had to have a much more benevolent disposition to qualify as beautiful.

Karlie lingered on Vivienne for a moment, one arm akimbo. “Anyway,” she said, “being a bride was really stressful. Especially if you're marrying Timmy, because he's an idiot about everything.”

Sissy circled the island, topping off glasses. “How are you and Bucky going along?” The worst question.

“Fine,” Vivienne said. “Things are going well.”

“Well, I didn't know whether you'd be sharing a room with him,” Sissy drawled, letting the sentence hang open.

Vivienne shrugged. “I spend the night at his place sometimes.”

“I think he really likes you,” Waverly said, all heart-of-gold.

“Buck's so unpredictable,” Karlie said blithely.

“How is he unpredictable?” Vivienne asked. His predictability was one of her main private criticisms of him.

“He's just hard to read. Like you never know what's in his head.”

“I don't get that from him at all.”

“Aren't all men like that?” Waverly offered.

“Clay was never like that,” Karlie said. “He wanted to marry you the day after y'all met.”

A small Hispanic woman appeared and pulled a tray of breaded chicken wings from the oven. Sissy, with one jeweled hand on the woman's shoulder, silently pointed to a box of toothpicks on the counter.

“He'll come around, Viv,” Sissy said, turning back. “Don't put the pressure on him until you really need to. Men hate that the most. He's gotta get the birds outta his blood. When I met Bracken, he was still paddling pledges. I gave him a little time to realize what he had in me.”

Vivienne, not wanting advice, tensed up. “We're just taking it slow.”

“Well, don't take it too slow,” Sissy said.

“Then he'll take you for granted,” Waverly said, nodding. Karlie was listening with her glass suspended before her lips.

“How do you know what's too slow?” Vivienne asked.

“You don't,” Sissy said, with a certainty that might've settled the question the world over. “You just
feel
if it's too slow. But don't be too eager. Too fast is even worse than too slow. You have to feel it out.” To illustrate feeling, she flapped her wrists up and down her body.

Waverly laughed.

“What I'm sayin' is true! It's not on a timeline for y'all girls, like it was when I was your age—I already had Waverly by now—but y'all still have the same things to think about. Viv, you're gonna be thirty-one around the corner.”

All eyes fell on Vivienne, as if she were alone in her fate. “Don't try to scare me.”

“Because you could be alone forever and end up an old maid?” Karlie said.

“You don't wanna be working at that store for ten more years!” Sissy said.

“I don't think Vivienne needs to worry about this,” Waverly said.

“I'm sitting right here,” Vivienne pointed out. She had barely noticed that her glass of wine was almost empty when Sissy promptly refilled it.

“That's not all they look for,” Sissy continued. “Bucky needs a mama. Bracken needed a mama too. They all need a mama. If you can find a way to be his mama without driving yourself crazy, you'll be fine.”

“Timmy's too dumb to know he needs a mama,” Karlie said.

“I'm not pressuring him,” Vivienne said. “It's only been a few months. And I don't want to be anyone's mother.”

Sissy said, “They can smell it if you're giving yourself a rigmarole in your head. Anyway, that's for career girls. You're not a career girl, Viv. All that aimlessness isn't for you.”