Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger (15 page)

Two that I knew of. My truth and my obfuscation.

“I notice you didn’t come to find out at the time,” Frank returned hard.

“I didn’t know where you were. I was waiting for
my bride
at
the altar
, which was where we had originally agreed to meet at that particular time.” He shifted his narrowed eyes to me, only for a second, then back to Frank. “Though I was definitely expecting to see my best man”—he let the words die in the air for a split second—“in there too.”

I shrank in my seat. Did you ever see that episode of
The Flintstones
where every time Fred gets embarrassed he literally shrinks until he’s, like, two inches tall? That’s how I felt. Like a tiny cartoon Fred Flintstone, between two angry giant cartoon men having an overblown cartoon conversation.

Meanwhile, Dottie just watched right along with Lyle, not offering a word to the conversation. She’d thrown a match on the gasoline and now was just letting it flame. Though, to be fair, how much could she say? Despite the fact that everyone’s tone seemed civil and no one made a physical move, there was a certain violence in the air that no sane person would want to get into the middle of.

“I think it’s Quinn who never got the straight story,” Frank countered blithely, lifting his wine to his lips. He wasn’t easily rattled. “At least not the whole one. Wasn’t that the problem, Quinn?”

I wished I’d gotten wine. God knew the water wasn’t doing squat to ease my nerves.

“It was so long ago.…” I looked at Lyle. Despite the fact that he’d started all of this—wittingly or unwittingly—he was the only focus I was comfortable with at this moment. Suddenly
he
, this stranger, was my only driftwood in the water.

“I think the
problem
,” Burke said, “was that she listened to a bunch of b.s. from someone with ulterior motives and instead of talking to me, she hauled her ass out of there vowing to, if I’m not mistaken,
cut my balls off
if I ever tried to contact her again in what she prayed would be my painfully short life.” He looked back at me. “Have I got that wording right?”

I cleared my throat. “That does sound familiar, but—”

At that moment, thank goodness, the swinging door from the kitchen opened, and I allowed myself to be interrupted by the maid Dottie had been talking to earlier, who entered the room along with a whip-thin man of perhaps forty-five or so, who looked like an old movie caricature of The Butler. Each held a silver platter.

They came directly to me first and stood on either side of me, lifting the lids of their respective platters to reveal the kind of gorgeous gourmet food normally reserved for a special occasion at a AAA four-diamond restaurant.

It was a weird dichotomy that Dottie did things this way. She was so relaxed and easy to be around, yet dinner service was always so elegant. I’d asked Burke about it once, years ago, and he said it was because this had been the one tradition Dottie’s mom had apparently instilled in her before she passed away when Dottie was still a teenager, and it was the way Joss had liked things once they got married. Ever since then, Dottie had maintained it, even under the most seemingly absurd circumstances.

“Filet mignon with
sauce béarnaise
or demi-glace reduction with port wine,” the maid said to me, indicating the choices.

“I— either. I’ll just— béarnaise,” I concluded lamely. I couldn’t ask her to decide. That
wasn’t done
in surroundings like this. At Ruby Tuesday, yes, maybe I could have let the waiter choose which sauce he thought I’d like for my boneless Buffalo tenders, but in Middleburg’s finest homes, a guest was expected to behave and be treated like (or
almost
like) the lady of the manor.

It was going to be a long night.

It already was.

“So, Lyle,” Burke said, and the edge to his voice caught my attention. “Have you been married before?”

“Nope,” Lyle said.

Burke looked at him in silence for just a little longer than was comfortable. “Why is that?”

Lyle shrugged. “Never found the right girl, I guess.”

“Mm.” Burke nodded in a way that said,
Bullshit
, louder than words could have. What was he thinking?

“Well, you have now,” I said, sounding more chirpy than I meant to. “You hit the jackpot with Dottie.”

“Exactly,” Burke murmured.

Apparently Lyle didn’t hear that. “I sure do love her,” he said.

“Ooh, go on.” Dottie giggled.

“I think you guys will be really happy together,” I said, feeling Burke bristle beside me. He was clearly against this marriage. “In fact—”

I was interrupted, thank goodness, by the surprisingly high, reedy voice of the butler. “Asparagus amandine, roasted baby beets, and scalloped truffle potatoes—which would the lady like?”

Under normal circumstances? All of them.

Tonight? A nice hemlock salad would have really hit the spot.

A little cyanide dressing on the side. Just in case.

“Potatoes, please,” I said, thinking they would be the easiest to dish out quickly, so he could move on and the Spotlight of Service could move off me.

They had a much easier time with everyone else, and it seemed to take the same amount of time to serve the other four collectively as it had to get me to dither my way through a choice.

I was relieved when they left the room, only to have the rebounding horror of seeing them return with more platters.

“Salad of microgreens, arugula, caramelized shallots, and roasted rainbow carrot, topped with champagne vinaigrette?” she offered in a practiced voice.

“Sure.” Wouldn’t want to insult anyone. “Just a touch, though, thanks.” I watched her scoop a pile onto a salad plate I hadn’t previously noticed.

Then, of course, the pièce de résistance.

As if in schlocky slow motion, he lifted the lid of his platter to reveal my grandmother’s obnoxiously colorful Tupperware bowl, with a gleaming silver serving spoon poking out of it like found treasure buried under an old tree.

Talk about cartoons! The plastic somehow looked even more
plastic
, brighter than a special-edition crayon, when perched on a gleaming antique silver platter.

“Macaroni salad?” he asked, somehow with a straight face, though I swear there was a smirk in his voice.

I can’t honestly ever remember being so embarrassed in my life. “You know, I don’t think that really
goes
with the rest of this. I was under the impression that this was”—I looked at Dottie pointedly—“a kind of picnic or something
very informal
.”

“Well, honey, this
is
informal,” she said, then gestured acknowledgment at the servers. “Oh, I know this all seems very stuffy, but look who’s here, it’s just us. We’re
family
. What would be more comfortable and casual than this?”

A firing squad?

“I can think of a few things,” Burke murmured.

“What’s that, honey?” Dottie asked, straining in his direction.

“
Casual
and
comfortable
aren’t the first words that come to mind as far as describing this meal,” he said to her. “Now, you know that, Dottie.”

“Nice, Burke,” Frank said. “Make everyone feel awkward. By the way, I tried the macaroni salad in the kitchen, it’s really good.” He looked at me with utter sincerity. “Seriously, it’s really good. I love that stuff.”

Burke just scoffed. Didn’t even bother to dignify it with an answer. I remembered when he’d figured out that technique with Frank.

It drove Frank crazy.

Obviously it wasn’t fair to make like
Burke
was the reason everyone might be feeling awkward right now, but I didn’t know what to say to ease the situation. If anything, I was the spark in this powder keg, and the quieter I remained, the better.

The servers made their way around the table and, to my utter humiliation, everyone politely took a splat or two of macaroni salad on their plates next to the elegant entrées.

“I
love
macaroni salad,” Lyle even said, tucking in and looking for all the world like he really meant it. “My dad made the best, believe it or not. He’d add bacon or ham hocks.” He took a bite and kept talking. “He was a barbecue man, and all summer long he’d do all the cooking. He wouldn’t even let my mother do the dishes, he’d just rinse them off with a hose and send me and my brother in to scrub them. The ones that weren’t paper, that is. We’d just throw the paper ones away. Isn’t that convenient? Just”—he made a throwing gesture—“threw ’em away.”

“Paper plates are
very
convenient,” Dottie agreed.

And the conversation went on like that. Paper plates, and a particularly long detour into doilies, which Lyle had quite a lot of feelings about, surprisingly.

So I had no warning that the conversation was going to take such a bad turn until it was upon me. We were discussing the sale of the farm, that Dottie felt ready since that chapter of her life was over and that Frank felt ambivalent about it since he didn’t have the time to be a part-time farmer on the weekends.

Burke said nothing, but I felt his unhappiness pulsating from beside me.

“If there were children who could inherit it, I might think twice about it,” Dottie said, and I felt a little pinch of sadness because of course I had once expected to have the very children she was referencing.

“Well, I’m not looking at marriage and kids anytime soon,” Frank said, “and of course with Burke’s first marriage,” then he amended, “
only
marriage, I mean. That didn’t turn out so good, so it’s not like we’ve got any real expectation of impending heirs.”

I kind of heard the whole sentence, but, honestly, I really lost my focus after the first seven words or so.
Marriage.
It was a shock every time I thought about it. I looked at him and he must have seen the question in my eyes.

“It was brief,” he said … briefly.

It was as if everyone else in the room faded into the background. “Care to elaborate?” I asked quietly.

He very deliberately took a bite of macaroni salad and shook his head. “Nope.”

I resisted an urge to jab him with my elbow.

Some habits die hard.

Okay, so at this point, I will admit the tension around the table was getting a little thick. Clearly no one wanted to interrupt—even when people are being rude, if they’re marching forward with a strong agenda, it’s hard to jump in front of them and say,
Hey, let’s just have some more macaroni salad and get along
.

Got it.

But at the same time, there was no stopping this boulder from rolling through the maze in this cave, just like something from Indiana Jones. The truth had been unleashed and, while I didn’t want to be knocked over by it, I had to know it in its entirety before I could take an easy breath again.

I didn’t taste anything else I ate.

When the meal was finally over, after what seemed like hours, and everyone had gotten up from the table, I told Dottie I had to leave.

Her expression dropped. “Are you sure, honey? I was hoping maybe you’d stay to play cards!”

She meant it. She actually thought the trauma had passed, that things were better, and that we could all sit down and play a nice game of cards together. I wished I could. I wished it was that easy for me. It should have been. It had been a long time and there was no need for me to feel weird about something that had no more relevance to my day-to-day life than an old episode of
Full House
.

“I’ve got a lot of stuff to do,” I said, and smiled in what I hoped was a firm but inarguable way. “Thank you so much for dinner.” I started to leave but was stopped by Burke.

“I’ll walk you out to your car,” he said.

I met his eyes and felt that same stupid shiver of pleasure I always felt when I met his eyes. It was immediately replaced by memory, and then resolve. “That’s really not necessary.”

“I believe you mean
thank you
.”

“No, I mean
no
.”

“There are bears out there,” he said with a hint of a smile.

“And wolves in here,” I said, unable to keep from smiling back. Arrrgh! Why was it so easy for him to disarm me? “I’d rather take my chances with the bears.” Carrying a picnic basket and wearing a dress made of salami and Snickers bars.

“I think you’ll fare all right. You’ll make it all the way into your car without incident, I guarantee it.” He put a hand to my elbow and guided me toward the door. My skin felt warm under his touch.

“Good night!” Dottie said, and I heard the subtle excitement in her voice.

“Good to meet you,” Lyle added, and there was nothing more to his tone than that.

I didn’t know where Frank was at that point, but I was glad not to be in the middle of a round two between him and Burke.

As soon as Burke and I got out into the cool night air, I shifted my arm to lose his grip. “So it’s interesting that you did get married after all,” I said, not too sharply—I was making an effort—but I was afraid my possessiveness came through in my voice.

“Jealous?”

Obviously. “Just surprised.”

“It was short-lived. But it’s not like you didn’t have a chance first.”

The gravel of the driveway crunched under our steps.

“Actually it’s a lot like I didn’t have a chance,” I said, wishing to God I were alone. There was no way this conversation could possibly end well. No way. “When it was all said and done I felt like I’d
never
stood a chance with you.”

“Ridiculous.”

I stopped and looked at him under the dim drive lights. “What’s the story?”

“Does it matter?”

Dread threaded through me. “Tell me.”

There was a moment of cicadas and crickets before, “You really want to hear it?”

Trepidation built in my chest like a big pile of Jenga blocks, ready to crash down unexpectedly at any moment, given one wrong move. “I’m sure I don’t.”

“Then I won’t.”

“Do.”

He shrugged. “It was ill-advised.”

I took an uneven breath. “All your marriages seem to be.”