Oh man. “We enjoy one another's company,” Robin said pleasantly and mentally patted herself on the back for being so smooth.
“No, but I mean, are you thinking about making it permanent?”
“Permanent?” she echoed dumbly.
“Like marriage,” Vickie prompted her.
“Marriage?” Robin squeaked, choking on her tea.
“Jacob's never been married, can you believe that? He's thirty-eight years old and never been married. But I have to tell you, I am so glad he didn't get hooked up with that Lindy—oh my God!” she exclaimed with a roll of her eyes.
Gossip. Well, all right then—now Robin was on familiar ground.
“She was just… stupid, you know what I mean?”
Yes, yes, she knew exactly what Vickie meant. “So you met her?” she asked carefully.
Vickie shrugged, sipped her tea. “She came by here one day looking for him, carrying a pie, if you can believe that. I mean, you don't start right off making pies for Chrissakes until you at least got him a little interested, because then he's just gonna expect it! You know what I mean?”
Robin nodded eagerly that she did, and decided she and Vickie were going to be great friends! “So he wasn't really interested in her, huh?” she asked, dredging for all the dirt.
“Ah, hell no,” Vickie said with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “Just trying to be friendly is all. He hadn't really been interested in anyone since Gloria a couple of years back.”
“Oh really? I never heard of Gloria.”
Vickie's eyes lit up like Christmas trees, but before she could tell her anything about Gloria, Mrs. Manning called from the other room, “You ain't talking out of school, now are you, Vic?”
Vickie's eyes widened under her shellacked bangs. “No, ma'am!” she called, then smiled ruefully at Robin. “I'll catch up with you later during horseshoes,” she whispered conspiratorially and didn't even seem to notice that Robin was speechless at the mere mention of horseshoes, yet another sporting event for which she had no talent or desire.
She followed Vickie into the adjoining room, noticed that Jake had abandoned her—she could see him outside, with Zaney and Cole, under the hood of Zaney's battered truck, through the sheer drapes hanging from the wood-frame windows. She was, she realized in a moment of panic, alone with Mrs. Manning, Wanda, Vickie, and the two kids. Wanda was working on a piece of embroidery or knitting or something or other. Vickie picked up a magazine and began to leaf through it.
Mrs. Manning smoked. She motioned to a high-back wooden chair with an old, stained embroidered seat. “Have a seat, Robin. Is it all right I call you Robin?”
“Sure!” Robin said and sat, folding her hands in her lap.
“So… how did you meet Jacob?” Wanda asked.
“Ah… he's renovating my house.”
“I've been trying to get him to come fix a door in my house for six months,” Vickie said absently as she leafed through the magazine.
Mrs. Manning was still staring at her. “Where do you live, Robin?”
“North Boulevard. It's near the Village.”
She nodded. “Nice house, I'd say.”
“It will be when Jake is done. He's excellent at what he does.”
If she wasn't mistaken, a hint of a sardonic smile flashed across Mrs. Manning's face, but disappeared quickly. “Ain't the first time I've heard that,” she remarked.
“What kind of work do you do?” Wanda asked.
“I, uh… I work for a shipping company. We ship freight around the world.”
“Oh… do you work in the office?”
“The, ah, corporate offices.”
“Doing what?”
Well, I was my father's lackey for a while, but then he demoted me to bubble wrap. … “I am an acquisitions specialist,” she said, wincing inwardly at how stupid that sounded.
“A what specialist?” Vickie asked unabashedly.
“I, uh… well, like right now, I am looking at acquiring a couple of packing material companies. Ahem. We, ah, we buy packing materials to pack our freight. If we buy a packing supply company, then we'd make our own and not have to rely on someone else's supply.”
“I don't know what you mean when you say packing materials,” Mrs. Manning said.
“You know… stuff that goes in boxes.”
“You mean like them Styrofoam peanuts?” Vickie asked incredulous.
Robin could feel herself coloring. Of all the things she had envisioned for herself, peanuts definitely had never been in the picture. Neither was Telephone Road, for that matter. “Yes. Like Styrofoam peanuts.”
Vickie looked at her mother. Wanda looked at her embroidery.
“I'd best see to the potatoes,” Mrs. Manning said, heaving herself out of the recliner.
“Can I help you?” Robin asked, coming to her feet.
Mrs. Manning's eyes flicked the entire length of her before she slowly nodded. “I imagine there is something you can do.”
Well, that was debatable, but Robin followed Mrs. Manning to the kitchen anyway. Jake's mom pointed to a cabinet next to her ancient fridge. “You'll find some plates in there. There will be twelve of us for dinner if Derek ever gets back from fishing. I don't know why he's got to go fishing on Easter Sunday, but he ain't my husband.” She proceeded on to the stove and lifted the lid on the potatoes.
T hank you, God—setting the table, something she could definitely do. “Okay!” Robin said, pleased with her task. “Where's the dining room?”
Mrs. Manning looked up. 'This ain't quite the Village, you know.“ She nodded at the kitchen table. ”You're looking at it."
“Oh.” Wooonderful. Robin proceeded stiffly to the cabinet Mrs. Manning had indicated, withdrew twelve old pottery plates decorated with brown and orange leaves, and walked back to the table, wondering if she should remove the used coffee cups there.
“You know,” Mrs. Manning said as Robin pushed the cups aside for the moment, “my son has a lot on his plate right now, what with his work, and school, and trying to help me manage Cole.”
“Yes, he's a very busy man,” Robin agreed as she began to lay the plates.
“You must be busy, too, with your packing stuff.”
Her job certainly sounded glamorous when put like that, didn't it? “Sometimes. I travel a lot.”
“Just wonder how you have time to see my son at all.”
Okay, maybe she was being a touch PMS-ey, but Robin did not like the way Mrs. Manning kept saying my son. Like she owned him, had a say in him or something. “We make the time,” Robin said simply. “I really enjoy his company.”
“Oh, I'm sure he enjoys yours, too,” Mrs. Manning said
with a laugh that sounded dangerously close to a snort. “But Cole needs him right now.”
What did that mean? Robin picked up the used coffee cups, marched to the sink, put them in an already huge pile of dirty dishes. “If you will show me where the silverware is, I'll put it out.”
Old lady Manning pointed to a drawer. Robin yanked it open, started counting forks.
“Now, I'm not trying to make you mad,” she continued.
“Please, Mrs. Manning, you aren't making me mad.”
Still, she chuckled, paused in her ministrations over the stove to light a smoke. “You can call me Norma,” she said, as if that was some huge favor. “All I'm trying to say is, I look at a pretty, rich girl like you, and I wonder why you'd be running around with my son when you could be with just about any man out there, and then I wonder if you aren't out just having a little fun at his expense. If you are, he don't need that right now.”
Of all the unmitigated, uncalled-for chutzpah] “Having fun?” Robin echoed, a little more sharply than she intended, and wondered what Jake would say if he knew his mom was essentially telling her to get lost. “I don't know what you see when you look at me, Norma,” she said pointedly, “but I really like Jake. And he seems to like me. We are seeing each other when we can, and I guess we're both content to just see where it goes.”
Norma Manning chuckled. “Good. Glad to hear you at least like him.”
Astounded, Robin gaped at the woman's back. She was hardly accustomed to justifying her dating habits. Okay, maybe to her father, but never to the mother of her dates. Funny thing was, while Robin was fuming, Norma seemed amused, and even got a little talkative. As if she had never accused Robin of using Jake, she asked her to baste the ham (without anything obvious that Robin could see) and check the beans (which she assumed meant stir). Norma mashed the potatoes and began to tell Robin what Jake was like as a boy—apparently one who slept with his bat and never went anywhere without his cleats or his baseball jersey.
Though the stories were humorous, they were also poignant to Robin. It had to have been more devastating than she could know when Jake tore his Achilles tendon and ended a dream that had begun when he was a boy.
But he did sound like an adorable little boy, almost as adorable as the man. By the time the food was on the table, Robin was actually laughing with his mom.
Vickie's husband, Derek, had arrived by the time Norma called everyone in for dinner, and they all crowded in the small kitchen until it looked as if it might actually burst at the seams. They squeezed in around the table, sitting in a hodgepodge of chairs. Jake dutifully said grace when his mother asked, his deep voice resonating in the room. With the amen, everyone attacked the food, startling Robin by grabbing bowls and passing them in every direction, talking on top of one another as they asked for various dishes, laughing at the things one another said and enjoying the home-cooked meal. Norma played hostess, groused at every request, but nonetheless jumped up and down to fetch whatever was needed.
The loud, raucous free-for-all was not like anything Robin had ever experienced. Even the food was a complete departure from the carefully balanced, light meals her mom instructed the cook to make on these occasions, and she wished for a glass of wine instead of iced tea… but it was fun.
There wasn't a stiff air of formality around the table, nor did anyone seem to mind the lack of proper manners. The emphasis seemed to be the companionship instead of rules; no one seemed out to impress the other. At her family gatherings, they often engaged in subtle contest over the price of a bottle of wine (actually there was no alcohol here, which some people—well, Robin, anyway—found disconcerting). As someone shoved a basket of rolls into her hand, Robin couldn't help but think of the last meal she had had with her family, the one served with bone china, crystal glasses, and real silverware while her father berated her and her sisters about their inadequacies. This gathering was missing the finery, but it had something much more valu-
able—a real sense of belonging and closeness.
It felt wonderful.
As Vickie heaped a large spoonful of mashed potatoes onto her plate, Robin thought this was what family was supposed to be, and when Derek asked what Robin did for a living, for the first time since she had been demoted, she laughed. And proclaimed that she was a bona fide expert on bubble wrap.
Sitting across from her, Jake quietly watched her, feeling awfully proud as she extolled the virtues of well-made bubble wrap. It seemed funny now that he had worried she would find his family and their ways a little barbaric for her refined tastes, or that Mom would manage to chase her off before dinner was even served. Robin was a champ; if she was appalled by the free-for-all, he couldn't see it, and furthermore, she actually seemed to enjoy the back-and-forth banter with Derek about the size of bubbles in bubble wrap.
In truth, as he looked at Robin, thinking her even more beautiful than he ever had before, he could admit that he had seen a change in her over the last several weeks. She had gone from the sort of highbrow woman who had a habit of looking through people like him to one who now looked directly at him, into him. One who could let him look back without squirming.
That afternoon, Elissa and Nicholas and even Cole hunted for the Easter eggs Robin had brought as the adults prepared for the traditional game of horseshoes, played every Easter without respect for age, gender, or ability. They formed teams of two, Derek and Jake ganging up on Vickie and Robin. Robin was as hapless at horseshoes as she was at bowling, but Vickie, bless her, laughed louder than anyone when Robin threw a horseshoe and broke the hummingbird feeder Vickie had given Mom. When the game was finished—Derek and Jake winning an unapologetic twenty-one to four, and with four ringers to his credit—Jake took a seat on the back porch with Mom to watch Robin and Cole play against Zaney and little Nicholas.
When Wanda got up to go in and make a pot of coffee, Mom lit up a smoke and inhaled deeply. "She's real nice,
Jacob,“ she said as she watched Zaney do one of his famous shot-put-horseshoe tosses that scattered Cole and Robin to opposite ends of the yard. ”And real pretty. I can see why you're crazy about her."
“Mom, don't start,” he warned her. “Don't make a big deal out of this.”
She exhaled, looked at him from the corner of her eye. “You think I don't know you? You think that your mother can't take one look at you and know you're gaga about that woman?”
Man, he hated when she did that. “You're imagining things,” he said dismissively.
“The hell I am,” she said with an air of motherly superiority. “And you'd be a fool not to be crazy about her. I just hope you're not so foolish that you get hurt.”
“Hurt? What are you talking about?”
Mom paused to tap the ash from her smoke, then inhaled deeply again. “Just what I said. I hope you don't get hurt, Jacob. She's real pretty and she's real nice, but it's real obvious she don't belong down here. She might as well be from the other side of the world. One day, you might just wake up and find her gone back to that side of the world. That's all I'm saying.”
God, but Mom had a way of bluntly stating the truth that grated on him. Like he hadn't thought of that every day they had been together. Like that didn't haunt his growing and deep attachment to her. Nonetheless, he snorted at her suggestion. “You watch too many soap operas, Mom. I'm having a good time right now, nothing more, so there's no need for you to worry about me.”
She laughed. “How dumb do I look, Jacob?” she asked, and still laughing, ground out her cigarette before going inside to help Wanda.