"No she's not," Wendy snapped, turning on her mother again. "This is none of your business, Mom. Butt
out."
"Wendy, for God's sake, what is
wrong
with you?" her mother said in a low hiss. "Consider where you are. You're embarrassing me! At least let's go inside until we straighten this out."
"This is
my
affair, Mom. Mine and mine alone!"
"Obviously not; take a look around you," Grace shot back.
Wendy measured her audience in one regal sweep: everyone was completely transfixed. Shit. If that wasn't just
like her family. Her sister-in-law was probably going to slap the whole episode up on her Web site. God, how she hated them all just then.
Who
was
this woman? Just another gold digger? Then why didn't it seem that way?
She turned back to Zina, who'd sat back down on the side of the chaise, apparently too weak or disinclined to leave.
"Jim?" Wendy asked through gritted teeth. "Would you like to have the floor?"
"
To say what?" he answered, angry and offended. He didn't bother glancing at Zina as he added, "You can't possibly be taking this seriously."
Be that as it may, Wendy was taking it very seriously, indeed. There was just something about the past couple of weeks.
"How long were you supposedly married to my husband?" she demanded to know from Zin
a. In her mind she was thinking.
She would have to have been a child. She still looks like a child. A weekend in Vegas, a hangover, and a quick divorce to undo the damage: is that what this was all about? Or was it all just a lie?
In a downtrodden voice, Zina murmured, "We've been married for
... twelve years."
Wendy rolled her eyes and said flatly, "That's ridiculous. You're not that old." She tried to do the math; in her present distracted and suspicious mood, it hurt her head to let in raw logic. Twelve years for Zina, plus twelve years, with dating, for Wendy, and assume the bare minimum of eighteen years old when Zina claimed to have gotten married
.
...
"You're not saying that you're, what, forty-two or even older, are you? Because that's ridiculous. Jim's not that old. You are definitely not that old," she adde
d, hating to concede the fact. "
Try to make some sense, would you? God! I can't understand you at all. You show up here, you make ludicrous statements, you
ruin
my party—really, I should just call the police! I might just do that, you know?"
Wendy was doing little more than filling the air with the sound of her voice—stalling, pure and simple—because somewhere deep, deep down, she'd heard something that had sounded wrong, something that didn't make sense, and she was afraid to go back and pick over the sentences and discover what that something was. She was genuinely, profoundly terrified to go back and review.
As it turned out, she didn't have to; her mother did it for her.
Grace said gently to Zina, "You mean, you
were
married for twelve years. Because you said, 'We've
been
married for twelve years,' and that implies that you still are. And you didn't mean that."
Zina bowed her head. And then she nodded forlornly.
"Yes I did."
Now it was Wendy's turn to feel paralyzed. The sheer boldness of the claim had left her speechless.
Her mother stared. Jim said softly, "Wow. Now I've heard everything."
In a flat, controlled voice, Wendy said to Zina, "You're saying—what? That you're
still
married. Is that it?"
Again Zina nodded.
"I see." Wendy turned to Jim and said, "Which would naturally mean: we're not."
Jim didn't bother to respond to her but only shook his head incredulously.
Zina looked up at him. Her cheeks were rosy, the first color that Wendy had seen in her face. She looked astonishingly innocent, a picture of purity; she looked like one of the saints on the holy cards that her mother collected at funerals.
But saint who? Teresa? Margaret Mary? Joan of Arc? Suddenly it seemed important for Wendy to place the face, although she had no idea why. Maybe it would help her to understand this pale enigma who had crashed her party. Maybe it was just easier to think about beautiful saints than to figure out who was telling the truth.
Zina whispered again, "How could you do that to me, Jimmy?"
"Do
what?
I've never seen you before in my life."
A steadier stream of tears began rolling down her flushed cheek. Wendy knew—everyone knew—that there would be more. The woman was teetering on the verge of a breakdown.
"Wendy? Wendy!" Her mother was alarmed. Wendy could see the question in her face: Do you have a plan?
Wendy looked at her husband. He obviously had none. He was annoyed, embarrassed, even angry—but he did not have a plan.
"I think we should call the police," Wendy announced.
Her mother looked relieved. Jim frowned and then said sternly to Zina, "Is that what you want, miss? To be grilled by the police?"
She shook her head quickly and said, "Jimmy, it's me—Zina! Don't you
know
me?"
She sounded so plaintive, so anguished. Wendy was convinced that no one who actually knew her could have resisted comforting her. She glanced at her brother Dave, who was standing back a little way and making little noises of distress; stranger or no, Dave looked as if he was willing to take Zina in his arms on the spot.
Jim said in a low, commanding voice that most of the company couldn't hear, "My wife is right, Zina or whoever you are. If you don't want to be held by the police, then I suggest you leave the premises right now—and quietly, please. Do
not
make a scene. We're in the middle of a celebration here. Now. Will you just go?"
Jim had been reasonably polite, but Zina looked as if she'd been clubbed. Wendy knew that she would have reacted the same way. Whatever the woman's motivation had been, it was ending up in public humiliation. It couldn't be easy for her.
Zina stood up and weaved so violently that Wendy reached out instinctively to steady her.
Zina waved her away. "How could I have been so wrong?" she said in a low wail.
Wendy felt a wave of relief. So the woman
had
been mistaken. Thank God, thank God, thank God for that. Wendy wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt—she seemed too deluded, too naive to be a con woman—so she said, "Can I walk you back to your car?"
Zina shook her head. "No
.
I—oh, God," she moaned, and then she hurried
away, leaving the company open-
mouthed and staring.
In front of the house and right next to the roses, some of Tyler's aunts and uncles were standing in a circle around the lady in the blue dress again, the same as after she fainted. This time
Tyler
was able to squeeze between the grown-ups for a closer look and no one even noticed. They were too busy asking the lady questions, all at the same time. Even standing up close,
Tyler
couldn't hear any of her answers, because her voice was so soft—and, of course, because his relatives were so loud.
They were saying things like, "Why are you here?" and "What do you really want?" and "Who put you up to this?" They said, "You're high on something, aren't you? We
will
call the cops, and then we'll see how far you get. You're after his money," they said. "Just like everyone else."
Tyler
could not understand why everyone was so upset with her. She looked like an angel to him, or at least someone on the cover of a magazine. Her skin was so white compared to his mother's, and she was more slender, and her eyes were a deep, beautiful blue. They were shining, and
Tyler
knew that that meant she was holding back tears, just the way his mother did when his father said something mean.
He felt sorry for the lady, standing alone in the middle of everyone; if a person wasn't used to his family and to their noisy ways, it could be pretty scary.
Tyler
could tell that she wanted to get to her car. But they just wouldn't let her. One thing he knew: she didn't do anything wrong. You could see it in her face, how nice she was. So why was everyone yelling at her? All she did was faint.
Tyler
was completely confused.
Suddenly she shook her head, and the tears did fall then. "I never should have come here," she told
Tyler
's uncle Dave.
Someone else said, "Well, it's a little late
now,
don't you think?"
She nodded a bunch of times, jerky little nods, and then for some reason she looked straight at
Tyler
, and her eyes got big, even through her tears, and right after that she pushed past him and managed to break through the circle and reach her car. He rubbed his arm where she touched it as she squeezed past: it felt all tingly.
She pulled out of the drive and then took off fast.
"Take down her license number!" yelled
Tyler
's other Uncle David, but that was because he was a lawyer.
No one had a pencil or a paper, so
Tyler
's aunt Lucille kept saying the number out loud over and over until somebody said, "Drop it, would you already? No one's planning to sue."
They all went back through the arch in the hedge and joined the rest of the family, who seemed to be split up into quiet ones and blabby ones.
Tyler
's grandmother was doing the most talking; his grandfather, the least.
Tyler
went over and sat by his grandfather so that he wouldn't have to talk and possibly miss something important.
He saw that his mother and his father were speaking not very loud, just to one another. His mother said something louder that sounded annoyed, and then his father said the f-word—in front of company, which he never did! Then his mother got mad and turned around and said to his uncle Frank—who looked exactly like the new star tackle for the
New England Patriots—"Thanks for abandoning the grill, Frank; I suppose I can serve the cardboard and shoe leather now."
"That's it!" said his uncle Frank, untying his apron. "I can't work in these conditions. I'm shutting down the grill."
"Big loss," said his uncle Dave.
His aunt Sharon, who was holding
Tyler
's baby cousin in her arms, kind of laughed and said to
Tyler
's uncle Frank, "Well,
this
was one of your more memorable gatherings." Then she sighed and said, "I'll see if I can move up our flight."
Right after that,
Tyler
's
U
ncle Dave walked up to
Tyler
's dad and said, "You'd better be telling the truth, man, or you're dead; I don't care if you are my best friend."
Then his other uncle David said, "You're probably going to need a lawyer, Jim. Call me at the office."
But his great-aunt Genevieve turned right around and said, "If he needs representation,
you
are not going to be the one to do it. Can you imagine the scandal? I would never speak to you again."
And Uncle David was her own
son.
After that, everyone started talking at the same time again, and
Tyler
couldn't make out much of anything.
He tapped his grandfather's forearm, trying to get through to him over the chatter of his too big, too noisy, too everywhere family. "Grampa, what did Aunt Lucy mean just now when she said Mom and Dad might not be married?"
His grandfather said, "It's nothing, Ty, just a big misunderstanding," but he hardly noticed that
Tyler
was even there. He was watching everyone else, just like Ty.
Tyler
's uncle Frank moved out of the way and
Tyler
was able to see his mother and father again. He could tell that they were getting ready to fight; he recognized the tone of their voices.
"How did she know where to find you, anyway?" his mother said. "We've only just moved."
"Good question," his father said. He sounded like he might know the answer but wasn't sure.
"How was she possibly going to back up a claim like that? She would need papers, proof, that kind of thing..."
"Anyone can forge a document," his father said.
"Jim's right," said Aunt Lucille. "David says that you can buy any certificate you want on the Internet."
"That doesn't make sense," his mother said to his dad and not to Aunt Lucille. "If she was going to wave it around to blackmail you for money—okay, then I could see it.
Maybe.
But no one tries a stunt like that in front of a crowd. It defeats the whole purpose."