Occasion of Revenge Read online

  “Who’s that?” I asked Connie, pointing toward the cackle.

  She shrugged. “And Guest.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s all I know. When your father RSVPed, it was for two: Captain George Alexander and Guest. I forgot to tell you.” She cast a fashion-critical eye over Darlene’s cocktail dress, a lacy froth of Pepto-Bismol pink with a flouncy skirt that hovered three inches north of her knees and a bodice that plunged a couple of inches too far south of her generous bosom.

  “I hope she doesn’t sneeze,” I said. Darlene held the stem of her glass between her thumb and forefinger, laughed again, then pirouetted away toward the meats table on dainty toes stuffed into size five sling-back, open-toed stiletto heels. “That’s Daddy’s date?”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  “But it’s only eight months since Mother died,” I managed to croak around the lump in my throat.

  Connie started to say something but ended up grinning me an apology over her shoulder as she was whisked aside by a sophisticated couple in their late seventies, immaculately dressed and carrying a large, beautifully wrapped wedding package.

  I looked around for Paul and found him at the antipasto table, stacking his plate with marinated mushrooms and asparagus spears while talking to my sister Ruth. Ruth wore an ankle-length, multilayered caftany thing in a sheer natural linen. I snitched an asparagus spear from Paul’s plate, bit off the bud end, then pointed the stem at Darlene. “Daddy has a date.”

  Ruth turned to look where Daddy was holding forth with Darlene and another woman whom I recognized as Ellie from the nearby Country Store. Ruth’s eyes brightened. “The lady in blue?”

  “I wish. No, the lady in pink. Darlene somebody-or-other.”

  Ruth sputtered into her wine. “Oh, gawd! Where’d she buy that dress? Togs for Tarts?”

  “Well, at least your father’s not sitting at home feeling sorry for himself.” Paul slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Nothing is going to bring your mother back,” Paul continued reasonably with a sympathetic one-armed hug that squished air audibly out of my shoulder pads. “Let the old guy have a little fun.”

  It was hard to think of my father as old. A 1950 graduate of the Naval Academy, he’d given the Navy thirty years, then worked another nineteen years building airplanes in Seattle before retiring to Annapolis last year. The month Mother died, he had turned seventy.

  “That doesn’t look like fun,” Ruth said. “It looks like trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with D and that stands for fool.”

  Paul nibbled on a carrot stick and stared in Darlene’s direction. “You can’t judge a book by its cover, girls.”

  I groaned. “May I write that down, Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “Maybe she’s a great conversationalist. A Harvard grad running a multinational corporation. A scholar with an advanced degree in comparative literature from Yale.” He turned to Ruth. “How come you don’t know this woman, Ruth? You see your father every day.”

  After Mom died, my divorced sister had given up her poky, overpriced apartment on Conduit Street in downtown Annapolis and moved into our parents’ home in the Providence community. Daddy, she discovered, barely knew how to balance a checkbook or file his income taxes. Mother had always taken care of the bookkeeping. And cooking? Forget about it.

  Ruth shook her head. “He’s never mentioned her. Probably too embarrassed.” She sipped her wine. “But he has been spending more evenings out lately.” She snorted. “He told me he was bowling.”

  Daddy must have said something funny because Darlene threw her head back, open-mouthed. He would have had time to count her fillings. I was beginning to recognize her laugh, full and deep-throated, ending in a giggle.

  “I think I have a very good idea where her talents lie,” offered Ruth, sourly.

  “Take a pill, Ruth.”

  Ruth smiled at Paul, sickly sweet. “I do believe I will, Mr. Ives.” She reached around him, selected a fringed toothpick from a silver cup and speared a crab ball, then dredged it through the cocktail sauce.

  “Why don’t you go introduce yourselves, girls?”

  I displayed my empty wineglass. “First, I’ll need another one of these.”

  Ruth, still chewing, speared another crab ball and sailed off in the opposite direction. “I think it’s his job to introduce his girlfriend to us,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to find Georgina.”

  “Last time I saw Georgina, she was in the tent in the garden fixing fruit-and-cheese plates for the kids,” Paul said.

  Ruth, her mouth full of crab, nodded, waved, and disappeared outside. I watched as she weaved among the boxwood hedges, then strolled down the well-manicured lawn which sloped gently away from the historic mansion toward the Chesapeake Bay.

  Paul took my elbow and steered me toward the bar. We had just refilled our glasses when the music died.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” The first chair violin, a painfully thin bleached blonde clad entirely in black, had trouble being heard over the celebration. Paul tapped a fork against his plate and after several seconds the room grew quiet and guests began drifting into the ballroom from the adjoining rooms and from the garden. The waif lifted her bow high, like a baton. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rutherford!”

  Connie and Dennis appeared from the hallway, holding hands and beaming at one another like star-struck teens. The skinny violinist, who could have put a heaping plate of crab balls to good use, set her bow to the violin and played a few introductory chords before turning to her musicians and segueing into “Mexicali Rose.” Paul leaned toward me. “ ‘Mexicali Rose’?”

  With my lips close to my husband’s ear I whispered, “Maybe there’s a Mexican holiday we don’t know anything about.”

  At the end of the second bar of music, Dennis swung Connie wide, twirled her into his arms, then waltzed her around the dance floor in graceful, sweeping circles. They could have been on wheels.

  I turned to Paul. “Holy Toledo! It’s international ballroom on PBS.”

  “Dennis told me they’ve been taking lessons.”

  I watched, admiring and amazed. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “It’s so beautiful!” I jabbed Paul with my elbow. “I’ve been trying to get you to take lessons for years, you bum!”

  “Maybe someday.”

  Before I could extract a promise to that effect, our daughter, Emily, appeared. She looked beautiful, too, in a slinky, floor-length slip the color of caramel that she proudly claimed she’d bought for fifty cents at Goodwill. Since leaving home for Colorado Springs, she had let her ragged, badly dyed hair grow out. Now it hung, sleek and smooth, the color of dark molasses, just touching her shoulders. She’d applied light touches of makeup to her eyes and cheeks and exchanged the black lipstick of her rebellious years for a burgundy gloss. Dante loomed tall behind her, dressed in black slacks and a white shirt. I doubted my son-in-law owned a suit. If it hadn’t been for his colorful tie, I might have mistaken him for one of the waiters.

  “I’m trying to get your father to dance,” I explained to Emily, who was balancing Chloe on her hip. The strings swung into “I Only Have Eyes for You” and the floor began to fill with other dancers. Suddenly, twenty-two pounds, all of it Chloe, was in my arms.

  “C’mon, Dad,” Emily said. “Let’s dance.” Without waiting for a reply, she seized Paul’s hand and dragged him onto the floor. Smiling crookedly, he held her, stiffly at first, then with more confidence as his elbows unlocked and his arms relaxed. He began rocking from one foot to the other, leading his daughter around the ballroom with a skip, half shuffle, skip, slide.

  Leaving me with Dante.

  I always managed to put my foot in it where conversations with Dante were concerned. Chloe saved me the trouble of having to think of something to say by grabbing my earring, a string of dangling pearls, and yanking—hard.

  “Ouch!” My hand shot to my ear. “You little imp!”

  Dante,
who had been watching Emily dance with her father with a grin on his face, turned to see what all the commotion was about. “You OK, Mrs. Ives?”

  I laughed, pried Chloe’s fingers from the earring, and slipped it into my pocket for safekeeping. I attempted to distract my granddaughter by making faces and talking to her like an idiot. “Widdle Chloe want something to eat, huh?”

  Dante held out his arms to his daughter. As his cuffs crept higher on his wrists, I could see portions of the elaborate tattoos that decorated his arms—the business end of a rattlesnake; the talons of an eagle. Until I had had a nipple tattooed on my reconstructed breast, the artwork on Dante was the closest I’d ever come to a tattoo. “Here, Mrs. Ives. Let me take her,” Dante volunteered. “She’s going to make a mess of your dress.”

  “That’s OK,” I said, thinking there wasn’t much Chloe could do that would break my heart over this dress. But in a few minutes, my granddaughter metamorphosed into a writhing sack of eels. I handed her back to her father gratefully. “Thanks.”

  Dante settled his daughter on his hip and plugged a pacifier into her mouth. When a vigorous sucking motion signaled that Chloe had a firm grip on the nipple, he turned to me. “I’d ask you to dance, but one of us …” He jiggled Chloe up and down.

  I was relieved. I was still working on my relationship with Dante. It had not started out on the best of terms when he’d dropped out of Haverford College just a semester before graduation to move out west, taking my besotted daughter, who had graduated from Bryn Mawr with honors a year earlier, with him.

  “Just look at your grandfather-in-law,” I said at last.

  “Who?” Looking puzzled, Dante’s gaze drifted from Chloe’s plump face to the dance floor. After a moment, he chuckled. “Oh, I see.”

  Daddy was squiring Darlene around the floor like a pro. Darlene’s skirt swirled away from her body, revealing shapely thighs encased in hot pink panty hose. I willed their label to say Queen Size, Super Support, but there wasn’t a chance of that. Although she must have been well over fifty, Darlene had the legs of a twenty-year-old.

  I scowled in my father’s direction. “Acting like a teenager.”

  Dante nodded sagely, his ponytail wagging. “Whatever.”

  “I think it’s disgusting.” Dante’s head swiveled in my direction and I immediately regretted my candor. “Sorry.” I smiled apologetically. “It seems like just yesterday that Mom …” I took a deep breath and held it, then turned my eyes back to the dance floor where Daddy and Darlene were sharing a sprightly fox-trot. “She’s certainly peppy, I’ll give her that.”

  “She’s not so bad.” Dante shifted Chloe to the other hip and repositioned the pacifier, which had fallen into the folds of the hand-smocking on her white piqué dress.

  Someone snapped a picture and I flinched at the flash. I squinted up at my son-in-law. “You’ve met her, then?”

  “Briefly. Emily and I talked with her for all of two seconds back at the church. She’s a widow living over in Chestertown.”

  Chestertown was a community over the Bay Bridge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, about an hour’s drive from Annapolis. “Chestertown? How’d Daddy hook up with someone way over there?”

  Dante shrugged. “Don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

  I was thinking about this when the music stopped. Paul and Emily reappeared, looking flushed from their efforts at contemporary ballroom. “The musicians are taking a break,” Emily said, sounding disappointed. Too bad. Now that Emily had broken the ice, I was hoping Paul would trip the light fantastic with me while the force was still with him.

  Behind Paul’s back I watched Daddy as he led Darlene from the dance floor over to the bar. They picked up refills, then wandered out to the garden. I saw them again briefly, participating with enthusiasm when we toasted the bride and groom with chilled champagne. My backbone stiffened by wine, I was headed in their direction with a million questions on my mind when Paul asked me to dance and everything else flew out of my head.

  When I thought about Daddy and Darlene again, it was cake cutting time, but they were nowhere to be seen. I waited until the last notes of “Good Night, Sweetheart” had died away, until the caterers began wrapping up the leftovers in heavy-duty aluminum foil, until the flowers had been loaded into a van headed for the nursing home, but I never got that dance Daddy had promised me.

  I emerged from the bathroom with my hair still damp from the shower to find Paul waiting, propped up on two pillows. He whipped the sheet away from my side of the bed and patted the mattress. I smiled, slid in next to him, and snuggled close, my cheek resting comfortably on his chest.

  “Sorry it’s so goopy.”

  He nuzzled my neck. “What’s goopy?”

  “My hair. All that hair spray. I brushed it hard, but …”

  “You can wash it in the morning.” His kiss began near my right ear, meandered down my cheek, and finally found my mouth. I wrapped my legs around his and melted into him.

  The end of a perfect day.

  In the past two years, I’d learned the fine art of appreciating perfect days whenever they came my way. And it was a good thing Connie’s wedding was an eleven on a scale of one to ten, because it was the last perfect day I would see for a good, long time.

  chapter

  2

  The telephone rang, jolting me out of a thoroughly satisfying dream, an action/adventure film, as I recall, featuring Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery dueling with spear guns for my attentions. I observed, aloof and amused, from the deck of a luxury yacht, sipping a dry martini—shaken, not stirred—fetchingly clad in a form-fitting black-and-pink skin-diving suit. Me, not the martini.

  “Hullo?” I managed, resurfacing so fast I was in danger of getting the bends.

  “Hannah, Daddy didn’t come home last night.”

  “What?” I groped around on the bedside table until I found the alarm clock. Six-thirty. I groaned.

  “His bed hasn’t been slept in.”

  Paul turned away from me, burrowing under the covers. “Who the hell is that?” he mumbled.

  I covered the receiver with my hand. “Ruth. She’s worried that Daddy isn’t home.”

  Paul flipped down the comforter and sat up. “Well, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out, Watson.”

  I laid a hand on his leg and returned my attention to my sister. “Are you sure? Maybe he’s asleep on the sofa. Or in the family room.”

  “Nuh-uh. I checked.”

  “In the bathroom?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is there a message on the answering machine?”

  “No.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Look, he probably took Darlene home and one thing led to another …”

  “Probably, but he could have called me, Hannah.”

  “He could have, but that probably wasn’t the first thing on his mind.”

  “The stomach turns.”

  I flopped back on my pillow, the receiver clamped to my ear. “My feelings, exactly.”

  “All I ask is a little common courtesy, Hannah. I cook, I clean, I iron his shirts. The least he could do is let me know when he isn’t coming home so I don’t worry.” She heaved an exasperated sigh. “If it had been me not coming home, he’d’ve had a fit.”

  By now, I was wide awake. Paul, listening to my half of the conversation, propped himself up on an elbow and used his free hand to trace little circles on my arm. I crossed my eyes, stuck out my tongue, and playfully swatted at his hand.

  Ruth had a point. Although Daddy was doing her a favor by letting her live at home rent free, Ruth more than made up for it by what she contributed to the running of the household. If Daddy had to pay someone—several someones—to cook, clean, wash, iron, pay the bills, and keep up the yard, he’d have to take out a second mortgage. Ruth considered her stay transitional and mutually beneficial. She’d agreed to help get Daddy back on his feet while she saved enough money from Mother Earth, her shop on Main Street, to m
ake a down payment on a home of her own. Lord knows Eric Gannon wasn’t in a position to help her out. Ruth’s ex was throwing all his money at a sweet Gen-Xer named Candee these days.

  “Daddy probably thinks that by letting me live here for free and giving me the car he doesn’t owe me anything,” Ruth complained.

  When Ruth’s aging VW Golf had died the previous summer in a shuddering heap of cracked windshield, bald tires, and rusting quarter panels, Daddy had signed over the title of Mom’s Corolla to her. With his passion for fairness, I’d received Mother’s emerald engagement ring and he’d given Georgina her beaver coat, but the rest of Mom’s things he’d kept, as if by parting with them he’d be admitting to himself that she was really gone. One day we’d have to go through Mom’s closet and dresser drawers, but not now. The pain was still too fresh and too deep.

  “He’s a grown-up, Ruth,” I reminded my sister. “To him, you’re still a kid. He probably doesn’t think he needs to account for his actions to you.”

  “Still, it’s rude. What if he’s been in an accident?”

  “Unlikely. He left the reception with Darlene surgically attached to his arm.” I wrapped my fingers around Paul’s incurably roving hand. “Look, if he hasn’t returned home by noon, let me know and we’ll send out a search party.”

  “Where?”

  “Darlene’s, to begin with. The local bars.”

  “That’s not funny, Hannah. Besides, do you know where Darlene lives?”

  “Somewhere in Chestertown.”

  “What’s her last name?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “Great. So we just drive over to Chestertown and ask around for somebody, anybody named Darlene?”

  I hadn’t been to Chestertown for several years, but I remembered it as a small, friendly place, home to Washington College and featuring a waterfront lined with stately colonial and Georgian-style homes. Chestertown had all the charm but none of the size of Annapolis; folks were likely to know one another there. Recalling Darlene’s startling hair and revealing wardrobe, I imagined that if we approached enough people and described her, eventually someone would be able to tell us who she was.