A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [20]
“You’ve found the sherry, I see,” Mrs. Fraser added, implying an act of poaching. Innes stood, as good manners demanded. He couldn’t sit unless Mrs. Fraser sat, and she showed no inclination to do so. Indeed, she seemed agitated, even slightly affronted, which couldn’t be, Innes reasoned, simply the sherry.
“May I pour you a glass?” Innes asked, bending slightly toward the bottle, catching Hazel’s bemused eye as he did so. Innes also saw, in the firelight, a circle of tiny diamonds on a finger of the hand holding the blue-and-gold goblet.
“Not just now,” Mrs. Fraser said, suggesting that possibly the hour for drinks had not yet arrived (another small affront?). “Hazel,” she added, looking pointedly from the young woman to the still-standing Innes, “wherever is Louise?”
And it was then, as Innes straightened to his full height (he was not exceptionally tall, though he towered over the diminutive Mrs. Fraser), that he began to understand that in Mrs. Fraser’s eyes, and perhaps implying some fault of his own, he had introduced himself to the wrong sister.
As it should be, Agnes thought, setting down her pen and standing up from the desk. With some satisfaction, she moved to the bed and began to unpack her duffel bag.
Bridget studied the two fifteen-year-old boys in the backseat: both asleep, bodies sprawled, mouths open, the tinny sound of music audible through the headphones that covered their ears. Matt, her son, had smooth skin despite the expected legacy of his father’s acne. His friend’s face was nearly ravaged, a cruel announcement of the arrival of adolescence. Bridget wanted to tell Brian about BenzaClin and tetracycline, but could one do that without insulting him? Probably not. Perhaps Bridget could mention the antibiotics to Brian’s mother? No, that might be just as bad. Bridget would stay out of it, then. And didn’t she have enough to worry about without taking on the burden of Brian’s complexion?
Still though. The miracles of modern medicine.
Bridget lingered on Matt’s sleeping face, something she was seldom able to do now. More often than not, her son was still awake when she went to bed, his circadian rhythms wildly out of sync with her own. Though Bridget saw him sleeping in the mornings when she went upstairs to fetch him for school, it was a chore she dreaded. Matt woke sullen and uncooperative, a deep resistance to being snatched from his dreams evident in his heavy footsteps to the bathroom, his overlong showers, and his maddening inability to pick out a shirt and a pair of pants in a timely fashion. Rarely would he eat breakfast, and trying to engage Matt in conversation in the early morning brought little joy. Instead, mother and son communicated in short interrogatives that Bridget suspected were being repeated throughout North America. You have your backpack? Your cleats? Did you finish your homework? What time is practice over? Answers might come in the form of grunts that could escalate to snappish replies if Bridget asked one question too many. She had learned over the last year and a half to be present if needed, invisible if not, a skill she had nearly mastered.
Afternoons were better. Matt, more sociable when he got home from school, charged through the door, smelling of the gym or the playing fields, ravenous and willing to consume almost any food put in front of him. It was the only time Bridget could get him to eat vegetables—raw with a dip. Matt would talk to her, her questions accepted as valid, though she rationed them and never asked the same thing two days in