A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [64]
“He does?”
“Doctors Without Borders is his particular interest. Julie was telling me.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You and he are going to have to come to some kind of truce before the wedding,” Nora said. “Jerry might be willing to upstage Bridget, but I don’t think you are.”
“No, of course not,” Harrison said, chastened.
“Would you like some cake? We have a lot of it left over from the Jungbacker lunch. It’s delicious. You don’t mind coconut, do you?”
“I love coconut.”
Nora walked into the murk of the pantry and emerged with a partly cut cake on a glass pedestal.
“That was interesting,” Harrison said, “what Agnes was saying about having to switch from teaching English to teaching history when she got the job at Kidd. That it was all stories anyway, so it didn’t matter much. I imagine she’s a great teacher.”
“Her field hockey team won a big conference,” Nora said, lifting two cake plates from a shelf. “You should ask her about it sometime.”
“She was telling me about the Halifax disaster. Do you know about it?”
“No.”
“Apparently, during World War I, there was a fire on a ship in Halifax Harbor. The sight drew everyone in the city to his or her window to look at it. Seconds later, the ship exploded—the biggest man-made explosion in history until the atomic bomb—and everyone standing at the windows was blinded by flying glass. Well, not everyone, but many.”
Nora cut two generous slices and handed one to Harrison.
“Is she gay?” Harrison asked.
“Agnes?” Nora asked, opening the silverware drawer. “No.”
“How do you know?”
“The way she talks about men,” Nora said, handing Harrison a fork.
“Has she ever had a relationship?”
“I think she has,” Nora said. “I think it might have been with a married man. She sometimes refers to it obliquely.”
Harrison bit into the rich cake. The frosting was a kind of whipped cream with flakes of coconut contained within. “This is delicious,” he said.
“I’ve found a wonderful baker in town. She’s seventy-three. She’s been making cakes for her family for years. I heard about her from her daughter-in-law. So I asked her if she’d like to make them for us. She’s been terrific to work with. Each cake has been better than the last.”
“Nice arrangement for both of you,” Harrison said.
“The boys are certainly good eaters.”
“I like Bridget’s son. His friend, too. The boy’s a hustler, though. Beat me at pool after suckering me into a game. Lost ten bucks.”
Nora smiled.
“Are you capable of remembering,” Harrison asked, “who you thought you’d be when you were seventeen? Who you imagined you’d be in twenty-seven years’ time?”
Nora turned her head to the windows. There was a smudge of something white on the sleeve of her black dress, flour maybe. Once inside the kitchen, she had raked her hair, as if letting go for the night, and as a consequence, it looked mussed, as if she’d just woken up. “I suppose . . . I suppose I thought I’d be a teacher,” she said. “I think that was the plan. What about you?”
“I thought I’d be a chemical engineer,” Harrison said. “I went to Northeastern for their work-study program.”
“You were on scholarship at Kidd.”
“Yes,” he said, watching Nora lick her fork clean.
“What happened at Northeastern?”
“The old story. I had a wonderful teacher for freshman English, realized I hated math, and that was that. I went to graduate school at McGill.”
“Why Canada?”
“Cheaper.”
“And that’s how you met your wife?” Nora asked, scraping the last of the frosting from the plate with her fork.
“You really like that cake,” Harrison said.
Nora looked up and smiled. “I do, as a matter of fact.”
“Yes, it’s where I met Evelyn.”
There was a silence in the kitchen. Harrison could hear the big wooden clock ticking the seconds. He wanted to tell Nora that when he was seventeen, he’d thought he and she would end up together. More drunk than he should be, he said it aloud. “Actually, I thought you and I would end up together.”
Nora said nothing.
“You remember that night in