Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [99]
“With or without exposing your hand?” Ruth asks, eyes narrowing, as if I’m asking her a trick question.
“Without.”
“That’s easy. If a player declares mah-jongg in error and does not expose her hand, and providing all other hands are intact, then play continues without penalty,” Ruth says.
“Okay, smarty-pants, what if the player exposes all or part of the hand?”
“Well, it depends, of course. Are we talking about the player who declared mahj in error or one of the others?”
I scramble to decipher the small print on the back of the card.
“Never mind, I know it. If the person who exposed her hand is the person who mahjed in error, then her hand is declared dead and play continues, assuming all other hands are intact. If they’re not, then the game cannot continue and the one who mahjed in error pays everyone double.”
“Since when is mahjed a verb?”
“Since now. Okay, now ask me one more time about the pair exception.”
“Can’t we be done now? I’m mahjed out,” I groan. But Ruth doesn’t even wait for me to ask.
“You can never call a tile that’s part of a pair, unless it is for mah-jongg.”
“Jesus, what a ridiculous game!” I say.
“No, it’s not. It’s actually fun.”
“It’s unnecessarily complicated. We’ve been studying for two hours, and I don’t even know what a ‘pung’ is and it’s all over this card!”
Ruth rolls her eyes. “A pung is a three and a kong is a four, silly.”
“Never ask me to play this game, okay?”
“Okay, I promise,” Ruth says. “More wine?”
“No, thanks.”
We’ve ordered a pizza and are just finishing off the last of the wine while the kids nap. I’m not used to drinking wine in the afternoon, and it’s given me a headache. I would have refused, but by the time Chloe and I arrived at Ruth’s she had worked herself into such a frenzy over tomorrow’s game that she needed it to calm her down. Ruth pours the last sip into her glass and tucks her feet up on the couch.
“Thanks,” she says. “I feel better.”
“Good,” I tell her, massaging my temples. Ruth gets up and leans across the kitchen bar to reach into the cabinet. “Here,” she says, handing me a bottle of Advil. “You look like you have a headache.”
“Thanks,” I tell her, taking two.
“Hey, I didn’t even ask you, how was Gymboree today?”
“Fine, it was fine. They had a water table, just a baby pool with some toys, but the kids loved it.”
Please don’t ask me if Neil was there. I can still remember the pressure of his fingers on mine and a complicated mass of feelings wells up in me, aided and abetted by the headache, the afternoon wine, the pepperoni pizza, and a hefty measure of guilt over the idea that somehow I’d given Neil the wrong impression.
I look away, afraid to meet Ruth’s eye.
“Water table, huh? Sounds like fun,” Ruth says, yawning.
“It was,” I tell her, recalling Neil’s teasing about the Toddler’s Manifesto. I look around the room, anywhere but at Ruth, at the empty pizza box on the coffee table, and then at our children sleeping at our feet, wrapped in their little blankets. Their lives are not very complicated. And the rules are clear. I envy them their simple lives.
chapter 21
I dip Chloe’s hand into a tin pie plate filled with turquoise paint. She squirms, as if she isn’t entirely enjoying the sensation of the squishy paint in between her fingers, and gives me a searching look. I put her hand to the paper and press gently. Once Chloe sees the print her hand has made, she stares transfixed, barely noticing as I dip her hand into the pie plate for another application of paint.
On Sunday, she will be a year old. The party will be very small, so I really don’t need to send out invitations, but I’d gotten the idea from Parents magazine and thought it looked cute. We make them for Ruth, Carlos, Fiona, Dad, Richard, and Ben. I also make a couple extra, thinking they might be nice to have for Chloe’s scrapbook.
I hold Chloe’s hands under the warm water, gently rubbing the creases of her tiny palms to remove the excess paint. She’s perched on the side of the sink watching me intently as I rinse her hands,