Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [77]
“Come on, Alison. This is childish.”
“Child—issssh!” Noah said, rocking on his heels. “You’re funny, Daddy.”
“Mom, I’m hungry,” Annie said, pushing past her into the playroom.
“Dinner is ready,” Alison said. “Daddy’s going to get it for you.”
“I thought you said it’s a family dinner,” Annie said.
“I thought it was, but I guess I was wrong.”
“Christ,” Charlie said, climbing to his feet. “If I’d known it was so important to you I wouldn’t have said anything.”
“That really would’ve made a difference?”
“Of course.”
“Jesus, Charlie,” she said. “The point is, it’s not important to you. Is it?”
Charlie stood in front of her with his arms crossed. “What are you trying to get me to say, Alison?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
He glanced down at Noah, who was sprawled on the floor now, busily running a blue engine around the train track, up a hill and across a bridge and through a green plastic tunnel, murmuring encouragement along the way: “Up the hill, Gordon! Now down the hill and over the bridge, that’s right!” Charlie glanced at Annie, who was looking apprehensively from one parent to the other. “We’re all a little cranky and hungry, aren’t we, Annie?” he said. “I think we’ll feel better after dinner, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” Annie said warily.
“Don’t go upstairs,” he said to Alison. “Let’s be a family tonight. Okay?”
She wanted nothing more than to believe him—that if she didn’t go upstairs they would be a family, that everything would be back to normal. But the word tonight sounded jarringly provisional to her, as if “family” might be a temporary condition.
Was she losing her mind? Could that be true?
“Come on,” Charlie said gently, taking her arm, and she went with him into the kitchen and took the salad out of the fridge and tossed it and set it in the middle of the table. Charlie carved the chicken, taking care to remove the skin and cut the white meat into chunks for the kids, and Alison lit the floating candles again and dimmed the overhead halogens.
Charlie sat at one end of the table and she sat at the other, father and mother with their children between them, sharing an ordinary dinner on an ordinary day, chatting about whether Annie should start ballet and what Noah was learning in his sing-along music class and whether it was time to plant grass seed on the front lawn. It was real life, the way things should be, and even as it was happening it felt to Alison like a distant memory, the moment already slipping into the past.
Chapter Four
November 1997
“That guy has a crush on you,” Ben told Claire when the party was over. They were lying in bed in the dark, going over the evening together.
“What guy?”
“That American from Kansas. Charlie.”
“Nah,” she said. “He probably has a crush on you.”
“I don’t think so.”
She poked him in the side, teasing him. “Poor guy doesn’t know anyone yet. We should have him to dinner.”
“Sure,” he said. “All your strays.”
“You like it. If it weren’t for me, you’d always have your nose stuck in a book.”
“That’s an original phrase.”
“Shut up and kiss me,” she said, turning toward him and twining her leg around his.
Ben hadn’t particularly liked Charlie at first sight. When he’d opened the door to find him standing awkwardly on their stoop, in his clothes from the Gap, Ben’s first impression was that Charlie looked like every other bland midwesterner he’d met, which admittedly weren’t many. Ben’s only prejudice, he liked to say, was against Middle America. As prejudices went, it was fairly safe: few people at Cambridge were going to disagree.
“You’ve never even been to the Midwest,” Charlie said over pints one night when they’d gotten to know each other better. “I’ll bet you don’t even know where it is on a map.”
“Hmm, let me think. This is a tough one. In the middle of the West, maybe?”
“Is Indiana part of it? Ohio? Arizona?”
“I know one thing,” Ben said. “Kansas is smack dab in the middle.”
“In the middle of what, exactly?”
“Look, you can pretend you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, but we both know I’m right. The American Midwest is a bastion