The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [78]
“We should talk,” he says. “Not now I’m afraid—I’m due at a meeting—but we should make time to speak privately.”
She knows her heart should sink at those words. No mother—no good mother—wants to hear those words: We should talk. And, somewhere inside her, there is a horrible, pricking worry, something plummeting with the sound of a long, sad cartoon slide whistle. I knew it. Things aren’t getting better. But that pathetic naysayer can barely be heard over the Love, American Style fireworks shooting into the air. They have to talk! Privately!
“The thing is, you are so in demand when you’re here,” she says. “People always seem to be tugging at you. And my husband and I still have only the one car, and he uses it most days. Perhaps you could come to the house. For tea?” Yes, for tea, on an afternoon when Sean has band practice and Tim Junior. is at the library and Go-Go is outside, doing whatever Go-Go does. Doris has never served an actual tea, but how hard can it be? That is, she has drunk tea, but never set the table for tea. She has a proper teapot somewhere and a cozy and a trivet. She can bake cookies if she puts her mind to it, or at least buy fancier ones, Pepperidge Farm, although she bets Father Andrew likes something with more heft—banana nut bread, pound cake?
Father Andrew considers her proposal, probably sifting through his schedule in his head, nothing more, yet Doris can’t help wishing more complicated calculations are going through his head. “That would be nice,” he says at last. “Today?”
“Tomorrow,” she parries, nervous that she will be punished for not accepting immediately what he offered, that it’s wrong to ask Father Andrew to work around her schedule. But she can’t ready the house by this afternoon.
“Tomorrow,” he agrees.
The next morning, she can’t wait for Tim Senior to leave for work. But once the house is empty, she is overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. When did the house get this dirty? How? Why can’t Tim Senior ever put his own coffee cup in the dishwasher?
She decides to start on the first floor and work up, as if it were a mountain to climb, pushing the mess in front of her, like a child rolling the base of a snowman. If she doesn’t finish the second floor, it’s not dire. She scrubs out pots that have been soaking for days, separates the boys’ laundry and folds it, putting it on their respective bureaus instead of leaving it in a heap on the hallway bench. She vacuums, she mops, she cleans the venetian blinds, wondering as she does so why they are called venetian. That could be a nice conversational gambit with Father Andrew. He seems to know such things.
She gets out a cookbook and realizes she has the ingredients to make a pound cake, although it will wipe out the butter and there will be hell to pay when Tim Senior has breakfast tomorrow. She can run up to the corner grocery later. Oh, she should have read ahead: the eggs have to be separated and beaten with a hand mixer. Where is her hand mixer? She finds it in Go-Go’s room, under his bed. She is forever finding things under Go-Go’s bed. She has to wash it, of course, grimed with dust as it is, and she screws up separating the first egg, which means she has none to spare, but she is perfect on the others. The house, neat for the first time in months, soon fills with the smells of vanilla and butter and sugar.
Can Doris work the same transformative magic on Doris? She goes into the master bathroom. Fluorescent light is unkind to everyone, but this is downright cruel. When did her face become gray and sunken, her hair thin and pink? She was one of the prettiest girls in her parish, second only to Sally McCafferty. Doris was like a rose, everybody said so, although her Aunt Ginny always added: “A plucked rose fades fast.” People laughed when Aunt Ginny said that, and Doris, innocent as she was, assumed it had something to do with virginity. Or perhaps it was pregnancy? Or merely marriage? At any rate, she is good and truly plucked,