Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(42)

A few days ago, Kate had hired a woman named Mrs. Carroll to come in every afternoon and do a little light housekeeping and serve as a companion to Bunny till Dr. Battista got home from work. Mrs. Carroll was the aunt of Aunt Thelma’s maid, Tayeema. Aunt Thelma had first suggested Tayeema’s younger sister, but Kate wanted someone seasoned who wouldn’t be susceptible to whatever Bunny tried to put over on her. “She is a whole lot cagier than some might realize,” Kate had told Mrs. Carroll, and Mrs. Carroll had said, “I hear you; yes, indeed.”

After breakfast, Kate went back upstairs and packed her last few odds and ends into her canvas tote. Then she changed her sheets for Bunny. She supposed this room would look very different the next time she laid eyes on it. There would be photos and picture postcards bristling around the mirror, and cosmetics crowding the bureau top, and clothes strewn across the floor. The thought didn’t disturb her. She had used this room up, she felt. She had used this life up. And after Pyotr got his green card she was not going to move back home, whatever her father might fantasize. She would find a place of her own, even if all she could afford was a little rented room somewhere. Maybe she would have her degree by then; maybe she’d have a new job.

She dumped her sheets in her hamper. They were Mrs. Carroll’s to deal with now. She picked up her tote and went back downstairs.

Her father was waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch drumming his fingers on his knees. He wore his black suit; once urged, he had gone all out. “Ah, there you are!” he said when she walked in, and then he rose to his feet and said, in a different voice, “My dear.”

“What?” she asked, because it seemed he was about to make some sort of announcement.

But he said, “Ah…” And then he cleared his throat and said, “You’re looking very grown up.”

She was puzzled; he had last seen her just minutes ago, looking exactly as she looked now. “I am grown up,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s somewhat of a surprise, you see, because I remember when you were born. Neither your mother nor I had ever held a baby before and your aunt had to show us how.”

“Oh,” Kate said.

“And now here you are in your blue dress.”

“Well, shoot, you’ve seen this old thing a million times,” Kate said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

But she was pleased, in spite of herself. She knew what he was trying to say.

It crossed her mind that if her mother had known too—if she had been able to read the signals—the lives of all four of them might have been much happier.

For the first time, it occurred to her that she herself was getting much better at reading signals.

—

Her father drove, because being a passenger made him nervous. Their car was an elderly Volvo with countless scuff marks on the bumpers from other times he had driven, and the backseat was heaped with the mingled paraphernalia of their three lives—a rubber lab apron, a stack of journals, a construction-paper poster featuring the letter C, and Bunny’s winter coat. Kate had to sit back there because Bunny had snagged the front seat lickety-split. When the car jerked to an especially sudden stop at a traffic light on York Road, half of the journals slid onto Kate’s feet. The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.

Rhodos 3 for $25, she read as they passed the garden center where she sometimes shopped, and all at once she wished she were shopping there today, having a normal Saturday morning full of humdrum errands. It had turned out sunny, in the end, and you could tell by the slow, dreamy way people were drifting down the sidewalks that the temperature was perfect.

She was feeling as if she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs.

Uncle Theron’s church was called the Cockeysville Consolidated Chapel. It was a gray stone building with a miniature steeple on the roof—a sort of shorthand steeple—and it lay just behind the section of York Road that featured clusters of antique stores and consignment shops. Uncle Theron’s black Chevy was the only car in the lot. Dr. Battista pulled up next to it and switched the ignition off and collapsed for a moment with his forehead on the steering wheel, the way he always did when he had managed to get them someplace.

“No sign of Pyoder yet,” he said when he finally looked up.

Pyotr was in charge of the morning rounds today at the lab. “See?” Dr. Battista had said earlier. “From now on I’ll have a trusted son-in-law whom I can depend on to spell me.” However, he had already brought up several details that he worried Pyotr might chance to overlook. Twice before they left the house he had said to Kate, “Should I just telephone him and find out how things are going?” but then he had answered his own question. “No, never mind. I don’t want to interrupt him.” This may have been due not only to his phone allergy but also to the recent shift in his and Pyotr’s relationship. He still hadn’t quite gotten over his sulk.

They went to the rear of the building, as Uncle Theron had instructed them, and knocked at a plain wooden door that could have led to somebody’s kitchen. Its windowpanes were curtained in blue-and-white gingham. After a moment the gingham was drawn aside and Uncle Theron’s round face peered out. Then he smiled and opened the door for them. He was wearing a suit and tie, Kate was touched to see—treating this like a real occasion. “Happy wedding day,” he told her.