French Braid(50)

Mercy said, “Pardon?”

Then they all found their tongues. “Happy anniversary, Mom!” they cried, and “Happy anniversary, Grandmom!” and they stood up and came thronging around her, but Robin was the first to reach her. He took her laundry from her and set it on the floor, and then he said, “It’s been fifty years, hon.”

Even then, she looked puzzled. “What has?” she asked.

“It’s our golden anniversary.”

“It is?”

“July fifth, 1940, coming up this Thursday. I just thought a Sunday would be a better day for a party.”

“Well, my goodness,” she said, and by now her face had cleared, and she started hugging the others and kissing them and telling Nicholas how he’d grown. “Well, goodness, I just—” she kept saying, and “Well, I just don’t—”

“Are you surprised?” they asked her. “Did you guess? Did you wonder if we’d remember?”

“Why would I wonder that, if I didn’t remember myself?” she asked.

“Good point,” Morris said, and Alice said, “Oh, Mom, how could you not remember? Fifty years, can you believe it?”

“No, actually,” Mercy said.

Then she gave David another hug, although she’d already hugged him once, and she said, “Look at you, Emily! You’re a young woman now.”

“Dad planned this every bit,” Alice said. “The date, the invitations, the menu—”

“Oh, I wish I’d known,” Mercy said. “I could have been looking forward to it all this time!”

This caused the tiniest little hitch in the conversation. Everyone paused to glance at Robin. “Oh,” he said.

But then here came Kevin from the kitchen, holding up two champagne bottles. “Toasts all around!” he said, and he sent Eddie and Emily to the dining room for glasses. Then he made a big production over the popping of the first cork, and looked resigned the way he always did once the glasses arrived, because they were the dish-shaped kind handed down from Mercy’s grandmother. Kevin had mentioned several times that flutes were what people used nowadays.

The toasts were brief, thank goodness—just “Happy anniversary” several times over and “Here’s to another fifty years!” (from Morris). Robin wasn’t sure whether he should drink when he was one of the toastees, so to speak, but he saw Mercy first wait a beat and then smile and nod and take a sip, and so he did the same. Stuff was so fizzy it tickled his nose. He said, “Oops, better check the oven,” and took his glass off to the kitchen.

Alice, of course, followed close behind with her own glass. “What can I do for you?” she asked him.

“Oh, pour the water, maybe?”

“Sure thing.”

He emptied the plastic container of potato salad into a bowl and took it to the dining room, and then he returned to the kitchen and grabbed some pot holders so he could remove the two loaf pans from the oven. “What’s that you’ve got?” Alice asked, re-entering with her pitcher.

“Salmon loaf,” he told her.

“Salmon loaf,” she repeated.

She came up next to him and peered down at the loaves. The tops had browned nicely, he saw, and puffed above the rims of the pans in a very attractive way. But something in Alice’s tone worried him, and he raised his eyes to check her expression. “Is that okay?” he asked her.

“Oh! It’s fine,” she said.

And then she kissed him on the cheek, so he must have been wrong to wonder.



* * *



—

Somehow, it still didn’t seem that Mercy had grasped the surprise-party concept. As she was taking her seat at the far end of the table, she asked David, “Where were you all on your way to, honey?”

“Excuse me?” he said.

“When you stopped by to visit, I mean. Your dad said you were on a road trip somewhere and just happened to stop by.”

“No, I—” Robin broke in, because David was looking baffled. “No, that was just something I made up, hon, to get you here for lunch.”

“They aren’t on a road trip?”

“This lunch was a surprise, you see, and they drove down for it especially, but I didn’t want you to know that.”

“But I would like to know it,” she said.

Which made Robin feel sort of frustrated, because how hard could this be, for heaven’s sake? Which part did she not understand?

“To know ahead, he means,” Alice explained. “If he’d told you ahead they were coming for lunch, you might guess he was throwing a party.”

“Well, I’d have to know sooner or later,” Mercy said. “I know now, after all. Right?” She searched the others’ faces. They were all looking confused too. “Am I right?” she asked them.

“He was afraid you might say no,” Greta told her, a bit too loudly.

Mercy focused on her.

“He was afraid you might not want to celebrate your marriage.”

“Oh,” Mercy said finally.

And that seemed to satisfy her, although Robin felt slightly unsettled by the whole exchange.

Later, though, she returned to the subject. People had branched out by then into several different conversations—Alice and Lily discussing Robby the Boy’s latest letter, and the little girls competing to entertain Emily (whom they found even more alluring than Eddie, evidently), and Morris telling Kevin and David one of his long-winded real-estate stories, overexplaining as always and detouring pointlessly and doubling back to insert some detail he should have mentioned to begin with. Then out of nowhere, Mercy said, “When I walked in and saw you all sitting around the living room, I thought somebody had died.”