The Nest(87)
The day they accepted an offer on the house, he hustled everyone out for Chinese food.
“To celebrate,” Melody said, bitterly.
“No,” Walt said, “to eat.”
Sitting in a roomy corner booth, Melody was trying to be calm, civil. She was on her second beer and the alcohol was going to her head. The food arrived and it looked wrong. All wrong. The relentless glistening brown of the platter of chicken and cashews offended her. The pink-tinged pork (why was it fluorescent pink?) scattered in the greasy fried rice nauseated her. The steamed dumplings that looked like wrinkled water-soaked fingers made her want to scream. Walt’s idle chatter about their new bedrooms and shorter commute infuriated her. (He didn’t seem to realize that the apartment being closer to the school was not something to brag about.)
“Aren’t you hungry?” Walt asked, pointing to an untouched egg roll on her plate. She looked down at the egg roll. It looked fine, plump and crispy. She remembered how much she’d loved egg rolls as a little girl until the night she’d grabbed one and dunked it in the neon-orange duck sauce and took an enormous bite and just as she started to chew Leo had leaned over and said, Do you know what they put in those to make them so good? Dead dog.
It took years for her to believe that he’d been kidding and try an egg roll again. Leo always ruined everything.
“I’m not hungry,” Melody said, pushing her plate away. “You can have this.”
“Do you want to order something else? Is something wrong?” Walt asked.
“Is something wrong?” Melody said. She was holding a fortune cookie in her fist and gripped it so hard it shattered and pieces flew across the table. “Yes. Something’s wrong. A million things are wrong. In case you haven’t noticed, Walter, our entire world has recently turned to shit.”
Something hard flashed across his face, an almost subliminal message like the words you were supposed to see spelled out in the ice cubes of liquor ads, something that in this case might say, You’ve gone too far.
“Excuse us,” Walt said to Nora and Louisa. Melody sat and watched Walt stand. “Can I speak with you, please?” he said. Melody looked at Nora and Louisa, sitting wide-eyed, and finally Walt took Melody by her upper arm and half guided, half pulled her to the back of the restaurant, near the restrooms.
“Enough,” Walt said.
“What are you doing? Why are you manhandling me!”
“I’m tired of you insisting on being miserable. Nothing here is ‘going to shit’ to use your charming phrase, including our children who might take your outlook a tiny bit personally. Enough. Get back to the table and apologize to Nora and be the person you’ve always been for them.”
“I wasn’t talking about Nora,” Melody said. Walt walked away in disgust. She was stunned. He’d never spoken to her in that tone or touched her in any way that wasn’t purely affectionate. She stepped into the restroom to compose herself. How dare he! She hadn’t been talking about Nora! (Okay, maybe she had been talking about Nora. A little. God forgive her.) She bent over and washed her face and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked horrible because she was horrible. How had she been so wrong about everything and everyone? Not realizing Nora was gay and not knowing how to talk to her about it and, by extension, about anything; not noticing the girls’ deception; not understanding Leo was a liar and a thief. Not being the type of mother who would sacrifice a house for her daughters’ college tuition—not willingly, anyway, not lovingly.
She didn’t know who she was anymore. She didn’t know how to be the person she’d always been. Besides, that person had been a bit of a chump, hadn’t she? She walked back to the table where everyone was silently chewing, watching her approach with, she ruefully noted, dread. She sat and picked up her egg roll. She tried to say, I’m sorry, but she couldn’t speak. She took a bite and thought, dead dog, and spit out the food in her napkin.
Without a word, she grabbed her purse and went and sat alone in the car. Through the large restaurant window, she could see Walt and Nora and Louisa. They were eating, but not talking. All of them silently passing platters and chewing while looking down at their plates. She tried to imagine she’d gone somewhere, just disappeared without a trace, and this was their life now. A husband without a wife, daughters without a mother. The tableau was so unbalanced and incomplete and sad.
Walt said something and the girls shook their heads. They each took a little more food from the big platter in the center. They kept looking over at the other side of the room, away from the window, all of them. She wondered if someone they knew was sitting over there or if they needed the waitress for drink refills or take-out cartons. The staff at this place had a habit of disappearing when you needed something. Nora probably wanted more fortune cookies. Walt leaned across the table and took one hand of each daughter. He said something to them. She squinted and leaned forward, as if she might be able to read his lips. She wondered what he was saying. The girls were looking at him and nodding. Then smiling. Then they all turned and looked across the room again and she realized what they were doing; they were looking toward the door. They were looking for her.
CHAPTER THIRTY–NINE
It was a Tuesday, which meant Jack opened the shop a little early after having been closed on Sundays and Mondays. Tuesdays were the days that most of the decorators made their rounds because the stores weren’t full of weekend amateurs or tourists, but the morning had been slow. So what else was new? Jack was sitting at a small desk in the back of the shop. He’d been making a few calls, writing e-mails. The front door opened and the little bell rang announcing someone’s arrival. Jack stood and couldn’t quite make out the person in the door; the sun was shining through the transom and hitting him square in the eyes.