All We Ever Wanted(74)

Dad opened a bottle of merlot sitting amid piles of unopened mail and other clutter. The wine was a new thing—they didn’t really drink when I was growing up—but the clutter was a fixture. I honestly didn’t know how they ever found anything.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” Dad said.

“No, thanks,” I said, pacing mindlessly over to the edge of the kitchen, looking into the family room, comforted by the sight of so many familiar knickknacks, along with stacks of magazines and newspapers and paperback books. Though their tastes differed, my parents were both big readers—and the presence of books in every room (to actually read, rather than simply display) was one of the things I really missed about my childhood home.

“So what’s going on with you?” I asked as cheerfully as I could, prompting Mom to launch into a detailed, long-winded update of all their neighbors and friends. The Joneses just got back from a European riverboat cruise—six countries in ten days!…Mary Ellen had a hip replacement the same week John had a kidney stone—imagine that bad luck….The middle Clay girl got engaged to her longtime boyfriend….The Floyds had to put Sassafras down….Oh, and guess who I ran into at the grocery store this afternoon and might join us for dinner?

   I mentally flagged her final run-on question as I glanced into the dining room and saw that the table was set for four.

“Oh, God, Mom. Who did you invite to dinner?” I said, my mind ticking through all the possibilities of people I did not want to see.

“Oh. He’s not coming for sure,” she said. “But—”

“Who, Mom?”

“Teddy,” she said with a little shrug.

“As in—my ex-boyfriend?” I said, knowing there was no other Teddy in our world.

“Yes!” she said. “That Teddy.”

I stared at her, doing my best not to show my annoyance and offset all the goodwill I’d created by coming home. “And why, exactly, did you invite Teddy over?”

“I told you. I ran into him at Food City.”

“And?” I said. “That just naturally segued into a dinner invitation?”

“More or less,” she said, not seeming the slightest bit sheepish—which was the most ridiculous part. At the very least she could have pretended to be apologetic.

“Can you explain that for me?” I said, exchanging a glance with my dad.

“Sure. So I saw him in the frozen vegetable aisle,” Mom said. “And I mentioned you were coming home….Then he said he hadn’t seen you in years. I said he should stop by and say hello if he was free….He said he was—and that he might just do that.”

“That doesn’t look like a might,” I said, gesturing toward the set table. “That looks like a definite.”

“Well, I hope so,” Mom said. “For his sake. He’s lonely, Nina.”

   “He told you that?” I asked, feeling very certain that he had not. Except for a pathetic type, which Teddy had never been, it wasn’t the kind of thing a grown man would offer up to an ex-girlfriend’s mother in the aisle of a grocery store.

“Well, not specifically. But I could just tell he is,” she said, then went into further detail about how she had heard, through the grapevine, that Kara, his ex-wife, had remarried and moved to Charlotte with her new husband. “Apparently he got some big job. Teddy’s brokenhearted. He misses the boys so much.”

I had actually heard some of this through Julie, who had represented Teddy in a very straightforward divorce agreement, which included an amicable, flexible custody agreement and a clean division of minimal assets (or, as the case might be, debt). Their split had surprised me, if only because I’d heard that Kara was as Christian as Teddy, although I obviously knew religious couples divorced, too. I hadn’t pressed Julie for further details, knowing how closely she guarded the confidentiality of her clients. At least that was the excuse I made to myself, so I didn’t have to think about other reasons that the subject of Teddy made me uncomfortable.

“How often does he get to see his boys?” I said, feeling grateful that Finch was the age he was. Then again, maybe things would have been different for him if I had made the decision to leave Kirk sooner.

“Not often. It’s a really long drive. It’s just so sad.”

I murmured something noncommittal as my mother continued with further unsourced rumors about Teddy’s ex-wife’s current husband. She finished with a long sigh and “Anyway. There’s nothing quite as sad as a single man’s grocery cart.”

I exchanged another look with my dad, this one of the smirking variety as Dad asked, “Nothing, Judy? Really? Not war?…Cancer?…Death?”

   “You know what I mean,” Mom said. “All those sad TV dinners and that lonely six-pack of Corona…I just had to invite him.”

I cut her some slack as I really did appreciate my mom’s compassion for the down-and-out—whether for a chained-up hound on an ASPCA commercial or a bachelor in a grocery store. She was proactive about her compassion, too. A giver, albeit a meddling giver. I knew this was just another example of those qualities—and that she wasn’t trying to put me in an awkward situation. I told myself it really wasn’t that awkward anyway. It wasn’t as if we’d just broken up or either of us held a candle for the other. At least I didn’t. And I assumed Teddy didn’t, either; otherwise he probably would have declined her invitation. “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I said. “It never takes a man long to remarry.”