She wouldn’t answer. She made a big show of measuring out the coffee.
“I just did repay you,” I said.
She kept her lips clamped shut.
“Eighty-seven hundred dollars,” I reminded her. “Every cent. In cold cash.”
She wheeled on me. She said, “Do you honestly believe money will make up for what I went through? Visiting all our high-class neighbors, throwing myself on their mercy, pleading with them not to press charges?”
“I never asked you to do that,” I said.
“ ‘Well, Mrs. Gaitlin, we’ll need to think this over,’ ” she said, putting on a pinched and simpering tone of voice. “ ‘We’ll need to give it some thought,’ they told me. That insufferable Jim McLeod: ‘I doubt if you fully comprehend, Mrs. Gaitlin, what a rare and valuable object that ivory happened to be.’ They loved to see me beg! Upstart Margot Gaitlin. It goes to show, they were thinking: you can take the girl out of Canton, but you can’t take Canton out of the … ‘Just look at her son, if you need proof,’ they said. Oh, always you were my son. I suppose I felt that way myself. Jeff was more related to Dad, but you were related to me. You I had to personally apologize for. You think you can repay me for that? You can never repay me. Not with eight thousand, not with eight hundred thousand! Take your money back.”
“Don’t you wish,” I told her, and I ripped the check in two. Then I made confetti of it, ripping it again and again and letting the little pieces flutter to the floor. My mother just stared — her mouth open, a spoonful of ground coffee suspended between us.
I had imagined that we’d been shouting, but when I stormed into the dining room I realized none of the others had heard us. They were still lounging around the table, and all Jeff said when he saw me was, “Where’s the wine, bro?”
“Oops,” I said, and I made a U-turn into the kitchen and retrieved the bottle. It was no affair of mine how much he drank.
The Pilgrim candles were headless now, their shoulders curly-edged bowls of wax. They looked like torture victims. Wicky rose and blew them out, saying, “Let’s adjourn to the living room, shall we?” By the time Mom brought in the coffee tray, I was on the couch, playing a game of cribbage with Opal. I waved the tray off without looking up, and no one thought anything of it.
Opal had learned cribbage just the day before, her first evening at my parents’, but already she was good at it. I felt kind of proud of her. “Fifteen-two, a run of three for five, and his nobs for six,” she said smartly. I never remembered to call the jack “his nobs.” I said, “Way to go, Ope,” and she sat back and grinned at me. With her legs tucked under her, you could see that the knees of her black tights were about to develop holes. I found that encouraging, somehow.
I had this sudden, startling thought: Would Opal get a visit from her angel, somewhere on down the line?
She was a Gaitlin, after all. Strange to realize that. She did have my last name and at least a few of my genes, even if they weren’t obvious.
Wicky was rocking J.P. to sleep, humming something tuneless. Jeff was poking the fire. (Another patriarchal activity, I guessed.) Sophia sat next to Gram on the love seat, and Dad occupied the one remaining chair. So when Pop-Pop returned from a trip to the John, he had to nudge me down the couch a ways. “Ah, me,” he said, sinking heavily into the cushions. “How’s the car, Barnaby?”
“Um …”
As luck would have it, my mother approached him just then with the tray. “Coffee, Daddy? It’s decaf.”
“Now, what the hell do I want decaf for? What’s the point of coffee if it don’t have any kick to it?”
“Think how much better you’ll sleep, though, Daddy.”
“Ha,” he said, but he helped himself to a cup and stirred in several spoonsful of sugar, while she waited.
“Jeffrey?” my mother said next, heading toward Dad.
“Yes, thanks. I will have some.”
She bent to rest her tray on the lamp table beside him. “Barnaby won’t let me give him back his money,” she told him.
“Eh?” my father said.
“His eighty-seven hundred. He won’t take it.”
I felt Sophia glance over at me, but the others paid no attention. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a double run for twelve,” Opal announced, while Jeff set aside his poker and took another swig of wine.
“I tried to give it back to him,” my mother said, “but he tore up the check.”
“We’ll discuss this some other time, shall we?” my father said pleasantly.
“I want to get this settled, though.”
“Another time, I told you.”
“What other time? We hardly ever lay eyes on him!”
“Margot,” my father said. “Do you suppose we could make it through one holiday without your tiresome fishwife act?”
Wicky stopped humming. There was a pause, and then my mother lifted her tray and proceeded back to the kitchen at a dignified pace. A second later, we heard the tray slamming onto a counter. A faucet started running. Dishes started clattering. Wicky looked over at Jeff, but he minutely shook his head, and so she stayed seated.
Gram cleared her throat. “Sophia, dear!” she said. “Tell us! What dots your family do for Thanksgiving?”
Well, at least they didn’t publicly demolish each other, Sophia could have said; but she told Gram, “Oh, nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. Usually, Mother’s two cousins come for dinner, along with one cousin’s husband. And then this year she’s invited my Aunt Grace from Baltimore too.”
“She’s invited your Aunt Grace?” I asked.
But I don’t think Sophia heard, because Gram was saying, “Isn’t that lovely! And will they be serving a turkey?”
“Oh, yes. In fact, it’s kind of like you-all’s arrangement — a potluck — although Mother does assign specific dishes. For instance, Aunt Grace is bringing her chestnut dressing. She fixed it ahead of time, except for the baking, and I helped her onto the train with it, but Lord knows how she’ll manage at the other end of the trip.”
“You helped her onto the train?” I asked.
All this was news to me, I can tell you.
Sophia sent me an absentminded smile. “The cousins are in charge of the vegetables,” she said, “and Cousin Dotty’s husband makes the pies. He’s an excellent cook, although in all other respects he’s considered something of a—”
There was a crash in the kitchen, followed by the tinkling of glass. Sophia stopped short. The rest of us exchanged glances.
Gram said, “Yes, dear? Something of a …?”
“Oh! Something of a … ne’er-do-well, I suppose. But—”
A metal object clanged so loudly that it gave off an echo, like a gong.
“Maybe I should go out there,” Wicky said.
“Stay where you are, why don’t you,” my father told her blandly.
She sat back, drawing J.P.’s deadweight body closer against her.
Sophia looked from one of us to the other.
“Ne’er-do-well!” I said.
Sophia said, “What?”
“I haven’t heard that term in ages!”
“You haven’t heard … ‘ne’er-do-well’?”
“It’s almost Old English, don’t you think?” I asked the room at large. I had to raise my voice to be heard above the racket from the kitchen. “It’s almost something Robin Hood might have said! In fact, a lot of those bad-guy words are like that: so quaint and antiquey. ‘Ruffian.’ ‘Knave.’ ‘Wastrel.’ ‘Scoundrel.’ Ever noticed?”
No one had, apparently.
“ ‘Layabout.’ ‘Rapscallion,’ ” I said. “ ‘Scofflaw.’ ‘Scum of the earth.’ ”
“ ‘Beast of burden,’ ” Opal offered unexpectedly.