Which wasn’t something he allowed just everyone. (Barry, for example, had recently been told that they weren’t on close enough terms yet.) Rebecca sent Poppy a grateful smile.
She said, “Once you get to know the Davitches, Will, you’ll realize we don’t have a prayer of expecting them when they’re due; so I suggest we make ourselves comfortable while we’re waiting. Can I offer you a drink?”
“No, thanks,” Will told her, but Poppy said he’d like a Scotch, and everyone else wanted white wine.
In the parlor, Rebecca lit the candles while Troy saw to the drinks. Biddy was asking Will where he came from, what he did for a living, how long he’d known Rebecca — the usual small-talk questions, which Will answered dutifully. “Church Valley, Virginia,” he said, “but now I live in Macadam. I’m head of the physics department at Macadam College. I can’t say for certain when I met Rebecca. Fifty years ago? More?”
“Fifty years!” Biddy exclaimed.
“I’ll never adjust to the sound of that,” Rebecca said. She accepted a glass of wine from Troy and sat down on the couch, close to Will but not touching. “Telling people I did such-and-such half a century back, or haven’t seen so-and-so in forty-five years… I think, What am I saying? Can I really have been alive that long?”
“And so now you and Beck are getting acquainted all over again,” Biddy told Will. She spoke in an indulgent tone, as if she found their story… cute, Rebecca thought. “It must be complicated, living in two different towns, though.”
“Yes, my odometer’s taken something of a leap,” Will said. He turned to Rebecca and confided, “Little cough in my engine lately.”
“Cough?”
“Kind of coughing noise when I accelerate.”
Troy gave an abrupt laugh. “I would expect a physics professor to use a more technical term,” he explained when everyone looked at him.
“No, Troy, I’m not in the least conversant with automobile engines,” Will told him. “I have to put myself in the hands of strangers — mechanics who charge me a fortune and then, half the time, don’t fix the problem.”
“Oh, you should go to Aldo,” Rebecca said.
“Aldo?”
“The man who coaxes my Chevy along. He’s very gifted. And such a nice person! Biddy, you know Aldo.”
“Oh, Aldo’s great,” Biddy said. “He solved my squeak when nobody else could.”
“Aldo is forever bragging about his wife,” Rebecca told Will. “How pretty she is and how talented and how she makes everything from scratch. Even the slipcovers. Even the rugs. Tanya, her name is. Tanya this, Tanya that, all the livelong day. Tanya and he are learning ballroom dancing. Tanya and he are planning a trip to Hawaii. Tanya and he got professionally made up and had their photograph taken as Bonnie and Clyde. The Man Who Loves His Wife, I call him. ‘Doesn’t that sound like the world’s most incredible marriage?’ I’m always asking people.”
Will said, “This is your… mechanic?”
“Yes, and then last month he told me Tanya was at the doctor’s. I said, ‘I hope it’s nothing serious.’ He said no, she just needed to increase her medication. It turns out she’s subject to these demented delusions and always has been. She thinks he’s plotting to leave her; she swears that he’s unfaithful; she once showed up on a woman’s porch waving a souvenir Japanese sword. Two of their sons won’t come home anymore. The oldest son asked him once, ‘How can you put up with her?’ and Aldo told him, ‘Because it’s somebody else. It’s not the real, true Tanya.’”
“This is the man who repairs your car,” Will said.
“Right,” she said. “I just think he’s so… admirable. He still believes his wife is amazing after all that’s happened. He still boasts about her hooked rugs and gets made up like Bonnie and Clyde.”
Will started to say something, but just then the front door slammed open. “Oh! Finally!” Rebecca said, and she went out to the foyer.
Min Foo stood there with Hakim, who was lugging one of those infant car seats that made parents appear to be returning from a successful trip to the farmers’ market. Abdul slept soundly inside, curled over like a little cashew with a knit cap partially covering his eyes. “I know! I know! You said adults only,” Min Foo told Rebecca. “But what do you expect? I’m nursing! What do you expect me to do? Watch it, Hakim. Don’t bang him into the wall.”
She was wearing an elegant black silk pants set and every holy medal she owned, but a distinct circle of dampness darkened the tip of each breast. Inwardly, Rebecca sighed. All she said, though, was, “Hello, dear.”
“Don’t set him there!” Min Foo squawked, spinning toward Hakim. “The next person walking in is bound to step on him! Really, the man is hopeless,” she told Rebecca. “This morning at seven — seven o’clock on a Saturday! — he asks me to brew him coffee.”
“I only asked if coffee had been made, Min Foo,” Hakim said mildly. He was stooping over the infant seat, trying to raise Abdul’s cap off his eyes.
“You could have checked for yourself and seen that it wasn’t made! ‘It’s not that I’m demanding,’ he said, but what could he demand, pray tell, considering I’ve always brought him every little thing?”
“Now, now,” Rebecca said, “I’m sure he didn’t mean—”
“Naturally you would stick up for him,” Min Foo told her. “You believe men are… What is that you’re wearing?”
Rebecca looked down at her outfit. (Maybe it was not so unnoticeable after all.) Before Min Foo could deliver an opinion, though, the door swung open again. “It’s us!” Patch cried.
It was not only Patch and Jeep but NoNo and Barry as well — Barry holding one of NoNo’s famous fall-foliage arrangements — with Zeb bringing up the rear. “Did you all ride together?” Rebecca asked, and Jeep said, “Nope, just got here together by happenstance.”
Rebecca had been hoping to spread the introductions out more, so that Will wouldn’t feel too confused. “Well, anyhow,” she said, “come on in and meet—”
“What is that you’re wearing?” Patch asked.
“It’s my brand-new suit that I bought on Thursday, and I like it; so don’t say a word.”
Patch blinked.
Rebecca reminded herself that it was crucial to stay calm.
When she led them into the parlor, Will and Troy both stood up. Will’s arms were dangling docilely at his sides, which for some reason gave her a pang. “Everybody!” she said. “I’d like you to meet Will Allenby, the…”
It seemed redundant to refer to him once more as the man in her life. (And maybe Will would find it presumptuous, besides.) “… the person I invited you here to meet,” she finished lamely. “Will, you remember NoNo, and this is her husband, Barry; and Patch and her husband, Jeep…”
“How do you do, how do you do,” Will said, shaking hands. It was one of those situations where so many people might have spoken that everyone expected someone else to, and Will’s voice was the only sound in the room. So when Poppy cried, “A toast!” Rebecca gladly took it up. “Yes, a toast!” she said. “I think we’ll need a new bottle opened, Troy.”
She helped him pass out the wine — a glass for Will, even, which he held awkwardly by the rim, his hand poised crablike above it. Min Foo insisted on club soda, another of those modern notions. (Rebecca, in her own breast-feeding days, had been ordered outright to drink lots of beer.)
“A toast to my birthday!” Poppy said when everyone was served.
Biddy said, “No, Poppy, wait.”
“Oh, don’t we all have drinks yet? I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your birthday, Poppy.”