Ruth turned to look where Daddy was holding forth with Darlene and another woman whom I recognized as Ellie from the nearby Country Store. Ruth’s eyes brightened. “The lady in blue?”
“I wish. No, the lady in pink. Darlene somebody-or-other.”
Ruth sputtered into her wine. “Oh, gawd! Where’d she buy that dress? Togs for Tarts?”
“Well, at least your father’s not sitting at home feeling sorry for himself.” Paul slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Nothing is going to bring your mother back,” Paul continued reasonably with a sympathetic one-armed hug that squished air audibly out of my shoulder pads. “Let the old guy have a little fun.”
It was hard to think of my father as old. A 1950 graduate of the Naval Academy, he’d given the Navy thirty years, then worked another nineteen years building airplanes in Seattle before retiring to Annapolis last year. The month Mother died, he had turned seventy.
“That doesn’t look like fun,” Ruth said. “It looks like trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with D and that stands for fool.”
Paul nibbled on a carrot stick and stared in Darlene’s direction. “You can’t judge a book by its cover, girls.”
I groaned. “May I write that down, Mr. Shakespeare?”
“Maybe she’s a great conversationalist. A Harvard grad running a multinational corporation. A scholar with an advanced degree in comparative literature from Yale.” He turned to Ruth. “How come you don’t know this woman, Ruth? You see your father every day.”
After Mom died, my divorced sister had given up her poky, overpriced apartment on Conduit Street in downtown Annapolis and moved into our parents’ home in the Providence community. Daddy, she discovered, barely knew how to balance a checkbook or file his income taxes. Mother had always taken care of the bookkeeping. And cooking? Forget about it.
Ruth shook her head. “He’s never mentioned her. Probably too embarrassed.” She sipped her wine. “But he has been spending more evenings out lately.” She snorted. “He told me he was bowling.”
Daddy must have said something funny because Darlene threw her head back, open-mouthed. He would have had time to count her fillings. I was beginning to recognize her laugh, full and deep-throated, ending in a giggle.
“I think I have a very good idea where her talents lie,” offered Ruth, sourly.
“Take a pill, Ruth.”
Ruth smiled at Paul, sickly sweet. “I do believe I will, Mr. Ives.” She reached around him, selected a fringed toothpick from a silver cup and speared a crab ball, then dredged it through the cocktail sauce.
“Why don’t you go introduce yourselves, girls?”
I displayed my empty wineglass. “First, I’ll need another one of these.”
Ruth, still chewing, speared another crab ball and sailed off in the opposite direction. “I think it’s his job to introduce his girlfriend to us,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to find Georgina.”
“Last time I saw Georgina, she was in the tent in the garden fixing fruit-and-cheese plates for the kids,” Paul said.
Ruth, her mouth full of crab, nodded, waved, and disappeared outside. I watched as she weaved among the boxwood hedges, then strolled down the well-manicured lawn which sloped gently away from the historic mansion toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Paul took my elbow and steered me toward the bar. We had just refilled our glasses when the music died.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” The first chair violin, a painfully thin bleached blonde clad entirely in black, had trouble being heard over the celebration. Paul tapped a fork against his plate and after several seconds the room grew quiet and guests began drifting into the ballroom from the adjoining rooms and from the garden. The waif lifted her bow high, like a baton. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Rutherford!”
Connie and Dennis appeared from the hallway, holding hands and beaming at one another like star-struck teens. The skinny violinist, who could have put a heaping plate of crab balls to good use, set her bow to the violin and played a few introductory chords before turning to her musicians and segueing into “Mexicali Rose.” Paul leaned toward me. “ ‘Mexicali Rose’?”
With my lips close to my husband’s ear I whispered, “Maybe there’s a Mexican holiday we don’t know anything about.”
At the end of the second bar of music, Dennis swung Connie wide, twirled her into his arms, then waltzed her around the dance floor in graceful, sweeping circles. They could have been on wheels.
I turned to Paul. “Holy Toledo! It’s international ballroom on PBS.”
“Dennis told me they’ve been taking lessons.”
I watched, admiring and amazed. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “It’s so beautiful!” I jabbed Paul with my elbow. “I’ve been trying to get you to take lessons for years, you bum!”
“Maybe someday.”
Before I could extract a promise to that effect, our daughter, Emily, appeared. She looked beautiful, too, in a slinky, floor-length slip the color of caramel that she proudly claimed she’d bought for fifty cents at Goodwill. Since leaving home for Colorado Springs, she had let her ragged, badly dyed hair grow out. Now it hung, sleek and smooth, the color of dark molasses, just touching her shoulders. She’d applied light touches of makeup to her eyes and cheeks and exchanged the black lipstick of her rebellious years for a burgundy gloss. Dante loomed tall behind her, dressed in black slacks and a white shirt. I doubted my son-in-law owned a suit. If it hadn’t been for his colorful tie, I might have mistaken him for one of the waiters.
“I’m trying to get your father to dance,” I explained to Emily, who was balancing Chloe on her hip. The strings swung into “I Only Have Eyes for You” and the floor began to fill with other dancers. Suddenly, twenty-two pounds, all of it Chloe, was in my arms.
“C’mon, Dad,” Emily said. “Let’s dance.” Without waiting for a reply, she seized Paul’s hand and dragged him onto the floor. Smiling crookedly, he held her, stiffly at first, then with more confidence as his elbows unlocked and his arms relaxed. He began rocking from one foot to the other, leading his daughter around the ballroom with a skip, half shuffle, skip, slide.
Leaving me with Dante.
I always managed to put my foot in it where conversations with Dante were concerned. Chloe saved me the trouble of having to think of something to say by grabbing my earring, a string of dangling pearls, and yanking-hard.
“Ouch!” My hand shot to my ear. “You little imp!”
Dante, who had been watching Emily dance with her father with a grin on his face, turned to see what all the commotion was about. “You OK, Mrs. Ives?”
I laughed, pried Chloe’s fingers from the earring, and slipped it into my pocket for safekeeping. I attempted to distract my granddaughter by making faces and talking to her like an idiot. “Widdle Chloe want something to eat, huh?”
Dante held out his arms to his daughter. As his cuffs crept higher on his wrists, I could see portions of the elaborate tattoos that decorated his arms-the business end of a rattlesnake; the talons of an eagle. Until I had had a nipple tattooed on my reconstructed breast, the artwork on Dante was the closest I’d ever come to a tattoo. “Here, Mrs. Ives. Let me take her,” Dante volunteered. “She’s going to make a mess of your dress.”
“That’s OK,” I said, thinking there wasn’t much Chloe could do that would break my heart over this dress. But in a few minutes, my granddaughter metamorphosed into a writhing sack of eels. I handed her back to her father gratefully. “Thanks.”
Dante settled his daughter on his hip and plugged a pacifier into her mouth. When a vigorous sucking motion signaled that Chloe had a firm grip on the nipple, he turned to me. “I’d ask you to dance, but one of us…” He jiggled Chloe up and down.