Page 72 of Cruel Kiss

"Don't be charming at her. She can smell it."

"No promises."

Sunday comes. Mom arrives at four in a good dress with a bottle of wine and a face I know from childhood, the one she wears to parent-teacher conferences and to the DMV. Loaded for war. She hugs the kids first, holds them too long, and then straightens up and looks past them into the hall where Ronan is standing.

"You must be Ronan," she says. Flat.

"Mrs. Meadows." He puts out his hand. "It's an honor. Cali speaks about you constantly."

"Does she?" She shakes it once, hard, a handshake she practiced. "She hasn't spoken about you at all. I had to hear about the wedding from a nine-year-old."

"Then you've been rudely excluded, and I'm sorry for it. Come in, please."

He takes her coat before she can decide whether to give it to him. He hangs it up. He steers her toward the kitchen with a hand that never quite touches her back, just hovers near it.

I follow behind them like I'm watching a car accident.

I don't know what I expected. A stiff dinner. My mother interrogating him about his intentions while he gave lawyer answers. Me refereeing.

What I get instead is this:

By four-thirty, he's got a glass of wine in her hand, poured to exactly the right level, not too full, and he's asking her about the year she spent in Chicago before I was born, which I did not tell him about, which means he pulled it out of her in the first ten minutes. By five, she's telling the story about the time she got locked out of the apartment in a snowstorm in her nightgown and had to sit in the laundromat until dawn.

Ronan is laughing. "You didn't call anybody?" he says.

"Who was I going to call? I didn't have anybody."

"You had yourself," he says. "That was clearly enough."

My mother goes quiet for a second. Then she takes a sip of wine to cover it.

I stand at the stove stirring a sauce that doesn't need stirring.

Isabella climbs into his lap somewhere around the salad course and stays there. He eats around her. When she starts to fuss because Hayden won't let her hold the caterpillar box at the table, Ronan settles it before I can even set down my fork, lowvoice, some negotiation about the box getting its own chair, and both kids agree like he's a judge whose word is final. My mother watches this. I watch her watch it.

When Isabella spills her milk, Ronan has it mopped up and a new cup poured before the tears can even get organized. When Hayden gets loud, Ronan doesn't shush him, just leans in and matches his energy until the loud has somewhere to go. He cuts Isabella's chicken without being asked. He knows Hayden doesn't like his food touching. He does all of it the way you do things you've done a thousand times, without thinking, and the whole time, he keeps my mother's wine glass full and her stories coming. By the time dessert is on the table, he has taken the entire job of the children off her hands so completely that she gets to just sit there and be a grandmother, which I don't think she's gotten to do in years.

What do I do in the meantime?

I sit at my own table and watch my paper husband be the realest thing in the room.

After dessert, Ronan takes the kids up for baths. Just like that. Stands up, says, "Come on, you two, let's rinse the pasta sauce off." Isabella grabs one hand and Hayden grabs the other, and they go, leaving my mother and me alone in the kitchen with the dishes and the last of the wine.

I start rinsing plates. She dries.

For a while, neither of us says anything. Upstairs, water runs. Isabella shrieks about something, delighted. Ronan's voice comes down through the ceiling, too low to make out the words, just the shape of it, calm and even.

"Well," my mother finally says.

"Well what."

"You know well what."

I rinse a plate. "He can be charming. I told you. It doesn't mean anything."

She takes the plate out of my hands and dries it. She doesn't say anything for a second, just works the towel around the edge, slow.

"Baby," she says, "I have been lied to by the best. Your father could talk a bird down out of a tree and then sell it back to it. I know charming. That—" She tips her head toward the ceiling, where our children are laughing at something. "—is not mere 'charm.'"