Page 183 of Sweet Ruin

“Commercial. Brooklyn, mostly.”

“Anything I’d know?”

“No.”

Uncle Johnny waits for more, but when he doesn’t get it, he frowns and returns to nursing his beer.

Aunt Virginia tries next. “Where’d you two meet?”

“At a party,” Kane says.

“Whose?”

“Hers.”

Aunt Virginia opens her mouth to ask a follow-up question, but the doorbell rings.

My mother comes out of the kitchen so fast that she nearly takes the corner of the sideboard with her hip. “That’ll be them,” she says.

“Them?” I repeat. “Who’s⁠—”

She doesn’t answer me. She’s already at the door.

I hear the storm door bang. I hear my mother emitting a high, happy little cry, and then Vivian’s voice going, It’s freezing, it’s so freezing out there, and then Connor saying something about parking.

Kane’s hand doesn’t move off my thigh. He doesn’t look toward the foyer. He looks at me.

“You knew,” I accuse.

“No.” His thumb moves once against the fabric of my dress. “But I assumed.”

I take a drink of water. It goes down wrong and I have to sit very still for a second so I don’t splutter and choke.

They come in together. Vivian first, in a black sweater dress, hair down and shining, and Connor behind her with his hand at the small of her back. He’s got a bottle of wine in the other hand and his cheeks are bright from the cold.

My mother has both of Vivian’s hands in hers.

“Everyone,” she says. “Look who’s here!”

Nobody applauds, but Aunt Sherry says “aww,” and a couple of the cousins mumble hello. Uncle Bub gets up to shake Connor’s hand and then thinks better of it halfway and pats his shoulder instead.

Vivian scans the room and finds me.

“Dee,” she says. Warm. Delighted. “You came.”

“I did.”

“That’s so good.” She squeezes her hands together under her chin. “That’s really so good.”

Then she sees Kane.

She sees him and her face goes white. I understand right then that she thought he’d be gone. She’d read the whole thing as a stunt I pulled in a bedroom a few weeks ago and that, by February, he’d have wandered off the way things always wander off from me.

My mother steers them to the head of the table, where two chairs are waiting.

Two chairs, set with the good napkins, right at the end nearest the kitchen.

“Well,” she says, standing behind Vivian’s chair with her hands on the back of it. “Now, we’re all here. Isn’t that something?”