6

SATURDAY OF THAT WEEK, RACHEL MADE A BIG DINNER. SHE was home early from work, a dental practice she managed, five dentists on rotation, and for once she wasn’t so tired that she barely just got through it, her eyes vacant.

No. Today she had the kitchen windows open—it was unseasonably warm—and she was baking something when David came in from his day of painting for his uncle. Something chocolate, and with nuts.

“How was your day?” she said, standing in the door of the kitchen.

She had the apron on, the one Max had given her years ago for Valentine’s Day, on it overlapping red hearts on a white-and-black background. It was almost painfully cheerful, and so was she.

“Okay,” David said, suspicious.

He stepped closer and Rachel gave him a peck on his cheek.

“How’s your uncle Bobby?”

“He’s fine,” David said. He didn’t say that Bobby was drinking again, he could smell it—not the vodka, but the tomato smell was a giveaway.

“You get a lot done?”

David tossed his bag in the hallway. “How’d you get off so early?” he asked. It didn’t sound right, sounded almost like an accusation, and so he said, “I mean, it’ll be nice to have dinner together. Whatever you’re making smells great.”

Rachel said he’d see, it was something special.

David smiled, but he could only think that somewhere in this, Jarvis, that asshole, would have to fit in, and turned and went out of the kitchen, reached for his bag in the hallway, and Rachel said, “Don’t smoke in your room, David,” and he stopped there, just out of sight of her.

He thought, Now would be the time to say what he had to about Jarvis. But he couldn’t. Not with her making such an effort.

“I’m not smoking,” he said.

“Well, all the same,” she said, “please don’t smoke in your room. You could catch things on fire—”

He put his head around the doorjamb to look at her, and she grinned.

“Janie hasn’t said a thing, so don’t get that into your head.”

“Mom,” David said. It sounded strange, he hadn’t said it in some time. “I don’t—”

“Yes, I know,” Rachel said. “I know you don’t smoke, but all the same, don’t do it in your room, and don’t in the garage. Promise?”

David said he wouldn’t, and he turned up the hallway, mumbling to himself.

Janie was home a short while later, jumping from a silver Mercedes and running to the stoop outside, where David was smoking.

“So, how was the party, Sport?” he asked.

Janie shrugged. “It was okay, but kinda dumb.”

She put out her hand. The nail on her index finger was black underneath, and the whole finger swollen.

“I did just like you,” she said, proudly. “I didn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t even cry.”

It made David nauseous, looking at her finger, and he held her hand as if it were a small bird.

“Listen, Janie,” he said, and as he was telling her how this wasn’t right for her not to cry, or have someone help her, and how she should tell Rachel, Rachel called them inside.

At the table, Rachel got a dish of ice for Janie’s finger and made her keep her hand in it.

She lit the candle in the center of the table, and David relaxed: Rachel wasn’t going to tell them she was marrying Jarvis or anything like that, after all, he could see that now, and Janie’s blue eyes sparkled in the candlelight, Janie joking, and David laughing, and he saw that his mother looked a little like that actress in It’s a Wonderful Life, across from him, tossing her head back, laughing, too, just now happy, all three of them, and he thought, I will remember this night always, and he did.