Page 50 of The Cadence
I had gotten over my initial surprise and anger at having the woman who had yelled at me at the dinner table, so my response was more reasonable that it would have been before. “Cully has a crush on her and she told me that she’s following the Woodsmen around. When he mentioned our party, then she must have tried to horn in on it and he wouldn’t have said no. As you mentioned, he’s not using his brain when he’s thinking about her. He also may not have understood that it’s rude to bring someone when she isn’t actually invited. I wouldn’t have known stuff like that either, if I hadn’t lived with my grandma and learned about the rules for how to behave. I had never been told to stay quiet in church, for example.” I had never even been to church before I showed up on her porch.
“I can’t imagine that you were ever obnoxious like that,” Will answered, shaking his head.
“Well, no, but other people might be because they haven’t been taught. A better example is that before, I didn’t have any table manners.”
“Neither does Kirsten. She was eating meat with her fingers.”
“She ruined the towel in the guest bathroom, too,” I sighed. “It looks like she didn’t wash her hands and she just wiped off the gravy instead. She told me before that no one cares about forks and knives in The City.”
“In New York,” Will clarified. “She said that no one uses silverware in the city of New York? Having been there, I can affirm that she’s very wrong. Langston is from the New York borough of Queens, by the way, and I’ve seen him with a fork several times.”
“I don’t think she really knows anything about that place. She just says things to make herself sound important,” I said, and sighed again as I looked at the pile of dishes. Resolutely, I picked up the sponge.
“I’ll do them,” he said, and took it from me. “You cooked the whole thing without my help, and I was supposed to be home. It’s my turn.”
“Cooking was ok, because Langston helped me.”
“Right, Langston had to step in. I’ll text him later to thank him and to say sorry again.”
While he started on the big roasting pan, I went out to the back patio and lay down on one of the new lounge chairs that Annie had ordered. They had big cushions and were very comfortable, much better than sitting on the ground as I had been doing when I came out here before. I rested for a while, mentally reviewing that mess of a dinner and considering what I might have done differently to improve it. One thing would have been to confirm the start time and try to make sure that everyone arrived when they were supposed to. Another thing would have been to tell Cully that no extra guests were allowed, even if he thought she was so cute and no matter how his penis was telling him to behave.
“Calla?”
I opened my eyes and thought that I might have gone to sleep for a moment, because I’d been imagining that my grandmother and I were talking about the dinner. She’d been laughing as I’d described it but also got upset when I had explained some of the suggestive things that Kirsten had first said to Langston, and then to Will. “That girl wasn’t raised right,” she’d told me, and I had agreed.
“Hi, Will.” I sat up. “I was going to come in after a few minutes to help you with the dishes.”
“They’re done.” He sat down on the end of my chair. “You had cleaned as you went.”
“That’s how I was taught,” I said, and felt a wave of thankfulness to my grandma. I knew that I couldn’t bring extra guests to a party and I knew that you should try not to leave a mess for yourself. I also felt a wave of missing her.
“Kirsten isn’t welcome here anymore,” he said next, and I nodded in confirmation.
“Absolutely not. I never want to speak to her again,” I answered. “First she wanted to use me to get close to Woodsmen players, and now she’s using Cully. And the way she talked to you was criminal!” I got angry just thinking about it. She’d told him that she wasn’t interested in a relationship but she was ready to hook up, that she was lonely and looking for a guy, but that she definitely wouldn’t be clingy like other women in his life. Will had responded that he didn’t have any clingy women in his life and she’d smiled and said that she was glad he was open forfun, and she’d stroked her fingertips over her breasts as she’d spoken.
Now he seemed to be trying not to smile. “Criminal?” he echoed, and that made me even angrier.
“Criminal!” I exploded. “And she thought that you and I were together—that you were my boyfriend. She thought that, and she still mentioned that her thong was chafing all her pretty parts! That’s a lot of nonsense.”
But it made Will laugh. He put his head down, resting his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook. I started to smile, too. “In all my life, I never heard a woman talk about her pretty parts,” I said, and then I laughed, too.
“We can look at this optimistically,” he said after a while. “At our next party, I can promise that no one will discuss their genitalia.”
“Do we have to use that word?”
“No, and especially not over dinner,” he answered. “Jesus Christ, that was awful.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I know you were interested in getting your mind off everything, and I wanted it to go well for you.”
“Is that why you thought I wanted to do this?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t really understand,” I confessed. “You had told me before that you didn’t want to have people around when you had a problem to tackle, and I know there are a lot of loose ends with your mom right now.” She was refusing to talk to him about most of those ends, and especially the largest one of whether she would move out of the home she’d shared with hisfather. There were a hundred other, smaller things too, and it seemed to me like she was being difficult about all of them.
“Loose ends,” Will repeated. “Yes, there are a lot. It’s better to be up here, away from the situation. I’m hiding.”
“You are not! You call her every day.”
“And you defend me better than any teammate I’ve ever had on the football field,” he responded. “When did I say that I wanted to handle things alone?”
