"What are you wearing to the reunion?"
Nancy was flipping through hangers in her closet. "I don't know," she told Bess.
"You know you have to pick something awesome," Bess told her. "It's tradition. I bet no one will be able to tell you had a baby if they didn't already know." She sighed in jealousy.
"Maybe I'll go out and buy something new," Nancy mused. "What do you think, something in silver with feathers?"
"Now you're just mocking me," Bess said. "And Frank's coming, right?"
Nancy looked over at their empty, unmade bed. Frank was downstairs playing with Sam; she could hear their mingled laughter. "Probably," she said dryly.
"I thought you said for sure."
Nancy shrugged, closing her eyes, her shoulders tight. "There's something that might come up and he swears he's going to try to get out of it. He swears."
Bess heaved a sigh. "Then he won't," she replied.
"I know," Nancy said. "You found a date yet?"
At their change in topic, Bess perked up. "I met this super cute guy at my gym. What do you think, a month should be long enough to wrangle him into going, right?"
"Sure," Nancy said. "Have you gone out on a date with him yet?"
"No," Bess admitted, and Nancy had to laugh.
--
Sam loved the warm weather.
When they went out for Nancy's morning jog, Sam loved to tug off her sunhat and bask in the warmth, chattering happily at the birds, other children, other joggers. Nancy jogged into a park and spread a blanket on the grass, took Sam out of the stroller and gave her a cup of juice.
"You're my favorite," she told Sam. "My big girl."
Sam grinned at her mother, trailing her fingers through a bowl of cheerios.
"You think maybe we can talk your dad into a picnic today?"
Sam raised guileless blue eyes to her mother's and Nancy sighed, her chin cupped in her palm, sweat drying cool on her skin. "Yeah, who knows," she said, then reached over and brushed Sam's hair back off her forehead.
She could see couples. Couples walking dogs, throwing frisbees, sprawled out on the grass. She looked down at her daughter. She and Frank hadn't been jogging together, not in a long time. At first because she was pregnant, and then because the baby was too small to be left alone or tossed about in a stroller, and then because their schedules were incompatible and he was gone eighteen of every thirty days. She felt like they were in the middle of a conversation that never ended. There was no closure. There was nothing when he could walk out the door given five minutes' warning.
He'd been enthusiastic about going to the reunion with her, at first. But the longest plans they had ever made together hadn't been plans at all, they had been Sam, who was theirs for eighteen years or until college, whichever came first. She could never pin him down. Not anymore. He paid the house and car payments on time and his checks faithfully appeared in their joint bank account on schedule and that was exactly as much as she could expect from him. No more, no less.
Sam offered her a cheerio and Nancy took it.
--
Frank bought her roses the day he knew for certain that he would be unable to join her. She took them and smiled at him, and he returned it, relieved.
She had been near her pharmacy earlier in the day. Had even gone inside, browsing the aisles. She walked out with a pack of gum instead of a pill refill. She was determined that she would have a good day, without medication or alcohol or any of the usual crutches. She'd even thrown out her pack of cigarettes.
"I'm really sorry," he said, his gaze still warily searching hers.
She smiled, and it was faint, but genuine. "It's all right," she said. "Next time."
He nodded, even while she thought that he would just find somewhere else to go, someone...
She shook her head briskly and moved to clear their dinner from the table. "How about a movie?" she suggested. "It's been a while since we just... relaxed."
"You're not mad?"
"No," she said lightly. "Now help me clear up."
After the movie and after Sam was asleep, she accepted his advances, as she nearly always did. He went outside as he nearly always did and Nancy curled up, on her side, toward the window, staring out into the dark. She was blank. She could smell the perfume of the roses above his scent on her skin.
Then he was back in bed and she curled up against his chest and breathed in, kept breathing in, until the smell of the smoke overwhelmed everything else. He rubbed his palm over her back in slow circles. "You're the best," he told her.
She smiled. "I know."
He slept and her eyelashes brushed against his shirt and she felt nothing.
In the morning he went to the office and she was going through her closet after her shower, looking for a skirt, when she found a dress she hadn't worn in a while. She pulled it out and smiled at it.
Even if she wouldn't be hanging on her husband's arm, she could still look good.
--
Frank called before he boarded the plane, and she promised him that she would limit herself to one drink and would try not to be too breathtakingly gorgeous, without him. Nancy hung up the phone laughing and looked over at her father, who was on the floor playing with Sam.
"I was thinking maybe we could do something tonight," Carson said. "It's been a while since we've spent some time together."
She smiled at him. "All of us? Even Sam?"
"Well," Carson said, looking down at his granddaughter, who was thrusting a faded wooden block, a relic from Nancy's childhood, up at him. "She can eat on her own, right?"
Nancy relaxed, talking to her father. After dinner in a soft expensive restaurant they lingered with cups of coffee and she fell into the same quiet lull she'd felt when he'd told her about his cases, when she had been a teenager and he had been the world to her. It was only when she chimed in, anticipating his argument about his client's not being advised of his Miranda rights, that the familiar, bitter anger began to put an edge on her words.
Carson put down his spoon. "You okay?"
Nancy twisted her engagement ring around on her finger. "Fine," she told him. "I'm-- I'm sure it's like this for everyone. Hannah staying home with me while you went off to the office."
"Well, your mother," Carson said quietly. "She took you with her everywhere she went. Strapped to her back, her little Indian baby. And I think you turned out all the better for it."
He smiled and she smiled and when their conversation continued she stopped listening to the nasty voice inside her head, and after a while, it stopped as well.
Sam was loudly protesting her bedtime as Nancy curled up with her feet tucked under her on the couch, in her father's living room, and the haze she had been under was lifting. Her father was in his study, finishing up a few last-minute papers before joining her. Nancy pulled her rings up to the next joint of her finger and rubbed the pale skin, distracted, before sliding them back firmly.
Her father wouldn't come into the room with that apologetic look on his face and tell her that he had to go.
Nancy ran her hand through her hair. Oh, there had been plenty of that, but there had been warning, and Hannah, and Bess and George. When her father went on a business trip or was spending all his time in his law library, he was the distance of a phone call away, willing to drop everything and come to her if she needed him, and she wasn't alone. When she was in New York she was a cipher of herself, Sam's mother and Frank's wife and not Nancy anymore, and help was no longer the distance of a phone call away but the distance of plane tickets and time zones.
"Now," Carson said, smiling when he walked back in. "You pick."
Sam had tired out and Nancy nestled against an arm of the couch with the remote in her hand, watching her father curl up in his favorite armchair, prop his feet up, and settle in. She smiled. She'd missed it. She'd missed seeing her father this way, a way Sam would probably never see her own father. She reached up and rubbed the sudden tears away before Carson could see them, blaming the fragility of several months gone without her medication.
"You sure you don't want some hot chocolate? I wrestled Hannah's secret recipe out of her."
She was on her second mug of warm milk and they sat in silence, watching television. If her conversation with Frank never had an end, nor did the conversation she had with her father, but it was because they were beyond words now. She could tell by his glances that he knew something was wrong but he was going to wait for her to come to him with it, as he always had. Carson had held her to hard and fast rules when she was younger, but the rules had been few, and he wasn't unreasonable.
"I'm really glad you're my father," she told him.
"I am too," he said, bemused, but his eyes were soft. "You know you can talk to me."
She nodded, her hair spilling over her shoulders. "I know."
She realized later, curled up in her old bed in the dark, that what she was feeling didn't have words for it. Not yet.
With her eyes closed she reached over and pulled out the drawer in the small table beside her bed, reached in and pulled out the framed picture. She dragged it up onto the bed and held it up, opened her eyes and watched his image resolve in the dim light.
Ned smiled back at her.
She sighed and put the picture back into the drawer and shut it with a clang, then clasped her hands under the pillow and tried to sleep. She just needed to get through the weekend and the reunion and she would be fine.
--
"What time are you going to get there?"
Nancy, half her hair in curlers, looked at her vanity, which was covered in makeup. "What time does the invitation say, eight? I don't know, maybe eight-thirty or something."
"I heard Wendy was maybe going to give away door prizes." Bess's tone was scornful.
"Don't want to miss that, then," Nancy laughed. "But then, what do you give as a door prize to the girl who saved you from a psycho ex-boyfriend?"
"Maybe a pager?" Bess suggested. "Sorry you're the only one going stag. But not too sorry, otherwise I'd lend you Bryan for the evening."
"So George is coming with someone? I didn't know she was seeing someone new," Nancy commented idly, lips parting as she brushed mascara onto her lashes.
Bess laughed, nervous. "Funny story," she said. "Um."
"What?" Nancy tugged the rest of the curlers out of her hair and ran her fingers through it.
"She's bringing Ned."
Nancy's knees went weak and she collapsed back into her chair heavily. She couldn't speak for a moment. Finally she managed an "Oh."
"It's not that they're seeing each other, it's just, you know, he practically graduated with us and everything, and Wendy said it sounded great..." Bess babbled, filling the silence.
"She called Wendy and got her permission?" And didn't call me, Nancy mentally finished.
"I'm sorry," Bess said.
The numb feeling began when Nancy hung up the phone. She could feel butterflies in her stomach. Huge butterflies. She walked over to her closet and she was years younger, approving again of the dress she had chosen a lifetime ago to show Ned what he was missing.
It was black and it clung to her every curve like a second skin.
She had a backup dress but once she put on the black one, the same one she'd worn to her junior prom, she couldn't bear to take it off, and she couldn't deny that she looked jaw-droppingly gorgeous in it.
Just as she couldn't deny that she was curious to see the look in his eyes when he saw it again.
Her father was playing with Sam downstairs. She was on his lap and he was trying to read something to her, but he was laughing, and when he looked up at Nancy, she felt sixteen again. His gaze followed her as she walked to the kitchen on bare feet, cracked open a can of diet soda and poked a straw in, to save her lipstick. Sam's blue-eyed gaze was following her, too, and Nancy laughed self-consciously as she sat down on the other end of the couch and dropped her shoes at her feet, took a long sip. "What, you two want a picture?"
"Great idea," Carson said. "I'll be right back."
There were still hours to wait but Nancy kept glancing at her slender silver watch. She sipped down the rest of her soda and took the can into the kitchen and stood in the middle of the cool floor, her hands at her sides, taking long slow breaths. Her heart was racing. The butterflies were legion. She could still go upstairs and change. She should go upstairs and change. She should put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and watch a cartoon with her daughter and her father and go to bed, shut her cell phone off and leave the door unanswered. Not do what she did, which was pick up her small tasteful handbag and kiss her father and daughter lightly on the cheeks and tell them not to wait up for her, and walk out to the car and crank the engine.
Two hours to waste, but she couldn't stay there, not with what was threatening to burst out of her skin.
She kept the air conditioning on high and drove out until the day began to turn blue with night. She drove by the park, the last place she had seen him; she drove down back roads until her mind was racing so fast that she couldn't think anymore, and found herself at Flanders' farm. She parked and let the car idle and the fingers gripping the steering wheel shook. Numb with butterflies. She'd had no idea it was even possible.
"So what if he'll be there," she said to herself. "Him and Don Cameron and a hundred other guys."
She stopped at a drive-thru for another diet soda and sat in the parking lot, sipping it. The tremor in her fingers slowed and finally stopped. There was nothing in her mind. No words.
She set her mouth and pulled down the vanity mirror and gave her makeup and hair a last once-over, then flipped it back up and cranked the engine.
--
"Nancy!"
Her cheeks ached from smiling. She grabbed a table with Bess and her date, but on her way up to the bar she was stopped repeatedly, by people she hadn't seen since before she had been pregnant. Everyone was happy, exchanging stories and baby pictures, flashing engagement or wedding rings, making exaggerated groans at the music Wendy had chosen.
She kept glancing at the door. If George was coming, she was going to make a fashionably late entrance. She turned her engagement ring around and around on her finger, considered leaving, but Bess would protest, and the dancing hadn't even started. She sighed and stepped up to the bar, her pulse high as she checked her reflection one last time in the mirror.
Nancy finally had her one drink in her hand when the two of them walked in. George in black pants and low heels and a smooth sleeveless shell, smiling. She looked elegant.
Ned took Nancy's breath away with one glance.
He was in a classic, clean-cut suit, coal black, white button-down, freshly shaved, gleaming. The lights went down and she could still feel his gaze on her from across the room, from the greeting table, where he was handed a nametag he promptly shoved into a pocket.
Nancy closed her eyes and finished her drink in one smooth swallow, then winced and clicked the glass back onto the tablecloth.
Bryan seemed nice enough, with enough good humor to come with Bess even after he knew he was her show-off date. When Bryan walked up to the bar to get Bess another drink, Bess leaned over and said, "So?"
Nancy, with a supreme effort, managed to focus on her. "So?" she repeated.
"What do you think of Bryan?"
"He seems nice," Nancy echoed. "He's cute."
"I know," Bess said, giggling.
Nancy ran her gaze over the room, trying to find something, anything else to think about. Wendy climbed up on the stage and made a few remarks, her smile very perfect in her tanned face. She looked like a flight attendant. Greg Creely was dancing with Cheryl Ames.
When Don Cameron asked her to dance, she nearly hugged him in relief.
"How have you been, Nancy?" Don asked, an easy smile on his face.
"Good," she told him, keeping her eyes on his and fighting the urge to scan the room as they slowly twirled. "I'm married and I have a little girl."
"That's great," Don replied, and his smile was genuine. "And you're happy?"
"Of course," Nancy laughed. "And how have you been? I feel like I haven't seen you in ages."
"I'm engaged, actually," Don told her. "She's great."
"Tell me about her," Nancy said, and watched his face light up. He looked so happy when he talked about her, her job and the way they were planning to spend the rest of their lives. She was glad he'd finally met someone who could appreciate him the way she never could. They continued through the next song, until Don glanced up over her shoulder, then slowed.
"Mind if I cut in?"
Her heart was in her throat when she turned around. Ned had his hand on her shoulder. Don nodded and dropped his hands, stepped back still smiling, and Ned took his place, with impeccable timing.
For a long moment Nancy couldn't speak. Ned folded his hand around hers and put the other on her waist and they swayed together with the music, a respectful distance between them. She just kept staring into his eyes, afraid to blink and miss the sight, afraid that this was the last time she would have the chance to memorize the curve of his jaw, the shadow of his eyelashes against his cheek. He searched her eyes and she couldn't breathe.
"Hey."
She smiled, then, even though she was trembling inside. "Hey."
"I'm having this weird déjà vu," he told her. "I walked in and when I saw you, for some reason, I felt like I was seventeen again."
Nancy ducked her head, blushing faintly, her fingers moving against his softly. "You too, huh."
He stared at some point over her shoulder for a moment. "You look good," he said.
"You too."
The song faded into another, slow and soft, and after a beat Nancy put her arms around his neck and he slipped his around her waist. She could see Bess over his shoulder, dancing with Bryan, her eyes sparkling. Nancy leaned her cheek against Ned's shoulder and closed her eyes.
"It's been so long."
"Yeah," Ned replied. "It's been a long time." They twirled slowly. "How have you been, since," he said, but trailed off.
"Fine," she told him. "Great. Frank was going to be here with me tonight, but," she shrugged.
He nodded. "Something came up," he completed. His eyes were soft.
She took a breath, traced her fingertips just over the back of his neck, and he shivered, closing his eyes. "I didn't know if you wanted to hear from me, so I just," she said, and sighed.
"And I appreciate it." He opened his eyes again and looked into hers and she was transfixed. His face tilted down, looking into hers.
She smiled, hesitantly. "You think maybe we can email each other, exchange Christmas cards? Like normal people?"
"Maybe," he said. He reached up and tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear.
"I didn't know what else there was to say."
"I don't know either," he breathed. He leaned down and they were still, swaying but gently together, as the song ended. He hugged her close to him, so briefly, too briefly. "Emails and Christmas cards. We can do that. We can," he sighed. "I just need more time."
Nancy pulled back as the song ended. "You still have feelings for me," she breathed.
Ned pulled away from her, his head down. George came by and he swept her into his arms for a fast dance and Nancy stood, frozen, in the middle of the dance floor, blushing faintly. Bess came over and grabbed her on her way back to the table, and Nancy stumbled along behind her, sinking gratefully into a seat.
"What's wrong?" Bess asked. "You look like you need a drink."
"I think I do," Nancy replied. "Or five. Five would be good."
The butterflies died, one by one. She sipped the rum and coke Bess brought her, but she couldn't feel it at all. After a few dances Don asked her for another, and she accepted, watching Ned dance with Wendy and then Bess. He looked happy, but Nancy couldn't smile. She managed to corner George after one dance.
"You taking Ned home?"
George shrugged. "We took a cab here, from my place," she said. She peered into Nancy's face, then. "You-- I didn't ask, but you're okay with him being here, right? I didn't think you'd mind."
"I'm fine," Nancy said. "I was just, surprised."
George smiled. "He was a good sport about all of it."
Nancy smiled back, then went to the bathroom and shut herself inside a stall and stared blankly at the metal door. She looked down at her hands, at her purse. She could leave now and be back at her father's house before midnight.
She put her face in her hands then and started shaking, but she didn't cry. She just felt numb. Email was something, though. Some connection.
She had thought about him every day since he had left her in the freezing rain and her father's yard.
She had taken the business card out and looked at it so much that it was dingy white. She had dialed his number a thousand times but had never completed the call, had started a hundred emails she never sent. She found herself drawing mittens in the margins of notebooks, seeing his name in nearly every word she read.
She had pulled the black dress out of the closet, had chosen to wear it, when she had known Frank wouldn't be with her, when she was hoping that maybe Ned would show. She had worn it, and part of her had wanted history to repeat itself. Had wanted him to see her and immediately, immediately react, immediately respond, to take her into his arms and kiss her until she was breathless, to lead her on spiked heels to some deserted closet, and...
There she stopped. She ran her fingertips gently through her hair and took in deep breaths.
He was right. Distance. Distance and space. She had made a mistake in coming tonight.
She was in line, waiting for the coat check girl to return, when she felt a hand at her elbow. "Surely you're not leaving so soon."
Her smile was watery. "Kinda have to," she said, then turned to look at him. "You know," she shrugged. "Kids and everything."
His lips curved up in a soft smile. "One last dance," he said softly.
She hated herself for nodding. She hated herself for gesturing to the coat check girl to wait another five minutes. She hated the jockey for putting a slow one on. She hated her shoes.
She hated how familiar it was to be in Ned's arms.
She closed her eyes and she could feel his pulse thrumming under her fingertips, as they swayed so softly, moving with no thought or deliberation in his embrace. She could let herself cry and let her mascara run on the drive home, but not now. Not if this was all she would have to tide her through another six months without him.
His chest expanded, against hers, she could feel his breath against her ear, and a shudder slid its way down her spine. She tilted her head back and their gazes locked and she was sixteen again.
"Left pocket," he finally managed to murmur, and without breaking their gaze she reached down, quizzical, into his left jacket pocket, found a keycard there.
"Seven-twenty-four," he said into her ear. "Whenever you're ready."
For the twenty-nine minutes she spent in the ballroom of the hotel after that whisper, her heartbeat was a perceptible throb in her ears. He said his goodbyes and walked through the front doors, his hands in his pockets, toward the taxi stand. Nancy took a seat at the bar, but ordered a ginger ale. The alcohol she'd consumed earlier had already burned off. Whatever happened tonight, she had to be sober. She had to be sure.
"I'm with you tonight."
George didn't protest, just nodded, the beginning of a smile on her lips. Nancy finished her drink and fought the urge to have a cigarette, to calm the slow tremble in her fingertips.
In twenty-nine minutes she stood with her head bowed in front of the room. She'd been watched to the taxi stand, doubled back and took the back elevator up to six, the stairs to seven. Her heels were dangling from her right hand, her trenchcoat slung over her left arm.
She didn't tremble. She exhaled, soft and slow, slipped the keycard into the door and pushed down the handle.
He looked beautiful, in the soft light of the bedside lamp. She saw the subtle gleam, the shift in his gaze when he saw her.
"I thought we agreed to stay away from each other."
"Hey, it was my high school reunion," she reminded him, and the door closed quietly behind her.
