Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 58

“Still…”

“Oh, shut up, Sherry,” Aunt Virginia scolds. “Those kids are space cadets and Delilah here knew exactly what she was doing.”

Then her eyes roam over to Kane.

She proceeds to slurp up the sight of him and go back for seconds. From his polished shoes to the dark rings on his fingers, she seems to be a fan of everything her eyes pass over.

“Well,” she says. “At least one of you came bearing something worth looking at.”

“Aunt Ginny!” yelps one of my shyer cousins, Jenna.

“What?” she says. “I’m old, not dead.”

Kane takes her offered hand. “Kane Makov.”

“Virginia McKenna,” she says with a flirtatious grin, as if her husband isn’t sitting eight inches to her left. “Pleasure to meet you.”

Deciding at last to intervene, Virginia’s husband leans over and thrusts his own hand toward Kane. “Johnny McKenna,” he says. “What line of work are you in, Kane?”

“Property,” Kane says.

“Yeah? What kind?”

“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?”

Under the table, Kane’s hand stays plastered on my leg.

Connor taps his glass with his knife. It rings loud enough that Aunt Sherry jumps.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. Uh. Everybody. Can I⁠—”

“Go ahead, honey,” my mother encourages.

Connor stands up. He’s got his hand on the back of Vivian’s chair now, and Vivian is looking up at him with her chin tilted and her hand over her mouth like she’s going to cry.

“So,” he says, “this has been a rough couple of months for this family. Nobody’s gonna pretend otherwise. And Viv and I have been talking about the right way to do this, and we decided the right way was in front of everybody. No more sneaking around.”

Somebody’s fork scrapes on a plate.

“On Friday, I asked Vivian to marry me,” Connor says. “And she said yes.”

Vivian’s hand comes off her mouth and there’s a ring on it. She holds it up and turns it so the light gets in it.

My mother lets out that same high cry.

“Oh,” Aunt Sherry says. “Oh, my.”

Vivian stands up to join him.

“I know how it looks,” Vivian says. “And I’m not going to sit here and pretend it happened the pretty way, because it didn’t. But you don’t get to choose who you fall in love with, right?” She looks around the table at everyone but me. “We fought it for a long time. We really did. And in the end, you can’t deny something like this. You can only lie about it, and we’re done lying.”

“We’re done lying,” Connor agrees.

“It’s real,” Vivian says. “It’s the realest thing either of us has ever had.”

My mother starts clapping.

She claps alone for about two seconds. Then she says, “Well, come on,” and Aunt Sherry joins, and then Jenna, and then Uncle Bub, and then most of the table.

Aunt Virginia does not clap. She sets down her wine and folds her arms.

Kane does not clap, either.

“I want to say something,” my mother says once the awkward, muted applause dies down.

She stays standing behind Vivian. She’s got her fingers curled around the top of the chair.

“This family has been through a terrible time,” she says. “We lost your father a year ago today. A year ago today. And instead of coming together, we’ve spent this whole winter airing everybody’s business out in the street, in front of the neighbors, with the phone ringing, and things being said on the internet that I will not repeat at my own table.”

Nobody says anything.

“What happened between these two,” she says, “is between these two. It’s a private matter. It was going to be dealt with privately, in this family, the way things always have been. And instead, somebody decided to make a spectacle of it in my living room on Christmas Eve, in front of fifty people, with children in the house.”

“They were in the den,” I mutter.

“With children in the house,” she repeats. “And I’ll tell you the truth, since we’re all being so honest tonight. The affair was a sin, and it hurt, and I don’t excuse it. But what was done at Christmas did more damage to this family than anything else that has happened in it. Vivian has lost work. She can’t go to the store. I couldn’t leave my own house for three weeks. That’s not the affair that did that.”

I put my fork down.

This b***h cannot be serious.

“Now,” she says, “I would like us to move forward. I think the way we start is very simple.” She turns and looks at me. “Delilah. You’re the eldest. You’ll say a few words for your sister, won’t you?”

I’m so stunned that I can’t even form words.

Just when you think people can’t stoop any lower… they dig under the old bar and find a way to wriggle beneath it.

“You’ll toast them,” she repeats. “Show everybody there’s no hard feelings. That’s how we put this behind us.”

Vivian is watching me now. Her hand is threaded through Connor’s arm and her chin is up. There is something ghoulish and hungry in her face, because this is the part she wants.

Not the ring.

This.

Connor looks at the tablecloth.

Kane leans in an inch and speaks so low that only I can hear it. “What do you need?”

What do I need?

That’s a good question. A great question, in fact. Give the man a prize, because in thirty-one years at this table, none of my so-called “loved ones” have ever once asked me that.

I take inventory of my options.

Option one: Arm myself with the serving fork. It’s lying right there by the roast, the big two-pronged one, and I could probably get it buried in Connor’s ass before anyone intervened. It would be quick. It would be memorable. Aunt Virginia would absolutely testify that she saw nothing.

Option two: Cry like a baby. That one is locked and loaded, if I choose it. It’s crouched right behind my sternum with its bags already packed. If I go that route, it won’t be a half-assed effort, either. We’re talking the full production. Snot. Hiccups. Wet, ugly, gulping sobs.

But that would just give my mother exactly what she’s been shopping for all evening. A crying Delilah is a Delilah who cares too much, who never got over it, who is jealous, who is not well.

Option three: Get the hell out of Dodge. Stand up, get my coat, and go eat dumplings in Sunset Park.

In the end, though, I choose none of those.

I set my napkin beside my plate and stand up.

My mother’s shoulders drop half an inch in relief. “Thank God you came to your⁠—”

“I’m not going to toast them,” I say. “I’m going to say one thing, and then I’ll sit back down and finish my dinner, because the potatoes are good.”

“Delilah—!”