The Wednesday Sisters(86)
“Lordy, Arlene,” Kath said. “Just like that?”
“And when she asks her editor's name, you can say ‘Kath Montgomery,’” Arlene said. “Or would you prefer Katherine? No rush, but I'll need to know eventually so I can order the nameplate for your door.”
Kath was pleased as punch to be made an editor, of course, but she was reluctant to start with Brett's book. Brett was her friend, and this was business. She didn't want to do anything that might jeopardize the Wednesday Sisters. But Arlene insisted. She was not about to take her hands completely off this one, she assured Kath. Kath shouldn't worry about that.
“Is she young, your friend?” Arlene asked. “Is she attractive?”
Kath said she had remarkable strawberry blond hair. “She's just this tiny little slip of nothing, near 'bout every bit of her is thin as bone, bless her heart. She'd be a wallflower without the hair, but her hair, it's the berries.”
“Little is okay,” Arlene said. “Little is memorable.”
Kath winced at memorable, thinking of Brett's gloves, trying to figure out how to put a little lipstick on that pig. Could Brett be talked out of wearing them? And how could Kath even ask?
“She's a pistol when it comes to smart,” Kath told Arlene. “She went to Radcliffe, she graduated top of her class with degrees in English lit and math and chemistry—or maybe it was physics—and she took graduate classes at Harvard. She knows more about the space program than the astronauts do, I swear, and she wears gloves.”
That last tacked on as if it might have something to do with knowing about space, or might be entirely missed.
Arlene sat back in her chair, the same worn chair she'd had in the old office, but it looked even shabbier here against the freshly painted walls. She frowned, a hand going to her chin. “Gloves?”
Kath heaved a big sigh. “Little white cotton ones,” she admitted. “Like girls used to wear to church.”
“Like Jackie O?”
“I don't have one guess in paradise why she wears them, I really don't. I might could—”
“How marvelously eccentric! Gloves!” Arlene's chair creaked as she leaned forward, grinning at Kath. “Excellent. Perfectly excellent. It will get people talking and get her name out there. Mark my words, Kath: those gloves will generate more attention than anything we could do.”
KATH RODE THAT HIGH of being made editor for the rest of the week. She showed up Sunday morning more chipper than ever, and offered her suggestions on our writing with a newfound confidence. She floated through the whole day that way: through church services with Lee and the children, through her solo outing to the grocery store. She was so happy that even Lee seemed affected. He offered to help with dinner—very unlike him—and she assigned him the worst tasks: peeling the potatoes and the garlic for the garlic mashed potatoes and slicing berries for strawberry rhubarb pie.
“She's making you an editor?” he must have said a dozen times that day, as if it shed some new light on Kath he never had seen before. And the way he looked at her made her feel like the young girl who'd placed all those wild bets again, the girl he'd fallen for.
He stayed as always after Sunday dinner, helping Anna Page with her homework and reading the children a story. Anna Page was quite sure she was too old for story time whenever Kath was doing the reading, but Sunday nights she snuggled right up next to her father. That night Lee tucked them into bed, too, and after they were down he came back into the kitchen. He fixed Kath a nightcap and stood talking with her while she finished the dishes. They spoke of the children, of things that needed to be taken care of around the house, that was all, but still it left Kath feeling hopeful.
She'd just put the last plate away when he reached up to close the cabinet door, close enough for her to smell the scotch on his breath.
“An editor,” he said, not a question this time.
Kath thought he was going to kiss her and she didn't know if she wanted him to or not. One part of her wanted him to scoop her up and carry her to their bed and close the door and make love to her, as he had their first time, at his family's beach house all those long years ago. But another part of her wasn't so sure anymore.
“Well, I suppose you'd better be getting on home,” she said. Home. Which wasn't where Kath lived anymore.
They both turned at the same time, then, to see Anna Page standing in the doorway, watching them. “Punkin,” Lee said without missing a beat. “What's the matter, punkin? Why aren't you asleep?”
The way Anna Page smiled up at her father, her eyes sleepy and her nightgown misbuttoned at the top, Kath knew her daughter didn't understand what she'd just heard, but that she would someday.