Step Ball Change: A Novel - Hardcover

Ray, Jeanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609610031 ISBN 13: 9780609610039

Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books, 2002

Synopsis

With a ringing phone, Jeanne Ray’s charming and amusing new novel gets off to a rollicking start that never lets up. Not for a minute. On the other end of the phone is Caroline’s daughter, Kay, a public defender like her father, sobbing at the improbably good news that the richest, most eligible boy in Raleigh, North Carolina, has asked her to marry him. While Caroline and Tom are trying to digest this, the other phone, the “children’s line,” rings; it is Caroline’s sister, Taffy, hysterical over her husband’s decision to leave her for a woman two years younger than her daughter.

Soon Taffy is wending her way up from Atlanta to seek solace in her sister’s home, even though the two have been separated by more than just geography for the past forty years. With her is her little dog, Stamp, who has a penchant for biting ankles and stealing hearts. Tom and Caroline quickly realize that the wedding their future son-in-law’s family is envisioning for nine-hundred-plus guests is to be their fiscal responsibility. To top it all off, the foundation of their home is in danger of collapsing and their contractor and his crew have all but moved in. It’s a thundering whirlwind of emotion that finally boils down to: Who is in love with whom? and Who’s going to get the next dance?

Wise, funny, and impossible to put down, Step-Ball-Change is peopled with characters you feel you have known your whole life. It’s the kind of book that you can’t bear to see end.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeanne Ray is a nurse living in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Julie and Romeo.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter one

It all started on Tuesday night. Tom and I were having dinner when the phone rang.

Let me stop here for a minute. I want to revel in that sentence. Tom and I were having dinner. It almost sounds like this was something that happened regularly. In fact, my husband, who is a public defender, had made a career of eating peanut-butter-cheese crackers from the vending machine in the Raleigh courthouse while he went over the testimony of guys named Spit one more time. I had been teaching adult tap classes in the evenings to young women who didn't have a date after work and were trying to improve themselves. That was not to say I was never home or Tom was never home, but it was hard to make it home simultaneously, and it was nearly impossible to be home alone. Our two oldest sons, Henry and Charlie, were married and gone, but George, our youngest, was still down the hall while he went to law school. Kay, our daughter, found her way over most nights to review cases with her father. And if none of the children were here, you could count on the fact that Woodrow, our contractor, and a couple of the plaster guys who worked for him would be sitting on the back porch having some fast food in the evening. Originally, Woodrow had come to build a glassed-in porch on the house, what we called a Florida room, but halfway through the project he discovered that our foundation had shifted, and suddenly the cracks that were deep below the ground were spreading across our walls like ambitious ivy. The Florida room was abandoned in favor of the more pressing problems, and now stood as a naked frame of skinny poles on the side of our house. We had been under construction for six weeks, and I had come to think of the workmen as distant relatives who wanted to leave but had no place else to go.

But tonight the house was dark. When Tom and I called out no one answered back. Woodrow was gone and George was gone and the drop cloths were neatly folded and stacked. To further raise the odds on the rarity of this evening, I had actually bought the ingredients to make a pasta dish with olives and real tuna that I had seen in a magazine. So when I say, "Tom and I were having dinner," I mean it was hot food, and we were alone together. Tom had been so hopeful as to put on a Stan Getz record, and "Girl from Ipanema" laced the air. The whole evening was a kind of far-fetched coincidence. There was potential-for-romance written all over it.

But there was a second half to that sentence: The phone rang.

Tom answered it and for a while after hello, he said nothing. He just listened with a puzzled expression that could mean he'd been snagged either by someone who wanted to steam-clean our carpets or by a very distant cousin whose kid was in jail. Public defenders were modern-day priests in a sense: If someone had done something wrong, they were quick to call Tom and confess. Then he started to say, "Kay? Kay?" and then listened again. He said, "Honey, are you all right? Take a breath. Try to take a breath. Are you all right?"

Words to make any mother put down her fork and jump to her feet. I gestured for him to give me the phone.

"Kay?" Tom said. "Do you think you could talk to your mother? I'm going to put your mother on the phone." Tom's voice sounded frightened. He had a better sense of the terrible things that can happen in the world than most people do. "She's crying," he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece. "I can't tell what she's saying."

"Kay?" I said. "Kay-bird?"

From the other end of the line there was a great deal of sobbing and snuffling, and immediately I felt my shoulders drop with relaxation. It was a sobbing and snuffling I knew. I can't explain how. It was as if I came equipped with the secret decoder ring that made me capable of distinguishing the intent of my daughter's cries. Even when she was a baby, I could tell from the other side of the house when she was hungry and when she needed changing and when she just wanted to be picked up and brought along for the ride. I could separate the cries of our three sons, too, but the difference was they stopped crying when they hit a certain age and Kay remained weepy by nature. Even now that she was thirty and a lawyer herself, she would find herself tearing up over an article in the newspaper or a commercial for long-distance service and have to excuse herself for a moment to go into another room and pull it together.

This crying, the subtle combination of gasping and a low, mucousy rattle that meant she wasn't even taking the time to blow her nose, I knew to be a cry over love. I mouthed the word to Tom, "Dumped." He raised his eyebrows and gave a sage shrug. Although it was a shame to think that such a thing had happened, neither of us was exactly surprised. Portraits of both Trey Bennett's great-grandfather and his great-great-grandfather hung in what they called the library of the country club. I had seen them over the years at wedding receptions and other inescapable social obligations. All the firstborn Bennett sons were named Conrad, though the grandfather was called Sergeant and the father was called, even on the most formal of occasions, Sport, and Trey was called Trey, indicating, one would think, that he was the third when in fact he must have been the sixth or seventh. The Bennett family was exhausting and inescapable in Raleigh, huge and recklessly blessed. They all had perfect teeth and Mercedes SUVs. They flew their own planes to their own summer houses and ski chalets. Their name was chipped into the marble of every hospital, art museum, and social register in the tri-city area. From what I could track in the paper over the years, they tended to marry young and reproduce enthusiastically, so Trey Bennett was a bit of an anomaly, being single at thirty-five. He was considered by everyone, especially his mother, to be the very definition of eligible. What he had been doing dating a thirty-year-old public defender who didn't even know any debutantes, much less been one herself, was a mystery to all of us, and now poor Kay was sobbing, her heart having been skidded across the pavement at top speed yet again.

"Baby," I said. "Deep breath. Come on now, try to relax."

Tom sat back down at the table and started to eat the dinner that was already halfway to cold.

"I-baaa," Kay said. "I-baaa."

"It's okay," I said. I pointed at my plate and Tom slid it over to me. The pasta was getting stiff, but I managed to force a few pieces into a twirl around my fork.

I settled in and listened to Kay cry. Sometimes that's all a mother can do. Truth be told, Trey had made me a little uncomfortable. Not that he wasn't nice. He was extraordinarily nice. His manners would have made Cary Grant feel inadequate. But whenever they stopped by our house, I was always aware that a family dog long since dead had peed on our only Oriental rug and left an irregular stain. When Trey was in the house, I wished I hadn't come straight from the dance studio in my leotard and warm-ups. I wished I'd showered. The few times he came to dinner, he complimented everything lavishly, but I was always plagued by images of matching serving utensils and Venetian water glasses. After the third time, Tom and I decided it would be less stressful to take them out.

"Do you want to come over?" I said to Kay. I looked at Tom, mouthed the word "Sorry."

He shook his head. "No, no," he mouthed back, and then he made a beckoning gesture with his hand for her to come on over. Tom was a good father.

On the other end of the line I could hear Kay put down the phone and blow her nose, which was a sign that she was in the first stages of pulling it together. Then she picked up the receiver and inhaled hugely. I didn't make a sound for fear of distracting her. "Married," she said, and then began to cry again.

"Trey's getting married!" I said. Tom leaned over the table. "I can't believe that. Oh, sweetheart, that's awful. That's too much."

"Me-e-e-e-e," she wailed. "Marry me!"

I stopped and cocked my head toward my shoulder as if this might make me hear better. "He married you?" I asked quietly.

Cry, cry, cry. "Asked," she managed to gasp out. "Asked me."

I clamped my hand down over the mouthpiece. "Mother of God," I said to Tom. "He's asked her to marry him."

The blood slipped away from Tom's face. Who knew where it was going. We saw it all in an instant, the way they say you review your life as a milk truck swerves into your lane of traffic. But in this case what flashed before our eyes was the future: anniversary dances at the country club, invitations to sail in the Caribbean, severe pressure to attend fund-raising dinners for senators who opposed school lunches and gun control. The phone rang.

It was George's phone, what we still referred to as the children's line even though three of our children were grown and gone and George was twenty-five years old, in his first year of law school, and less of a child than Tom or I had ever been. Under normal circumstances we would have let the machine pick up, but these were not normal circumstances. Tom rose, pale as Banquo's ghost, and floated down the hall toward the ringing.

"Kay," I said sweetly, trying to make my voice that same voice that had soothed her as a baby. "Are you going to marry Trey?" For some reason all I could think about were their names, Kay and Trey, Trey and Kay. Marriage was hard enough without rhyming.

The crying stopped abruptly and I could hear the scratchy brush of Kay wiping the phone with a Kleenex. "Of course I'm going to marry Trey."

"Caroline," Tom called from down the hall.

"One second, baby. Yes?"

"Minnie, it's your sister on the...

About this edition

• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0609610031
• ISBN 13: 9780609610039
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240