A corner table on the 96th floor of the Hancock building, the harvest moon dotting the lake’s blackness with shimmering specks of silver. He slides into the table like a player stealing second base, a black velvet bag dangling between two fingers.
“Will you?” he asks.
“I will,” she answers.
When the elevator opens, he turns to her, babbling, giddy, “Let’s tell the kids.”
She squints. “Maybe in a month,” then hedges, “Or possibly, six.”
“Tomorrow morning,” he chirps, elation fogging empathy.
Her middle school son, still young enough to cry, dives into the sofa. “I’m Danny in the sixth-grade play. I’m not moving.”
“No one is moving.” She sits on the sofa’s edge and rubs her son’s back.
Her college kid, the engineering genius, so like his late father, paces the living room, delineating the pros and cons of this proposed family iteration. She stands, taking his hands into her own. They breathe together into the stillness of her love for him.
His girls. The oldest daughter, first.
He presses the doorbell and spots an eye in the peephole.
He sighs, “She probably guessed why we’re here.”
The daughter’s husband lets the couple in, calling up the staircase to his wife, who has bolted to their bedroom, hands covering her ears.
But, for her, the winds of a tornado are so irresistible that she stomps back down the stairs, eyes blazing, her hand gripping the railing as if she might rip it off.
The engaged couple trembles. They clutch each other’s hands. The father clears his throat.
The oldest daughter screams. “I won’t hear what you have to say−never−so get out.”
The father stands his ground, frazzled, sweat on his brow and upper lip. He squeezes the hand of his bride-to-be tighter, possibly for courage or perhaps inspiration, or maybe he wants her to be the one to tell his daughter what the daughter says she does not want to hear and vows she will not hear even if she does hear it.
The father chokes it out, “We’re getting married.”
The daughter releases a growl of rage. She stomps back up the stairs and employs the only weapon available. She slams her bedroom door. Fury building, she repeats the slamming again and again – the noise ricocheting down the stairway.
Sitting on the sofa, her husband breathes deeply, his hands folded in his lap. Eventually, he mutters, “Well, you know how she can be.”
The room is silent. No one speaks.
Until the oldest daughter cries the finale, “Get out.”
And they get out.
They drive to the home of his youngest daughter, a recently married dark-haired beauty who eerily resembles her deceased mother. The younger one sits like a cross-legged Buddha on her living room floor, editing the final draft of a graduate school application, her cell phone balanced on her knee.
She already knows. She wipes tears off her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
The fiancée kneels next to her. “Can I help?”
Their eyes meet, browns and blues lingering, mingling, registering hope.
“Yes,” the younger one whispers, “I believe you can.”
MARY-FRANCES SCHNEIDER 