Lee Nichols - Hand-Me-Down

“Help!” she cried, in a muffled voice. “Help me!”

Uh-oh. I raced into her room. She was gone. “Hannah?”

“I’m stuck.” A little voice, from behind the bed. “Back here.”

Only her calves were showing, sticking up between the bed and the wall. “You fell down the bunny hole,” I said, laughing.

She kicked her feet. “Bath Barbie’s down here, but I can’t reach her.”

“Hold on…” Her bed was a heavy wood four-poster, painted white with green vines on the posts. I heaved it away from the wall as the doorbell rang again—and Hannah fell sideways to the floor and disappeared with a clunk.

A second later, she poked her head up, dust bunnies tangled in her hair. Which now needed washing. “I can almost reach her!”

“Doesn’t Mommy ever clean?” I crawled under the bed, hooked a finger around Bath Barbie’s neck and dragged her out. “Ta da!”

Hannah grabbed her triumphantly. I made her say thank you, and the doorbell was still ringing as we entered the hall on our way to the bathroom.

“Will somebody get that?” I yelled down the stairs.

“I’ll get it,” Hannah said.

“Someone other than you.” I marched her into the bathroom and Kyle and Tyler were gone. All that remained was a pile of sodden clothes and a trail of wet footprints on the terra-cotta floor.

“Get in,” I told Hannah.

“It’s dirty.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Run a new one. I’ll be up in a minute to help wash your hair. I have to find your brothers.”

I turned and caught sight of myself in the mirror. The steam from the bathroom and exertion from the kids had caused my face to sweat and my hair to frizz. One of my sleeves was frothed with bubbles and there were dust bunnies clinging to my skirt. I opened the bathroom door and Tyler launched himself at me like a greased piglet.

“Here we are!” he said. Wet, naked, and clinging to my new clothes.

“We answered the door.” Kyle swaggered in, naked and dripping.

“Thanks,” I said. “Who was it?”

A man stepped in from the hall. “Me.”

I brushed a cobweb from my face. “Ian! Hi! How are you? Stay for dinner?”

Okay, so I invited him. So what? Anyone would have done it. It was a reflex. An impulse. It doesn’t mean anything. I’d actually intended to invite him. It was planned. Premeditated. It was only polite. He’d delivered the gift, I couldn’t not invite him. He was being kind of pushy, when you thought about it. What kind of person arrives to a party with a gift? The kind who expects to be invited. He basically invited himself. It was boorish. Rude. I really expected better….

Actually he’d been wonderful. He brought the age-encrusted relic, beautifully gift-wrapped. He didn’t cringe at my dust-bunny meets bubble-thing appearance. And he’d even shepherded the naked boys into clothes while I finished with Hannah. I really had no other choice but to invite him.

I only hoped Charlotte wouldn’t be mad. Emily certainly was. I was downstairs in the living room enjoying aperitifs and appetizers, when Emily culled me from the herd of crostini-eaters and backed me against the French doors. “It’s her birthday,” she snapped. “Nobody wants the high school boyfriend at her thirty-fifth birthday.”

“So I invited him,” I said. “So what? Anyone would have done it. It wasn’t planned or premeditated. There were dust bunnies on my ass—”

“How could you be so selfish? How do you think Charlotte feels?”

Before I could answer, Charlotte’s silvery laugh floated from across the room where she was chatting with Ian. They were standing by the mantel, candlelight illuminating their faces. Charlotte was stunning in a short, burgundy velvet dress with a mandarin collar. She laughed again and touched Ian’s arm. They were glowing so brightly, it took me a moment to realize that David, for some reason wearing a green Hawaiian shirt, was with them.

“Oh, she’s weeping,” I said, wondering why I’d chosen pale lilac instead of burgundy velvet.

“She always looks happy,” Emily said. “That doesn’t mean she is.”

“What does Charlotte Olsen have to be unhappy about?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

“Name one thing.”

Emily opened her mouth, then closed it again. Even her oversized brain had trouble with that one. Finally, she said, “Her bratty younger sister.”

“Oh, Emily, you’re not that bad,” I told her, and slipped back toward the safety of the herd.

There were about twenty people. The immediate family and a number of Charlotte’s and David’s closest friends, mostly from David’s hospital. We milled around, sipping wine and talking about medicine: this crowd could really get in a lather about HMOs and payment plans. They were the unsexy friends that Charlotte and David preferred. There was a B-list of friends, too, made up of people on, well, the actual A-list, from Charlotte’s modeling days. But most of her real friends were of the unglamorous sort.

I avoided Ian, doing an invisible contra dance with him across the room. Every time he approached, I withdrew. He went left, I went right. I almost got trapped between a blond sofa and a brunette neurologist during one do-se-do, but slipped nimbly out to the deck and back in through the kitchen to save myself. My theory was that if we weren’t seen together, I could pretend it hadn’t been me who’d invited him.

As I closed the door to the kitchen behind me, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I froze. It would be Emily hopping after me with her hatchet. I turned slowly, resolved to meet my doom, and saw that the heavy hand belonged to the caterer. A harried-looking woman in her late forties with no body fat and an inordinate number of freckles.

I beamed in relief and babbled, “Oh! I was just outside. On the deck. Then I came in. Here. To the kitchen.”

“We’re ready to serve dinner,” she told me, wiping a strand of hair from her face.

“Right. Right! Should I let everyone know?”

She thought that was a fine idea, so I slunk into the other room and told Emily, the idea being that she’d spring into action and shove everyone into their chairs. She glared at me, instead. “He’s flirting with her!”

Oh, here we go. I peeked over her shoulder. Ian was chatting with David. Charlotte was nowhere in sight. “What, telepathically?”

Her glare hardened. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Calm down, Em.”

“I won’t calm down. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s harmless flirtation. They dated, they’re like siblings.” I shuddered, unable to believe I’d just said that. “I mean, not like sibling-siblings. More like cousins. Kissing cousins. No. That’s wrong, too. Anyway, it’s harmless.”

“They dated?” she asked. “Who dated?”

I glanced at her wineglass. “How much have you had?”

“Anne, focus.” She nodded across the room. “She’s half his age.”

I followed her nod. Dad was talking with the caterer at the kitchen door. Looking a little more animated than usual, but nothing sinister. Well, he was intensely focused on her face. Probably trying to see if he could identify freckle constellations. I expected him to rear back any moment and say: “There! I found Cassiopeia!”

But he didn’t rear. He drained his wineglass and chuckled as the caterer refilled. He gestured, offering her a sip, and when she refused he made serious inroads into that glass, too. Hmm. He wasn’t much of a drinker, normally.

“Ah-ha!” Emily said.

“So he’s flirting a little….”

“She’s half his age.” Emily lived in fear that Dad would marry a woman who was younger than his daughters. “She’s twelve!”