Elin Hilderbrand - The Love Season

“Action is more that child’s mother than I am,” she told Renata once.

Always on the subway home Action complained about the very evening Renata had found so comforting. Action accused her parents of being too absorbed with their careers; she accused them of neglecting Major emotionally.

“Why do you think he wants so much love from me?” she said. “Because he’s not getting it from them. They dress him up like a junior executive to make the world think he’s normal, instead of letting him be comfortable. Ten years old and that boy does not own a pair of jeans. And then there are the servants.” Renata braced herself; she already recognized the tone of Action’s voice. “Miss Engel and Mrs. Donegal. One young and Jewish, one old and Irish, but servants just the same. Those women do the work my parents should be doing. The dirty work.”

“You’re being kind of hard on them,” Renata said.

“Please don’t take their side against me,” Action said. She stood up and grabbed the pole next to the door, as though threatening to step off the train at the wrong station. “I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

When Renata got back from her run, she was hot and dying of thirst. She stood inside the refrigerator and poured herself half a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice cut with half a glass of water. The sweat on her skin dried up and she shivered. She gulped her juice and poured more.

On the marble countertop next to the fridge was a list written out in Suzanne Driscoll’s extravagant script. At first, Renata thought it was a list for Nicole-the lobsters, salad greens, and whatnot. But then Renata caught sight of her own name on the list and she snapped it up.

Priorities: Pick date! Check Saturdays in May/June ’07 .

Place: New York-Pierre or Sherry Neth .

(Nantucket in June? Check yacht club.)

Invites: Driscoll, 400. Knox side?

Call Father Dean at Trinity .

Reception-sit-down? absolutely no chicken!

Band-6-piece min., call BV for booking agent .

Renata-dress: VW? Suki R?

Also: flowers-order from K. on Mad .

Cake-Barbara J.’s daughter-in-law, chocolate rasp, where did she get it?

Favors-Jordan almonds? Bonsai trees?

Honeymoon-call Edgar at RTW Travel, Tuscany, Cap Jaluca

“Okay,” Renata said. Her breath was still short from the run. This was a list for the wedding , her wedding. Suzanne’s list for Renata’s wedding. A little premature organization from a woman who was, quite clearly, a control freak, right down to the Jordan almonds.

Renata looked around the kitchen. She was in foreign territory. This was nothing like the kitchen in the house where she grew up, which had a linoleum floor, a refrigerator without an ice machine, and a spice rack that Renata had made in her seventh-grade industrial arts class. (How many times had Renata begged her father to remodel? But no-this was how the kitchen had looked when Renata’s mother was alive; that was how it would stay.) Nor was the Driscolls’ kitchen anything like the Colpeters’ kitchen in the Bleecker Street brownstone. The Driscolls’ kitchen was a kitchen from a lifestyle magazine: marble countertops, white bead board cabinets with brushed chrome fixtures in the shape of starfish, a gooseneck bar sink in the island, a rainwood bowl filled with ripe fruit, copper pots and pans gleaming on a rack over the island. Renata knew she was supposed to feel impressed, but instead she decided this kitchen lacked soul. It didn’t look like a kitchen anyone ever cooked in or ate in. There was no sign that human beings lived here-except for the list.

Something about the Driscolls’ kitchen in general-and the list in particular-made Renata angry and uncomfortable. Sick, even, like she might spew the juice she’d drunk too quickly into the bar sink. There was a telephone over by the stainless-steel dishwasher. Renata dialed Cade on his cell.

Three rings. He was sailing. Can you hear me now? Renata looked through the glass of the double doors that led to the deck, the lawn, a little beach, the water. Sailboats of all shapes and sizes bobbed on the horizon. Renata might have better luck shouting to him, Your mother is already planning our wedding! She’s calling booking agents! She’s arranging for our honeymoon in Tuscany!

The ringing stopped. It sounded like someone had picked up. But then a crackle, a click. No reception out at sea. Renata hung up and called back. She was shuttled right to Cade’s voice mail.

“It’s me,” she said. Her voice sounded tiny and meek, like a girl’s voice, a girl too young and incompetent to plan her own wedding. A girl without a mother to help her. “I’m at the house. Call me, please.”

Because, really, the nerve! Renata hung up. Here, then, was one of life’s mysteries revealed. How and when did a woman start resenting her mother-in-law? Right away, like this. Renata crushed the list in her palm. She couldn’t throw it away; it was her only evidence.

Renata reached for a banana from the fruit bowl, thinking, Replace potassium , but she was so angry, so worried that her wedding might be commandeered by Suzanne Driscoll, that as soon as she picked up the banana she flung it into the cool, quiet atmosphere of the kitchen. It hit a bud vase on the windowsill that held a blossom from the precious hydrangea bushes; the bud vase fell into the porcelain farmer’s sink and shattered.

“Shit!” Renata said. She retrieved the banana, peeled it savagely, and ate half of it in one bite, surveying the damage. She was tempted to leave it be and suggest later that Mr. Rogers had knocked the vase over, though of course Mr. Rogers was far too graceful a creature for such an accident. If something had broken while Renata was alone in the house, it would be assumed that Renata was responsible. Thus she did the only reasonable thing and cleaned up the mess-the bud vase was in three large shards and myriad slivers. She threw the shards away with the flower-maybe no one would remember it had even been there-and washed the slivers down the disposal. She had covered her tracks; now all she had to do was eat the evidence.

“Hey.”

Renata gasped. Her nipples tightened into hard little pellets. Miles sauntered into the kitchen with Mr. Rogers asleep against his chest. “How was the run?”

“Fine,” Renata said, sounding very defensive to her own ears. “Hot.” She stuffed the rest of the banana into her mouth. “I’mgngupstshwrnw.”

“Excuse me?” Miles said.

Renata finished chewing and swallowed. Her father liked to point out that when she was angry or distracted her manners reverted to those of a barnyard animal.

“I’m going upstairs to shower now,” she said.

“Okay,” Miles said with a shrug. It was clear he couldn’t care less where she went or what she did.

The guest bathroom’s shower-unlike the dorms at Columbia where Renata had been living all summer while she worked in the admissions office-featured unlimited hot water at a lavish pressure. It was soothing; Renata tried to calm herself. One of the traits she had inherited from her father was a propensity for flying off the handle. Daniel Knox was famous for it. The sister story to the bra-shopping story was the stolen-bike story. When Renata was nine years old, she forgot to lock up her bike in the shed. She and her father lived in Westchester County, in the town of Dobbs Ferry, which was a safe place, relatively speaking. Safer than Bronxville or Riverdale, though burglars and other derelicts did travel up from the city on the train, plus there was the school for troubled kids, and so the rule with the bike was: Lock it in the shed. The one day that Renata forgot, the one day her pink and white no-speed bike with a banana seat, a woven-plastic basket, and tassels on the handlebars was left leaning innocently against the side of the house, it was stolen. When Daniel Knox discovered this fact the next morning, he sat down on the front steps of their house in his business suit and cried. He bawled. It was the mortifying predecessor to the crying in the department store; this was the first time Renata had seen her father, or any grown man, cry in public. She could picture him still, his hands covering his face, muffling his broken howls, his suit pants hitched up so that Renata could see his dress socks and part of his bare legs above his socks. Her father’s reaction was worse than the stolen bike; she didn’t care about her bike. At that time, because she was younger, or kinder, than she was during the bra-shopping trip, she clambered into her father’s lap and apologized and hugged his neck, trying to console him. He wiped up, of course-it was just a bike, replaceable for less than a hundred dollars-and everything was fine. Renata, over the years and despite her best intentions, had sensed herself about to overreact in the same embarrassing way. The scene downstairs in the kitchen, for example. What if Miles had walked in and seen her throw a banana and break the vase? How to explain that? I’m angry about Suzanne’s list . It was just a list , just a collection of thoughts, of good, generous intentions, which now sat crumpled on the side of the guest bathroom’s sink, the words blurring in the shower steam.