I felt myself blush.
Our meals were served, and mine was as delicious as Basil had predicted it would be. I was served a glass of the wine from the bottle he had chosen, too. While we ate, Basil went on and on about the great restaurants he had been in, and continually taunted Wade about his failure to enjoy life. The only places Wade had been to that Basil had been to were the places he had been taken when he was a child and young boy.
"Someone has to mind the store," Wade offered in his own defense.
"Yeah, you do that, Wade. You mind the store while me and Celeste here enjoy ourselves, right, Celeste?"
I didn't respond, and he laughed. Occasionally I looked at Ami to see if she was getting annoyed or angry with Basil's flirtatious antics and total concentration on me, but she seemed withdrawn into her own thoughts. Eventually Wade asked her if she was all right, and she said she was just more tired than she had anticipated.
"We've got to make it an early evening anyway," Wade said. "There's school tomorrow, and I have a lot to do at the plant, Dad. You know that shipment from Burlington came in all wrong. There is so much incompetency these days. I've got to go through the invoices line by line, item by item."
"Right, right," Basil said, waving the air as though Wade's conversation was full of flies instead of words. "Don't you remember what your mother used to tell me?" he added, leaning over toward Wade. "Don't discuss business at dinner. It's not polite. The women will be bored. I can't imagine this young woman having any interest in your pipes," he added, his words falling like slaps on Wade's now reddened cheeks.
Basil winked at me again, as if he and I had conspired in this attack on Wade. I couldn't help feeling sorry for Wade, and I wanted to come to his defense, but I kept my sharp words under lock and key. I felt like we were all sitting on a powder keg, and all it would take was one contrary word to Basil to set it off. I certainly didn't want to be the one to light the fuse.
Suddenly, however, Ami laughed, a nervous, high-pitched laugh that seemed to come out of nowhere and caught everyone's attention.
"You know, Basil," she said, "you're just impossible. You'll never let anyone contradict you."
"I hope not," he told her. His eyes narrowed, and his impish and flirtatious smile suddenly flew off and left a dark, almost threatening expression there instead.
Ami looked as if her breath had caught. She brought her hand to the base of her throat and then looked away quickly. The tension I sensed between her and Basil confused me for a moment. The memories of old shadows unfolding like clenched fists flooded my brain. I could hear the voices whispering warnings, and I recalled the farmhouse walls pulsating like the walls of a quickened heart. Darkness seeped in under the doors. Asleep in her bedroom, Mama woke with a scream. Owls froze on branches and the moon slipped behind a cloud.
In my memory I was crying and calling for Noble, but he was already gone by then, and my sense of loneliness was second only to the sense of death lying down beside me, tickling and teasing me with its cold fingers. The unmarked small grave in the family cemetery unzipped in my nightmares. Someone was coming: someone terrible was coming.
"Are you all right?" Wade suddenly asked me. "You look a little pale, Celeste."
Now everyone's eyes were on me.
I nodded, weakly.
"I'm okay."
"Let the girl be, Wade," Basil said. "I don't know how or why you turned out to be such a nervous Nellie!'
"Yeah, it's a big mystery, Dad. Let's call it a night." He signaled for the waitress. "She's been through a traumatic experience. We should have just spent the night at home."
"Oh, nonsense," Basil said. "She's too young to call that a traumatic experience. She's fine. You're fine, Celeste. You don't have to worry about anything. If my son here doesn't protect you, you can be sure I'll be there. She just needs some good things happening in her life. Now, what's this hesitation about getting her a car?" he suddenly blurted, taking Wade by surprise and certainly me as well.
"Hesitation? She hasn't even gotten her license yet, Dad. She's just started taking lessons."
"Lessons," he muttered. "Nowadays, young people even take lessons in how to eat. For crying out loud. My father threw me into our old truck
and said get going and don't hit anything or I'll wack you from here to kingdom come, and I haven't had an accident in forty years of driving. What's so complicated about it, especially today, where you don't have to shift? You point and shoot, for crissakes. Listen, Celeste, I'll be by tomorrow when you come home from school to give you a driving lesson that will qualify you in less than an hour."
"But we have the driving instructor coming then, Dad," Wade said, almost whining.
"Driving instructor be damned. Those people drag it on and on to make more money off you. Cancel it. I'll teach the kid, and then I'll take her to get her driving test. I know everyone over at the motor vehicle bureau anyway. I'll collect on some favors I'm owed."
I looked to Ami to put up an argument, but she simply smiled.
"Don't worry, Wade. She does know the basics already," she said. "And you know as well as I do that it's who you know in this world too often and not what you know."
Wade started to protest, but Basil reached across the table and plucked the bill that the waitress had just given him out of his hand. It took Wade by surprise, and he choked on his reply before he could get out the words.
"I might as well be the one signing for it," Basil said. "I'm paying for it anyway."
I had the feeling he was doing it for my benefit, acting like a bragging teenager. Wade's face was as flushed as if he had a terrible fever.