“Isn’t it festive?” Maribelle enthused. “They get a little jump on Christmas here, but why not? Oh, this is my table over here.” She motioned toward the windows, and as she did, she glanced around the seating area, her gaze skating over the few other diners.
“A lot of people are missing today. Off to see their children or siblings or whatever. So we have the table to ourselves!” For the first time in a long while she seemed excited and bubbly. “Sit, sit.” She waved Kacey into one of the cushy chairs as she took her own seat a
nd unrolled a napkin that had been placed in her wineglass.
“So tell me,” she said, smoothing the linen carefully over her dress. “How’s work going?”
“Hectic,” Kacey said, trying to understand the change in this woman who was her mother. Gone was the dour, stubborn, glass-is-half-empty person, replaced by a smiling, happy woman who seemed to embrace life. Someone who was interested in her daughter. “Just the other day a woman was rushed into the ER. She’d been out jogging and had fallen over that short little guard fence up on Boxer Bluff, by the park, you know the one I mean. Just at the crest, near the falls, from what I understand.”
“Oh, what a shame. I hope you fixed her back up again.” Maribelle flashed a quick smile and effectively changed the subject. “Now, honey, check out the menu,” she said, pointing with a cranberry-glossed nail to the list of offerings on the menu left on Kacey’s plate. So much for her interest in her daughter’s work or the patient’s well-being. “Look. You can have roast turkey or baron of beef. Can you believe it, an actual choice? It’s because of the new chef. Mitch.” She rotated her hands upward, as if to praise the heavens. “He’s just what this place needed after that miserable Crystal. How she ever got the job here in the first place is beyond me. . . . Let’s see, well, I don’t know why I even care. I’m having the turkey, of course. Tradition, you know!”
Who was this woman? Kacey wondered as her mother flagged down the waitress, Loni, and they ordered. Maribelle took another scan of the room, then welcomed the glasses of Chardonnay that Loni poured.
As the meal was served, they sipped and chatted, making small talk and working their way through a squash soup, green salad garnished with hazelnuts, feta cheese, and cranberries, and eventually sliced, moist turkey served with buttered sweet potatoes, sauteed green beans, and a delicate oyster stuffing with gravy. The meal wasn’t as homey as the corn-bread stuffing, Campbell’s soup green bean casserole, and yams with a marshmallow topping that Ada Collins, Kacey’s grannie, had served every year, but it was a close second best.
Better yet, her mother was in a cheerful, almost festive mood, so unlike the times she’d either sulked or just “gotten through the day” at her in-laws’ farm, the very spot Kacey now called home.
Tonight her mother smiled and kept up the conversation, regaling her with humorous little anecdotes of “senior living.” As long as they talked about Maribelle, everything seemed fine.
Little did Kacey know that she was being set up, though she should have seen it coming.
After the main course was finished, Maribelle asked the question that had probably been on her mind all evening, or quite possibly the last three years. “So,” she said pleasantly as she stared across the table at her daughter, “what have you heard from Jeffrey?”
Ahhh, Kacey thought. The ambush. “Nothing.”
Maribelle’s eyebrows pulled together in concern. “Maybe you should give him a call.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To be friendly,” Maribelle said, lifting her shoulders innocently. “It’s the holidays.”
“We’re divorced, Mom. Have been for three years.”
“Oh, darling, don’t you think I know that, but ... sometimes a couple can get past whatever it was that kept them apart.” Maribelle’s smile disappeared slowly, and she set her fork on her plate. “I always liked him, you know.”
Oh, yeah. She knew. “It didn’t work out.”
“You didn’t give it enough time. Three years? My God, that’s barely a sneeze in life. I was married to your father for over thirty-five years! And trust me, not all of those times were rosy.”
Kacey did believe her.
“You should just contact him.”
“Not gonna happen, Mom,” Kacey said and pushed her plate aside.
Her mother let out a long-suffering sigh as the waitress came with offers of dessert and coffee.
“I’ll try the pumpkin cheesecake with the caramel sauce and decaf, Loni,” Maribelle said familiarly.
Kacey said, “Just regular coffee with cream.”
“You have to try some dessert. It comes with the meal, no extra expense, and it’s . . . out. Of. This. World!” her mother insisted, then turned to the waitress again. “By any chance did Mitch make crème brûlée today?”
“Espresso-flavored,” the waitress said with a knowing smile.
Maribelle’s eyes brightened. “My favorite, but I think I really should sample his cheesecake.” To Kacey she added, “Order the brûlée and we’ll swap bites. I’m not kidding you when I say it’s scrumptious. If I weren’t so stuck on tradition with the pumpkin, I’d order it myself.”
“I don’t think—”