Susan forestalled her.
“I’ll get it, Mother,” she said hastily, and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. When she returned, after a rather longer time than was necessary, Ricardo and her mother were talking comfortably about South America. Both Susan’s parents had been anthropologists and when she was a child they had periodically disappeared for stretches of a year at a time into the jungles of the Amazon.
“I have never been to the Brazilian jungle,” Ricardo said as Susan settled down again into her chair. He had accepted his drink with a perfunctory smile. He’s used to being waited on, she thought, as she sat back and prepared to listen.
The discussion was pleasant and civilized, and from the way her mother looked at him, Susan realized that Ricardo knew what he was talking about. When they left he gave Mrs. Morgan a smile that visibly moved her. Susan was beginning to suspect that he got a lot of mileage out of that beguiling grin.
“Mother liked Ricardo,” she wrote in her journal that evening. She had been keeping it ever since she was sixteen, as a way of sifting through, assimilating and comprehending the raw material of her life. And life for Susan, daughter of two educated and brilliant super-achievers, had never been easy. She loved her parents dearly, she had admired and adored her elder sister Sara, but she was different from the rest of the family, slower, more introspective, more deeply feeling. The journal had become essential to the daily routine of her life.
She looked now at the sentence she had written and then added, “and what is perhaps more surprising, she was impressed by him. There is an extraordinary quality about him that goes beyond his looks. He simply sat there on our porch, drinking lemonade and wearing perfectly ordinary-looking clothes, and one somehow had the impression that he was conferring an honor on us by his very presence.” She frowned a little as she thought. “It’s not that he’s conceited,” she wrote then. “He’s not. But he has—perhaps presence is the best word for it. Whatever it is, it did a job on Mother. She’s coming to the wedding and she never even objected when she learned her Protestant Yankee daughter was going to be married by a Catholic priest. I suppose the fact that said Protestant daughter is also seven months pregnant had a lot to do with her compliance.”
Susan put down her pen and looked out the window of her bedroom. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. Ricardo was playing a night game and wouldn’t be home until after midnight. She thought now that it was odd she hadn’t thought of staying with her mother until the wedding. Her mother hadn’t suggested it either. They had both simply fallen in behind Ricardo like good soldiers, nodding yes to whatever he suggested.
Extraordinary, she thought, and yawned. She was very tired. She looked one more time at her diary entry and then closed the book. She got into the wide bed in the big bedroom Ricardo had given to her and tried to get comfortable. He hadn’t even suggested that she share his room. The baby kicked, hard, and Susan smiled ruefully. In her present condition she was scarcely alluring, she thought. And then she fell asleep.
The wedding went very smoothly and afterward Ricardo took everyone out to lunch in a very expensive Greenwich restaurant. Then Joe Hutchinson, Maggie and Mrs. Morgan left and the new Mr. and Mrs. Montoya returned home. However, Ricardo only stopped long enough to drop Susan and change clothes. The Yankees were playing a twilight double header that evening at six. Ricardo had to be at the stadium by five. “Don’t wait up for me,” he told her pleasantly as he dropped a kiss on her cheek. “I’ll be late.”
“All right.” She stood at the door as he walked toward the Mercedes he had left parked in the circular drive in front of the house. “Good luck!” she called, and he gave her a grin before he slid in behind the
Andrea Speed, A.B. Gayle, Jessie Blackwood, Katisha Moreish, J.J. Levesque