Vinegar Girl

Chapter Eight

“How do you do, Pyoder?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“Um!” Kate broke in.

Too late, though. “I have been having very bad allergy, but now am feeling better,” Pyotr said. “It was maybe the smelly wooden material they put on the ground around bushes.”

“Mulch, we call that,” Aunt Thelma informed him. “M-U-L–C-H. It’s meant to hold the moisture in during our long hot summers. But I very much doubt that that could be what you’re allergic to.”

It always made Aunt Thelma happy when she could set somebody straight. And Pyotr was smiling into her face so widely and so steadily, clearly preconditioned to adore her — just the sort of thing she found appealing. Maybe the evening would go better than Kate had imagined.

They were assembled in the entrance hall: Kate and her father and Pyotr, and Aunt Thelma and her husband, Uncle Barclay. Aunt Thelma was a tiny, pretty woman in her early sixties, with a smooth blond bob and very bright makeup. She wore a beige silk pantsuit and a filmy, color-splashed scarf wound several times around her neck and flung back over her shoulders. (Kate used to fantasize that her aunt’s perennial scarves were meant to hide something — a past surgery or, who knows, maybe a couple of fang marks.) Uncle Barclay was lean and handsome and gray-haired, wearing an expensive-looking gray suit. He headed a high-powered investment firm and seemed to find Dr. Battista and his daughters humorously quaint, like something in a small-town natural history museum. Now he watched them with an indulgent smile, slouching gracefully in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, which caused an elegant drape in the hem of his suit coat.

The rest of them had dressed up to the extent of their abilities. Kate wore her denim skirt with one of her plaid shirts. Pyotr was in jeans — foreign jeans, belted exactly at his waist and ballooning around his legs — but he had added a crisply ironed white shirt and his shoes were not his usual running shoes but snub-nosed brown Oxfords. Even Dr. Battista had made an effort. He had put on his one suit, which was black, and a white shirt and a spindly black tie. He always looked so thin and uncertain when he was out of his beloved coveralls.

“This is very exciting,” Aunt Thelma began, at the same time that Kate said, “Let’s go to the living room.” She and Aunt Thelma frequently experienced an overlapping-speech problem. “Uncle Theron’s already here,” Kate said as she led the way.

“Is he,” Aunt Thelma said. “Well, he must have shown up too early, then, because Barclay and I are exactly on time.”

Since Uncle Theron had indeed arrived early, by special arrangement so that they could discuss the ceremony, Kate had nothing to say to this.

Aunt Thelma sailed ahead of the rest of them and entered the living room with both arms outstretched, ready to engulf Bunny, who was just rising from the couch. “Bunny, dear!” Aunt Thelma said. “Gracious! Aren’t you chilly?”

It was the first really hot day of the year, and Bunny couldn’t possibly be chilly. Aunt Thelma was merely pointing out the skimpiness of her sundress, which was the length of a normal person’s shirt and tied at the shoulders with huge, perky bows that resembled angel wings. Also, her sandals had no backs to them. A no-no.

One of Aunt Thelma’s many instructions to the girls over the years had been: Never wear backless shoes for a social occasion. It was second only to Rule Number One: Never, ever, under any circumstances apply lipstick while at the table. All of Aunt Thelma’s rules were etched permanently in Kate’s mind, although by natural preference Kate owned no backless shoes anyhow and she never wore lipstick.

Bunny, though, tended not to catch Aunt Thelma’s subtexts. She just said, “No, I’m sweltering!” and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Hi, Uncle Barclay,” she said, and she gave him a peck too.

“Theron,” Aunt Thelma said regally, as if granting a dispensation. Uncle Theron had risen from his chair and was standing with his chubby, blond-furred hands clasped in front of his crotch. He and Aunt Thelma were twins, which explained their alliterative names if not their baby sister’s, but Aunt Thelma had “come out first,” as she always put it, and she had the firstborn’s self-assured edge to her while Theron was a timid man who had never married or, it seemed, had any serious experiences in life. Or maybe he’d just failed to realize if he had had them. He always seemed to be blinking at something, as if he were trying to get his mind around the most ordinary human behavior, and in the nonministerial, short-sleeved yellow shirt that he was wearing tonight he had a peeled, defenseless look.

“Aren’t you excited?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

“Excited,” he repeated in a worried way.

“We’re marrying off our Kate! You are a dark horse, aren’t you?” she said to Kate as she settled herself in an armchair. Pyotr, meanwhile, dragged the rocker he had been sitting on closer to Aunt Thelma. He still had his eyes trained expectantly on her face; he was still beaming. “We didn’t even know you had a beau,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “We were afraid Bunny might beat you to the altar.”

“Bunny?” Dr. Battista said. “Bunny’s fifteen years old.” The corners of his mouth were turned down, and he still hadn’t taken a seat. He was standing in front of the fireplace.

“Sit, Father,” Kate said. “Aunt Thelma, what can I get you to drink? Uncle Theron’s having ginger ale.”

She mentioned the ginger ale because she had just learned that her father had picked up only one bottle of wine — her mistake, entrusting him with the errand — and she was hoping no one would ask for any wine until dinner. But her aunt said, “White wine, please,” and then turned to Pyotr, who was still waiting with bated breath for any pearls that might drop from her lips. “Tell us, now,” she said, “how—?”

“We only have red,” Kate said.

“Red it will have to be, then. Pyoder, how—?”

“Uncle Barclay?” Kate said.

“Yes, I’ll have some red.”

“How did you and Kate meet?” Aunt Thelma finally managed to ask.

Pyotr said promptly, “She came to Dr. Battista’s lab. I expected nothing. I thought, ‘Living at home, no boyfriend…’ Then she appeared. Tall. Hair like Italian movie star.”

Kate left the room.

When she returned with the wine, Pyotr had moved on to her inner qualities and Aunt Thelma was smiling and nodding and looking charmed. “She is somewhat like the girls at home,” he was saying. “Honest. Tells what she is thinking.”

“I’ll say,” Aunt Thelma murmured.

“But in truth she is kindhearted. Thoughtful.”

“Why, Kate!” Aunt Thelma said in a congratulatory tone.

“Takes care of people,” Pyotr went on. “Tends small children.”

“Ah. And will you continue with that?” Aunt Thelma asked Kate as she accepted her wine.

Kate said, “What?”

“Will you continue at the preschool once you’re married?”

“Oh,” Kate said. She had thought Aunt Thelma was asking how long she could keep up her charade. “Yes, of course.”

“She does not need to,” Pyotr said. “I can support her,” and he flung out one arm in a grand gesture, nearly knocking over his glass. (He too had opted for wine, unfortunately.) “If she likes, she may retire now. Or go to college! Go to Hopkins! I will pay. She is my responsibility now.”

“What?” Kate said. “I’m not your responsibility! I’m my own responsibility.”

Aunt Thelma tut-tutted. Pyotr just smiled around the room at the others, as if inviting them to share his amusement.

“Good girl,” Uncle Barclay said unexpectedly.

“Well, once you have children that will be a moot point anyhow,” Aunt Thelma said. “May I ask what wine we’re drinking, Louis?”

“Eh?” Dr. Battista was giving her a distressed look.

“This wine is delicious.”

“Oh,” he said.

He didn’t seem all that thrilled to hear it, even though it might have been the first compliment Aunt Thelma had ever paid him.

“Tell me, Pyoder,” Aunt Thelma said, “will any of your family be coming to the wedding?”

“No,” Pyotr said, still beaming at her.

“Old classmates, then? Colleagues? Friends?”

“I do have friend from my institute, but he is in California,” Pyotr said.

“Oh! Are you close?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“He is in California.”

“I mean…is he someone you’d want at your wedding?”

“No, no, that would be ridiculous. Wedding is five minutes.”

“Oh, surely it will last longer than that.”

Uncle Theron said, “Take his word for it, Thelma; they’ve asked for the stripped-down version.”

“My kind of ceremony,” Uncle Barclay said approvingly. “Short and sweet.”

“Hush, Barclay,” Aunt Thelma told him. “You don’t mean that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event! That’s why I can’t believe that you and I are not invited.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Aunt Thelma’s own social instincts got the better of her; she was the one who spoke up. “Tell us, Kate, what will you wear?” she asked. “I would love to take you shopping.”

“Oh, I think I’m set,” Kate said.

“I know you couldn’t have hoped to fit into the dress your poor mother wore to her wedding…”

Kate wished that, just once, Aunt Thelma would refer to her mother without using the word “poor.”

Maybe her father felt the same way, because he interrupted to ask, “Isn’t it time to get supper on the table?”

“Yes, Father,” Kate said.

As she stood up, Uncle Theron was asking Pyotr whether he was allowed to practice religion in his country. “Why I would want to do that?” Pyotr said, looking honestly curious.

Kate felt glad to be leaving the room.

The men had done the cooking earlier that afternoon — sautéed chicken on a bed of grated jicama, drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce since the other evening’s maple syrup had not been deemed a success. All Kate had to do was set the platter out on the table and toss the salad. As she walked back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she caught snatches of the talk in the living room. She heard Uncle Theron utter the phrase “premarital counseling,” and she stiffened, but then Pyotr said, “Is so confusing, the two types of ‘counsel.’ I am mixed up how to spell them,” and Aunt Thelma was delighted to jump in and give him an English lesson, so the moment passed. Kate wasn’t sure whether he’d changed the subject on purpose.

He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “jumped the gun!” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.

He was still undeniably foreign, though. Even his posture was foreign; he walked in a foreign way that was more upright, shorter in stride. He had the foreigner’s tendency toward bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse. “Even a fool can see you’re after something,” she would say, and he would affect a perplexed look. Hearing him now in the living room, pontificating about the hidden perils of ice water, she felt embarrassed by him, and embarrassed for him, and filled with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But just then a pair of sharp heels came clicking across the dining room. “Kate? Do you need any help?” Aunt Thelma called in a loud, false, carrying voice, and a moment later she slipped through the kitchen door to put an arm around Kate’s waist and whisper, on a winey breath, “He’s a cutie!”

So Kate was being too critical, clearly.

“With that golden cast to his skin, and his eyes tilting up at the corners…And I love that ropy yellow hair,” her aunt said. “He must have some Tartar in him, don’t you think?”

“I have no idea,” Kate said.

“Or is it ‘Tatar.’ ”

“I really don’t know, Aunt Thelma.”

—

Over supper, Aunt Thelma proposed that she should take charge of the reception. “What reception?” Kate asked, but her father drilled her with a narrow stare. She could guess his meaning: he was thinking that a reception would look so convincing to Immigration.

“I have to admit that this must be a genuine marriage,” the black-and-white detective would report to his superiors, “because the bride’s family threw a big shindig for them.”

Immigration often used 1940s slang words, in Kate’s fantasies.

“It’s just selfish not to let your friends and relations be part of your happiness,” Aunt Thelma was saying. “Why, what about Richard and his wife?”

Richard was Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay’s only child, a blow-dried, overconfident type who worked as a lobbyist in Washington and had a habit of drawing himself up and taking a deep, portentous, whiskery-sounding breath through his nose before delivering one of his opinions. He couldn’t have cared less about Kate’s happiness.

“I suppose it’s your decision if you don’t want us all at the ceremony,” Aunt Thelma told her. “I’m not pleased about it, but this is not about me, I suppose. However, we should be allowed to take part in the occasion somehow or other.”

It was like blackmail. Kate could imagine Aunt Thelma parading in front of the church with a picket sign if she weren’t allowed her precious reception. She looked toward Pyotr, who was still wearing his huge, hopeful smile. She looked toward Uncle Theron — deliberately bypassing her father — and he was nodding at her encouragingly.

“Well,” she said finally. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

“Oh, goody. This is so, so perfect, because I’ve just redone the living room,” Aunt Thelma said. “You’ll love what I’ve covered the couches in: this gorgeous satin-stripe fabric that cost an arm and a leg, but it was worth every penny. And I’ve opened out the seating arrangement so the room can hold forty people now. Fifty, in a pinch.”

“Fifty people!” Kate said. This was exactly why she hadn’t wanted her aunt to come to the wedding: she just somehow ran away with things. “I don’t even know fifty people,” Kate told her.

“Oh, you must. Old school friends, neighbors, fellow teachers…”

“Nope.”

“How many do you know, then?”

Kate thought. “Eight?” she suggested.

“Kate. There are more than eight people at the Little People’s School alone.”

“I just don’t like crowds,” Kate told her. “I don’t like mingling. I don’t like feeling guilty I’m not moving on and talking with somebody new.”

“Ah,” Aunt Thelma said. A calculating look came over her face. “How about a little-bitty sit-down dinner, then?”

“How big is little-bitty?” Kate asked warily.

“Well, my table only seats fourteen, so you know it can’t be too big.”

Fourteen people sounded to Kate like quite a lot, but it was better than fifty. “Well…” she said, and then her father jumped in to say, “Let’s see, now: there would be you and Pyoder, me and Bunny, Thelma and Barclay and Theron, and Richard and his wife, and, oh, maybe our neighbors, Sid and Rose Gordon; they were so nice to us after your mother died. And then…how about what’s-her-name?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Your best friend from high school, what’s-her-name.”

“Oh. Alice. She’s married now,” Kate said.

“Good. She can bring her husband.”

“But I haven’t seen her in years!”

“Oh, I remember Alice. She was always so polite,” Aunt Thelma said. “So, how many does that make?” She started counting on her fingers. “Nine, ten…”

“It’s not as if we’re trying to meet a minimum requirement,” Kate told her.

“Eleven, twelve…” Aunt Thelma said, pretending Kate hadn’t spoken. “Thirteen,” she finished. “Oh, dear. Thirteen at the table: unlucky.”

“Maybe add Mrs. Larkin,” Dr. Battista suggested.

“Mrs. Larkin is dead,” Kate reminded him.

“Ah.”

“Who’s Mrs. Larkin?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“The woman who used to tend the girls,” Dr. Battista said.

“Oh, yes. She died?”

“We could have Edward!” Bunny piped up.

“Why would you want to invite your Spanish tutor to a wedding reception?” Kate asked her, evilly.

Bunny slumped lower in her seat.

“Louis,” Aunt Thelma said, “is that sister of yours still alive?”

“Yes, but she lives in Massachusetts,” Dr. Battista said.

“Or…I know you must have one favorite colleague at the Little People’s School,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “Some special friend there?”

Kate pictured Adam Barnes sending her a sooty-eyed gaze over Aunt Thelma’s Wedgwood china. “None,” she said.

There was a silence. They were all looking at her reproachfully — even Uncle Theron, even Pyotr.

“What’s wrong with thirteen at the table?” she asked them. “Are you all really that superstitious? I don’t want any at the table! I don’t know why we’re doing this! I thought we were just going to have a simple little no-frills ceremony, Father and Bunny and Pyotr and me. Everything’s getting out of control here! I don’t know how this happened!”

“There, there, dear,” Aunt Thelma said. She stretched a hand across the table to pat Kate’s place mat, which was the only part of her she could reach. “Thirteen at the table will be fine,” she said. “I was just trying to observe the conventions, that’s all; we’re not the least bit superstitious. Don’t you trouble your head about it. It will all be taken care of. Tell her, Pyoder.”

Pyotr, who was seated next to Kate, leaned closer to sling an arm around her shoulders. “Do not worry, my Katya,” he said, breathing pink-peppercorn fumes.

“Sweet,” Aunt Thelma cooed.

Kate pulled away and reached for her water glass. “I just don’t like fuss,” she told them all, and she took a drink of water.

“Of course you don’t,” Aunt Thelma said soothingly. “And there’s not going to be any fuss; you’ll see. Louis, where’s that wine? Pour her a glass of wine.”

“We finished it, I’m afraid.”

“This is stress, that’s all. It’s bridal jitters. Now, Kate, I just want to ask you one more teeny, tiny question and then I’ll shut up: you’re not going away on the same day as your wedding, are you?”

“Going away?” Kate said.

“On your honeymoon.”

“No.”

She didn’t bother explaining that they wouldn’t be taking a honeymoon.

“Wonderful,” Aunt Thelma said. “I always think it’s such a mistake, starting a long demanding trip right on the heels of the ceremony. So this means we can have our little party in the evening. So much nicer. We’ll make it early, because you’ll have had a big day. Five or five-thirty or so, for the drinks. Now. That’s all I’m going to say. We’re going to change the subject now. Isn’t the chicken interesting! And you men did this? I’m impressed. Bunny, are you not having any?”

“I’m a vegetarian?” Bunny said.

“Oh, yes. Richard went through that stage too.”

“It’s not a—?”

“Thank you, Aunt Thelma,” Kate said.

For once, she really meant it. She found it oddly comforting that her aunt was proving so unflappable.

—

It wasn’t bridal jitters.

It was “Why is everyone going along with this? Why are you allowing this? Isn’t anyone going to stop me?”

The previous Tuesday — Kate’s day for Extended Daycare — she had returned to Room 4 after herding the last child into the last parent’s car, and all the teachers and all the assistants had jumped up from the miniature chairs shouting, “Surprise! Surprise!” In the short time that she had been gone, they had assembled from wherever they’d been hiding to cover Mrs. Chauncey’s desk with a paper tablecloth and set out refreshments and paper cups and a stack of paper plates, and on the Lego table an upside-down lace parasol spilled tissue-wrapped gifts. Adam was strumming his guitar and Mrs. Darling was holding court behind the punch bowl. “Did you know? Did you guess?” they kept asking Kate, and she said, “It never crossed my mind,” which was absolutely true. “I don’t know what to say!” she kept saying. They pressed their gifts on her with long-winded explanations: these mugs were ordered in blue but when they arrived they were green; this salad bowl was dishwasher-proof; she was welcome to exchange this carving set if she already had one. They settled her in the place of honor — Mrs. Chauncey’s desk chair — and served her pink-and-white cupcakes and homemade brownies. Adam sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Mrs. Fairweather asked if they could see a photo of Pyotr. (Kate showed them the restaurant photo on her cell phone. Several people said he was good-looking.) Georgina wanted to know if Kate was planning to bring him to Room 4 for Show and Tell, but Kate said, “Oh, he can’t possibly spare the time away from his research”—picturing, meanwhile, how Pyotr would have reveled in being put on display, how he would have turned the whole event into some kind of circus. And Mrs. Bower advised her to make it clear from the get-go that he should pick his own socks up.

It seemed they viewed her differently now. She had status. She mattered. All at once they were interested in what she had to say.

She hadn’t fully understood that before this, she hadn’t mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified. And also fraudulent. It was confusing.

Would getting married have any effect on her probation? She couldn’t help wondering. She hadn’t been called to the office even once since she had announced her engagement, she realized.

Adam’s gift was a dream catcher. The hoop was made of willow, he said. He had wound it in strips of suede, and then he had added beads like those on the dream catcher he had given Georgina for her coming baby, and feathers like those on the dream catcher he had given Sophia. “Now, this open space at the center,” he said, taking it from Kate to demonstrate, “is supposed to let the good dreams slip through, and this webbing around the edge is supposed to block the bad dreams.”

“That’s lovely, Adam,” Kate said.

He placed it in her hands again. He seemed sad about something, or was she deluding herself? He looked directly into her eyes and said, “I want you to know, Kate, that I wish you only good in your life.”

“Thank you, Adam,” she said. “That means a great deal to me.”

The forecast had been for rain that day, and Kate had taken the car to work. Driving home, with mugs and pots and candlesticks rattling in the backseat among her father’s lab supplies, she had smacked the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. “ ‘That’s lovely, Adam,’ ” she quoted herself in a high-pitched, mincing voice. “ ‘That means a great deal to me.’ ”

And she balled up her fist and punched her own forehead.

—

Aunt Thelma asked Kate if she were planning to be Kate Cherbakov (pronouncing it as her brother-in-law did). “Definitely not,” Kate said. Even if this marriage had not been temporary, she was opposed to the notion of brides changing their names. And Pyotr, to her relief, chimed in with “No, no, no.” But then he added, “Will be Shcherbakov-ah. Female ending, because she is girl.”

“Woman,” Kate said.

“Because she is woman.”

“I’m sticking with Battista,” Kate told her aunt.

Uncle Theron said, perhaps in context, “I was telling Pyoder in the living room that I like to suggest a little counseling session to couples before I marry them.”

“Oh, what a good idea!” Aunt Thelma exclaimed, as if this were the first she’d heard of it.

“We don’t need counseling,” Kate said.

“Issues like whether you plan to change your last name, though—” Uncle Theron began.

“Do not worry,” Pyotr said hastily. “Is not important. Is only a brand of canned peaches.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’ll settle it between ourselves,” Kate told everyone. “Who wants more chicken?”

The chicken was all right, she supposed, but the pink-peppercorn sauce tasted weird. She was looking forward to raiding her stash of beef jerky as soon as she was alone again.

“I don’t know whether Kate mentioned it,” Aunt Thelma was saying to Pyotr, “but I’m an interior decorator.”

“Ah!”

Kate had the impression that Pyotr didn’t have the slightest inkling what an interior decorator was.

“Will you two be living in a house, or in an apartment?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

“Apartment, I think you would call it,” Pyotr said. “Is inside a house, however. Widow’s house; Mrs. Murphy’s. I have top floor.”

“But after they marry, he’s moving in with us,” Dr. Battista said.

Aunt Thelma frowned. Pyotr frowned too. Bunny said, “With us?”

“No,” Pyotr said, “I have whole top floor of Mrs. Murphy’s house, rent-free because I lift Mrs. Murphy from wheelchair to car and I change her light bulbs. Is only a walk to Dr. Battista’s lab, and every window I look out of, I see trees. This spring there is a bird nest! Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. No dining room, but kitchen has table.”

“It sounds darling,” Aunt Thelma said.

“After the wedding, though, he’ll live here,” Dr. Battista said.

“I am allowed to use whole backyard, big, large, huge, sunny backyard, because Mrs. Murphy cannot go there in wheelchair. I plant cucumbers and radishes. Kate could maybe plant also.” He turned to Kate. “You wish to plant vegetables? Or only flowers.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, yes, I’d like to plant vegetables. At least, I think I would. I’ve never had a vegetable garden before.”

“But I thought we discussed this,” Dr. Battista said.

“We discussed this and I said no,” Pyotr said.

Aunt Thelma took on a gleeful expression. “Louis,” she said, “face it. Your little girl has grown up.”

“I realize that, but the understanding was that she and Pyoder will live here.”

Bunny said, “No one told me that! I thought they were living at Pyoder’s! I thought I was going to get Kate’s room now. With the window seat?”

“It makes much more sense for them to live here,” her father told her. “We would just rattle around in this big house all by ourselves.”

“Whatever happened to ‘Whither thou goest, I will go’?” Bunny asked.

Uncle Theron cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “those words were spoken to a mother-in-law. People never seem to realize that.”

“To a mother-in-law?”

“Is entire top floor of house,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Second bedroom is study now, but I am going to change it to bedroom for Kate.”

Aunt Thelma sat up alertly. Her husband grinned and said, “Well, now. I seriously doubt if Kate will require her own bedroom.”

Aunt Thelma waited for Pyotr’s response as intently as a pointer narrowing in on a quail, but Pyotr was too busy staring down Dr. Battista.

It could be like the coed dorm Kate had lived in while she was in college, she thought. She had loved the coed dorm. She had felt very free there, very casual and natural, and the boys there had been not dates but comfortable acquaintances.

She wondered if Pyotr liked chess. He and she could play chess in the evenings, maybe.

“I blame that old popular song,” Uncle Theron was saying. “ ‘Whither thou goest…’ ” he started singing in a fine-grained, slightly quavery tenor.

“Bunny is too young to be at home without supervision,” Dr. Battista told Pyotr. “You of all people should be aware of my long hours.”

It was true. Bunny would have the house stocked with teenage boys as quick as a wink. Kate experienced a pang of loss as she saw the big, large, huge, sunny backyard slipping out of her grasp.

But Pyotr said, “You can hire a person.”

This was also true. Kate perked up.

Aunt Thelma said, “Can’t argue with that, Louis. Ha! Seems you’ve met your match.”

“But…wait!” Dr. Battista said. “This is not at all how I planned it! You’re talking about an entirely different setup here.”

Aunt Thelma turned to Kate and said, “It would be my pleasure to come to your apartment and give you two a free consultation. If this is some old Hopkins professor’s house, I’ll bet it has all kinds of potential.”

“Oh, yes, lots,” Kate said, because it would look suspicious if she admitted she had never laid eyes on the place.

—

Dessert was just store-bought ice cream, because neither Pyotr nor Dr. Battista had had any other ideas. When they’d looked hopefully at Kate, she had said, “Well, I’ll see what I can find.” So at the end of the meal she went out to the kitchen and took a carton of butter pecan from the freezer. As she was setting a row of bowls on the counter, the door to the dining room swung open and Pyotr walked in. He came up next to her and elbowed her in the ribs. “Quit that,” she told him.

“Is going well, no?” he murmured in her ear. “I think they like me!”

“If you say so,” she said, and she started scooping ice cream.

Then he flung an arm exuberantly around her waist and pulled her close and kissed her cheek. For a moment, she didn’t resist; his arm enclosed her so securely, and his fresh-hay smell was quite pleasant. But then, “Whoa!” she said, jerking away. She turned to confront him. “Pyotr,” she said sternly. “You remember what we agreed on.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, and he stood back and held up both palms. “Yes, nobody shall be crazy about anybody,” he said. “I can help you carry these bowls in?”

“Please do,” she told him, and he picked up the first two she’d filled and backed out the swinging door to the dining room.

It was true that they seemed to like him. She saw that while they were eating their ice cream — Uncle Barclay quizzing him about whether his country had hedge funds, Uncle Theron more interested in whether his country had ice cream, Aunt Thelma leaning toward him in an intimate way to suggest that he call her “Aunt Thelma.” (Which he immediately shortened to “Aunt Thel,” or more accurately, “Aunt Sel.”) Dr. Battista had been in a silent sulk ever since the housing discussion, but the three guests were acting quite animated.

Well, no wonder. They were happy to be getting rid of her.

She had always been such a handful — a thorny child, a sullen teenager, a failure as a college student. What was to be done with her? But now they had the answer: marry her off. They would never have to give her another moment’s thought.

So when Uncle Theron reminded her that she and Pyotr would need to apply for a marriage license, she said pointedly, “Yes, Father and Pyotr already saw to that. And Father has the form he wants me to fill out for Immigration.” And she sent a challenging look around the table.

This should have made her aunt and her uncles sit up and take notice, but Uncle Theron just nodded and then they all went back to talking. It was much more convenient to pretend they hadn’t understood her.

“Wait!” she wanted to tell them. “Don’t you think I’m worth more than this? I shouldn’t have to go through with this! I deserve to have a real romance, someone who loves me for myself and thinks I’m a treasure. Someone who showers me with flowers and handwritten poems and dream catchers.”

But she kept quiet and stirred her ice cream in her bowl.