“When you stopped by to visit, I mean. Your dad said you were on a road trip somewhere and just happened to stop by.”
“No, I—” Robin broke in, because David was looking baffled. “No, that was just something I made up, hon, to get you here for lunch.”
“They aren’t on a road trip?”
“This lunch was a surprise, you see, and they drove down for it especially, but I didn’t want you to know that.”
“But I would like to know it,” she said.
Which made Robin feel sort of frustrated, because how hard could this be, for heaven’s sake? Which part did she not understand?
“To know ahead, he means,” Alice explained. “If he’d told you ahead they were coming for lunch, you might guess he was throwing a party.”
“Well, I’d have to know sooner or later,” Mercy said. “I know now, after all. Right?” She searched the others’ faces. They were all looking confused too. “Am I right?” she asked them.
“He was afraid you might say no,” Greta told her, a bit too loudly.
Mercy focused on her.
“He was afraid you might not want to celebrate your marriage.”
“Oh,” Mercy said finally.
And that seemed to satisfy her, although Robin felt slightly unsettled by the whole exchange.
Later, though, she returned to the subject. People had branched out by then into several different conversations—Alice and Lily discussing Robby the Boy’s latest letter, and the little girls competing to entertain Emily （whom they found even more alluring than Eddie, evidently）， and Morris telling Kevin and David one of his long-winded real-estate stories, overexplaining as always and detouring pointlessly and doubling back to insert some detail he should have mentioned to begin with. Then out of nowhere, Mercy said, “When I walked in and saw you all sitting around the living room, I thought somebody had died.”
“Died!” several people said, and Alice asked, “Who?”
“David, maybe?”
“David!”
“Well, right off I saw I was wrong,” she said. “But you were all so quiet!”
“We were quiet because you looked scared,” Morris said.
Robin glanced at him in surprise.
“I was scared because I thought someone had died,” Mercy said.
Well, this was getting them nowhere. Robin pushed back his chair and stood up. He cleared his throat. “I’m not much of a one for speeches,” he said.
He had their attention. He plowed ahead. “But I wanted to tell about this salmon loaf.”
“It is delicious,” Greta said.
He paused to say, “Well, thank you.”
“I would like the recipe.”
“I got it from this church cookbook my great-aunt gave us for our wedding,” he said. “I’ll copy it out for you.” He went back to his original line of thought. “We’d been going on all these dates, you see. I’d taken Mercy to all these restaurants, trying to make an impression. Just about pauperized myself!” Soft chuckles around the table. “Crab Imperial in white china seashells, chickens wearing leg ruffles, this dessert they set on fire, one place—”
“Cherries Jubilee,” Mercy murmured.
“Crazy foods! So then we got married. We didn’t take a honeymoon; couldn’t afford to. All those pricey restaurants, I guess.” More chuckles. “First night in our own apartment, then, that little place in Hampden; you girls remember that place. First meal of our marriage. Mercy goes out to the kitchen and starts to fix our supper. I stay sitting in the living room reading the evening paper. It feels like I’m acting in a play or something. I’m wondering what she’ll feed me; I’m hoping it’s not something French. I’m thinking I don’t care if I never see another French dinner in my life. Then she calls me to the table. I fold up my paper; I go out to the kitchen…In front of my plate there’s this salmon loaf, waiting for me to serve it. This loaf pan of salmon with a toasty brown top, and it looked so…”
He swallowed. His eyes were filling with tears; he hoped nobody noticed. “It looked so cozy,” he whispered. “It looked to me like home. Like I finally had a home.”
He had planned to say more, but he stopped. He sat down.
From her place at the other end of the table, Mercy said, “Thank you, sweetheart.”
He raised his eyes to her and found her smiling at him. That made it all worthwhile.
* * *