“Ed, I’d like to talk to you about an investment that I’m pretty sure will interest you,” he said to my brother, backing him up against the dessert table.
“Now, son, this is a social occasion,” my father said to him after a few minutes. Eddie took his business card out of his wallet and gave it to Steven. Steven did the same. “I’m going to make your brother rich,” he said.
He’d talked about calling his company Steamy or Misty, both names that combined his and mine, neither of which made any sense at all and sounded more like a dirty movie than a real estate business. “I guess I’m just a sentimental guy,” he said when I shot them down. Finally I’d come up with Home Sweet Home when I was having lunch with Aunt Ruth and staring at a fake sampler she had on her wall in the kitchen. Steven had gone right out and had cards printed up. He was still working construction, then knocking off to go over to work on the places he was fixing up. I helped him some, pulling up stained carpeting, chiseling Pepto pink tile off the bathroom wall. I’d panicked him a little bit in one of the houses when the toilet ran slow and I said the septic might be failing, but I had an old plumbing snake of my father’s, and once I snaked it it was fine.
“Sometimes I wonder why you’re paying for college,” he said, lying beside me in a sleeping bag on the breezeway floor, both of us stripped to our underwear and smelling of sweat and spackle. “With two of us we could make twice as much money on this. We could clean up.”
I didn’t say anything. My mother had ordered a sheet cake for my graduation party that said GO GET ’EM MIMI! which for my mother was pretty whimsical. I knew it didn’t mean GO GET THAT OLD TOILET OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND PUT IN A NEW ONE!
“That young man of yours is a keeper,” said Cissy Langer, fingering the heart around my neck and listening to Steven tell Mr. Langer about an apartment building that he was really itching to get his hands on if only he had the cash. She leaned in and whispered, “He is good-looking, too.” There was no question. The black curls, the dark eyes, the broad mouth. I still wasn’t sure why he’d chosen me. That was another thing that made me hang on to him.
“Mary Margaret, bring me a piece of cake,” Ruth called. “A corner piece, with one of those big frosting flowers.”
“I’ll take it to her,” my father said.
“You stay where you are, Bud. I asked your daughter and that’s who I want.” Good thing my mother was across the grass talking to the Ventis, whose big party for LaRhonda at the steak house wasn’t until Saturday night. “I’m closing the whole place for you kids,” Mr. Venti had said. “Do you know what kind of a loss I’m taking doing that?”
“Oh, Daddy, don’t start,” LaRhonda had said. Her father talked all the time about how much college was going to cost him and how LaRhonda was just going to waste it by getting married anyhow. “Give the girl a ring and save me a whole lot of money,” he was always saying to Fred. LaRhonda kept saying she was mainly going to State to spite him, but she also kept talking about the sororities, spent most of my party sitting over in a lawn chair talking to Ed’s wife, Debbie, who had been a Kappa, which was what LaRhonda wanted to be, too. Fred was next to her, empty beer cans lined up in a nice neat row at his feet. He’d given her a wallet for graduation. “I already have a wallet,” she’d said. “Not one I gave you,” he said. “Take a look inside.” There was a picture of Fred and LaRhonda in the photo compartment, and a hundred-dollar bill in the bills compartment.
“He’s a decent guy, but he does not know the way to a woman’s heart,” Steven said, running his hand up my arm and nodding at my neck, then putting one finger in the frosting on the piece of cake I was holding. “That’s mine, young man,” Ruth called.
“Just testing it to make sure it’s good enough for you, ma’am,” he called back as I went inside.