French Braid(6)

They rode along in a comfortable silence awhile.

“Did you catch that thing my mom said about my beard?” he asked suddenly. “Talk about judgy.”

“What thing?”

“When she was showing you the photo album. She gets to my high-school days and ‘Here’s James at his graduation,’ she says. ‘Doesn’t he look nice? It was before he grew his beard.’ She cannot let it go about my beard. She hates it.”

“Well, she’s a mother,” Serena told him. “Mothers always hate beards.”

“The first time I came home with it, freshman year in college, my dad offered me twenty bucks to shave it off. ‘You too?’ I asked him. ‘What is this?’ He said, ‘I personally have nothing against a beard, but your mother says she misses seeing your handsome face.’ ‘Fine,’ I told him, ‘let her pore over my old photos, if she wants to see my face.’?”

“Well, you did look very attractive in your graduation picture,” Serena told him.

“But you don’t think I should shave my beard, do you?”

“No, no. I like your beard.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “I was glad to see the Before version, though.”

“How come?”

“Well, now I know what your face looks like.”

“You were worried what my face looks like?”

“Not worried, but…well, I’ve always thought that if, let’s say, I grew up and met the man I was going to marry and he happened to have a beard, I would ask him if he’d mind shaving it off one time before the wedding.”

“Shaving it off!”

“Just one time. Just for two little minutes so I could see his face, and then he could let it grow back again.”

James released her hand and drew away to give her a look.

“What,” she said.

“And how about if he said no?” he asked. “How about if he said, ‘This is who I am: a guy with a beard. You can take me or you can leave me.’?”

“But then if he…” She trailed off.

“Then if he what?” James asked.

“If he…turned out to have a weak chin or something…”

He went on looking at her.

“Well, I don’t know!” she said. “I’d just want to find out what I was getting into, is all I’m saying.”

“And if he had a weak chin you’d tell him, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, it seems I can’t marry you after all.’?”

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t still marry him; I’m saying I would go into the marriage informed, is all. I would know what I was dealing with.”

James stared glumly at the back of the seat ahead of him. He made no move to take her hand again.

“Oh, Jaaames,” Serena caroled softly.

No answer.

“James?”

He turned toward her abruptly, as if he’d come to some decision. “Ever since we started planning this trip,” he said, “you’ve been putting up little…walls. Setting limits. No staying in the same room together; has to be on a Sunday…Four measly hours we were there! We spent more time traveling than visiting, pretty near! And I don’t get to see my folks so very often, you know. I’m not like you, living in the same city with them and practically in the same neighborhood, dropping in on them whenever you need to run a load of laundry.”

“Well, that’s not my fault!”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, “You know what I was thinking when we were riding up to Philly? I was thinking that once you’d met my parents, you’d decide we might as well stay over. We could take an early-morning train back in time for your class, you’d say, now that you’d seen they were okay.”

“I already knew they’d be okay, James. I just felt—and besides, I didn’t bring my toothbrush! Or my pajamas!”

He didn’t so much as change expression.

“Well, next time,” she promised him, after a pause.

“Fine,” he said, and he drew his phone from his pocket to check the screen.

They were passing a stretch of the Chesapeake Bay now—a wide sheet of water, matte gray even in sunlight, with lone birds hunched motionless on posts sticking up here and there. The sight made Serena feel melancholy. Homesick, almost.

This was all because of her cousin, really. Running into him had sent a kind of jagged feeling down the center of her chest, a split between the two parts of her world. On the one side James’s mother, so intimate and confiding; on the other side Nicholas, standing alone in the train station. It was like taking a glass bowl from a hot oven and plunging it into ice water: the snapping sound as it shattered.

“Could we ever maybe have a family reunion?” Serena had once asked as a child.

And her mother had said, “Hmm? A reunion? I suppose we could. Though it wouldn’t be a very big reunion.”

“Would Uncle David and them come?”

“Uncle David. Well. Possibly.”

Nothing about that reply had sounded promising.

Oh, what makes a family not work?

Maybe Uncle David was adopted and he was mad that no one had told him. Or he’d been written out of a will that had included both his sisters. (Even in her childhood, Serena read a lot of novels.) Or some sort of family argument had spun wildly out of control, the sort where outrageous remarks were made that a person couldn’t forgive. That seemed the most plausible explanation. You can’t think later what the argument was about, even, but you know that things will be changed forever after.