Step-Ball-Change by Jeanne Ray

our best manners when the occasion arose. Tom’s leg was stiff from having been up and he hobbled a bit when he went to fix Trey a drink, but he was smiling, grateful for an excuse to leave the table. While he was up he got out a vase and put my roses in some water.
    “I’ve stayed so late,” Woodrow said, but it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. We had started dinner very early.
    “I don’t mean to break up the party,” Trey said.
    Woodrow patted Trey on the shoulder. “Don’t you think that for a minute. I got here at six-thirty this morning.”
    “Woodrow has a life of his own,” Tom said, and handed Trey a glass of cranberry juice with ice.
    “Could you give me a ride?” Jack said. “I came over here with George.”
    “I’ll take you back,” George said.
    But Woodrow said that he was going that way, even before Jack told him which way it was. They said their good nights and Woodrow gave Stamp a long scratch on the back of the neck and let him out to the full length of his leash. “He wants to be a good dog,” Woodrow told Taffy, and then we all said good night.
    Tom started picking up plates, but I told him to go into the living room with Trey for a while. I think he would have rather walked around with the dog hanging off of his leg than try to make any more conversation for the evening, but he and Trey went out to sit with Taffy. George and Kay helped me pick up the plates.
    “I’m thinking about killing you,” Kay said to her brother.
    “He’s a nice guy. What were you going to do, let him read about it in the paper?”
    Kay started stacking up plates. “Whatever I was going to do, it was my decision, all right?”
    “I’ll clean up,” George said. “Go on in the living room and hang out with your fiancé.”
    But then Kay put her plates back down on the table and started to cry.
    “Oh, God, Kay,” George said. The sight of Kay’s tears threw every member of our family into a panic. “Listen, I’m sorry.”
    “George,” I said. “Go into the living room. We’ll finish this.” I wanted to find a way to head this crying off at the pass. It wouldn’t be long before Trey would wander back out to the kitchen and then he’d want to know what Kay was so upset about. If she was to give in to the bout of weeping, there would be no stopping it.
    George looked helpless and utterly guilty, but I sent him away. Kay and I hadn’t had a minute alone since she had come in the night before to announce her engagement.
    “Do you want to talk about this?”
    She put her hands over her eyes and shook her head, but then after a minute of taking deep breaths, she reversed her decision and nodded. “I want to marry Trey,” she said.
    “That’s a good start,” I said. “What about Jack?”
    Kay went over and shut the kitchen door, which was never, never shut. Then she tore a paper towel off the roll and blew her nose. “Jack is Jack. Jack is never going to get married.”
    “And if Jack had wanted to get married, would you have married Jack?”
    She sat down on the floor next to Stamp and unhooked him from his leash. For this act of kindness he crawled into her lap and licked her neck. “What I wanted was something simple, something really clear and straightforward like what happened with you and Dad. I always imagined that one day somebody was just going to ask me to marry him and that it was all going to make perfect sense. And then Trey asked and it felt so great. Trey is a great guy.”
    “You don’t marry someone because they’re a great guy, you marry them because you love them, because you can’t imagine spending the rest of your life without them.”
    “I know all of that,” Kay said, rubbing the dog’s ears. She had forgotten that she had been mad at him. He was a dog, after all. “But who’s ever really sure? Say a client tells me he’s innocent—sometimes I really believe him, sometimes I’m almost positive, but how do you know? I mean, were you sure? When you and Dad