Step-Ball-Change by Jeanne Ray Page B

sort of soup. Chicken soup. I made the noodles myself in the kitchen of a friend who had an apartment. I spent my birthday making noodles and soup, and when I took it over to Tom’s, his roommate told me he had gone to the game. At the time I’m certain I had been furious, but now it seemed funny. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you remembered?”
    “Why do you think? It didn’t come up for ten years, and when it finally did, I was thrilled that you had forgotten. I’d done something stupid and you had the decency to forget it.”
    “So why did you want to marry me?”
    Tom mulled over the question in the dark. Maybe he hadn’t thought about it in forty-two years, or maybe he had never thought about it, but the answer was a long time coming. “It was the soup, I think,” he said finally. “You had left me the soup even though you knew I wasn’t sick and I had lied to you. When I went over to talk to you that night, you said you could never date a person who lied and that was that. I went back to my dorm and I ate the soup. It was so wonderful. I kept thinking, Where am I ever going to find another girl who would spend her birthday making me soup when she thought I was sick? Where am I going to find a girl who would still give me the soup even though she knew I was a lying creep? The more soup I ate, the worse I felt about the whole thing.”
    “You married me because the soup was good?”
    “I asked you to marry me because after the fight I missed you. I figured if I missed you that much then you must be the person I was supposed to marry.”
    “But that’s not the same as being completely sure.”
    “Well, that depends. Is being sure you don’t want to be apart from someone the same thing as being sure you want to be with them?”
    “It’s probably close enough.”
    Tom slid one arm under my waist and pulled me to him and pulled himself over to me. I put my head on his chest and listened to his heart. It had been the single most consistent sound in my life. “Do you want to tell me what’s stirred all this up?”
    “You were right. It was Kay. She wants to know how a person is supposed to be sure about who they marry.”
    “First you find someone who knows how to dance.” Tom rubbed my hip, the little knot that was always there. He found it and untied it. “Then you wait to see if they bring you soup.”
    I kissed him and then broke away to pull my nightgown over my head. I dropped it on the floor and then I kissed him again. “And if they bring you soup?”
    “Marry that person immediately.”



chapter eight

    T HREE DAYS LATER L ILA B ENNETT CALLED AND INVITED me to lunch. I immediately regretted not having made the preemptive strike. We should have invited the Bennetts out to dinner, then the four of us could have met together. Tom and I could have touched our shoes under the table in the reassuring way we did in certain social situations. We could have dissected the evening in the car on the way home and made something funny out of it no matter how badly things might have gone. But it was all too late for that. She had asked and there was nothing to do but to go. I was on my own.
    “Shouldn’t we invite Tom and Scout?” I had asked hopefully on the phone. It was Sport. Sport. Scout was the little girl in To Kill a Mockingbird .
    “Just the mothers this time,” she had said to me, graciously ignoring my gaff. “There’s so much work to be done.”
    “Well, you can’t wear any of this,” Taffy said, sliding my clothing piece by piece down the bar in the closet while I sat on the bed.
    “Oh, come on, there has to be something in there.”
    She held up my favorite black blazer, tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so.”
    I was a fairly secure person, but I knew that fashion wasn’t my strong point. I tended to favor clothes that could be worn over other clothes. “What about the dark purple dress?”
    Taffy laughed and closed the closet door. “Forget this. Come with