Sex Lessons with My Worst Enemy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sunday Dinner

Whitley arrives at Bernie's Sunday table with a sugar-sweet invitation and gets sent off the stoop; Anson turns up with a pie and wins the room, and Bernie asks what Callie did to him.

By Sunday noon the whole street had seen the video.

Bernie's neighbor across the hall had played it for her on a phone the size of a dinner plate.

My grandmother met me at the door of her half of the duplex with a wooden spoon in her hand.

"Bring him to dinner," she said.

"Gran, it's not like that."

"I watched a man take a microphone out of your hand in front of eighty people. It's exactly like that."

She went back to her roast.

I texted Anson from the hallway with my heart in my throat.

He wrote back right away.

"When?"

At five, the table in Bernie's dining room held a dozen people and a ham.

The neighbors came every Sunday.

There was the retired mailman, the two sisters from upstairs, and a man who fixed furnaces.

There was also a young couple with a baby, and they ate more than the rest of us put together.

Bernie sat at the head with her glasses on a chain, watching the door.

The bell rang at five past.

Anson stood on the stoop in a plain dark sweater, holding a pie in both hands like a man carrying a bomb.

"It's cherry," he said. "I wasn't told what she likes."

"She likes pie," I said.

"Good. I stopped for three kinds."

He had three pies.

Bernie looked him up and down for a very long time.

"You're the one who's been mean to my granddaughter for six years," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Sit by me."

He sat by her.

I watched from the far end of the table as my grandmother interrogated him over the ham.

Where did he grow up, what did his father do, did he wash his own dishes.

He answered every question in that dry, steady voice, and somewhere around the potatoes the furnace man started laughing at something he said.

By the time dessert came, the mailman had asked for his advice on a letter to the city.

I was being charmed at my own table by my worst enemy, and I couldn't stop it.

The doorbell rang again at seven.

Bernie didn't get up.

I did, and opened the door on Whitley.

She stood on the stoop with a cream envelope in her hand and her hair blown perfect by the wind.

"I won't stay," she said softly. "I just wanted you to have this from me. In person."

It was a wedding invitation.

Heavy paper, gold edges, my name in calligraphy.

"Callie Knutson and guest," she read aloud, and smiled past me into the dining room.

Eleven faces had turned toward the door.

"I hope he comes," she said. "I hope he comes and sits with us. I think everyone should get to know him."

Behind me a chair scraped.

Bernie came up the hall at her own pace, one hand on the wall, and stopped at my shoulder.

"Whitley Cade," she said.

"Hi, Mrs. Knutson. I was just..."

"You ate at this table for ten years."

Whitley's smile held.

"You licked the pan. You cried in my kitchen the night your mother left. I sat up with you."

"I remember. I'm so grateful..."

"Then you know what this table is." Bernie's voice stayed even. "It's not a place you bring a knife."

The furnace man had stood up quietly in the doorway.

The mailman had too.

Whitley glanced at them and her color changed.

"I only meant..."

"I know what you meant."

Bernie took the envelope out of her fingers and dropped it in the hall wastebasket.

"Good night, dear. Mind the step."

She shut the door.

Nobody said anything for a second.

Then the youngest neighbor's baby banged a spoon on the table and the room broke up laughing.

Anson was looking at me over the heads of the room, and he wasn't laughing.

He was smiling, quiet and warm, and I felt it right in my chest.

Afterward he rolled his sleeves to the elbow and washed every dish in the house without being asked.

Bernie dried beside him and hummed.

I stood at the counter pretending to wrap leftovers and watching his hands in the suds.

At ten he left with a foil package of ham under his arm and a lecture from the mailman about parking.

When the door closed Bernie caught me by the elbow and steered me into the kitchen.

She shut the swinging door behind us.

"That boy," she said, low, "looks at you like a man who's already apologized."

I opened my mouth.

"What did you do to him, Callie?"

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