The PowWow

Thursday dinner at Jeremiah's had acquired, over the last several months, a quality of warmth that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the fact that a wedding was coming.

You could feel it the second you walked in. Rebecca had always cooked like she was feeding an army that might arrive at any moment, but lately there was something extra in it — a second dessert nobody had asked for, a new tablecloth that had appeared without explanation and would, I suspected, reappear in June with flowers on it. She hummed while she worked now. Actual humming. I'd clocked it three weeks running and hadn't said anything, because some things you let a woman have.

Jacob noticed none of this, in the way Jacob notices nothing that isn't scripture, food, or Naomi, which was itself a category that had recently expanded to include a fourth item: staring at Naomi with the low-grade, helpless contentment of a man measuring joy.

"You said something?" I asked him, halfway through dinner, after he'd missed an entire exchange about Isaiah's school schedule because his eyes had drifted, for the third time, toward the kitchen doorway where Naomi and Rachel were laughing at something with Rebecca.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said. "Never mind."

He went back to not listening. I let him. A man gets to be distracted the month before his wedding, even a man built like a landmark and generally as attentive as one.

Roiya's phone buzzed twice during the salad course and three times during the main, and each time she glanced at it with an expression that had graduated, over the last several weeks, from mild irritation to something closer to weather-worn resignation. Bishop, presumably, or whoever had replaced Bishop — I'd genuinely lost the thread somewhere in the last month, the rotation moving fast enough that I'd stopped trying to keep current roster notes.

Curtis, seated beside her, took the brunt of the actual conversation once dinner wrapped and everyone drifted toward the living room. I watched it happen from the corner of my eye while pretending to examine the dessert options — Roiya folded onto the couch beside him, phone finally silenced and face-down on her knee, and launched into what I gathered from body language alone was a comprehensive accounting of everything wrong with men generally and one man specifically.

Curtis listened.

That's really the whole sentence. He listened, with the attentive, unhurried patience of a man who had apparently decided, at some point I hadn't been present for, that this was simply a service he provided now — nodding at the right places, offering a quiet observation here and there that Roiya either took or waved off, never once checking his own phone, never once looking like he had anywhere else he'd rather be. I've known Curtis for years. I've watched him deliver forensic breakdowns with the emotional range of a man reading a grocery list. I had never, until roughly three months ago, seen him this patient with anything that wasn't a spreadsheet.

I decided, again, not to say anything about it. My restraint, lately, was reaching almost biblical proportions. Somebody should be commending me for it.

My own mind, meanwhile, wasn't fully in the room either, though for a different reason than Jacob's.

I'd been carrying a small velvet box in my jacket pocket for eleven days.

I want to be clear that I'd thought this through. I'd priced rings for two months before that, more carefully than I'd researched anything since seminary, walked out of four different stores before finding the one that made something in my chest go quiet and certain, and I knew — with the specific, bone-deep knowledge a man gets about maybe four or five things in his whole life — that Rachel was who I wanted across a table from me for the rest of however many decades the Lord saw fit to give us.

What I didn't know was when. I know I’d told her I would wait for her to be ready, but since I’d told her that, she’d been closer than ever and even brought up our future together on more than one occasion. Go team Levi.

Every time I turned the question over, I ran into the same wall: Jacob and Naomi's wedding was five weeks out, and every ounce of joy this family had to spare was already correctly, appropriately pointed in that direction. Rebecca's humming. The new tablecloth. Roiya's dress fitting, which I'd heard about in more detail than I'd requested. This was Jacob's month. His and Naomi's. I wasn't about to walk into the middle of it holding a ring box like a man who couldn't stand to let his brother have a single uncontested spotlight in thirty years of sharing everything else.

So I told myself: after the wedding. Give them their day, give the family room to celebrate one enormous, uncomplicated thing before I introduced a second one. It was the generous read. It was also, I suspected, a little bit of a coward's math, and I was self-aware enough to know the difference and not quite brave enough yet to close the gap.

I filed it. My filing cabinet was operating well past any reasonable capacity rating.

Rebecca came through with coffee once we'd settled — Jeremiah in his chair, Jacob and me across from him, Roiya folding herself into the corner of the couch with her legs tucked under her, Naomi and Rachel drifting in from the kitchen a minute later still finishing whatever conversation had been making them laugh. Curtis took the chair by the window, comfortable now in a way that had crept up on all of us gradually enough that nobody had marked the exact day he'd stopped being a guest and started being furniture, in the specific, treasured sense that word means in this family.

"Tell me about the boy," Jeremiah said, once the mugs were distributed and Rebecca had settled into a chair in the dining area with Rachel and Naomi with the attentiveness of a woman who intended to hear every word of every conversation.

I walked him through it. The house, the coffee, Isaiah on the floor with his GI Joes, the uniform, the ticker tape, the flowers that were nothing in particular. Jeremiah listened the way he always listened — completely, without interrupting, his stillness a kind of invitation for me to keep going until I'd actually finished rather than stopping where I thought the interesting part ended.

"Triple it," Jeremiah repeated, when I got to that part. Quiet. Turning the phrase over the way he turned over anything that mattered.

"That's a strange thing for a great-grandfather to say from beyond the veil," I said. "Strange thing for anybody to say, honestly. I've been to a few funerals. Nobody's ever come back to remind me about my portfolio."

"No," Jeremiah agreed. "They wouldn't."

I glanced at Jacob, hoping for backup, and found him only about sixty percent present — the rest of him drifting toward the dining room where Naomi had settled onto the seat next to Rachel's chair, the two of them and Rebecca now deep in some conversation involving a swatch of fabric that Naomi kept holding up to the light.

"Jacob," I said.

"Mm."

"You have anything to add, or should I just describe the wedding cake discussion happening across the room, since that's clearly getting more of your attention than demonic visitation."

Rebecca laughed — a warm, delighted sound, the sound of a woman who had waited a very long time to watch her son be distracted by something other than scripture and duty, and was thoroughly enjoying the novelty. "Leave him be, Levi," she said, not looking up from her area of the dining room table. "He's allowed."

Jacob had the good grace to look faintly sheepish, which on Jacob registered as approximately one degree of change in his eyebrows.

"I heard the flowers," he said. "Green. White. Nothing specific."

"You heard the flowers," I repeated.

"I hear everything," Jacob said, mild, and went back to watching Naomi hold up fabric swatches with the expression of a man for whom that particular activity had become, inexplicably and completely, the most interesting thing in the room.

Jeremiah let that pass without comment, which told me he'd clocked the same thing I had and decided, as I generally did, that a man gets some latitude the month before his wedding.

"Roiya," Jeremiah said. "What did you see?"

Nothing.

"Roiya."

Still nothing. She was looking at her phone again, thumb moving, the glow of the screen doing more to hold her attention than her own name apparently could.

Jeremiah cleared his throat. Not loud. Not sharp. Just present, the small deliberate sound of a man who had all the patience in the world and was choosing, on this particular occasion, not to spend more than one clearing of the throat's worth of it.

Roiya's head came up.

She looked at the phone in her hand like she was seeing it for the first time, hung her head for a second — genuine, if brief — and slid it into her pocket. When she looked back up there was something in her face for just a moment that I could have sworn was defiance, sharp and quick, gone almost before I'd registered it. The particular look of someone bracing for a correction and pre-loading the resentment before it even arrived.

But then she answered him, and her voice was even. Level. No edge in it at all.

"He's clear about details he shouldn't know," she said. "Uniform his great-grandfather actually wore, matches a photo Isaiah's never seen. Same with the ticker tape thing — nobody showed him that, ever, according to both parents. He described a garden that didn't match anything specific enough to trace, which honestly bothered me more than if it had matched something. Like the important part was the people, not the place."

Jeremiah nodded slowly, and something in his expression settled, the small private satisfaction of a man getting exactly the observation he'd been hoping for.

I looked at Roiya for a second longer than the conversation strictly required, turning over the flash of defiance I thought I'd seen and had apparently misjudged, because whatever had been in her face a moment ago, nothing was in her voice but competence and clarity. I decided I'd read it wrong. Tired eyes, bad lighting, a woman who'd had four phone conversations about her love life today and one about dead relatives, and any of that would put an edge on a person's face for half a second without meaning anything underneath it.

I let it go.

I've since had cause to wonder whether that was the right call.