It Took Him Forty Seconds to Understand, and She Thought About It for a Year

Dan arrived at ten to nine with the cake held out in front of him like something radioactive, and did not understand the problem for a good forty seconds.

Priya has thought about those forty seconds, on and off, for about a year.

He put the box down. He looked at the tables. He looked at her face, then back at the tables, and she watched him try several explanations and discard them, and the one he arrived at first, out loud, was:

“Maybe the hall people moved them. Cleaning.”

“The hall people did not sit your mother’s neighbour at the top table, Daniel.”

He looked again. This time she could see him actually reading it — table one, table four, the godparents gone from one and her parents gone to the other — and she watched the moment it landed, which was a small physical thing, a sort of drop in the shoulders.

“She’s got a key,” he said. “From the Scouts. She never gave it back.”

“I know. I told you that on the phone eleven minutes ago.”

“I know. Sorry. I was driving.”

---

Here is what Priya could not explain to her sister afterwards, and has never really managed to explain to Dan.

She was not angry that he had been slow. He is slow; she married a man who reads instructions. She was angry about the direction he had been slow in.

Because in those forty seconds he had not thought: somebody has been in our hall. He had thought: there will be an innocent explanation, and I would like to find it before my wife says the thing she is about to say.

He had been, for forty seconds, on the other side of the room.

---

“I’ll ring her,” he said.

“Don’t ring her.”

“Priya—”

“Don’t ring her.” She put her hands flat on the nearest table, which she noticed was shaking slightly, and which turned out to be her. “Because I know exactly how that goes. You’ll ring, and she’ll say she was helping. You’ll say it wasn’t her call. She’ll cry. Then you’ll spend twenty minutes telling her it’s fine, and then you’ll come back in here and tell me she’s very upset, and I will have to manage that as well as everything else. And Aanya gets christened at eleven whatever happens.”

“So what do we do?”

“We put it back,” Priya said. “And I’ll talk to her when she gets here.”

“Here? At the door?”

“At the door.”

---

It took nineteen minutes with both of them working.

She knows it was nineteen because Dan said it afterwards, in the car, in the tone of a man offering a comforting statistic, and she had wanted to hit him with the gypsophila. Nineteen minutes. As though the problem had been the time.

Her hands shook for about half of it, which annoyed her considerably more than the cards had. She kept having to put a card down and pick it up again to get it square. At one point Dan said, “Are you all right?” and she said, “I’m putting the cards back,” which was not an answer, and he took it as one.

She did the top table herself. She would not have been able to say why.

---

Her mother arrived at ten past ten, because her mother arrives early to everything as a matter of principle, carrying a foil tray of something that was not required and had not been asked for, and wearing the sari she had bought specially in April and shown Priya three separate times on video.

She went straight to table one. She put her handbag on the chair with her name on it, the way she does, claiming it. She looked at the room — the flowers, the cloths, the eighty cards — and she said, “Oh, this is lovely, beta.”

Priya said, “Thanks, Mum,” and went into the kitchen, and stood by the sink for about a minute and a half with the tap running so that nobody would come in.

---

When she came out, Dan was standing at the end of the hall holding the box of order-of-service sheets and not doing anything with them.

“You could still ring her,” he said. “Give her a bit of warning.”

“Warning of what?”

“That you’re — you know.” He shifted the box. “That it’s going to be a conversation.”

Priya looked at him for a second.

“Dan,” she said. “If I ring her now, she gets the drive over here to decide what version she’s going to do. If I say it at the door, I get the real one.”

He thought about that for slightly too long again, and then, to his enormous and lasting credit, he said: “Yeah. All right.”

“You don’t have to be there.”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

---

At twenty past ten, Priya went and stood by the double doors with the order of service sheets she did not need to be holding, and looked out at the car park, and worked through the sentence she was going to open with.

She had, by her own count, about nine versions of it.

At twenty-eight minutes past, a silver Honda came in off the road, rather fast, and parked across two spaces.

The door opened, and a hat came out first.