“Are you insane?” she shouted at Eleanor. “You crazy old—” Eleanor stepped closer to the fire, the flames lighting the lower half of her face. “Get out of my house,” she said. “Both of you.”
Nobody moved for several seconds. Then Margaret Whitmore, who was sixty-one and had spent most of her life watching her older sister absorb disrespect until it became impossible to absorb more, walked to the French doors and opened them wider. “You heard her,” she said. Harrison stared at his mother.
His face carried anger, shock, embarrassment, and something deeper Eleanor could not yet identify. He looked at the destroyed cake, then at the burning bag, then at Sloan, who was crying now from fury more than grief. For one absurd second Eleanor saw him as he had looked at eight years old when he broke a neighbor’s window with a baseball and stood in the kitchen waiting for someone else to decide how much trouble he was in. But Harrison was not eight.
That distinction mattered. “Mom,” he said again, quieter. “Can we just go inside and talk?” “No.”
“You’re making this worse.” Eleanor almost laughed. Sloan wiped at her face with both hands. “Making it worse?”
She burned my property in front of forty people. “And you destroyed her birthday cake in front of forty people,” Margaret said. “It was an accident.” “Don’t embarrass yourself further,” Eleanor replied.
Sloan stared at her. The calmness in Eleanor’s voice did what fury could not. It stripped the scene of ambiguity. Everyone at the party had watched Sloan swing her hip into the table.