2. Charly
— ? —
Charly
“Your aunt cannot sit with my coworkers.”
“She’s a delight at parties.”
“She got escorted out of a Cheesecake Factory.” I drag her little paper square to the far edge of the seating chart, past the dance floor, practically into the parking lot. “Half my unit has put grown men in restraints. Professionally. I’m not handing them a reason.”
“Put her with my college guys, then.” He sets two mugs of tea on the table and drops into the chair beside me, close enough that his knee slots against mine and stays. “They’ll adore her. She can bore them with the casino story.”
“Your college guys are the reason we need a second bartender.”
“See, this is why I love you.” He leans in and presses a kiss to my bare shoulder, then another one an inch higher, slow about it, his stubble dragging against the strap of my tank top. “You plan for disaster. It’s very romantic.”
“One of us has to.” The chart blurs when he does that, all the names going soft, and I tip my head to give him more room because three months out from the wedding, I’m allowed to be stupid about my own fiancé in my own kitchen at eleven at night. “You’re not even pretending to help anymore.”
“I stopped helping ten minutes ago.” His mouth moves up the side of my neck, unhurried, and his hand slides flat across my stomach to pull me back against him. “You hadn’t noticed. I was starting to take it personally.”
“The chart is important.”
“The chart can wait until tomorrow.” He turns my chin with two fingers and kisses me properly, tea-warm and slow, the pen dropping out of my hand somewhere in the middle of it. By the time he pulls back I’ve lost my place on the table entirely. “There she is. Hi.”
“Hi yourself.” My voice comes out lower than I planned, and his grin says he heard it. “Tomorrow we have to go to the florist at ten o’clock. Peonies versus ranunculus. You swore you would come with me.”
A pause. The pause has a shape I already recognize, and my stomach knows it before he opens his mouth.
“The Whitmore people moved their meeting to ten.” He winces and catches my hand before I can pull it back, lacing our fingers, pressing his lips to my ring.
“I tried, babe. If I miss this one they’ll give the account to someone else, and I need the commission for the honeymoon.
I won’t miss Thursday’s cake tasting though, I already cleared the whole morning. I’ll be the first one there.”
“You said that about the venue walkthrough.”
“And I showed up.”
“Forty minutes late. The coordinator spent half the tour thinking I’d made you up.”
He laughs, and I let him hear me not laughing, so he spins my whole chair around with both hands and gets down on his knees on the kitchen tile, eye level, thumbs running slow circles over my kneecaps.
“Hey. I know it’s stressful, handling this all by yourself.
” The circles keep going, an apology in a language only my knees speak.
“The chart, the vendors, the hundred emails. Three more weeks of crunch at work and then it eases up, I swear, and you get me at every appointment and I’ll know exactly whatever a ranunculus turns out to be. ”
“It’s a flower that costs eleven dollars a stem.”
“What the hell? That’s ridiculous.” His hands slide up to my waist and he pulls me forward off the chair, right into his lap on the kitchen floor, and I go down laughing because there’s no dignified way to resist a man who’s already won.
“Eleven dollars. We could fill the church with carnations and a bake sale and call it rustic.”
“I told the florist you’d say that.” Settling against his chest, I loop my arms around his neck. “She already hates us.”
“You’re a menace and I’m marrying you.”
“Worst mistake of your life.” He says it into my hair, arms wrapping all the way around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, gentle about it, and we sit there on the cold tile in the middle of the night, swaying a little to no music at all.
“Rebecca texted me, by the way. She’ll do the florist with you.
She said she already moved her morning around. ”
“Of course she did.” It comes out light. My sister keeps showing up before I’ve finished asking. “I hadn’t even told her the appointment existed.”
“She’s in PR, babe. Herding chaos is the whole job. Let her.”
“She color-coded my vendor spreadsheet. There are tabs now.”
“And God bless her for it.” He kisses my temple and hauls us both up off the floor, groaning about his knees the whole way, keeping me tucked under his arm. “One of the three of us should know what we’re doing.”
“Has my mother sent her card back yet?”
The question comes out of me without permission, flat, and the kitchen goes quiet around it. Adam reaches past me and sets the kettle down without pouring.
“Not yet, love.”
“It’s my wedding. The card has a stamp on it already. She licks the envelope, she puts it in the mailbox. It’s so fucking simple.”
“Babe, hey.” His arms fold me in from behind, chin coming to rest on top of my head, and I let myself lean back into him because pride is exhausting and he’s warm.
“Rebecca says she’s coming. Mom told her at lunch, apparently.
They had lunch.” My hands find his forearms and grip.
“Rebecca and I came out of the same body four minutes apart. But Mom will only drive across town to eat a Cobb salad with Rebecca and won’t put a stamp on a card for me.
Twenty-nine years and it’s always been like that.
It’s never once tipped the other way. That’s the part I keep getting pissed about.
It’s not that she isn’t coming. It’s that she told Rebecca and not me. ”
Adam doesn’t give me a speech. Rebecca’s version is always she’s proud of you, she just can’t say it to your face.
Dad’s version is give her time. He skips both, reaches over my shoulder, picks Mom’s name card up off the chart, and sets it dead center at the head table, in the exact seat I haven’t had the nerve to fill.
“She’ll be in that seat.” His arms close back around me, and his voice drops, quieter, just for me.
“And if she still can’t be warm to you, even there, even on your day, then everybody in that room is going to see it.
They’ll see her sit stone-faced at her own daughter’s wedding while you’re the happiest person in the building.
That’s not on you anymore, Charly. That was never on you.
You stopped being the problem a long time ago. She just hasn’t noticed yet.”
I stare at the little square for a long minute.
“I hate that that helps.”
“I know you do.” He turns me around in his arms and kisses my forehead, then the bridge of my nose, then my mouth, soft, no agenda, just punctuation. “Come to bed. The chart can lose the war without us.”
***
The bakery on Thursday smells the way heaven probably smells if heaven has a bakery. Diane has the table set before we even sit down, six slices fanned out on white plates, little flags in each one, a printed card at every chair.
Diane is the planner Rebecca found us. That means Diane is excellent. It also means Diane ran three of Rebecca’s work events before she ever ran my wedding.
“Okay, so.” Diane clicks her pen and looks across the table. “Rebecca, walk me through the tasting order, you wanted citrus first?”
“Citrus first.” Rebecca pulls the lemon plate toward the center, already in command of the table. “Charly burns her palate out if you start her on chocolate. I’ve watched this woman eat dessert for twenty-nine years. Trust the process.”
“I’m sitting right here. The bride is right here.”
“And the bride looks tired.” She hands me a fork, sweet as anything, and bumps her shoulder into mine. “You’ve got the bags under your eyes. We’re putting cake in you and fixing your whole life. Oh, and Mom says hi, by the way, we had lunch Tuesday, she’s obsessed with your centerpiece idea.”
The fork stops halfway to my mouth.
“You had lunch Tuesday.”
“Mm. She drove in.” Rebecca is already flagging the next plate, not looking up, the way you mention weather. “She looked good. She seemed a bit tired though, but good.”
I called her Tuesday night and got the machine, and I stood in my own kitchen leaving a message to a beep while my mother was apparently full of Cobb salad and opinions about my centerpiece, none of which she has said to me.
I put the fork down and pick my face back up off the floor and say nothing, because there is nothing to say at a cake tasting that does not detonate the whole room.
The door chimes. Adam comes through it with three coffees in a carrier and his tie already loose, ten minutes early after all that, and the relief that goes through me is honestly embarrassing.
He crosses the room, takes my face in both hands, and kisses me hello in front of Diane, the baker, and God.
“Told you I’d be first.” Another kiss, quick, to the corner of my mouth, before he drops into the chair on my other side and hooks his ankle around mine under the table. “Nobody decide anything important yet. The cake is the one part of this wedding where I plan to be insufferable.”
“You were insufferable about the band.”
“Well, I needed to choose the band.” He hands Rebecca her coffee, slides Diane hers, and picks up a fork, all business. “Run the cakes, Diane. I’ve been thinking about this since Tuesday.”
We go through the plates one by one. The almond sneaks up on everybody.
The chocolate makes Adam close his eyes in a way that’s frankly inappropriate for a Thursday morning.
But the lemon raspberry, that one rings a bell in me the second it hits my tongue, bright with the berry baked through the middle, and I know it’s the one.
“This one.” I tap the plate twice. “This is the cake. I would die for this cake.”