12. Marnie
Marnie
The rehearsal is at five on Friday and the dinner is at seven at a supper club on the lake with a walleye special and a deck that holds forty.
Everything that can go sideways in a day goes sideways in that day.
The officiant's flight from Denver gets pushed and he arrives at almost six.
Drew's grandmother's oxygen concentrator does need a dedicated circuit.
The florist delivers eleven centerpieces instead of twelve and the twelfth arrives after six in the front seat of a Honda Civic.
I handle all of it. I'm good at this. Nobody in this family has ever had to wonder whether something got handled.
Sherry is a wreck from the first minute.
That's not a criticism. I've watched her since four o'clock and it's real, the way her hands won't stay still, the way she keeps stepping back from clusters of people she doesn't know.
Her whole face is one long apology. At the run-through she stands off to the side by the arbor and cries while April and Drew practice their turn, and April sees, and goes to her, and hugs her for a long time in front of everybody.
Keith watches that with his hand over his mouth.
April is overwhelmed. She's been up since five. She's got a rash on her chest that she gets when she's stressed and has had since she was nine, and I put my hand on her back at one point and she leans into me like a kid.
At 7PM, in the parking lot of the supper club, Gretchen finds me with the clipboard.
"So on the ceremony," she says, "Keith mentioned a change to the front row. He wanted to check whether we could get the reserved cards reprinted tonight or whether we just move them by hand tomorrow."
Everything in me goes very quiet.
"What change."
Gretchen looks at her clipboard. She's a professional. She has run four hundred of these and she can hear a temperature drop through a parking lot.
"He asked about putting Ms. Corbett to his left. He said it was still being discussed."
"When did he ask you that?"
"About twenty minutes ago."
"Move them by hand," I say. "Nothing changes. Seat one is Erin, then Nathan, then me, then Keith, then Roz, then Ms. Corbett."
"Got it."
"Gretchen."
"Yes?"
"If anybody asks you again tonight, the answer comes from me."
She nods once and goes, and I stand in that parking lot for about ten seconds with my hands shaking.
Inside, they're seating people for dinner.
I find Keith by the bar.
"Can I talk to you."
We go out the side door onto a little strip of grass between the building and the boat racks, where the noise from the deck comes over the roof in bursts. There's a light on the wall with about two hundred bugs going at it.
"You asked Gretchen."
He exhales. "I was asking about logistics."
"You told her it was still being discussed."
"It is still being discussed."
"No, Keith." I'm keeping my voice down and it costs me everything.
"It was discussed Wednesday night and I said no, and you texted me at seven in the morning that you'd figure it out, and I thought that meant you were going to tell her no.
It meant you were going to keep going until you found somebody who'd say yes. "
"That's not, not what happened.” He turns and puts both hands on top of his head. "You know what today was for her? Do you have any idea? She stood there and watched a rehearsal for a wedding she found out about on Facebook."
"I know exactly what today was for her."
"Then why can't you give an inch?"
"An inch." I laugh. "An inch."
"One row. One chair."
"You already have the chair, you got the chair on Tuesday, this is the next chair."
"It's my ex-wife, Marnie, and my daughter, and one hour of your life, and I cannot for the life of me understand what you think you lose."
And then he says it.
He says it fast and loud, right into my face, with the bugs going at the light and forty people on a deck twenty feet above us.
"For once, can you remember that April had a mother before you?"
The world does a thing.
I don't know how to describe it any better than that.
I've had twenty-two years of this man and I have been angry at him and disappointed in him and I have loved him through a bankruptcy scare and a dead father and eleven months when he slept at the office, and nothing he has ever done to me has felt like this.
I go completely still.
He's still breathing hard. He's already got his mouth open to keep going.
"No, Keith," I say.
He stops.
"April had a bio mother before me." My voice comes out low and even and terrible. "She needed a mom after she left. She needed somebody to be with her, day in and day out, and to be with her by her side.”
"Marnie."
"Twenty-two years." I take a step toward him, and he actually gives ground, my husband, six-foot-one, gives ground on a strip of grass.
"Do you want the list? Because I have the list. I have the chicken pox and the seven surgeries between three kids and the night she was fifteen and I drove to Roseville at one in the morning to get her out of a car with a boy who'd been drinking, and I never told you because you'd have lost your mind, and I sat with her in the driveway until three. "
"I know."
"You don't know, that's my point, you don't know a third of it, and you're not supposed to, because that's the job, the job is that you don't see it.
" I can hear myself getting loud and I can't reach the thing that stops it.
"But you don't get to not see it for twenty-two years and then stand in a parking lot and tell me that woman is the one who was here before me.
I was here, Keith. I was here at 2 a.m. by her side with a fever thermometer and a bottle of cough medicine. Where was she?"
"That's not what I meant."
"Then what did you mean?"
"I meant biologically. That's all I meant."
"Biologically." I nod slowly. "Great. Wonderful. That's the part of motherhood that counts more than everything I’ve done for our daughter. Nice to know, thank you for explaining.”
He puts a hand out toward my arm and I step back from it, and I watch that register on his face, and something in him finally, finally cracks open.
"Marnie, I'm sorry. I didn't. That came out wrong, that's not what I think, you know that's not what I think."
"I don't know that."
"Come on."
"I don't know that anymore, and I'd like to. I'd like it back."
"Then let me fix it. Tell me what to do right now, tonight, and I'll do it."
I look at my husband under the bug light.
"Not tonight," I say. "Our daughter gets married in seventeen hours. Go inside and give a toast."
And that's when I see Nathan.
He's standing at the corner of the building by the ice machine with two beers in his hands, one for him and one for Drew, and I have no idea how long he's been there, and from the look on his face it's been long enough.
He doesn't say anything to me.
He walks past both of us, and he stops in front of his father, and he looks at him with an expression I have never seen on my son, twenty years old, that face.
"Wow," Nathan says.
Then he goes inside.