Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Iignore Jeff the whole walk back to the hotel, thinking only of roses and the man who changed my life today.
Jeff, meanwhile, turns into ten different people. He rages, demanding to know whose house this is. When I tell him, he calls me a whore. Then he cries, begs for my forgiveness.
I say nothing. I’ve learned from Clint just how much power there is in silence.
Jeff whines, telling me if I don’t feel bad for him then to think of his father.
At that I snort but still say nothing. His father barely looked at me anytime we were together. He called me Jeff’s little church mouse.
I don’t speak to Jeff until I get back to that beautiful garden behind the hotel. A few guests are there, stunned into silence when they see us. Jeff puts on his mask, smiling warmly. I realize, stunned, that that’s what he did for me, too, whenever I asked him anything of importance.
In the hallway, I head straight for the broom closet.
“Maggie, what the hell are you doing?” Jeff says. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
I fling open the door. “Do you really think I’m that pathetic?” I ask. “Also why did you fuck her here when you had a perfectly good room upstairs?”
Jeff looks around, hissing my name.
I comb the floor with my eyes. I see it, right away, lying right there in the middle of the floor.
I pick it up, then turn on Jeff, holding it between us like some kind of ward. I walk back out to the garden, Jeff following like the sad sack he is.
“You know,” I say as I push the door open and step out into the warm spring air, “my grandfather gave this to my grandmother on a dock, where she was waiting for him to come back from a fishing trip. He asked her to marry him, even though he was a penniless fisherman. She said yes, and they planned on raising my dad and whatever younger siblings he might have had in a little house by the sea, filled with love and books and whatever food she could grow in the garden and her husband could bring home with him on the net.”
Jeff blinks. “I know all this. You told me.”
“I did. A thousand times over. You promised me a life better than that. But you know what I know now? I know there is no better life than what I just described. With someone who makes you feel rich, no matter how poor they are by your standards.”
Jeff scoffs. “You don’t want a quiet life. You want the kind of life we talked about.”
I smile sadly. “You mean the one you talked about.”
He looks so confused I almost feel sorry for him. “But you said you wanted to make your mom happy!”
“I did,” I say. My stomach lurches knowing how much I’ll hurt her with this. She was so excited for me to get married.
Just then I hear, “Oh thank God.” And like I conjured her, there’s my mom, rushing up to me, throwing her arms around me.
I love my mom. We may not have a lot in common—she’s outgoing the same way Julia is, the same way Dad and I weren’t—but she’s never pushed me to be something I’m not.
She just wanted me to have what she had with Dad.
Mom holds me by the shoulders. “Are you okay, Magpie?” She uses Dad’s nickname for me. It makes my chest squeeze. “Jeff said you went missing,” she says. She looks down, taking in my outfit for the first time. “What happened to your dress?”
My eyes brim with tears. “I couldn’t breathe, Mom.”
“Oh, honey. Okay…well…it’s only for the ceremony. Your other dresses are in your room, you can change—”
But I shake my head. “I’m not getting married, Mom.”
Mom’s shoulders sag. But she doesn’t look surprised. She looks like she might have been prepping herself for this. “Why not?”
“She’s just having cold feet,” Jeff says.
I glare at him for speaking over me and open my mouth to tell her everything.
But Jeff looks at me, begging me with his eyes to make some excuse that doesn’t involve him. I know I’ve got his life in my hands. Do I hate him enough to ruin him?
“Maggie is just a little confused,” Jeff says. “She can get like that.”
But to my surprise, now it’s my mom’s turn to glower. “Excuse me?”
“I just mean…you know Maggie. She’s scared. Always hiding.”
Mom’s gone stiff. “Son, it sounds to me like she’s the only one not confused right now.”
Again, I swear Mom’s channeling Dad. Or maybe Grandma.
“Maggie, is there something you’re not telling me?” Mom asks.
I hesitate. But then, over Mom’s shoulder, I see Clint. I’m worried I might be imagining him. He stands in the glow of sunlight, next to one of his beautiful rose bushes. He smiles. It’s a big, broad smile, just like his father’s. Then he lifts his hands and signs.
“Keep going.”
He’s right. Jeff can’t be a pastor if he’s living a lie. I can practically see the words on the notepad appearing before me.
You’re not ruining him. He ruined himself.
“I caught Jeff having sex with his hair stylist,” I say. “Right here, on our wedding day.”
Several gasps erupt around us. I hadn’t noticed we’d drawn a crowd, mostly from Jeff’s side of the guest list.
Jeff goes pale. Then he turns murderous. “Right. So you went off and fucked the help!” he yells.
My eyes widen. I look over to where Clint stands. I think he’s too far away to have read Clint’s lips. But he can read body language. He can see Jeff’s red face; the spittle flying from his mouth.
He comes toward us, fists balled. I know they’re not for anything except to protect me.
But I sign, “Stop.”
Clint halts immediately.
“I’ve got this,” I whisper, knowing he can’t read my lips and hoping he understands.
“Jeff,” I say, voice hard.
But to my shock, my mother steps in front of me.
“I will thank you to keep your temper in check around my daughter,” she says.
It’s in that moment I realize I didn’t just get my righteous sense of justice from my dad.
“Don’t you know what your slut of a daughter just did?” Jeff asks. “She just ruined my life, and yours!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I yell.
“Just full of profanities too. She—”
But he doesn’t get to continue, because my mother slaps him, hard, across the face.
Jeff gasps, holding his cheek. “Did you all see that?” he cries. “I was assaulted!”
“Oh, we saw it,” Julia says. She arrived without me noticing, but she appears now, next to me, holding up her phone and grinning wide. “You know this is exactly the kind of thing that people would eat up on social media. You could go viral for calling your fiancée a slut.”
She turns to me, winking. “It looked like you had this in hand.”
I hug Julia, laughing, while people tsk and start to heckle Jeff.
Mom.
I let go of Julia, turning to my mother, devastated to have brought her into this.
She’s shaking.
But she looks almost gleeful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her let loose like that.
“Thank you, Mom,” I say, stunned.
“Well. You can thank your father. It was he who taught me a little rage can help a woman breathe.”
I hug her next. Over her shoulder, Jeff still stands there like a dingbat.
“Scram, Jeff!” I say, having no idea what I ever, ever saw in him.
“Yeah, scram!” Julia says, laughing.
I recognize it was a weird word choice, but that’s me. I make the weird word choices. What can I say, I’m a book nerd.
“Maybe Clara will feel sorry for you and take you in,” I tell my ex-fiancé.
“Clara left as I was arriving,” Mom says. “I thought she’d finished your hair!”
The three of us laugh then, a little manically.
“Scram!” someone shouts from the crowd gathered around. I’m stunned to see Jeff’s assistant was the one who yelled it. He winks at me.
Finally, Jeff slinks off.
It’s only once I’m gone that I look back to where Clint stood, not embarrassed about what just happened, but hoping he saw me be brave. He doesn’t know quite how big this was for me, or my mom, but somehow, I know he’d be proud.
But Clint is nowhere to be seen.
Heart dropping, I tell Mom and Julia I’ll be back, then head for the main hall, where everyone except Jeff’s family and a few of his most loyal church friends has stuck around to enjoy the party.
I head for the counter, seeing if maybe I can get someone to call him. Behind the counter is a woman in her sixties, dressed in a smart pantsuit.
“You must be the bride,” she says. “Maggie, is it?”
“Yes,” I say. We’ve never met—Jeff’s mom arranged everything once I picked the venue.
“I’m Linda,” the woman says. “And I suppose I should say the bride no longer.” She glances toward her computer screen, which I see has a security feed pulled up with a direct view of the garden.
I wince. “Yes, that’s me. I’m so sorry for all the commotion.”
But to my surprise, the woman only shakes her head.
“I’ve seen much worse. Anyway, your bill was paid weeks ago by your…
ex-fiancé’s family. Incidentally”—she lowers her voice and leans across the counter conspiratorially—“that man has been trying to buy me out for years. Honestly I was tempted. I’m of a certain age, and this place needs a refresh.
But thanks to the appalling behavior of his son, I now have good reason to wait for a better buyer. ”
Of course. This is the woman Clint told me about. His cat’s named after her mom.
“Anyway, the place is yours to do as you please for the remainder of the weekend. Just know all the alcohol goes on a growing tab, so…have fun.” She winks.
“Thank you,” I say, laughing. “Want to join us? We’re calling it a Jilted Bride Jamboree.”
At that she laughs long and hard. “Goodness, I can see why Clint likes you.”
I freeze.
The woman smiles. “You were going to ask me to find him, weren’t you? I’m so sorry, but he doesn’t have a cell phone, and…well, I think he probably needs a little air.”
“Oh,” I say, because, of course, she’s probably right.
“He left you these, though,” she says, reaching behind the desk and pulling out my rose and a piece of paper torn from his notebook.
I hold them like precious jewels, tears welling yet again. “Thanks,” I say, praying he didn’t leave these as a goodbye.
She smiles, turning back to her computer.
I think about what to do next. I want to go back to the garden to see if Clint’s magically reappeared.
But I realize I can’t do that. I won’t. Because what I want to do is continue to be brave. To not run away when things get hard.
I’m about to leave, but I find I can’t. Because there’s something I need to know. “Linda?”
She looks up.
“What will happen to him? If you sell?”
Linda sighs. She seems to consider whether to tell me to get lost or to be real with me.
When she comes around the counter and grasps my hands, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter option.
“When I talked to his father about selling this place after my mother passed, years ago now, he told me Clint would never leave. When I asked him if he’d want to go and meet a girl somewhere, his father told me he already had, when he was ten years old, and that there was no one else in the world for him. ”
My stomach and heart seem to collide inside me.
Linda sighs. “When I saw the way he turned to a ghost seeing whose wedding was on the schedule, I knew it was you.”
My throat feels thick with tears. “Oh,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say.
“Now listen, don’t you worry about Clint.
He has no expectations. I don’t know what will happen when I sell.
I’ll put it in the contract that he needs to stay, but you know that won’t be binding once the deed is handed over.
” For a moment, she looks deeply sad. Then she gives her head a little shake.
“But I’ll leave him with a good severance.
And if he’s not with you…I don’t imagine he minds too much where he is. ”
But that’s where she’s wrong. I know he wouldn’t want to lose his home. She’s telling herself that so she doesn’t feel terrible about uprooting him. But I can see in her eyes how she’s tired and ready to move on. She can only do the best she can.
But her best isn’t good enough.