4
My mother was waiting out front when we pulled up, but she didn’t know it was us because she was watching for my Corolla. I had to roll down my window and call, “Mom!”
before she realized. Then she came over and peered in. “Why, Max,”
she said when she saw him.
“Hi, there,” he said.
“He’s going to have to stay at my house tonight because he brought a cat,”
I told her.
“A cat,” she said.
“And Kenneth is allergic to cats.”
She still looked a bit uncertain, but she opened the rear door and got in.
She was a lot more dressed up than I was—blue-and-white-flowered silk, high heels, patent leather purse—but in her old age she’d grown scrawny and her dress hung on her like a sack.
(She wouldn’t buy any smaller-size clothes because she claimed she’d never get her money’s worth out of them, meaning she expected to die at any moment, although she was perfectly healthy.) It always made me feel a little sad these days to see her.
She was in high spirits, though. “Isn’t this exciting?”
she asked as she shut her door.
“Very exciting,” I said.
“How did Debbie’s spa day go?”
“It went fine,” I said.
“Women have all the fun, don’t they? I bet Kenneth and his friends didn’t have a spa day!”
“Nope,”
I said. “Kenneth went to work as usual, I believe.”
Mom gave a little bounce in order to smooth her skirt beneath her. “And it’s stopped raining!” she said.
“Mm-hmm.”
I wasn’t rising to the occasion sufficiently; I was aware of that. Maybe Max was, too, because once we were on the road again he glanced at her in the rearview mirror and said, “How’ve you been, Joyce?”
“Very well, thank you,” she said.
He used to call her “Mom.”
Then after the divorce she said, “I guess ‘Mom’ is kind of misleading now, don’t you think?”
Probably she meant he should go back to “Mrs.
Simmons,” but when he switched to “Joyce” she didn’t correct him.
She was in new territory, after all; we’d never had a divorce in our family.
She really didn’t know how to handle it.
And I was not much help.
She kept asking me why.
She said, “I just don’t understand what could have gone wrong,” but all I said was, “Oh, you know how these things are.
No one outside of a marriage has the least notion what’s going on inside.” I did try to make it clear that Max should not be blamed.
Even so, though, she developed a polite but distant tone with him on the rare occasions she saw him.
Now she said, “You’ve done something to your hair, I think,” and her shift of focus away from Max was so abrupt that he said, “No…”
before he realized it was me she was addressing.
“I got a kind of comb-out,” I said.
“Very nice, dear.”
On other weekdays we’d have had rush hour to deal with, but Baltimoreans leave work early on Fridays and the streets were all but empty. The church wasn’t far, anyhow. (It was Kenneth’s parents’ church. Our own family didn’t have one.) “I hope we’re not late,”
my mother said, gazing out at a bus stop where a single old man sat waiting. “They might decide to start without us.”
Max said, “No, no, we’re the ones doing the starting. Have to give the bride away, don’t you know.”
“They still give brides away?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The church parking lot held just a few cars, widely scattered, but while we were getting out of Max’s car another one pulled up next to us, a convertible with a young man at the wheel, no doubt one of the ushers, and he joined us as we walked toward the church. “Hello there,”
he said. “Dave Lewis,”
and Max said, “Gail and Max Baines. And this is Gail’s mother, Joyce Simmons.”
“Ah, yes, you two are giving the bride away.”
I said, “Well, not—”
but Max overrode me. “Right,” he said.
We climbed the front steps and entered the foyer, which smelled like furniture polish.
The church interior was small but elegant, with an elaborately carved pulpit up front made of some dark wood.
The pulpit was where the action was.
Everyone stood clustered around it, listening to the minister say something about the organist.
But Debbie was the one I was looking for.
I found her standing at the edge of the group, between Kenneth and his parents.
Even from behind I could tell she’d pulled herself together.
Every hair was in place, and she had traded her jeans for a long full skirt.
One of Kenneth’s hands was resting possessively on her waist, but she kept a bit separate from him, I thought.
Or maybe I was imagining that.
It was Kenneth who spotted us first. He turned and said, “There they are!”
and then Debbie turned too and said, “Oh, good,”
and they came over to us.
No one would have guessed Debbie had recently been crying.
And Kenneth seemed very much his normal, sunny self—a pleasant-faced, calm young man with a shock of straight blond hair falling over his forehead and an engagingly lopsided smile.
He said, “Hi there, Deb’s Gram,” which was how he always addressed my mother, and he pecked her on the cheek and gave me a hug.
I stayed rigid and merely endured it, but I don’t think he noticed.
“I just want to warn you,”
Max was telling him, “I may be contagious.”
“Contagious?”
Kenneth asked.
“Got a little cat dander on me.”
“Yes, I heard,”
Kenneth said, but he didn’t sound alarmed. “Well, I did bring my inhaler, if worse comes to worst.”
“Inhaler!”
Max and I said in a single voice.
Kenneth blinked.
“Kenneth actually went to work today,”
Debbie told us. “Can you believe it?”
This wasn’t news to us, of course. It was merely her way of claiming him, making sure we understood that she was still in his corner; so I said, dutifully, “Oh, my,”
and shook my head.
Then here came his mother, dark-haired and stylish and looking way younger than me. “Good evening, Gail!”
she said. “And this must be Max! Hello, Max, so nice to meet you, finally. I’m Sophie, and this is Rupert,”
because Kenneth’s father was close behind her. It was his fair coloring that Kenneth had inherited, but Rupert had a plumper face and the beginnings of a paunch. “And Elizabeth,” Sophie added. “Kenneth’s sister.”
“Ah,” I said.
Elizabeth turned out to resemble her father, soft-cheeked and a bit overweight.
She hadn’t made the same effort with her outfit as the others; she wore loose brown slacks and a casual overblouse.
Was it because her heart wasn’t really in this wedding? I felt distinctly hostile toward her.
Even though I believed her story, it seemed that in some way she had caused the story, merely by reporting it.
And her mother: Did she believe it too? Had she even heard about it? No, I wouldn’t think so.
She was holding both of Mom’s hands in her own and, “My goodness, Joyce!”
she was saying. “You look like a bride yourself!”
My mother raised her eyebrows. Everything Sophie said, as a rule, was about three degrees too vivacious. It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.
But we were creating a distraction, so we broke off and headed up front with Sophie to be introduced to the minister. Reverend Gregory, his name was. He seemed too elegant for a minister, with his smartly tailored slacks and the collar of his shirt standing up too deliberately at the rear. “Ah, yes,”
he said in an almost-English accent, “I’m delighted to meet Deborah’s loved ones,”
and he went on to explain that we’d be doing without the organist this evening, since she was in bed with a migraine, but that she would be with us tomorrow.
After that, Sophie turned to address the group as a whole.
“I suppose all of you know by now,” she said, “that Kenneth and Debbie seem to have something against the notion of a wedding planner.
But I’ve done some research on Google, and there are a few things I’d like to point out.” Which she proceeded to do, looking very happy to find herself in charge.
Who should signal the start of the processional, for instance; who should stand where, who should say what…
She had it all written down on an index card that she pulled from the depths of her purse.
I found this a relief, to be honest.
Better her than me.
I watched at one remove as she debated with herself about where my mother should be seated.
With Max and me in the front left pew, perhaps? Or with other relatives one row back, so she wouldn’t be left alone when we rose to bless the couple’s choice? No, wait.
Maybe Mom should join Max and me in the blessing.
But here my mother put her foot down. “Certainly not,” she said, and then to me, in an undertone, “Where would it all end? With your aunt Tess blessing them too? With random second cousins?”
We didn’t have any random second cousins that I knew of, but I said, “Good point, Mom. Let’s keep it simple.”
During all of this, though, I was secretly focused on Debbie.
I kept trying to figure out her state of mind.
Unfortunately, I could see her face only in profile.
When Kenneth murmured something in her ear, I wondered what it meant that she drew away to look at him.
When she laughed, I relaxed slightly.
“Nice that she didn’t get false eyelashes at that spa place,”
my mother told me. “What with those gorgeous lashes of her own.”
“Yes…”
“Will she just not wash her face till after the wedding, do you suppose?”
“No, a person is coming from Darleen’s tomorrow to do it all over again,”
I said, because I’d asked Debbie the same question.
Then someone behind me tapped my shoulder, and I turned to see a man who could only be Uncle…Jacob? He was lean and high cheekboned with iron-gray hair, clearly from Sophie’s side of the family. “Gail?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’m Jared Johnson. Remember me?”
I gave him a closer look “Jared?” I said.
Of course. I should have recognized him. Jared was who I’d been going out with when I met Max. Except he’d had a full beard back then, and coal-black hair that nearly reached his waist. “My goodness!”
I said. He hadn’t been half so handsome in those days, at least not that I’d been able to see under all that fur. And he had certainly not worn such a dignified suit.
“I had guessed it might be you,”
he said. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you ever since my sister began talking about the wedding. And…Max, isn’t it?”
“Hey there,”
Max said. I could tell he didn’t have a clue who this was.
“So you two ended up married,”
Jared said. “And divorced, I hear.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I’m divorced myself,”
he said. “Married a California gal and moved out west, but now I’m back east. Took an administrative job in College Park.”
“And Kenneth’s your nephew,”
I said. “Well, isn’t that—”
But then my mother sent me a look, and Max and I faced forward again to hear what Reverend Gregory had to say. He was clearing his throat in a preparatory way and ruffling through his notes. “As I understand it,”
he told us, “the bride does not rehearse walking down the aisle ahead of time. It’s considered to be bad luck. But might everybody else take their positions, please?”
People started sorting themselves out, Kenneth and Jared heading toward the front of the church while the bridesmaids and the ushers gathered at the rear.
I noticed Kenneth’s parents settling in the right front pew, so I steered Mom and Max toward our own pew.
Mom slid in first, followed by me and then Max.
Debbie took a seat next to Max, for the moment. This gave me a chance to lean past Max and ask her, “How’re you doing, honey?”
“Doing fine!”
she said brightly. “How about you?”
“Oh…,” I said.
“It’s a nice-looking church, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,”
I said, and I gave up and faced forward again.
Max said, suddenly, “Wait. Was that Jared Johnson?”
“Now you’ve got it,”
I told him.
“I’ll be darned,”
he said, and he cast a glance toward where Jared was standing next to Kenneth.
The two of us had never discussed Jared back in our courting days, probably because I had always been so offhand about him. But now Max seemed slightly unsettled. “Since when did he turn into such an…executive type?” he asked.
“No idea,” I said.
“Hmph.”
Unexpectedly, Reverend Gregory broke into song. “Dah-dum-dah-dum!”—the first few notes of “Here Comes the Bride,”
which I was fairly sure was not what Debbie and Kenneth had chosen for the processional.
After a moment of uncertainty, Bitsy took the arm of the usher standing next to her and started walking up the aisle.
She kept her free hand clutched in a fist in front of her waist, presumably to imply that she was holding a bouquet.
Caroline followed with Dave, the young man we’d met in the parking lot, and then along came Kenneth’s sister on her own.
I wished, wished, wished that Debbie hadn’t chosen Elizabeth to be her maid of honor! Why not Bitsy, for heaven’s sake, or Caroline? But maybe that was a matter of politics—cementing the relationship with her future sister-in-law.
(And also, perhaps, avoiding the need to choose one equally close friend over the other.) I’d even agreed with her, originally.
Never having been all that popular with my own in-laws, I had thought Debbie was starting out on the right foot. But this Elizabeth, with her butter-wouldn’t-melt expression and her don’t-care outfit!
Debbie was rising now, sidling out of the pew, going up front herself to take her place next to Kenneth.
The two of them faced Reverend Gregory, with the maid of honor and the best man on either side.
Reverend Gregory set his sheaf of notes upright on the pulpit and tapped them a few times before he laid them flat.
Then he raised his head and looked out over his audience. “Dearly beloved,”
he began, and then he said, “Et cetera, et cetera,”
and waved a hand dismissively. He turned toward where Max and I were sitting and asked, “Who is it who blesses this couple’s choice?”
Max took my hand, and we stood up. When he squeezed my fingers, we started speaking in perfect unison. Except that I said, “We do,”
and Max said, “Her mother and I do.”
I sent him a look, and we dropped hands and sat back down. “Where did that come from?”
I whispered, and he said, “Sorry, I think that’s how they worded it when my niece got married.”
Meanwhile, Reverend Gregory was continuing through a string of further “et ceteras,”
which gave an effect of sloppiness although I could see that he merely intended to keep things fresh for tomorrow. Kenneth and Debbie responded in earnest, though, when the time came. “I do,”
each said, almost defiantly.
“I now pronounce you et cetera,”
Reverend Gregory told them. “You may kiss the—sorry, will you two be kissing?”
“Absolutely,”
Kenneth said.
“You never know, these days,”
Reverend Gregory said.
Debbie and Kenneth kissed, but just a brief peck. I couldn’t tell a thing from it. I was watching, believe me, but to me they seemed perfectly normal.
Were we simply going to carry on as usual, then? As if nothing whatsoever had happened?
Reverend Gregory started singing, “DUM! DUM! Dah-dum-dum-dum-dum”—Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”—and Debbie and Kenneth turned to walk back up the aisle.
Jared and Elizabeth fell in behind them, with the other attendants following.
When Debbie reached the back of the church, she stopped short and flung something white high in the air and behind her. A pamphlet of some sort, it looked like. “What was that?”
Mom asked me, and Debbie said, “My bouquet!”
even though it wasn’t likely that she’d heard Mom’s question. “No, dear!” Sophie called, rising from her pew. “The reception is where you toss the bouquet! At the tail end of the reception!”
“Oops! Too late,”
Bitsy said, because she had already stooped to retrieve the pamphlet and she was holding it up triumphantly.
“What is this?”
Max muttered in my ear. “I thought we weren’t going to have a wedding planner.”
It could have been much worse, I didn’t tell him. He hadn’t heard Debbie’s day-to-day reports on her struggle to keep things low-key.
And now Sophie was calling out, “Does everyone know where the restaurant is? Does anyone need directions?”
We were going to the Silver Spoon, I’d been told—Sophie and Rupert’s decision, since the rehearsal dinner was supposed to be hosted by the groom’s parents. The Silver Spoon was considered one of Baltimore’s finest restaurants, so my mother clucked approvingly. “Do you suppose they still make their famous crab dip?”
she asked as we filed down the aisle.
“I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t,” I said.
“And the waiters still pour the wine from two feet above people’s glasses?”
“That I’m less sure of,”
I told her. “It seems a kind of 1970s thing to do, don’t you think?”
“We could hope, though,”
my mother said.
And we stepped out of the church into rain-washed late-afternoon sunshine, where everyone stood smiling and blinking and looking celebratory.
* * *
There would not be any speeches or formalities at this dinner, Sophie had assured me.
It would be just your regular restaurant meal, with a minimum number of diners ordering their own food and chattering among themselves at a single long table.
Except that Kenneth’s father had apparently not been informed of this, and he clinked a fork against his glass as soon as the wine had been poured.
(From an unremarkable height, I noticed.) “I’d like to welcome all of you,”
he told us, “but most especially Deborah. The newest member of the Bailey clan!”
Debbie murmured, “Why, thank you,”
no doubt assuming that this was the end of it, but no, he had to go on. “The very first time we met her,”
he said, “I told Sophie I had a feeling that this might be The One. Didn’t I, Sofe?”
“You did, dear,” she said.
“?‘You just watch,’ I told her. ‘We haven’t seen the last of that young lady.’ This was at Thanksgiving, mind you, a year and a half ago. Debbie brought a pumpkin pie that she had baked from scratch. The most delicious pumpkin pie, and I don’t even like pumpkin pie!”
There were chuckles around the table, and my mother, sitting next to me, murmured, “Quite rightly.”
“But this pie,”
Rupert went on, “had, I don’t know, something fluffy beaten into it, whipped cream or something, so that it wasn’t even orange anymore but more like, let’s say, beige; and I said to Sophie, I said, ‘She wouldn’t go to all that trouble if she was just some casual date coming for a free meal. Mark my words,’ I said.”
Sophie said, “All right, well—”
“And sure enough, just before Valentine’s Day—three and a half months later, is all!—Kenneth comes to the house and says, ‘What do you think?’ and hauls out this diamond ring in a Stieff box. ‘I’m going to ask Debbie to marry me,’ he says. Well, we were thrilled! Sophie got kind of teary, in fact.”
“That’s true,”
Sophie told us. “But anyhow—”
“So here’s to you, dear Debbie,”
Rupert said, and he raised his wineglass. “I hope you’ll be very happy in our family!”
The others raised their glasses too, and murmured, and Debbie smiled and said, “Thank you, Rupert,”
and took a sip from her own glass. But I was sitting diagonally across the table from her, close enough to see that as soon as she set the glass back down, she stopped smiling. And really, the smile had never reached her eyes.
I looked over at Max, two seats away from her, but he was beaming at her fondly and I could tell he suspected nothing.
Who did suspect, though, was Kenneth. He was sitting next to her, focused on her so watchfully that he seemed to be expecting her to give a speech of her own. And even when she didn’t, even when she let go of her glass and picked up her menu, he went on studying her.
I’m a worrier; I admit it. I’m always jumping to the worst-case scenario. But this time, I swear I had good reason. I swear he was trying to find out if she had believed his story, and he suspected that she had not. And what’s more, he was right: she had not. She was distinctly unhappy.