Chapter Eight
Eight
Ah, LaGuardia. The cursed pit of nothingness. I had no idea when I first moved to New York that I’d spend so much of my time here—you never consider practicalities like that when you’re daydreaming.
Today, I’d welcome a delayed flight—a canceled one would be even better—but lucky me, everything is right on time.
There will be no divine intervention for me this morning; I’m going to this engagement party whether I like it or not.
I spend most of the flight imagining (or is it dreading?) my reunion with Shannon and what’s to come.
Since it’s a gathering thrown in her honor, at least she won’t be able to avoid me. Not the whole time, anyway.
I thought by flying in from out of town the day before the party I’d be spared most of the preparations, an assumption that is swiftly corrected when I leave the terminal and find my mother waiting for me at arrivals.
I can tell right away she means business: she’s got a full face of makeup on but is head to toe in athleisure, her sunglasses perched atop her asymmetric bob. She bestows a kiss on my cheek, then rubs the residue of her lipstick away with her thumb.
“Let’s go,” she instructs me. “We have to get to Costco.”
Her shopping list is enormous. She carries around a little clipboard while I push the shopping cart, efficiently ticking off each item as we make our way up and down the aisles.
“We’ll get these for your uncle,” she says, loading a bag of fat-free chips into the cart, her flip-flops smacking against her heels as she moves. “He needs to be more mindful of his cholesterol. You know they put him on those pills?”
I did not.
We go until the cart is piled so high that I can barely maneuver it. I narrowly avoid mowing down a small child when I swing it around the end of the frozen aisle.
Mom maintains a steady stream of conversational nothings as we go, filling me in on all the latest happenings with our neighbors, and then my cousins, and even a tidbit about our dentist, who’s been getting awfully close to his new hygienist.
—
I feel a rush of nostalgia when we pull up to the house, a picture-perfect snapshot of suburban living with its chestnut-brown roof and rolling green lawn. For as much as I say that I hate it here, it always feels good to come home. It’s tranquil in a way that living in the city simply is not.
Dad is hard at work when we park up on the driveway, wandering around with his pressure washer and spraying down the stone tiles outside our front door.
He playfully douses the passenger-side window with water when Mom stops the car, a little comedy bit he’s been doing since my sister and I were teenagers and first learning to drive.
His shoulders slope more than they did back then, and the bald crown on his head has gradually expanded outward, but the beat-up khaki shorts and the blue button-down he wears for housework are as they ever were.
The blessing and the curse of this place has always been the same: time passes, but nothing changes.
It takes me three sweaty trips to and from the car to get all the groceries inside, and Mom graciously allows me ten minutes to shower before I have to be back downstairs to help prep the veggies.
I sit at the worn oak table, my wet hair soaking the shoulders of my faded 2004 Track and Field Stars T-shirt. At the kitchen island, Mom gathers the ingredients for her famous onion dip.
“Your sister will be here tomorrow around noon,” she says, spooning the contents of the sour cream tub into the glass mixing bowl at her side.
“Great.” I keep my focus firmly on the celery in front of me, chopping a stalk down the middle with a solid thwack.
“Make sure those sticks are even.”
“They are.”
“And I hope you’ll be on your best behavior,” she adds, looking up from under her brows.
I mirror the action, tilting my chin down and my eyes up. “I will.”
“This is a big day for her,” she says, sprinkling her spice mix over the bowl. “We don’t want any…drama.”
“I’ve got it, Mom. I’ll be good.”
“Good,” she says, wiping her hands on her pink checkered apron. “Now where did I put that serving tray?”
—
The food prep alone takes us several hours. I catch glimpses of my dad now and then, but mostly he’s consumed by yard work until well after the sun goes down.
I buzz around the house like a diligent little worker bee, performing every chore my mother assigns to me until I finally collapse into bed around midnight and fall into a dreamless sleep.
It feels like seconds have passed when she flings my bedroom door open the next morning.
The alarm clock beside my head blinks 6:45 a.m.
“Get moving,” she tells me without so much as a good morning. “We need to finish setting up the backyard.”
—
Forgive me for feeling less than enthused about this party, because it’s the second time I’m attending it. My sister Shannon’s first engagement party was a little over two years ago. That wedding was never to be.
Whether for efficiency reasons or as a result of a complete lack of creativity, our family’s second attempt at hosting this gathering is a carbon copy of the first. The advantage of throwing the same party twice, I suppose, is that the setup is easy—simply do what I did last time.
Well. Minus one thing.
There have been upgrades here and there, of course. The menu now features expanded vegetarian options, for example, and the color scheme has evolved from peaches and cream to strictly black and white, as per the changing trends of the internet. Sadly, we have not updated the groom.
I’m dragging a Muskoka chair across the lawn by its huge wooden armrest when Shannon finally appears, sliding open the glass door and stepping onto the patio.
She is party ready, resplendent in a white linen dress that drapes across her left shoulder and shows her (really very natural) spray tan to advantage.
Her blond hair has been styled into perfect waves, brushed until they shine.
She raises a manicured hand over her eyes, surveying the scene.
Closest to her, on the deck, are the food tables, and dotted around the lawn are tall cocktail tables, borrowed from the church basement and covered in white linens.
There’s a drinks station set up on the far right of the lawn, which is really just a table with some empty glasses on it and a neat line of coolers beside.
Dad has painstakingly strung up our Christmas lights all along the perimeter of the back fence, and when the sun goes down later, the effect will be beautiful, casting the entire lawn and the old maple trees toward the back in a perfect golden glow.
A huge painted canvas stands sentinel on the patio, near the doors, left over from last time.
It reads she said yes in looped cursive handwriting, and then Shannon I can only wonder at what Shannon says about me.
“Sweetheart!” Mom calls out to me. “Your sister is here. Come and say hello!”
She scurries back inside, leaving the two of us out here alone, forced to acknowledge each other.
“I think the Muskoka chairs should be farther back,” Shannon says, skipping the hellos altogether.
“Sure.”
“Dan wants enough room to play Beersbee.”
“Makes sense.” Who wouldn’t want to play Beer Frisbee at their re-engagement party?
She watches silently while I drag one Muskoka chair, then the other, toward the back fence. I rotate them, ungracefully, nudging them into place with my hip.
Once they’re facing each other, I dust my hands off on my jean shorts and turn toward the house. “I’m all dirty, so I won’t…” I say, gesturing at her white dress.
“Yeah, don’t,” she says, stepping aside to let me through. She awkwardly pats my shoulder as I walk past. This is the first time we’ve seen each other in two years.
That my sister became the great stranger of my adult life would be a surprise to my younger self. We used to be so close.
Then came Dan.
To say I hate this man with the fire of a thousand suns would be putting it mildly. I’d pay good money to never have to see him again. Unfortunately for me, they don’t take credit cards in hell.
—
Mom takes one look at me when I come through the sliding glass doors and hustles me upstairs to make myself presentable, with explicit instructions to take my time and not to take too long.
“People will start arriving around two,” she warns me. “I want you dressed and downstairs so you’re here to greet them.”
Considering the role I played at the original engagement party, it would definitely be saying something if I wasn’t outside with the rest of the family, smiling at the guests.
It’s not only Mom who will be watching closely to see whether I make another scene: something tells me that for many of the RSVPs, I’m one of the main attractions.
—
I keep my vow to my mother and am downstairs, ready to go, at 2 p.m. sharp. I spend ages agonizing over my outfit to officially re-enter family life, torn as to whether to go with a look that says “innocent, contrite, sweet angel” or one that says “unapologetic demon dressed to kill.”