Chapter 11
chapter
eleven
Clover
Here is something I was not expecting about this morning: I am completely fine.
Not fine in the way I usually mean it, which is to say not fine at all but functional enough to pass a casual inspection. Actually fine. Genuinely, surprisingly, against-all-reasonable-expectations fine.
The bridal suite is full of women who have collectively decided that this morning is going to be beautiful, and the force of that collective decision is apparently strong enough to carry even me along with it.
Someone has ordered enough food to sustain a small village.
There is a mimosa in my hand that I am drinking at a responsible pace.
My hair, by some miracle of the universe and a stylist named Pilar who worked on it for forty minutes with the focused expression of someone defusing something, is behaving.
I am in my bridesmaid dress, which fits.
Something I was uncertain of until this morning, because the last fitting was six weeks ago, and I went through a brief but committed pasta phase in the interim.
Everything is fine. I am fine.
Juniper is at the vanity, and she is so beautiful it keeps catching me off guard.
Not because she isn’t always beautiful, she is, but because today there’s something else underneath it.
A quality of settled happiness that sits on her like light.
She catches my eye in the mirror every few minutes and smiles the specific smile she reserves for me, the one that means can you believe this and I love you and thank you for being here all at once.
Every time she does it I have to take a small breath to keep my tear ducts from activating.
I am keeping it together. I am a vision of composure.
Lizzie, Graham’s wife, is perched on the arm of the settee refilling mimosas with the generous hand of a woman who understands what mornings like this require.
She has a warmth to her that I clocked within about four minutes of meeting her, the kind that isn’t performed, that’s just how she moves through the world.
She’d pulled me into a hug when we were introduced and said I’ve heard so much about you in a way that made me feel like what she’d heard was good.
Emma, Bram’s wife, is beside her, curled into the corner of the settee with her shoes already off.
She has sharp eyes and a dry humor that I have decided I want to study and eventually replicate.
We spent twenty minutes earlier comparing notes on being the chaotic one in a family of capable people and I think we might be actual friends by the end of this weekend.
Rebecca, Heath and Graham’s sister, is standing at the window with her mimosa looking out at the beach where in approximately two hours her nephew is going to get married.
She’s tall and has the same steadiness about her that Heath has, that quality of being entirely comfortable taking up exactly the amount of space she takes up.
She’d looked at me when we were introduced with a thoughtful expression and said so you’re Clover in a way that suggested she had been briefed and was now conducting her own assessment, and then she’d smiled and said I can see it and moved on before I could ask what she meant, which has been occupying a pleasant corner of my brain ever since.
These women, I think, looking around the room at all of them, these women are going to be family.
Well, technically Juniper’s family, but mine by proxy.
I am not allowing myself to go down the mental road of what-ifs with Heath and me.
Not yet. We agreed to table the conversation until after Leo and Juniper’s wedding.
The thought lands somewhere warm and stays there.
“Pilar, you are an actual genius,” I say, catching another glimpse of my own hair in the mirror. “I want you to know I have been fighting this situation my entire life and you have made it look intentional and elegant. I don’t think I’ve ever managed elegance in my entire life.”
Pilar, who is currently applying something to Juniper’s cheekbones with a brush the size of a finger, glances at me in the mirror with a professional satisfaction. “Your curls are beautiful. They just need direction.”
“Don’t we all,” Emma says from the settee.
“Story of my life,” I agree.
Juniper laughs, soft and happy, and Pilar makes a small noise of protest about keeping still, and the room settles back into the warm hum of women getting ready together and I think, not for the first time this morning, that I am genuinely okay.
That whatever happens after this weekend, whatever Heath and I figure out or don’t figure out, right now in this moment, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Because my sister has found her person, and that is what truly matters.
The door opens.
I know before I turn around. I don’t know how I know. Some shift in the room’s atmosphere, a subtle change in pressure, the way Lizzie’s mimosa hand pauses almost imperceptibly on its way to someone’s glass. I turn around and there she is.
Kiki. Leo’s mom.
Juniper had given me the lowdown on things last night
She is, I will give her this, extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of beauty that is crafted and manufactured. It’s hard to tell what she’d look like without all the artifice.
She’s wearing something ivory. It’s not white, but it’s definitely in the white family which rankles me. What kind of woman tries to upstage her future daughter-in-law? Juniper glances at the woman, then looks back at the mirrow witout missing a beat.
KiKi’s blonde hair is perfect. Her smile is the kind that makes you feel, for just a moment, like you are the exact person she was hoping to see.
“Juniper, darling.” She crosses to my sister with her arms out, but Pilar blocks the onslaught.
“Do not touch her yet, I am still working,” Pilar says.
KiKi look taken aback, but quickly hides it. “You look absolutely stunning.”
“Thank you, Kiki,” Juniper says, warmly and without inflection.
Kiki steps back and does a slow survey of the room. She acknowledges Lizzie and Emma and Rebecca with polite nods, but she obviously knows she’ll find no warm welcome with those three.
Then her eyes find me.
“And you must be Clover.”
“That’s me,” I say.
She looks at me, assessing, measuring and ultimately I feel I must come up lacking in her eyes. But the smile doesn’t waver, and her voice when she speaks is warm as anything.
“What a fun name,” she says.
Fun. Not unusual or distinctive or even pretty. Fun.
“Thank you,” I say, because I am a person who has been called worse and also because Juniper is sitting three feet away in her wedding dress and I am not doing anything that makes this morning harder than it needs to be. “Your dress is beautiful.”
“This old thing.” She smooths a hand over it in a way that suggests she has not been thinking about this dress for weeks.
“I almost didn’t come today, you know. A wedding is such an intimate thing.
But Leo insisted.” She sighs with the light resignation of a woman who is very accustomed to being insisted upon. “I couldn’t say no.”
She drifts closer to me. The other women watch her closely, without inviting her into their midst. I hold my mimosa and smile. Today is my sister’s day and I will not allow anyone to ruin it for her.
“I hear you and Heath had quite the adventure getting here,” she says. Conversational. Light. Like we’re talking about delayed luggage.
“Bit of a travel day,” I agree.
“Heath does love to play the hero,” she says, with a small fond laugh that contains within it an entire revisionist history of a marriage. “He can’t help himself. It’s almost sweet.” She tilts her head. “He can be very charming when he wants to be. Very attentive.” A pause. “At first.”
There it is. There’s the shape of what this is.
I look at her pleasantly. “He’s been very kind,” I say, which is true and also tells her nothing.
She seems to recalibrate slightly. I watch her do it behind the smile.
“Of course he has. Heath is kind.” She says it the way you say of course the weather was nice, as if it is a small thing and not the whole point.
“He’s just—well, you seem like a perceptive girl.
I’m sure you’ve already noticed that he’s very married to his work.
Very absent.” She lowers her voice slightly, the register of shared confidence, of one woman leveling with another.
“It’s not a criticism. It’s just who he is.
I would have hated to see you invest in something without the full picture. ”
I consider this.
I consider Kiki, who left her son and his father and has spent twenty years being called by her first name by the child she didn’t raise, offering me the full picture.
I consider Heath on the plane, listening to every ridiculous word I said with his complete and unhurried attention.
Heath ordering food in the middle of the night because he noticed I hadn’t eaten.
Heath who arranged my room and upgraded it before I even knew he owned the building, not because it was easy but because it was the thing to do.
Maybe there’s a chance the Heath I’ve known for the past twenty-four hours is—as Kiki is implying—not the man he really is.
But somehow I doubt it. I think Kiki’s “full picture” is a load of bullshit.
Maybe she was too selfish to see the man he was when she had him or maybe she just can’t stand the thought of him finding happiness with someone else.
Or maybe she’s just the kind of person can’t stand it when the focus is on someone else.
I’m sure she would love to see this ‘tête-à-tête of ours end with me in humiliated tears and with the spotlight away from Juniper.
Too bad. Neither of those things is going to happen. Not on my watch. Nothing is getting in the way of my sister’s wedding day.
Besides, I’m looking forward to getting to know Heath myself.
“That’s really thoughtful of you,” I say, and I mean it pleasantly and I mean it to land, and I can see from the slight shift behind her eyes that it does. “I appreciate you looking out for me.”
She blinks. Reassembles. “Of course. I just know how he can be.”
“I’m sure you do.” I smile. “Can I get you a mimosa?”
It’s not a victory exactly. It’s more of a draw, which with a woman like Kiki I am choosing to count. She takes the mimosa and drifts away toward the window, and I turn back to the room and find Emma looking at me from the settee with an expression of open appreciation.
She raises her glass slightly. I raise mine back.
Lizzie leans over and says quietly, “Well handled.” She glances around the room, then lowers her voice even more. “I’ve only met her a couple of times, but she does love to stir up trouble. All in the name of attention. Much like my toddler.”
That makes me chuckle.
I feel pretty good. I feel, in fact, quite excellent. I handled a thing. I stayed. I did not call 9-1-1 and flee the scene.
And then Kiki, who has drifted to stand near Juniper while Pilar finishes her makeup, says something.
I don’t catch all of it. I catch the shape of it.
Something about whirlwind romances. Something about these things said in a tone that classifies these things as a category of mistake.
Something about the best intentions and so young that lands in the vicinity of my sister’s face while my sister is sitting in her wedding dress forty-five minutes before she marries the man she loves.
I set my mimosa down on the nearest surface.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
My voice comes out different than it was before. Not loud. Not hot. Just very clear and very direct, stripped of all the pleasant social padding I had deployed up until this moment. Every head in the room turns.
Kiki turns too. She looks mildly surprised, which satisfies me.
“Did you just suggest that my sister’s marriage is a mistake?”
“I was simply—”
“Because I want to make sure I understood you correctly.” I cross the room, not quickly, not with any drama, just steadily, until I am close enough that this conversation is clearly between us and not for the room.
“Juniper is the most level-headed person I’ve ever met.
I trust her judgment implicitly. While I haven’t known Leo for long, I’ve seen him with my sister and there are no doubts as to how he feels about her.
No, they haven’t known each other for long, but time only measures time.
It doesn’t measure anything else.” I hold Kiki’s gaze and I do not look away.
“So if you have something to say about her choices, on her wedding morning, in her bridal suite, I am genuinely curious what you think gives you the standing to say it. Is it the length of your first marriage? Or perhaps the sheer number of husbands you’ve had? ”
Am I being kind? Absolutely not. But you do not go after my sister. It is the only time I release my claws.
The room is very quiet.
Kiki looks at me for a long moment. The careful, beautiful face doesn’t crack exactly, but something behind it shifts.
“I meant no offense,” she says. Which is not the same as an apology and we both know it.
“Great,” I say. “Then we’re all good.”
I pick my mimosa back up. My hand is completely steady, which surprises me, because my heart is going at approximately twice its normal rate.
Rebecca, from her position at the window, makes a small sound that might be a cough or might be something else entirely. When I glance at her, she is looking out at the beach with an expression of perfect composure, except for the fact that she’s grinning like a fool.
Juniper catches my eye in the mirror.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to. The look she gives me is the one that means I love you and thank you and I saw that all at once, and it is worth every bit of the adrenaline currently working its way through my system.
I settle back into my spot. Lizzie tops up my mimosa without being asked.
“So,” Emma says, into the quiet, with the timing of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. “Pilar. Do you think you could do something with my hair or is it a lost cause?”
The room exhales and shifts and moves on, the way rooms full of women who have decided to have a beautiful morning will do, and Kiki finishes her mimosa near the window and leaves shortly after without saying much else, and I stand in my bridesmaid dress with my well-behaved hair and my topped-up mimosa and I think that I have never in my life felt quite so much like myself as I do right now in this room with these people.