Chapter 1 #2
Sophie put Dennis and his wife beside the box of things going to the venue in the morning.
She had stopped telling Kelly about every alteration Lorraine made.
Her sister got angry, and then Sophie found herself defending decisions she hadn’t wanted to make in the first place.
Haley was worse in a different way; she remembered all of it and would ask three weeks later whether Lorraine had ever thanked her for rearranging the shower lunch.
When Jesse hung up, Sophie was rinsing her thumb under the tap. He reached around her to put the potato container in the sink.
“You could have said no,” she said. The water ran cold over her knuckles.
“To an extra couple of minutes with my mom?” He looked honestly surprised. “Come on.”
“You didn’t want an extra couple of minutes with me.” She regretted saying it before he answered, because now they were arguing over a dance and she sounded jealous.
“You’re getting the rest of my life.” He nudged her gently with his hip, trying for a smile. “She gets five minutes. I think you’ve come out ahead.”
Sophie turned off the tap. “That’s not what I meant,” she said, and dried her hands slowly.
“Then what are we doing?” He spread his hands. “She’s excited. It’s her only son’s wedding. Let her have her song.”
Sophie uncapped the damaged pen and wrote the new running time beside the old one. There would be less time for the guests to dance before Nina, their wedding photographer, left. In the morning she could ask what it would cost to have her stay later.
“Fine,” she said. She folded the towel over the oven handle and pulled the two ends level.
Jesse waited a moment, then kissed her shoulder. “I’ll call the DJ in the morning,” he said. “You don’t have to do another thing.”
His mother owned the little workshop and office where he ran his electrical business.
Hank had fitted the benches himself, Lorraine charged less rent than anyone in town, and the glass front door still bore the gold lettering from the antiques shop she’d once kept there.
Jesse had offered to replace it; Lorraine said she liked seeing her name when she came to bring him lunch.
In July, Sophie had suggested they put the workshop lease on the same calendar as the mortgage and insurance.
Jesse had laughed because there was no lease, only a standing payment to his mother, and told her he wasn’t about to ask Lorraine for a receipt every time she did him a favor.
Sophie put the calendar away. They still needed to decide where to seat Ruth.
She leaned back against him. Tomorrow the planning would be behind them; no one would need her to approve a napkin or settle an argument about a cousin’s boyfriend. She and Jesse would be married, and they could get back to the ordinary life they were good at together.
He picked up the box of cards and carried it to the front door. Then he came back for her, and this time she let him lead her past the kitchen table and down the hall and into the bedroom.
By the following afternoon, Sophie had almost forgotten the song.
There had been coffee in paper cups, Kelly swearing at the weather forecast, Marianne fastening the little bracelet Sophie had borrowed from her.
Haley had cried when the veil went on, denied it, and gone to find a tissue with half her makeup still to do.
In the car to the venue, Sophie had looked down at her hands and imagined the second ring beneath her engagement ring. She had sent Jesse a picture of her bouquet resting against the seat, carefully keeping her dress out of the frame, and he had answered before they reached the next light.
Hurry up. I want to marry you.
She had read it three times, smiling at the screen.
Sophie had one hand under the hem of her wedding dress when Lorraine stepped out of the reception hall. She was looking at Lorraine’s face when she began to smile, already forming the compliment she had offered every woman she had passed since leaving the car.
“Wow, you look gre—” Sophie stopped on the shallow step. The chiffon moved around Lorraine’s ankles, white against the dark stone, and Sophie let go of her skirt.
Lorraine smiled back. Her dress had a fitted bodice covered in tiny pearls and clear beads, sewn so thickly along the neckline that they flashed when she turned her shoulders.
Beneath the waist, layers of white chiffon fell to the ground, the outermost panels lifting in the breeze to show more white underneath.
The hem brushed the stone when she took a step toward Sophie.
There was no colored lining, no print, no jacket to break up the white.
A sheer shawl lay across Lorraine’s arms, its edges weighted with the same pearled beading, and three clusters of pearls gleamed in her pinned-up hair.
At Sophie’s second bridal appointment, a woman in the next fitting room had bought a dress with less embellishment than this.
Two women beside the reception doors stopped talking. One looked from Lorraine’s skirt to Sophie’s, then dropped her gaze so quickly that Sophie felt heat climb beneath her makeup. Beyond them, someone called Lorraine over for a photograph, and Lorraine lifted a finger to ask for a minute.
Sophie had chosen her own gown in February.
Marianne had come out of the fitting room with her blouse buttoned wrong after crawling under the skirt to look at the hem, and Kelly had laughed until Sophie started laughing too.
They had eaten cheap noodles afterward because the alterations were more than Sophie expected.
She remembered holding the dress bag upright on the train all the way home, refusing the empty seat so nobody could step on it.
Lorraine had seen the photograph from that appointment. She’d sent a voice message saying that an open back was a brave choice for a church-going girl, though Sophie hadn’t been to church in years, and Jesse had told Sophie to take a compliment when she got one.
Now Lorraine’s pearl-covered bodice caught the same sun as Sophie’s. Sophie could hear the photographer asking for a little room on the path, and couldn’t make her feet move out of anyone’s way.
“There she is,” Lorraine said, opening her arms. “Our beautiful bride.”
Sophie took the offered embrace because stepping away would have been conspicuous.
Lorraine smelled of the expensive bath powder she kept in a crystal dish, and the beading at her neckline scraped Sophie’s bare shoulder leaving a faint red mark.
Two white skirts pressed together around their feet; Sophie stepped back carefully to keep her heel off Lorraine’s hem.
“Careful of the veil,” Sophie said. She backed away and looked down at the chiffon again.
The florist had wired a pearl into Lorraine’s corsage at Sophie’s request. Sophie had seen it in a tray and remembered the earrings Lorraine wore every day; now she could barely distinguish her gift from everything Lorraine had bought to wear with it.
Lorraine was supposed to be wearing a sage dress.
Lorraine had stood on a little platform in a fitting room with her chin raised, one hand on her hip, looking elegant and pleased with herself in the picture she’d sent Sophie.
Sophie had sent back three green hearts and shown Jesse the picture while he was brushing his teeth.
“Your mother found her dress,” she had told him. He had leaned over her shoulder with toothpaste at the corner of his mouth and said the color would look good in the garden.
Now Lorraine was adjusting the edge of the white shawl. Her nails were pale pink, and the shoes beneath her hem had small pearl buckles.
“What happened to the green dress?” Sophie tried to sound casual. A server came through the door carrying empty champagne flutes, and she stepped aside.
Lorraine glanced at the server. When she turned back to Sophie, her voice was low enough that Sophie had to lean closer to hear.
“The cleaner ruined it. I nearly cried when I picked it up.” She smoothed the chiffon over her stomach. “There was nothing to be done.”
“When did that happen?” Sophie could hear the string quartet warming up beyond the low garden wall.
“Yesterday, sweetheart. You had enough on your mind.” Lorraine reached toward a curl beside Sophie’s cheek and tucked it behind her ear, undoing what the hairdresser had spent several minutes arranging. “This was the only thing that fit properly.”
Sophie looked at the pearl buckles. Yesterday Lorraine had attended the rehearsal in navy linen and announced that she had collected everything for the wedding, right down to Hank’s pocket square.
“You could have called me,” Sophie said. Her smile felt caught against her teeth.
“And made you worry about my clothes? Goodness, no.” Lorraine laughed softly.
Hank appeared in the doorway with a folded program. His tie was sage green, matched exactly by the square of silk in his breast pocket. He glanced between the two women and opened the program to the order of service.
“You look lovely, Sophie,” he said. He nodded toward the garden. “Good day for it.”
Sophie thanked him and waited for him to say something about Lorraine’s dress. He refolded the program.
“I should find my sister,” she said. She lifted her skirt again, too high this time, showing the white strap around her ankle.
Lorraine touched her arm. “You aren’t upset, are you? You went so quiet.”
Sophie looked at the hand on her skin. “I have to finish getting ready,” she said, and moved away before Lorraine could answer.
The bridal room smelled of hairspray and the fries Haley had smuggled in from a drive-through. Kelly was bending over a button on Marianne’s sleeve, her mouth full of pins, when Sophie closed the door behind her. All three women looked up.
“What happened?” Haley set her lipstick down without replacing the cap.
Sophie crossed to the window. From there she could see a corner of the stone path and Lorraine’s white shawl drifting out of sight beside Hank’s dark jacket.