3. Charly
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Charly
The morning starts with a dog wearing a bow tie.
I’m half-zipped into my dress, mascara wand frozen mid-stroke, when the bridal suite door swings open and a golden retriever trots in like he pays rent here.
There’s a note tucked into his collar, cream cardstock, Adam’s handwriting slanting across it in that confident scrawl I’ve traced with my fingertips a hundred times.
Meet me at the altar. I’ll be the handsome one in the tux next to the priest. A
“Oh my God.” Rebecca’s hands fly to her mouth. “Did he get you a dog?”
“He got us a dog.” I’m already on my knees, dress be damned, and this ridiculous creature is trying to lick my entire face off while his tail wags hard enough to knock over the champagne.
“He got us a dog and put him in a bow tie and I am going to marry that man until we are both dead, Bec, I swear to God.”
“You’re going to destroy your makeup.”
“Worth it. Completely worth it.”
The door opens again and the temperature drops fifteen degrees.
My mother comes in like a cold front. She’s in the silver-gray silk she picked without asking me, and she does the thing she always does in a doorway, stops, takes the whole room in, and finds the one thing that’s wrong.
Today the one thing that’s wrong is me, on the floor, in my wedding dress, with a dog. Her face arranges itself into the smile she saves for photographs and funerals.
“Charlotte. You’re kneeling on the floor, you’re going to ruin your dress!”
“There’s a dog, Mom. Adam sent him to me.”
“I have eyes.” She snaps her fingers at Rebecca without looking at her. “Get your sister up. Fix her hair. We’re running out of time and she looks like she’s been wrestling in the mud.”
Rebecca mouths sorry at me and helps me to my feet while Mom circles like I’m a problem to be solved. Which, historically, I am. She adjusts my veil, tugging it this way and that, never quite meeting my eyes.
“Your posture is atrocious. Stand up straight. Rebecca, come show her how to hold the bouquet, you remember how beautifully you did it at the Hartley wedding?”
Of course she does. Rebecca does everything beautifully.
I watch my sister demonstrate how to properly hold my bouquet while Mom watches her like she hung the moon, and I love my twin too fiercely to resent her for it, but just once I’d like to be the daughter who gets looked at instead of looked over.
“Perfect,” Mom says. To Rebecca. About Rebecca. “Charlotte, exactly like that.”
I copy the position precisely. Mom frowns at me and I haven’t even taken a step and she adjusts my grip anyway.
The door swings open a third time and Dad steps through, and the whole room exhales. He’s wearing the sage green tie I picked out, the one that matches the bridesmaids, and his eyes are already wet.
“Don’t say anything,” he says, before I can say a word, already swiping at his face with the back of his hand. “Don’t look at me like that. Your dad is allowed to cry a little bit.”
“Dad. Come here.”
“You can’t blame me, sweetheart. You were five years old yesterday.
You had a gap in your teeth and a frog in your pocket and you told me you were never getting married because boys were disgusting.
” He crosses the room and takes both my hands in his, and his grip is warm and steady and everything Mom’s fussing wasn’t.
“And now you’re standing here in this dress, and I have to walk you down there and hand you to somebody else. So yeah. I’m going to cry.”
“Don’t start. If you start, I start, and Mom just fixed my mascara for the third time.”
“I’m not starting anything.” He’s absolutely starting something. Tears are actively rolling down his face. “I’m just looking at my little girl, who grew up so fast, and wondering when that happened.”
“Sometime around nursing school, I think.”
“You were working a double the night I decided to be a nurse. You missed the whole thing.”
He laughs, wet and rough, and pulls me in close. His mouth brushes my ear, voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me.
“Don’t tell your sister, but you’ve always been my favorite.”
“Dad. Stop. You can’t play favorites, especially with twins.”
“I know. I know we’re not supposed to, and I’d never say it where she could hear me.
” He keeps his voice low, just for me, his thumb moving over my knuckles.
“But you and me, sweetheart, we’ve just always had a thing I can’t explain.
Quiet people find each other. And your mom and Becca have got theirs, all that noise and sparkle, two peas. That’s just how the four of us landed.”
“That’s a very diplomatic way of saying Mom likes Becca better.”
“That’s not what I said.” But his mouth tugs, and he doesn’t argue it either.
He pulls back enough to look at me, fierce and wet-eyed.
“What I’m saying is you’ve got me. You’ve always had me.
And I will put that boy in the ground if he ever breaks your heart.
Shovel, forty acres, nobody ever finds him. ”
I’m grinning so wide my cheeks ache with it.
I’ve been grinning since the dog. I press my free hand flat to my chest like I can hold my own heart still, and I can’t stop bouncing on the balls of my feet, and somewhere down that aisle is the man who burned his hand twice just to see me, waiting to be my husband.
“Ready. God, Dad, I’m so ready. I’ve been ready for three years.”
“Then let’s go get you married, sweetheart.”
***
The first notes of the wedding march reach me through the doors and my eyes go hot before I’ve taken a single step.
I picked this song on purpose. Adam wrinkled his nose at it, called it the most predictable four notes in the world, and I told him predictable is what makes people cry, and look at me now, proving my own point before the doors are even open.
He’d grinned and promised to walk me back out to something with a beat. I dab under my lashes one more time and breathe.
The room is packed, every seat full and people standing along the back wall, and most of them I don’t even know. Adam’s side, mostly. Work friends, college friends, cousins I met once at a party.
A few faces I love scattered through the rows, the girls from my unit, my old roommate, Dad’s brother already dabbing his eyes. Candles glowing in tall glass jars. White roses spilling off every surface.
And none of it matters, because at the end of the aisle there’s Adam, and the second I see him the whole crowd goes soft and far away, all those faces dissolving into nothing, until it’s just him.
He’s not smiling. He never smiles when he’s overwhelmed, just goes still and lets his eyes say everything, and right now his eyes are fixed on me like I’m the only solid thing in the room.
Beside him stands Clarence, his younger brother, best man, hands folded, watching the aisle with that careful blankness he wears like a coat.
His eyes catch mine as I start walking, and his jaw tightens, there and gone, before the blankness closes back over it. I don’t have time to wonder about it. I have an aisle to walk and a man to marry.
“You’re shaking,” Dad murmurs, patting my hand where it grips his arm.
“That’s you, old man.”
“It’s both of us.” He huffs a wet laugh under his breath. “Slow down, sweetheart. You’re trying to run down the aisle. Let your old dad have the walk.”
One step, then another. The crowd blurs into silk and camera phones and carefully arranged emotion. Mom sits rigid in the front row, posture architectural.
Rebecca’s already at her place with the bridesmaids, one hand resting low on her stomach the way she stands when she’s queasy.
She gives me a smile that doesn’t quite reach the rest of her face.
Poor thing hates being up front, I think, and then Adam fills the whole world and I forget she’s there at all.
Dad kisses my cheek and whispers.
“I love you.” He places my hand in Adam’s waiting grip.
Except Adam doesn’t take it.
He kisses my cheek instead. Quick and light, the way you greet someone at a party you didn’t want to come to. And then he leans in, his mouth grazing my ear, and whispers:
“I’m sorry, Charly. I can’t do this.”
The world stops making sense.
Sound goes first, the string quartet fading to a hum and then to nothing, my own heartbeat filling up the silence like water flooding a room. I pull back to look at his face and he won’t meet my eyes. He’s looking past me.
I turn.
Rebecca stands a few feet away, frozen, her bouquet dangling from nerveless fingers, that hand still pressed flat against her stomach. And the gesture that meant nothing thirty seconds ago means everything now.
“Charly.” Adam’s voice comes from somewhere far away, underwater, wrong. He reaches out, not for me. His hand finds Rebecca’s, right there, in front of all of them, and that is the thing that guts me, not the words, the hand. “I never meant for this to happen.”
He’s not talking to me anymore. He’s talking to the room, to a whole crowd of witnesses in their wedding finery, and his voice cracks in the middle of it, and for one second he looks terrified of what he’s doing, and then he does it anyway.
“Rebecca and I, we didn’t plan it, but she’s pregnant and it’s mine. I can’t stand up here and marry you knowing that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The silence shatters.
Whispers erupt across the pews, did he just, her own sister, at the altar, and the sound of it crashes over me like ice water.
This is when I’m supposed to collapse. Let my body give out and someone catch me.
It doesn’t.
“How long?”
The voice that comes out of me doesn’t sound like mine. Flat and calm and absolutely lethal.
Rebecca flinches like I slapped her. “Charly, please, let me.”
“I asked you a question, Rebecca. How long?”
Her face crumples. “Since your birthday weekend.” Her voice cracks. “I’m so sorry, I never meant for it to be like this.”
My birthday. Before the proposal. Before the ring. Before any of it.