Chapter 24
We decide to elope. The courthouse, I suggest, and your face falls.
“Weddings are about attention,” I tell you quickly, my hand tucked into the crevice of your elbow. “They’re about everyone else. If we just do this, just the two of us, at the courthouse, it will be about us.”
You like this, and you smile slowly, a Cheshire cat grin that stokes the disquieting sensation that’s ever present in my gut.
“What about your mother?” you ask. “Won’t she want to be there?”
“She’ll understand.”
A lie. My mom will be livid when she finds out I’ve excluded her from my wedding.
It will prove, in her mind, that she’s right about everything she thinks of me.
That I’m ashamed of her, of my upbringing.
That I’m better than her, with my expensive degrees, my white-collar work, my handsome fiancé with the dimple in his left cheek, with my engagement ring that costs more than every car she’s ever owned.
She’s so skilled at convincing me that our distance is all my fault. As though she wasn’t the one who left.
I’ll deny her claims. I don’t want a big wedding, Mom. I just want to marry my fiancé, and that’s all. It has nothing to do with you. As if that will be an easier pill to swallow. My mother struggles with comprehending that everything isn’t always about her.
“Friends?” I ask you. “Would you want to include any of your friends?”
“I don’t care about them.” Your left hand finds mine, pinches the diamond, turning my ring side to side.
“Sounds like we’re in agreement.”
I select a white dress that grazes my shins. I order it online, and of course it doesn’t fit exactly right. After it arrives, I meet Zoe for dinner. We go to the tailor first, and she smiles at me, almost shyly, as the seamstress tucks pins into the straps.
“You look beautiful, Klara,” she says. It’s all so fast. There’s a question in her eyes: Are you sure this is what you want—all of this?
There’s no answer in mine.
What could I say? I’m thirty-five and pregnant, and you love me in a way I’ve never been loved before. In a way that scares me, that leaves me breathless, that propels me forward down the only path that makes sense. And so how can I, always so prudent, stray from such perfect logic?
Zoe and I leave my dress with the tailor and walk to our favorite Chinese restaurant. We order two entrées to share. Zoe drinks dry white wine.
I wave the server away. “I’m fine with water.”
“Really?” Zoe asks lightly after he’s disappeared.
“Bit of a headache,” I tell her, fingertips to my temples.
I don’t say anything about the baby. I can’t.
Even though Zoe is my closest friend, and she has been since we lived in the same dorm room freshman year of college, I’m not ready to tell her about the life growing within me.
She knows too much. She knows I’ve never wanted children.
She knows that’s why things ended with Adam, the person I thought I’d marry.
And now here I am, less than a year later, preparing to marry someone else.
She’d press, she’d question, and I’m afraid of what I might say.
The smell of the food, the spice in the sauces, make my persistent nausea swell. I cut chicken and broccoli with the side of my fork and move it around my plate while Zoe watches, brows furrowed.
“Is everything okay, Klara?” she asks before sipping her wine, regarding me over the rim of her glass. “You seem… I don’t know. A little down. More down than you should be, considering.” She trails off, her gaze falling to my ring.
“Just the headache,” I insist, but she presses her lips together and waits for me to continue.
“It’s just a little fast, Zoe.” I reach for my water, avoiding her face, the unrelenting care in her eyes. “That’s all,” I insist. “I mean, this time last year, I was living with Adam. And now?”
“Now you’ve found someone who really seems to love you. He seems so devoted, Klara. But if you feel it’s too fast, of course you should slow it down. You don’t have some big wedding planned. What’s the harm in pushing things off for a few months?”
“You’re right,” I say, and I force myself to smile. And I pretend that’s an option, that a delay wouldn’t devastate or anger you.
“You know I’m just so cautious,” I tell Zoe. “I can be overly prudent.”
“Oh, I know,” says Zoe, smiling back at me, and I can tell I’ve reassured her.
“I’m sure it’s just that,” I say. “I’m worrying for no reason. I promise.”
When I get home, you kiss me like I was gone for weeks.
“How was it?” you ask. “How’s Zoe?”
“It was good,” I tell you, and I feel like a fool because you’re so perfect.
I sit beside you on my bed—our bed now—and eat an entire sleeve of saltines. You rub my feet with the pads of your thumbs, even though my feet aren’t sore.
That was it, my way of including my best friend in our wedding. It’s not nearly enough, but I don’t let my thoughts linger on that for too long. This is happening. We’re getting married.
Zoe isn’t there when I pick up the dress. I didn’t ask her to go with me, and she didn’t bring it up. I can’t pull her away from her work, her life, her baby to again watch me try on a dress I don’t want.
I slip it on, then stand before the array of mirrors, my reflection blurring, a hundred copies of myself, none of them familiar.
“It’s perfect,” I tell the tailor. “Thank you so much.”
I leave with the dress covered in translucent plastic, not sure that I’ve ever felt so lonely, although I can’t quite figure out why.