CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Alex
Now
Della said yes before he finished the sentence.
I know because Riley called her from the porch while I was still sitting there and I heard her response from three feet away without the phone on speaker.
She had opinions.
This was expected. This was, in fact, the entire point.
She called me a few days later, once she’d had time to properly begin plotting.
“Flowers,” she said. “What do you want for flowers.”
“Whatever you think,” I said.
A brief pause. “You’re going to let me decide.”
“I’m going to let you decide,” I said.
Another pause. Longer. “I’ve been waiting for this since you were nineteen years old.”
“I know,” I said.
“Don’t rush me,” she said. “I’m going to do this correctly.”
“Take all the time you need,” I said.
“Six weeks,” she said. “I need six weeks. We’ll do it the second Saturday in June. That gives the invitations time to land properly and gives me time to do this the way it deserves to be done.”
“Six weeks. June,” I agreed.
She hung up.
I looked at the phone.
Martina appeared in the doorway. She raised her eyebrows.
“Six weeks,” I said.
She took it in stride and went back to the kitchen.
The six weeks were Della’s.
That was the only way to describe them. She ran the operation with the authority of a woman who had been rehearsing it for decades and was not going to waste a single detail.
Riley reported back periodically with the equanimity of a man who had accepted that some things were beyond his jurisdiction and this was one of them.
“She asked me about chair colors,” he said one morning.
“What did you say?”
“I said chairs were fine,” he said.
“Good answer,” I said.
“She didn’t think so,” he said.
I laughed. He came around the table and put me against the refrigerator. The magnet behind my shoulder dug in. He kissed me like the six weeks were a problem he could solve with his mouth.
“Della’s chairs,” I said against his teeth.
“Don’t care.”
Martina’s radio was on in the next room. He stopped. Forehead to mine.
“June,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
My dress was simple.
I’d found it without looking very hard, which told me it was right. Cream colored. Nothing elaborate. Nothing that announced itself. The kind of dress that was about the person in it rather than itself.
Martina saw it and said nothing.
That was the highest compliment she had.
Arthur saw it when I was checking the hem and said it looked nice, which from an eleven-year-old boy on the subject of women’s clothing was also the highest compliment available.
Addy showed up on a Wednesday with a shoebox and an agenda.
“Something borrowed,” she announced, setting the shoebox on my kitchen table like she was presenting evidence. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper that had clearly been reused from some earlier gift, was a pair of earrings.
“These are beautiful,” I said.
“Wore them at my own wedding,” Addy said. “For all the good that marriage ended up doing me.” She waved a hand, dismissing her own joke before I could react to it. “I want you to wear them for yours. Consider it a good omen going the other direction this time.”
I turned the earrings over in my palm, small and warm from the tissue paper, and didn’t trust my voice for a second.
“Thank you,” I said finally.
“Don’t get weepy on me,” Addy said. “I’ve got exactly one good waterproof mascara and I’m saving it for the actual day.” She sat down across from me and helped herself to the pot of coffee I’d started an hour earlier, now lukewarm, without asking. “Where’s my favorite nephew-adjacent person?”
“Backyard. With Riley.”
“Good. I want to talk to you without an eleven-year-old editorializing.” She wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at me with an expression that was, for Addy, unusually careful. “I’ve been meaning to say something to you since that first Sunday. When you two showed up with him.”
I went still. “Okay.”
“You saw my face,” she said. “That first day. Don’t pretend you didn’t, I watched you watch me.”
“I saw something,” I admitted.
“I knew,” Addy said simply. “The second he walked in. Before anybody said a word about DNA tests or timelines or any of it. I took one look at that boy’s hands and the way he stood with his weight on one hip, exactly like Riley used to stand at fifteen, and I thought, well, there it is.
” She shook her head. “And for about four seconds, I felt something ugly. Not about you. About Joshua, mostly, and a little bit about years my family didn’t get to have with that boy.
I didn’t like myself very much for feeling it, because it wasn’t his fault and it certainly wasn’t yours.
Not really, after I thought it through.”
“Addy—”
“Let me finish, I rehearsed this in the car.” She held up a hand.
“By the time we sat down for dinner I’d already put it away, because a boy who squares a gravy boat with the corner of the table after a strange woman told him to loosen up is not a boy I’m going to hold a grudge against for existing.
I love him. I loved him by dessert. I just wanted you to know I saw it, and I felt something complicated about it for about the length of one car ride, and then I got over myself, because that’s what you do in this family.
You feel the complicated thing fully and quickly and then you show up for Sunday dinner anyway.
” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand, hard, the same ferocious grip from the day I’d walked back into Della’s kitchen.
“I wanted you to hear that from me instead of wondering about it for the rest of your life. You’ve got enough people in this family keeping things from you lately. I didn’t want to be one more.”
I hadn’t realized, until she said it, how much I’d needed exactly that. Not an apology, since there was nothing to apologize for, but an accounting. The truth, handed to me plainly, by someone who could’ve kept it easily and chosen not to.
“Thank you,” I said again, and this time my voice did crack a little. Addy let it, generously, without comment.
“Now,” she said, standing and refilling her coffee before I could stop her, “let’s talk about whether Mom’s going to let me give a toast, because I have several ideas and all of them are slightly inappropriate, and I would like your blessing before I workshop them on your future mother-in-law.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
“I’ll take that as a maybe,” Addy said, and went to find Arthur.