7. Marnie
Marnie
We don't fix it. We do the other thing, the thing long marriages do, where you both agree in silence to trim off the anger and keep walking.
He brings me coffee Thursday morning. I ask about the German distributor.
Finally on Friday night he says, "I shouldn't have said you were jealous.”
"No," I reply. “I’m careful. I’m protective.”
He says, "I know," and then he tells me a story about Devi's kid and their new kitten and I laugh, and that night we go to bed together once more.
Nobody apologizes for the actual thing. Neither one of us says the word jealous out loud again. It just sits in the house like a piece of furniture we walk around.
The bridal shower is the last Sunday of August at Katrin's mother's place in Edina, forty-one women, a tent in the backyard because it's ninety-one degrees, and a cake I picked up at seven in the morning because the bakery van broke down.
I'm there at eight. I do the tables, the drink station, the sign, the fans, the extension cords, the thing with the cousin who cannot be seated near the other cousin. By eleven I've been standing for three hours and my dress is stuck to my back.
Sherry arrives at 12:15 in yellow, carrying a scrapbook.
She's made a scrapbook.
It's not a big one. Twenty pages, maybe.
Photographs of April as a baby that nobody in our family has, because when Sherry left she took the albums from her side, and here they are, laid out with little handwritten captions in gel pen.
April at two weeks. Sherry in a hospital gown looking about nineteen.
April in a bouncer with a stuffed elephant.
April cries. All forty-one women cry. It's genuinely moving and I know that it is because I'm crying too, standing at the back with a serving spoon in my hand.
And for a moment, I feel good about everything because it’s a beautiful gesture. Sherry Corbett gave my daughter something that day that I could not give her. Nobody else on earth had those pictures.
Then the whole afternoon does the thing it does.
Sherry insists on being helpful in a way that keeps landing near me.
She refills the lemonade I just refilled.
She fixes the banner I hung. When someone asks where the extra chairs are she says, "Marnie, do you know?
" and I say the garage, and she goes and gets them, and someone says, "Isn't she wonderful. "
Every time she crosses a line she steps back over it so fast that the only person who saw it is the person who was standing on the line.
Around two, Katrin gets everybody together for pictures.
Bridesmaids. Cousins. The one with the aunts, where Drew's mother won't stand on the end.
Then Katrin, up on a chair with her phone, yells it out to the whole tent.
"Okay! Bride and her mom!"
I'm standing eight feet away with a stack of plates.
Sherry is standing six feet away with nothing in her hands.
We both move.
It's nothing. It's a half step. She goes forward and I go forward and there is a second, one full second, where forty-one women watch two women take a step toward the same girl.
The tent goes quiet in that specific way.
And Sherry stops, and laughs at herself, and puts her hand up.
"Oh God. Marnie. Obviously."
The laugh that goes around that tent is enormous. Relieved. Affectionate. Somebody says "aww." Drew's mother says something about how lovely that was, how gracious, and Katrin says, "Okay, okay, get in there, Marnie," and I put down the plates and go stand next to my daughter and smile at a phone.
April's arm goes around my waist. She squeezes twice, our thing, and I squeeze back.
And I am so angry my ears are ringing.
Because I know exactly what happened. Sherry Corbett was standing six feet from that girl with her hands empty when the call came, and she moved first, and then she surrendered the moment she created, in front of an audience, looking breezy and carefree in her yellow dress.
I have no way to say that out loud without sounding exactly like the woman my husband already thinks I am.
Erin rides home with me at five because Nathan took the cake stand and the leftover pop in his car. She's got her shoes off and her feet on my dash, which I allow, because I've lost that war so many times it's become a treaty.
We're on the freeway when she says it.
"She moved first."
I keep my eyes on the road. "Who moved first?"
"Mom." Erin looks over. Seventeen years old, no filter, her father's flat gray eyes. "When Katrin called for the mom picture. Sherry took a step. Then she did the whole obviously thing."
"She was being nice."
"She was being something." Erin puts her feet down. "Everybody thought it was so cute. Aunt Deb was practically weeping."
"It's a picture, honey."
"Okay, but I saw it." She pulls at a thread on the hem of her dress. "I just wanted you to know somebody saw it. That's all."
I have to sit at the light on Excelsior for a full cycle before I can talk.
"Thank you," I say.
"You're welcome. Can we get McDonald's."
"Yes."
Later Katrin gets one of the two of them anyway, because of course she does, because Katrin is twenty-nine and posts everything. April and Sherry, cheek to cheek, both laughing, both with the same crooked incisor I never noticed until this second.
It goes up that night.
Making up for lost time. There's nothing like a mother's love. Three hearts.
Two hundred and eleven comments by Monday. Women I have known for fifteen years, women who have eaten at my table, writing things like this made me cry and what a beautiful reunion and never too late.
I don't care about Facebook. The last time I posted was Erin's confirmation and I only open it when somebody dies.
But I care on Monday night, in bed, when I scroll the reactions to see whether my mother-in-law had seen it.
Keith Hennigan and 208 others.
He heart reacted to it.
He is lying eighteen inches away from me with his reading glasses on and a book about supply chains on his chest, and at some point today my husband looked at a photograph captioned there's nothing like a mother's love under a picture of the woman who left, and he tapped it, but not just that, long enough to make it into a heart emoji.
I turn my phone face down.
"You okay?" he says, not looking up.
"Long day."
"You did the whole thing. You know that, right? Katrin didn't do that, you did that."
"Thanks."
He turns a page. "Sherry said the scrapbook was the only thing she had left from that year. She was worried it was too much."
"It wasn't too much. It was the best part of the day."
"That's what I told her." He takes off his glasses and looks at me, and he's warm, he's my husband, he's got the crease on the side of his face from where he's been lying on his hand. "You know she's terrified of you."
"Of me?” I snort.
"You're the one who did it right." He kisses my shoulder and turns off his lamp. "She knows that."
I lie in the dark for two hours and think about it all.
Not about the picture or even the heart emoji. About that word he used, terrified, and the way his voice went soft on it, and the fact that when a woman is terrified of you, the story writes itself around who is frightened.
And how easily Sherry has flipped the script from villain to victim.
At my expense.