10. Marnie
Marnie
"Lie?" I say. "That's the option you landed on? Lie or hand her my insides."
"That's not what I did."
"Then say what you did."
Keith takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose, which is a thing he does at work when somebody brings him a bad build.
"She asked me if she should back off. She said she could feel that you didn't want her here and she'd rather step out now than ruin the wedding. And I said no, that you were struggling with it and that it wasn't about her, it was about how much you love April."
"Oh, so it was a compliment."
"Yes! Actually, yes, it was!"
"Keith." I put both hands on the counter. The laminator ticks as it cools. "Do you know what you did? You gave your ex-wife access to our marriage."
"That is dramatic."
"It's not dramatic, it's a plan for her. There's a room in this house that has two people in it. That's it. That's the whole membership. And you took a woman you've known for eight weeks of adult life and you walked her into it and you showed her where I keep my worst feelings."
"She's not a stranger, she's April's mother."
"She abandoned April.”
"And she came back and she's trying, and you cannot stand it.
" His voice goes up for the first time. "You cannot stand that she might be a good person, Marnie.
Because if she's a good person then you're not the only one who ever loved that kid, and I don't know when that became the most important thing in your life, but it did. "
I don't yell. I want to tell you that I did, because it would be a better story.
"You know what she said to me on the sun porch?" I say. "She said it must feel like somebody came back for a job I did for free."
Keith blinks.
"She said that?"
“Yup.”
"Well." He spreads his hands. "That's kind of a generous read on her part, isn't it? She's trying to understand you."
"She was telling me she knows exactly what she's doing."
"Jesus Christ, Marnie." He walks a circle in the kitchen.
"Do you hear it? Every single thing that woman says, you run it through a machine, and it comes out the other side as a threat.
She buys a dress, it's a threat. A step at a party, threat.
She says something kind, that's the worst one, that's proof. "
"She has never once been unkind. I know."
"Then what are we doing?"
"That's my question."
He stops.
We stand in our kitchen, twelve days out from our daughter's wedding, and neither one of us says anything for a long time.
"I'm not a threat to us," he says finally, quieter. "You know that. She's not a threat to us."
And this is the true thing, so I say it.
"I never thought she was, Keith. You did that all by yourself."
Saturday she calls April.
I'm at the venue with the coordinator doing the walk-through when my daughter's name comes up on my phone, and April is crying so hard that at first I think there's been a car accident.
"She's not coming."
"Slow down. Who's not coming?"
"Sherry. She called me and she said she's been thinking about it and she doesn't want to be the reason there's tension, and that she's caused enough damage in this family and she's not going to cause more, and she said she'd watch the video.
" April is gulping air. "Mom, she's going to watch my wedding on a video. "
I'm standing in a barn on a hillside in Chanhassen with a woman named Gretchen holding a clipboard six feet away, and I put my hand over my eyes.
"When did she call you?"
"An hour ago. Mom, is this because of me? Did I do something?"
"No."
"Then why?"
Because it's twelve days out. Because twelve days out, a wedding cannot rearrange itself, and everybody knows it, and any woman who withdraws at twelve days will be begged back by three separate people within the hour.
Because she has done nothing that could be described in a sentence that doesn't make me sound insane.
"Honey, listen to me. Where's Drew?"
"He went to get his suit."
"Okay. I'm going to hang up and call her, and then I'm going to call you back, and I want you to drink some water."
"Mom."
"Water, April."
Keith is already on the phone with Sherry when I get to the parking lot. I can see him through the windshield of his car with the phone at his ear and his other hand doing the thing where he presses his fingers to his forehead.
He gets out. He does not say hello.
"Are you happy?"
I stop walking.
"Excuse me?"
"She's been sitting in her apartment for three days convinced this whole family hates her." He's got the phone still in his hand. "She's not stupid, Marnie. She can feel it. You've been civil for eight weeks the way you're civil to a private investigator.”
"So she called our daughter about it.”
"She called because she's trying to do the right thing!"
“Less than two weeks aw.”
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means this is when it costs the most, if we change the wedding. This is when everything is set in stone and has already begun to tip over the edge, there is no turning back.” I hear my own voice and it's shaking, and I hate that it's shaking, because a shaking voice gives the impression that I’m not one hundred percent sure of what is happening now, what she’s doing.
"It means that if she'd complained a month ago we'd have had a conversation, and now nobody can have a conversation, we can only beg her to do exactly what she wants, she did this on purpose.”
Keith looks at me for a long moment.
"That's a really terrible way to see a person," he says.
He goes back to his car. I stand in the gravel.
Then I take out my phone, and I call Sherry, and when she picks up I hear the little intake of breath before she says hello, and I know she's been waiting. She’s been anticipated this exact move, and she knows she’s won.
"It's Marnie."
"Marnie. Oh my God. I'm so sorry, I've made a real mess of everything, you must hate me.”
"You should come to the wedding,” is all I say. I can neither confirm nor deny the rest of her statement.
"I don't want to make it harder for anyone. I don’t want to be a burden.”
"April wants you there. It's her day, not mine and not yours." I watch a truck pull in with the tent rental. "So come to the wedding. Please."
There's a pause and it runs a half second too long.
"That means more than you know," she says. "Really. Thank you."
I hang up and stand in a gravel lot in Chanhassen and understand, in a way I can't prove and will never be able to prove, that I have just been walked backward across a room by a woman in a cardigan, and that I did it in front of my husband, and that every single person involved will remember me as the one who almost ruined it. I walked into her trap, but she has something she can hold over me that I can’t hold over her.
I love my daughter so much I’ll do anything for her. Literally anything.
I call April back from the car.
"She's coming."
My daughter starts crying again, the good kind this time, and says thank you over and over, and then says, "You're the best person I know," and I have to say something normal about the shuttle contract so I can get off the phone.
Nathan's home when I get there, eating cereal at nine at night, and he takes one look at me in the doorway with my keys still in my hand.
"What’s going on?”
"Nothing."
"Mom."
I open the fridge for something I don't want. "Did you know Sherry told April she wasn't coming to the wedding?"
He sets the bowl down.
"When?"
"This afternoon. It's fine. I called her, she's coming."
"You called her." He says it slowly, turning it over. "So she made a dramatic exit, and then you had to go ask her to come back to the thing she quit from, and now everybody's relieved and it's your name on the rescue."
I stand there holding the fridge door open.
"You're twenty," I say. “Too smart for your own good.”
"I'm on a group project with four people right now, I know exactly how this works." He picks his bowl back up. "That woman would run a school board like a military operation.”
And I know he’s right.
I just hope I’m not part of it.