13. Marnie
Marnie
Ididn’t want to spend my time not doing things, not showing up. So I didn’t stay in bed. No migraine, no collapse. I didn’t tell my daughter, on her wedding day, that her father said something in a parking lot that took twenty-two years out of me at the knees.
Here's what a wedding day is when you're the one running it.
I do all of it in leggings and a button-down shirt with my hair in a clip, and at eleven o'clock I sit down for four minutes and eat half a bagel, and that's my day until two.
Keith texts twice. Can we talk. Then, an hour later, Please.
I answer the second one. After.
At two o'clock I go up to the room where my daughter is standing in a slip in front of a mirror.
She turns around. Her hair's done. Her face is done. She looks like herself, which is the only thing you can hope for.
"There you are," she says.
We do the dress. Three of us, Katrin and Bex and me, and the satin is heavier than it looks and there are eleven buttons that go with a hook, and Katrin gets the giggles, and April says, "Do not make me laugh, I will sweat."
Then everybody clears out for the photographer's first-look setup, and it's just me and her.
I get the veil.
It's short, to the shoulder, and the comb is my grandmother's.
Silver, a little bent on the left side, and my mother wore it in 1969 and I wore it in 2003 at a courthouse with a bouquet from a grocery store and a four year old holding my hand in a dress with a raccoon on it, because April refused to wear anything else that day, and I let her, because she was four and it was her wedding too.
I put the comb in. My daughter watches me in the mirror.
"Mom."
"Hold still."
"Mom."
I meet her eyes in the glass.
"You're the reason I know what a marriage is supposed to look like," April says.
I put my hands on her shoulders and I look at my own face in that mirror, and I am seventeen hours out from a bug light on a strip of grass, and I hold it. I actually hold it.
"Don't you dare cry," I tell her. "That woman used four kinds of glue on you."
She laughs and grabs my wrist and says, "You have to say something back, that's the rule," and I say, "You've been the best thing in my life since you told me your eyes were just wet," and she says, "Okay, that's worse, that's so much worse," and we're both fanning our faces like idiots.
Sherry comes up at 2:40.
I leave them alone. I go stand in the hallway with my back against the wall for a minute and a half, and I hear my daughter laughing in there, and I go downstairs and fix a boutonniere.
The ceremony is at four.
Two hundred and six chairs on a lawn above the lake in September light that no photographer could invent. The officiant made it from Denver. Drew cries before she's halfway down the aisle, which is exactly what everyone hoped he'd do.
Front row: Erin, Nathan, me, Keith, Roz, Sherry.
Keith's hand finds mine when we sit and I let him have it, because two hundred and six people are watching, and because it's my daughter's wedding, and because I have never in my life made a scene and I wasn't going to start at four o'clock on that lawn.
At the back, before the music, April turns to me.
She's supposed to have her arm in Keith's. She does. But she reaches back with her free hand and finds mine, and she holds on, and for about six seconds the three of us stand there in the grass.
I hear Keith make a sound.
Not once do I look at him. I put my hand in the small of my daughter's back and I say, "Go get married," and I go take my seat.
She cries during the vows. Drew forgets a whole line and has to be fed it. Erin sobs like she's been shot, which is Erin. At the end of the row, past Roz, Sherry Corbett weeps into a folded handkerchief through the entire ceremony, alone, exactly the way she said she would.
I feel almost nothing while I watch it. I'm aware that it's beautiful. I'm aware that my daughter is happy, and that's most of what I need out of a life.
But there's a thin place in me that has opened up, and everything is going through it and out the other side.
The reception is what a reception is.
I dance with Nathan, who is a terrible dancer, and with Drew's dad, who is worse.
Erin and her cousins do something to the dance floor around ten.
The slideshow runs between dinner and cake and there's a sound in the room when the picture of Sherry at nineteen in the hospital gown comes up on the second slide, a soft collective noise, and Sherry puts her face in her hands at table three.
April comes and finds me during the last hour and sits on my lap like she's six, in the dress, and says, "Did you see the thing with Drew's uncle," and we laugh until we can't.
At 10:40 Keith asks me to dance.
The song is old. It's the one from the year we met, which he requested, which was not an accident.
He holds me the way he's held me a thousand times. He smells like himself. My head goes on his chest because after twenty-two years the body does what it does.
"Marnie," he says.
"Not here."
"I know. I know that." His hand flattens on my back. "Can we talk when we get home?"
"Yes," I say.
I meant it.
I want to be very clear, because it matters to me and it will matter to him later. At 10:40 at night on September twentieth, dancing with my husband in a barn in Chanhassen, I meant yes.
At 11:30 the shuttle takes the second load. The venue starts stacking chairs at 11:50. I've got the cake stand and two totes of leftover centerpieces and Grandma Dee's cardigan in the back of the Highlander.
Keith is standing under the string lights with April, both of them laughing, and she's got her shoes off and her dress hitched in one hand.
"You go," he says. "I'll catch a ride with Nathan. She wants to talk about the Ireland thing."
"Okay."
"An hour, tops."
"Take your time."
I drive home alone.
Twenty-eight minutes on 5 and then 62. There's a construction lane past Shady Oak and I sit at a merge behind a truck for a while with the radio off.
I'm not crying. I want that in here too. I'm perfectly calm the entire drive, and I'm doing something I've done all my life, which is arithmetic.
Sixteen years to a mortgage. Two kids left at home. One dress, one shower, one lawn, one row.
Almost nine thousand mornings.
The house is dark. The dogless, kidless, enormous quiet of it. I put the cake stand on the counter and I stand there in my good dress and my ruined feet for about four minutes.
Then I go upstairs and I pack a bag.
It takes eleven minutes. I've never done it before so I do it badly, and I end up with four shirts and no socks and my grandmother's comb, which I take out of April's room where she left it in the little box, because I can't leave it there.
Downstairs I take off my rings.
The engagement ring is small. Everybody assumes it isn't, now. It's a quarter carat from a store in a strip mall next to a Fantastic Sams, and it took him four months, and I have never once wanted a different one.
I set them on the kitchen island where the coffee maker is.
I don't write a letter. Sitting on the stool with a pen, I think about it for a while, and everything I start is either cruel or a negotiation, and I don't want either.
In the end I write eleven words on the back of a place card left over from the reception.
We can talk when I know what I want to say.
Then I take my bag out to a car with a back door that only opens from the inside, and I drive to a motel in Chaska, and I sleep for nine hours, which I have not done since August.