Chapter 9 #2
By the end of March, all the big and small details for Felicity’s wedding were perfectly on track.
Dominique went down a checklist with one of her assistants weekly.
Everything was on time. There had been no major problems so far, but Dominique knew that could change in the blink of an eye.
Weddings were unpredictable and sometimes hard to control.
She called Felicity and reported the details to her.
“Great, Mom, and I only have three more paintings I want to finish to complete the show.” It was all she wanted to talk about. “Everything’s on track for that too.”
“Your wedding is going to be here before you know it,” Dominique said, and Felicity felt a roller coaster in the pit of her stomach.
She hadn’t made her peace with it yet and it was coming closer.
She had picked the invitations at Cartier.
They were sober, classic, and elegant, and were going out on the twentieth of April.
Once people were invited it would be that much more real and there would be no turning back.
Three hundred and fifty people were being invited to the wedding and most of them would come, particularly to a glamorous venue like the Metropolitan Museum.
Now and then, Felicity felt a flurry of excitement, and the rest of the time, terror.
Taylor had been nicer to her recently, which made it easier to remember why she loved him and wanted to marry him.
She had no specific doubts about him, her only objection was that it felt too soon, and she felt too young and not ready to be a wife.
His parents were boring but they weren’t bad people.
Their worst flaw was that they were stingy, and hated spending money.
His father talked constantly about getting enough “bang for their buck.” They were getting a lot of bang out of Dominique’s bucks and none of their own.
It was going to be a dazzling, impressive wedding.
There would be an enormous, beautiful tent in the back garden of the Met for dinner, and another tent for dancing.
On a balmy June night, nothing could be more romantic.
The band had been hired, the caterer chosen, the flowers ordered, and there would be huge crystal chandeliers in the tents, and flower garlands on the tent poles.
The flowers were going to be especially beautiful.
Felicity hadn’t told Taylor the details.
She wanted to surprise him, and knowing her mother’s taste, Taylor was sure it would be spectacular.
There were going to be giant urns of flowers on tall columns.
A place had been set aside for the ceremony with a flower arch over them.
The minister Dominique had found had agreed to do the religious ceremony at the Met, which required dispensation from the bishop, and permission from the museum, and Dominique had obtained that too.
They were being married by an Episcopal minister since they were both Episcopalian.
The much simpler event to organize was the rehearsal dinner, at Phillip Whitfield’s club, with a minimum of flowers on each table, their least expensive menu, and cheap wine he had gotten a great deal on.
The rehearsal dinner was about how little the Whitfields could spend and get away with, and Dominique was spending a fortune on the wedding.
The expenses had multiplied exponentially, which she had expected.
Felicity felt guilty about it and had wanted it to be so much simpler.
Taylor and his family felt no guilt at all.
They knew that Dominique Dupont Walker was good for it, so why not spend liberally.
In March, as the wedding approached, Felicity had rolling waves of nausea, which she knew was due to stress.
She was tense about her gallery show, and panicked about the wedding and all that it implied.
She would be an adult now forever, a wife, and one day she would be a mother, which was even more terrifying.
She had begun to suspect an ulcer when the nausea never stopped, even worried that she might have stomach cancer, and read about it online.
It sounded like she did, and if she was dying, there was no point having a wedding.
She didn’t confide in anyone that she thought she might have cancer.
She wondered if she would live long enough for her show, and she went to their family doctor and confessed her suspicions.
He was worried for her and ordered a battery of tests, including an MRI and a PET scan last on the list. She seemed healthy enough to him on examination.
Her color was good, her weight was low but in the normal range.
A simple blood test showed she wasn’t anemic, and he asked her if she could be pregnant.
She said she couldn’t since she was on the pill.
“Have you ever missed a pill, or been pregnant?”
“I’ve missed a pill once in a while, but I’ve never gotten pregnant. When I miss one, I take two the next day. It works like a charm.” She smiled confidently at him.
“Some of my patients have had charming babies as a result of that method,” he warned her. “Have you missed a pill lately?”
“Not that I remember. I know I’m not pregnant, I haven’t gained any weight.
I have no symptoms. I’m stressed out of my mind, I have an important gallery show of my work in eight weeks, and I’m getting married in ten.
I’m freaked out about both. According to the internet, it’s either stress or stomach cancer. ”
“Let’s run a quick test to be sure before we do all the other tests,” he said blandly, and handed her a pregnancy test and directed her to the bathroom. She was gone a long time, which concerned him, and her eyes were red and full of tears when she returned with the test stick.
“It’s wrong. I know it is. It’s a false positive. These tests are unreliable.” She choked on a sob and sat down across from him.
“When you missed a pill, which you don’t remember recently, did you and your fiancé use a condom?”
She shook her head and the tears spilled down her cheeks.
“I can’t have a baby. I don’t want one. I’m not even ready to be married, let alone be a mother.
My fiancé wanted to get engaged, but I told him I’m not ready to have children for at least another five years.
” She choked on a sob and he handed her a tissue.
“We need to do a sonogram on you, Felicity, to check for a heartbeat and see how far the pregnancy has advanced, and then you can make some decisions. I’m sorry.
I know this can be shocking news, at the wrong time.
” She nodded and continued crying, and a nurse led her to the sonogram lab.
She hopped on the table and the technician applied gel to her abdomen, and the machine hummed to life as the tech ran the metal wand around in the gel, and the image leapt onto the screen.
There was a blob in the machine’s field of vision that looked suspiciously like a baby, waving an arm.
Felicity could see the head and the body and a hand.
And there was a rapid pounding sound like a machine or a metronome, steady, strong, and regular.
“We’ve got a nice strong heartbeat,” the tech said, as Felicity choked on a sob.
The tech entered something into the computer, which then showed that she was ten weeks pregnant, and her due date was in October.
With a rapid calculation of her own, she was going to be four and a half months pregnant at her wedding.
She felt a wave of nausea wash over her as she lay there, blinded by tears.
This couldn’t be happening to her, but it was.
She went back to the doctor’s office after the sonogram, looking devastated.
“I’m sorry, Felicity, I know that’s not good news.
But at least it’s a healthy baby, if you decide to keep it.
Why don’t you and your fiancé talk it over, and let me know what you decide.
You don’t have a lot of time to make the decision,” he said gently.
“I can refer you to someone who would handle the procedure.” Despite the changes in the laws elsewhere, she could still get an abortion in New York.