by Beth Fred
“That was a quick sunset,” I say.
Before I have the words out, a roll of thunder bursts into the air. There is a flash of lightning, and cold water pours from the sky.
Eric takes off his jacket and puts it around me. But it’s no use. In these few seconds, I’m so wet my dress is sticking to me and my hair is falling out of the curl-piled bun Marcy put it in. People run for their cars.
My hand is in Eric’s. “This way.” I veer my head toward the other side of the house, where the back door is. Mom, ever the lady, is struggling to put away food trays and punch bowls properly. I catch sight of her as I run past. I should offer to help, but I want out of this matted wet dress.
I pull Eric through the back door. “Race you up the stairs,” I say as I dart through the kitchen, holding up my dress so I don’t fall.
He catches up with me, so I kick off the white heels and continue to run. I’ll get yelled at for that later. Oh well. Right now, I need to win.
“This is not fair!” he says from behind me. “You know this house like the inside of your hand.”
“STBY,” I say.
“STBY?”
I dig my bare feet into the wood floor and move faster. “Sucks to be you.”
“You freakin’ millennial.”
I lunge at the stairs, hopping over one in the process. “You’re married to a millennial,” I call over my shoulder. I can’t help but laugh. I haven’t raced through this house since I was a kid.
In my fit of laughter, I move my hand, and the dress I’ve been holding slips through my fingers. Somehow, it gets stuck in a railing spinster, and I fall backward.
Eric catches me. Just like the prince in every fairytale.
“You okay?” He slowly repositions me so that I’m just behind him holding his hand and he can help me climb the stairs.
He takes a step away from me, turns sideways, and throws his other hand onto the trim of my door. “Ha! I win, darling.”
“Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater.”
“I do not like pumpkin, and I could have let you fall.” He sticks his tongue out at me.
“Fine. But get out of my room. I have to get out of these wet clothes.”
He cocks his head and swaggers an eyebrow at me. “But today was a fairytale.”
“Eric, don’t even think about it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He struts to his room.
Mom’s heels come clanking up the stairs. “Amanda Emaline Buchanan, why would you kick your shoes off in the kitchen? That is so unlady-like. And why would you leave them there? Do you want your new husband to think you’re a slob?”
She opens my door and tosses the shoes in.
“Since I’m married, don’t you think you should knock now?”
She scans the room. “Where is your husband?”
“In his room. Definitely knock there.”
“You two get ready and come downstairs. We have a surprise for you,” she says.
I managed to get the dress half unzipped before Mom made it upstairs to throw shoes at me, but I can’t reach the zipper anymore, and between the dress and my corset, I’m stuck and can’t really breathe. “Mom.”
She laughs. “You need help with the dress?” She’s crossed the room to me by the time she’s finished speaking, and she tugs down the zipper. “I guess we should have gotten a reception dress after all.”
I shake my head. “I’m cold from the rain, and it’s getting late. I think I’ll wear jeans.”
She slaps the back of my head. “You are not wearing jeans on your wedding day. I forbid it. I’m still your mother. I can forbid things, and I forbid this.”
“Drama queen.”
“Ingrate.”
I roll my eyes. “Fine. I’ll wear a dress.”
She smiles. “Thank you.” She goes through the door, shuts it behind her, and her heels clank down the stairs.
I let the dress fall to the floor and pick a nice sundress to wear.
“Kids, come on,” Mom calls from downstairs.
Knock-knock.
“Come in.” I pull a lace cardigan over my dress.
“We’re kids.”
I spin around to face Eric. “I heard.”
He laughs. “I’m Senator Buchanan’s kid now.”
“Well, you did marry his daughter.”
“I know. But this is too funny.”
We walk downstairs side by side but not touching. My parents are both well dressed and standing in front of the door.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We’re going out for a late dinner,” Dad says.
Mom smiles at me. “Sweetheart, go grab your nightgown and anything else you might need for the night. You’re not coming back.”
My face turns bright red at the mention of the nightgown.
Dad studies my red face then casts his eyes to Eric. “I might like you more than I thought.”
Eric chuckles, trying to pretend he doesn’t know exactly what Dad means. The blood pumps under my cheeks even harder. I’m not sure which would be more awkward: to tell them that I will not need some seductive nightie tonight, which would make sure Eric understood that, or to just grab the nightgown and let them continue to think this marriage is real. I’m about to say I don’t need the nightgown, but when I glance at my church lady mom, she’s adjusting her wedding band. She never took it off even after his affair. I can’t tell her my marriage is a sham. It would break her heart. I leave that kind of thing to Dad.
So I dutifully march upstairs, throw the gown and a toothbrush in a backpack, and come back down. I don’t have to use it, but if I took an empty bag or if she found the nightgown in my room later, she’d know.
Chapter 19
Eric
Her parents sprang for the honeymoon suite at The Capitol Hotel in Little Rock.
A four-poster California king-size bed sits ominously in the center of the room. It’s covered in fluffy white blankets, and in the center of the bed is a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice and a basket of chocolate-covered strawberries.
I trace my eyes from the bed to Mandy. “Nightgown?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I want to see it.”
“No way!”
I laugh. “I didn’t say I wanted to see it on you. I said I want to see it.”
Her face turns crimson. She flops her backpack down on the bed, shaking the champagne bottle. She pulls a white nightgown out of her backpack. It has an opaque satin skirt and a sheer lace bodice. There is a matching sheer wrap over the bodice. I’ve never seen that on a nightgown before.
“It’s very innocent,” I say.
The red in her face deepens. She pushes the gown back into her backpack and shoves it to the floor. I’m afraid sitting down on the bed beside her will make her even more uncomfortable, so I pull out the desk chair and sit there instead. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“Not what my parents think we should do.”
I laugh. “I know that. You haven’t agreed to the kids being Catholic yet, anyway.” My eyes fall on the elaborately decorated bed. “They must really want grandkids.”
“Obviously.” She picks up the basket of strawberries, takes one, and bites it in half. “Whatever. The strawberries are still good.”
“What do you usually do on Saturday night?”
She shrugs. “If I have homework, I do that. If not, Kristin and I watch SNL.”
“Saturday Night Live?” My face tightens. Evan tells me not to watch that junk. It does me no good to learn I’m the butt of their jokes before I have to. Before the cable stations play clips for me and ask me how I feel about it as if they don’t know. But if I don’t help Mandy get comfortable being my wife, it’s going to be a long nine years. I pick up the remote and turn the TV on. “SNL it is.” Then I notice the clock. “We have a couple of hours before it starts. You wanna pick a Pay-Per-View?”
“Sure,” she says.
I toss her the remote and spend the ne
xt hour watching a movie about some girl who realizes she is in love with her best friend only after turning him down three times and insisting he should marry another girl then gets annoyed with him for proposing to said other girl. Women. But Mandy is engrossed.
“Can I have a strawberry?” I ask.
She holds out the basket. I move to the bed and pluck one. I linger there for a moment. Her eyes cast from me back to the TV.
“Can I sit down with you?” I have no idea why I ask. This goes beyond trying to make Mandy comfortable with me. I want to be near her. But I shouldn’t. She’s made it clear this is a contract.
Still, she doesn’t flinch when I slide an arm over her.
The credits on this stupid movie roll up. Mandy checks her phone. “We still have ten minutes before SNL. Do you mind if I check CNN?”
I laugh. “For what? To make sure the world keeps turning? It does. CNN is for left wing liberals to hear themselves talk, but sure. For my favorite tree hugger, I can endure CNN.”
She laughs. “You know, I’ve never actually hugged a tree.”
“Are you going to hug the cherry tree I bought you?”
She flips the channel. “Probably not. But I will take care of it. It is a living being, after all.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about, tree hugger. Maybe you could read to it.”
“I might. I was thinking of putting a bench beside it on the patio for a reading spot. Might as well read out loud.”
CNN is debating tax cuts. The token Republican says, “We should not have to pay more taxes because half of the country is never going to work for a living. The Bible says a man who does not work does not eat. Not that his neighbor will feed him.”
A young African-American woman responds, “They have a job. A lot of them work for you, but their boss doesn’t pay them a living wage.”
A white guy joins in. “Yeah. It’s the new slavery.”
“These people are so stupid,” I say.
“Hey. That’s your guy.”
“No, Mandy. They’re all stupid.”
“What’s stupid about expecting to be paid a living wage while the jerk who owns your company has to go on TV and complain about how much he is taxed on his millions of dollars?”
“I think the stupidity comes in comparing it to slavery. You choose what job you take. Granted, it’s a post-recession economy and there might not be a lot to choose from, but you can’t settle for a job that sucks then complain about it. Although I admit Toberson is a jerk.”
“You took campaign money from him. He’s one of the rich guys you’re supposed to be looking out for.”
I forgot how obnoxious she can be. “Our interests align. That’s what politics is. A coalition of interests in support of a mutual cause. Lower taxes do help to create more jobs. But I agree, if you’re making millions, you can probably afford more taxes. I’m not Toberson’s buddy. But he would prefer my policy to Simpleton’s.”
“Simpleton is psycho. But I don’t see how you can admit that millionaires don’t pay enough taxes while running for office on a party ticket that blames the poor for being poor.”
“You know my parents are from Mexico, right?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Poor people here have it pretty good. They have air conditioning, hot water, refrigerators, and they usually have food to put in it. They can get subsidized rent and subsidized utilities, and they can usually go to school on a grant. I’m worried about the people like my parents who both worked two jobs to keep us going and made too much money for any kind of assistance—not that they would have asked for it—but not enough money to pay for what they needed. So their kids come out of school owing a mortgage with no house or marrying a man they’d prefer not to in order to avoid it.”
“You could make college free for everyone. That way kids whose parents can afford to send them to college but refuse to pay for ‘basket-weaving’ degrees don’t have to marry Republicans either.”
“Mandy, you need to cut your dad some slack.”
She glares at me. “Are you taking his side? You would. I could have been a stick-in-the-mud attorney too, but I must basket-weave!”
“That is not fair. I’ve told you I admire your work. But there is more going on with your dad than you realize. And he seems to have given you a pretty decent life. It’s easy to be compassionate with images of poverty on CNN when you’ve never lived stuck in the middle.”
She doesn’t say anything but rolls her eyes before redirecting them to the TV where Toberson is being cut off mid-sentence.
“Sorry, Chris. We have to interrupt for breaking news,” the anchor says. “CNN just received this press release earlier this evening from the Martinez campaign. It seems that Republican nominee Eric Martinez has married Amanda Buchanan, Senator Jack Buchanan’s daughter. This comes as a shock to those of us in the media. We never even knew the two talked, and it should be pointed out that Amanda Buchanan is a Democrat who at times has publicly disagreed with her own father, so it will be interesting to see how this changes the dynamics of the race. But now Evan Hicks, campaign manager for the Martinez campaign, has called in. So let’s go to the phone. Evan, were you as surprised by this as the rest of us?”
“No. Those two have such a strong dynamic between them, I expected to be here the first time I saw them together.”
“Now the campaign has sent a press release, and this would usually be a PR person’s job. Why are you calling in?”
“Well, as you know, Martinez and I have been friends since law school. I was his best man tonight, and I couldn’t let this message be handled by any staffer because it’s so personal. Presidential politics is hard, and this wedding will be more or less consumed by the campaign. I really wanted to take a moment to redirect the discussion that this is a celebration tonight, and whatever your politics, hopefully you can be happy for this young couple starting a life together.”
“Are you surprised that your Republican candidate married a self-proclaimed Democrat?”
“Not at all. You pointed out earlier that Mandy—as those of us close to her call her—has disagreed with her dad publicly before. If you consider her positions on issues, it’s always been about helping the poor. It’s not usually a progressive agenda. She’s a good girl with a kind heart, and she is exactly the kind of person I see Eric with.”
“How did they meet?”
“They’ve known each other for a couple of years. They encountered each other a few times at different dinners and such for senators and their families. Of course, Mandy was there with her father. I think they tried to keep things quiet before the wedding to prevent speculation. And can you really blame them? They had a secret wedding in her parents’ backyard tonight, and we’re already discussing it on international television.”
“So this is real.” Mandy turns off the TV.
“It was part of the deal. You knew it would happen.”
“I know.”
“Truth or Dare?” I ask to break the tension.
She giggles. “What? Are we in middle school? Truth.”
So my tree-hugger isn’t gutsy. “How many boyfriends have you had?” No idea why I want to know that, but I do. And I don’t.
She bites her lip. “Really, one. I mean, I’ve gone on first dates, but they never led to second dates. Kristin used to say I’d never get over Adam.”
“That’s rough. What happened?”
“The whole thing was stupid really. I’ve watched one too many Julia Roberts movies. We’d gone to school together forever, and he’d never noticed me.” She cocks her head. “Not that anyone ever did unless their parents encouraged them to talk to me to promote whatever cause they were working on, but whatever. So after spring break of my senior year, Adam became a very attentive admirer. We went on our first date on a week night. I wasn’t usually allowed out on weeknights, but since it was my first date ever, Mom made an exception. By the end of the week, we were a happy couple. He was the most awesom
e boyfriend anyone could have asked for.”
I want to punch the guy in the stomach.
Mandy turns her head. What comes next must be hard for her to talk about. “He picked me up in a horse-drawn carriage, and we had a picnic at this waterfall for my prom proposal. But the week before prom, he just flaked out, avoided me at school, and quit returning my calls. I’d already paid four hundred dollars for a dress, so I went anyway. But when I got there, my friend Ashley grabbed me and pulled me into the girls’ room. Several other girls were there, including a couple who never talked to me. And every time I tried to leave the room, one of them would stop me. Finally, I asked, ‘What is going on?’
“One of the other girls turned to Ashley and said, ‘She’s going to find out either way. We can’t keep her in here all night.’
“Ashley says, ‘Umm…Adam is here—with a girl.’
“My heart sunk, but from the crease in Ashley’s forehead, I knew there was more. ‘Okay?’ I asked. ‘She—she could be your twin. She’s your doppelganger.’ And I remembered in the fall, he’d always been talking about this girl who lived in Little Rock to anyone who would listen. He’d quit by Christmas, so when he asked me out, I thought nothing of it. But I wasn’t convinced short, chubby girls had doppelgangers, so I marched out of the bathroom to find Adam and his friend. And there she was clasped in his arms. My doppelganger. She had my face, except her one dimple was on the right cheek. Our hair was the same color. We were the same size, but she wore it better. And even her damn dress was the same color as mine.” She pulls a pillow over her face. “I was used as a place holder until he got his girl back.”
I peel the pillow away from her face. “I’m going to find this guy and bash his head in.”
She smiles, and my heart swells because a second earlier I thought she might cry, and I can’t handle seeing this girl cry.
“That isn’t necessary or presidential,” she says.
An hour later, she picks up what’s left of the strawberries and the bucket of champagne and places them on the nightstand beside the bed. She tosses me a pillow. “Do you need a blanket? I think the sofa pulls out.”