Judd heads to the back, where the pool table is, with the football guys—he was the captain for a year, the year they won the championship, and I hear them telling each other the story again, of how poor Lincoln Barton intercepted a catch and then started running the wrong way on the field, and almost lost the final game for them. It’s a story that always has to be told again. They probably told it last night when they all got together, too.
Okay. To be honest, I had wanted to be at home instead of here. Not New York home, but home home, with Bunny and Maggie and Dad, and Hendrix’s kids. Mostly Bunny. I got to see her for an hour at dinner, after Judd picked me up from the airport. She seemed alarmingly frail and thin, but when she saw me, her face broke out in such a big smile, and we sat next to each other on the couch while Maggie and Ariel got dinner together—beanies and weenies—and it was enough, just sitting there, inhaling the scent of her powder, and patting her hands. We didn’t even have to talk; we just listened to the others and breathed at each other, and every now and then she would squeeze my hand and then put her head on my shoulder.
Then she leaned over and whispered, “Remember when you washed my hair?”
Ohhh. That’s what I always do when I pick her up at Hallowell. It was always our thing anyway, hair washing in her sink in the Bunny Barn. She did mine and I did hers, even from the time I was a little girl and had to stand on her kitchen chair. I’d look out the window while I massaged the foamy shampoo into her hair. The smell of the shampoo—we used No More Tears, and it had a sweet, almost baby smell to it that I loved.
My heart contracted and grew again.
But anyway—after everything was cleaned up and Bunny said she was tired, I took her upstairs and helped her into bed. Hendrix’s family is sleeping in the Bunny Barn, because that makes the most sense, and so she and I are sharing my old room. I was nervous, not at all sure that she would actually be okay up there all alone, but then Ariel said she was putting the baby monitor in there, so that Maggie and my father would hear if she needed anything. I stacked pillows on the floor along the side of the bed in case she falls.
And then I took a deep breath and came. And now I’m glad I’m here. Everyone smiling at me, all happy that the last two waifs and strays have come home again, and with news. It’s as if we’ve finally agreed to join the Family of Man. Buying at last into the social norm.
Jen Abernathy-now-Homer, who had been with me the day my first period started, comes over and slams me in a body hug.
“Look at you, girl, marrying a hometown boy after all!” she says. Then she points at her giant belly. “Yep. Number four. But I think we’re closing in on what’s causing them, and so we’re taking steps.”
Sally Fernando, who used to be the head cheerleader and now has a dress shop downtown, says in a singsong voice, “Okay, girls, now we’ve got to get the real scoop on this engagement. How did he propose? What did he say? Did he get down on one knee? What did you say? Where’s the ring?”
I take a deep breath and go through the details, just as Judd and I rehearsed them in the car when he picked me up from the airport . Here’s the story as it will now forever after be told:
We got engaged in a diner at midnight. It was spontaneous! Wonderful! Neither of us could be more surprised!
We both realized that, as best friends for, like, practically forever, we must have been always meant to be together. We can’t believe we missed all the signs, such as our mutual feeling that romance isn’t real and that friendship is all anyone needs. (That was his contribution; I said no one would ever believe that.)
No, he did not get down on one knee because—well, it was the diner! You don’t kneel down on the floor of a diner unless you’ve lost your contact lens. Am I right?
And oh yes—the ring? Here it is, gleaming on my finger. And funny thing: when he proposed, he just happened to have a twist tie in his pocket, and so he fashioned it into a little ring. Then, Judd being Judd, he had to take it back so his bread wouldn’t get stale!
“Awww,” they say in unison.
And the proposal itself? A very romantic-for-Judd proposal, the best he could do really as he laid out his case that . . .
“We’re sick of dating,” I hear myself say, veering off script.
No sooner have I said it than Judd materializes beside me. “And we want children,” he says. He’s on his way back to the bar for a refill and now has flung his arm over my shoulder and is smiling at the group of women. “That’s the God’s honest,” he says. “We want kids, we’ve always been the best of friends, and frankly, my dears, I think we’re going to be smashing at this whole marriage/parenthood thing.”
“You both look so—New York,” says Lisa Peterson coolly. “So cosmopolitan. Do you think you’ll stay there?”
I blink. “Well, yeah—I mean, I think so. We both have jobs there, after all.”
He shrugs. “Ah, who knows what’s in the future? After the knockout surprise of Phronsie here agreeing to take me out of the friend zone and actually marry me, I can’t pretend to predict anything that’ll ever happen again in the world.”
“I’ve always thought you were the cutest couple,” says Karla Kristensen.
Judd’s old crush. I turn and smile at her. I hadn’t seen her come in, but here she is, still luscious (those boobs have aged well) and now smiling at him over the top of a martini glass. It’s the smile of someone who knows she has broken his heart about five ways from Sunday, twisting it out of his body, stomping on it, and then picking it up only to fling it against the wall a time or two. And now she’s clearly picking up the knife for one last dramatic twist.
I may still hate her.
But Judd—he’s looking at her like he doesn’t hate her at all. I elbow him in the ribs so he can remember to close his mouth.
I go back to the farmhouse early, pleading exhaustion. There is only so much of a good time at Tandy’s that I can take—my father had a saying that fits right in here: “I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.” Judd is spending the night at his parents’ house, but he walks me out to the car, running his hands through his hair as we walk, smiling and telling me again and again how much fun it is to be here.
“They’re all so happy for our news!” he says. “Did you notice that?”
He’s a little drunk.
“Yes,” I say. We stand there in the parking lot. Tandy’s neon sign has a T missing. ANDY’S BAR AND GRILL. There’s the sound of a train whistle in the distance. And the wind stirring the pine trees lining the parking lot. I make a little mound in the gravel with my toe. It’s balmy here, compared to Charleston.
“Well,” I say. “This was fun.”
“And tomorrow—my parents are coming over to your folks’ house for dessert,” he says. “Maggie says we’ll nail down a bunch of stuff about the wedding.”
I stand on tiptoe and give him a kiss. He kisses me back and then pulls back and laughs.
“Look at us here, acting all like an engaged pair of humans,” he says.
“Yep. That’s us,” I say. “Engaged as hell.”
“Engaged as all get-out,” he says. “Remember when we talked like that?”
He kisses me again, and then finishes off with a peck on each cheek. Closure kisses.
“I’m going back in for a while,” he says. “Sure you don’t want to stay?”
“No. I’m tired. And I want to check on Bunny.”
“Okay, then, have a good night,” he says.
“Good night to you,” I say.
When he opens the big oak door to the bar, for a moment—just a moment—I see the inside of the bar, hear the strains of music tumbling out at me (the Bee Gees now singing “How Deep Is Your Love”) and a woman is laughing. I catch a glimpse of blonde hair, jeans, hear a guy saying, “And that was the day I got the ticket!” and then Judd slips inside, gets swallowed up, the door closes, and I stand there in the parking lot in the silence.
And what I’m wondering is where Adam mig
ht be right now.
All night I’m aware that Bunny, like some precious cargo, is beside me in my old double bed. The curtains are open, and the moon is shining in the window. For a long time, I lie there on the pillow next to hers just watching her. She’s so beautiful and frail, with her lined face so peaceful in sleep, and her white hair like a cloud on the pillow. Her breathing is soft and even, but every now and then she does an extra little breath that sounds like a gasp. Like she’s about to say something.
At one point she opens her eyes and stares at me. “You,” she says in a foggy voice.
“No, you. I’m glad you’re here with me.”
She closes her eyes, drifts back to her dream landscape. I watch her for a while longer, see how the patch of moonlight marches across the sheet, bringing the shadows of branches along with it.
She was so strong, and she spent so many years watching over me and protecting me, and now it’s my moment to do that for her.
I reach over and put my hand on top of hers, and when I wake up in the morning, it’s still there.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I have several long-time jobs on Thanksgiving morning: making the cream cheese pumpkin pie, peeling the potatoes, and making the dinner rolls. But my main responsibility is to rescue the gravy boat from its cabinet above the refrigerator. Every year I go looking for this gravy boat. Every year it’s shoved into a different part of that cabinet above the refrigerator, the one no one can reach.
There’s an annual conversation that goes along with this official rescue, too.
Me: “I’ll get the gravy boat now.” I love gravy. I think one of the reasons I love Thanksgiving so much is for the turkey gravy—and for that, you have to have a special boat.
And then Maggie says it’s so much trouble to get it, and why don’t we just use one of the bowls instead this time, and anyway, there are too many things piled on top of the refrigerator, blah blah blah. And I always laugh and insist on getting it, and things nearly fall over, and Maggie has an exasperated look on her face, but I rescue it. And when it comes down from its shelf, I wash it so carefully because it may have a little chip and some dust, and she says, “Oh, that old thing—why do we even keep it around for once a year?”
This year, Judd—who has watched this ritual time and time again—listens to Maggie’s insistence on not having it and says he’s the one who’ll get it.
He winks at me as he hands it to me. “Thanksgiving is saved,” he says. “This is what John-Boy would do.”
We traditionally eat at one thirty, so by noon, the kitchen is a mishmash of everyone doing their own particular thing, a situation that would have made Maggie lose her mind years ago, but now I can tell she sort of welcomes all the commotion. Maybe being alone with my father has brought her to a new realization. I see her at one point, juggling all these things at once: handing Ariel a peeler for the pumpkin, instructing Hendrix on where in the attic he can find the electric knife to carve the turkey, and directing the little boys to the closet where the cloth napkins are kept, so they can set the table. And she’s glowing, Maggie is. Like she was made for this.
I smile at her, and then I have this moment that’s so sharp it might qualify as an epiphany. I was so judgmental about how hard she tried to reach me when I was a kid. I get it now. She just wanted to be a good mother. It wasn’t enough to be a good stepmother, whatever that would look like—she actually had hoped to replace our mother in our hearts. And of course that could never be, but I was so mean about it. Everything she tried, I resisted.
She catches my eye and gives me a wink. Maybe she’s on drugs, I think. Some special potion that lends her an ability to see the grace in the family dynamics, the magic beneath the mess.
Because it is magic—and I’m buoyed by it, too, swept along in its clockwork-style predictability. I can hear a recording of the Macy’s Day Parade on the television set in the den, hear the children shrieking at a video game, and my father instructing them to for God’s sake put down that game and look at the floats. Which they couldn’t care less about. Ariel looks at me and smiles. “They are never, ever going to care about balloon floats on television, are they?”
“No, and my father is never, ever going to stop being disappointed that they don’t. It’s as though he personally produced this parade. And none of us have ever cared all that much.”
“Turkey time in ten!” yells Maggie.
I sit there at the table, among them all, seeing their bright, flushed faces, their strenuous attempts to stay nice to each other, their willingness to come together each year for this, the greatest of family rituals, and I pass the mashed potatoes when I’m asked to.
And I’m fine.
It’s just that every now and then, when I close my eyes, or turn suddenly, to pass the gravy, to say the blessing, to get up to clear the table, it’s as though I see Adam standing somewhere nearby. Standing in the doorway, arms folded. Smiling. Feel him, is more like it.
Go away. Get out of my head. You don’t belong here.
Because I am here now. I’ve made the transition back to where I belonged all along. I am going to be Judd’s wife.
Judd brings his parents—Daisy and Rudolph Kovac—to our house around five o’clock for dessert. They are the same as I remember—sweetly daffy with slight, bemused frowns, as if they are trying to work out what the hell wrong turn they took to find themselves on this planet. Much less the parents of a human man.
Yet now, here they are, having been delivered to Maggie’s rambunctious table, where my three nephews are tossing a dinner roll back and forth, where my father is sighing and scowling, and Maggie and Ariel and I are rushing around, ferrying pots of coffee and plates of pie to the table.
Somehow we make it through pie eating and coffee drinking, and then, as if on a secret signal, the menfolk retire to the living room, and we women clear the table and turn to the female business of planning a wedding.
“But wait,” I say. “Maybe Judd would like some say in this, too.”
“He doesn’t,” says his mother.
“But I would like him to be involved,” I say.
“But would you?” says Ariel. “Really?”
I think it over. No. She’s right. No, actually, I wouldn’t.
“Smart decision,” she says in a low voice. “You have now entered Traditional Wedding Mode, New Hampshire–Style. You have to just sit back and let the industrial wedding complex take over. These women have been training since birth for this.”
Maggie gives me a triumphant smile. I see Mrs. Kovac sit up straighter.
“Now, Maggie,” Daisy Kovac says, “I know the rules here. The mother of the bride picks dress color. My job is to show up and wear beige.”
Maggie and I share an astonished glance. Daisy knows this? How is that even possible? Maggie reaches over and touches her hand. “Oh, Daisy. You can wear whatever color you’d like! This isn’t going to be that kind of thing at all.” Then she smiles. “But beige will be fine. I myself am thinking of something in a royal blue.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Kovac. “That’s the mother of the bride color.”
They know so many things, it turns out. June seventh is selected as the date, and from there it seems a quick jump over to the fact that the napkins will be yellow, the flowers will be tulips and daisies, there will be three bridesmaids and three groomsmen—and who thinks the ceremony should be on the beach?
That last one is my question.
They all turn and look at me.
“The beach?” says Maggie.
“You mean, where sand is?” says Mrs. Kovac.
“Well, sure,” I say. “I’ve been to a beach wedding, and since it’s going to be on the Cape, in Wellfleet, why not invite the waves and the sand to the ceremony? I mean, why else have a wedding on the Cape if you’re not going to make use of the beach?”
There’s a silence.
“Maybe the beach after the ceremony,” says Maggie.
They move on
to more important matters. Centerpieces.
“I really don’t care that much about centerpieces,” I say.
Ariel pokes me in the side. “It’s not up to you,” she whispers.
Maggie says, “I think tea lights and perhaps a spray of daisies.”
Mrs. Kovac agrees. “Yes, and some ribbon tying daisies.”
“And some seashells?” I offer.
Maggie smiles at me. Ariel pokes me in the side once again.
Band or DJ?
“DJ,” says Maggie. She sees my face. “All these are just suggestions, you know. It’s your wedding.”
“It’s not,” whispers Ariel.
Invitations?
“Judd and I can pick them out—”
Maggie wrinkles her nose. “Honey, please. Remember this is the only wedding I’ll ever get to plan in my whole life. You got married before and didn’t let anybody know in advance. And, Ariel, bless you, your mother got to do all the planning. And goodness knows when I got married to Robert—well,” she says. “We just won’t go into that except to say there wasn’t much to plan. Certainly it didn’t get to the level of centerpieces and DJs.”
For just a moment, I see it—that old flicker of sadness in her eyes.
But then we’re onto the guest list, and Ariel and I slip away, out to the back porch where—to my surprise—she wants to smoke a joint. “It’s the way I keep myself sane,” she says. “Do you want some?”
“No,” I say. “Yes.”
“Exactly,” she says. “I know the feeling.”
We stand outside in the cold, staring at the barn. In the distance, I know, are the bulldozers and earth-moving equipment. Tomorrow they’ll roar to life, Maggie has told me. The noise will be excruciating.
Ariel shivers.
“Do you ever look at all this and see it practically dying right in front of you?” she says. “A whole lifestyle. Just gone.”
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