by Beth Labonte
“Summer!”
“It’s true! And I can’t believe you were letting him flirt with you, right in front of Dad!” I pause for a few seconds as I follow Babette through a golf cart tunnel. I’m not even sure if I should ask my next question, but I do anyway. “Mom...are you and Dad okay?”
She doesn’t respond, and my stomach suddenly drops.
“Mom?” I look over at her and she shrugs.
“A shrug?” I say, starting to panic. “Why would you shrug? What does a shrug mean?”
“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she says, meaning that it’s definitely something for me to worry about. “It’s just that once you moved out of the house, it got a little quiet. A little lonely.”
“But you told Graham’s parents that you were enjoying yourselves. What about the ballroom dancing and the day trips and the bicycle built for two?”
“Those things keep us busy, sure. But I’m talking about when the two of us sit down to dinner on a Tuesday night and your father wants to tell me about his hobbies. What do I care about silent film stars of the nineteen thirties? Or that he found some great deal on Betty Boop floor mats on eBay? Oy, please. The way he wastes his money.”
“Well, can’t you talk about stuff that you have in common? Talk about ballroom dancing or, or...”
I suddenly realize that I have no idea what my parents see in each other. Aside from a shared love of baked haddock and hand sanitizer, I’m at a complete loss.
“Did you know that the sound of your father scratching his big toe with his other big toe drives me insane,” asks Mom.
Of course I know that. Hello. The sound of my father scratching his big toe with his other big toe was one of the main reasons I tried to find myself a husband on a cruise ship and get the hell out of that house. But I can’t give her any ideas.
“So, what?” I ask. “They’re just toes. Are you saying that Dad repulses you now?”
“You know I love your father, Summer.”
“What does any of this have to do with Roger, anyway? Are you going to start looking for attention from other men? You would never consider chea—”
“Oy!”
Mom cuts me off mid-sentence and claps a hand over her mouth. With her other hand she points to an elderly couple in a golf cart, pulled over to the side of the road. I slow down for a closer look. Is that...Lorraine? And Gil?
“Oh my God!” I yell.
“What are they doing?” shouts Mom.
“What do you think they’re doing!” I shout back, as I veer into the opposite lane.
“Stay on the road!” Mom grabs for the wheel.
“Let go!” I wrench the wheel from her hand, swerving us dangerously close to a tree. I come to a stop on the side of the cart path.
“What kind of a place is this?” shrieks Mom. Despite the horrified look on her face, she keeps turning around to sneak glances at Lorraine and Gil.
“A very friendly one,” I laugh. “Stop staring!”
“Well, they’re right out in the open! It’s like they want people to watch.”
She has a point. I put on my blinker and slowly pull back out onto the path. That’s when I realize that in all of our excitement, I’ve completely lost Babette.
Shit.
I glance nervously over at Mom, trying not to panic. She probably assumes that I know my way around this place. Well, maybe I do. Graham and I have driven this route numerous times, so I probably have some sort of mental map ingrained in my subconscious. I just need to relax and open up my mind. I’ll probably cruise right into the center of town. Easy peasy. Lemon squ—
Crap.
The path has come to an end and I’m forced to merge back into regular traffic. Now there’s a rotary up ahead with about six different signs pointing in all different directions, and absolutely none of them look familiar. The cart in front of me turns right to get back onto a cart path, but I’m distracted by a sign with an arrow pointing straight ahead. Duke’s Landing, it reads. The sign pointing toward the cart path reads Sunshine Recreational Trail. I make the split second decision to continue straight.
“What did that sign mean?” asks Mom.
“Which one?”
“The one that said ‘No carts beyond this point.’”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious.”
“We didn’t drive past it, did we?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no.”
“What?”
“Mom, please don’t freak out.”
A car blows past us on the left, laying on its horn.
“No carts allowed on this road!” shouts an old man.
“I know!” I shout back, throwing my hands in the air.
“Keep your hands on the wheel!” yells Mom.
Another car blasts past us. No, wait, it’s a truck. An eighteen wheeler, actually. I nearly fall out of the cart when he lays on the horn. Then he flips us off. I don’t know what to do. There’s no exit anywhere in sight. To my right is a grassy area, but there’s a high curb preventing me from driving onto it. Beyond the grass is nothing but a high stone wall, blocking people’s backyards from the highway. Probably blocking homeowners from having to witness grisly golf cart/Mack truck collisions. On the other side of the highway I can see a cart path running along the side of the road. Over there is where all the friendly, smiling people are. Over here, is hell.
“What do we do?” shouts Mom. “How do we get out of here?”
“I don’t know!” I shout. “There’s no exit!”
“Stop the cart!”
“Are you crazy? We’ll get creamed!”
“Maybe we can lift it up onto the grass!”
“Really, Mom? You and I are going to lift a golf cart? Who are we, female wrestlers?”
“I’m glad you find this so funny!”
Before I can reply that nothing in the world could be less funny than our current situation, another car pulls up next to us. It’s an older woman and she keeps jerking her thumb behind us, probably telling us to take a hike.
“I know! I know! No carts on this road. Sorry!” I shrug.
She shakes her head and continues jerking her thumb behind us. Then she rolls down the window.
“You lost your bag!” she shouts.
My bag?
All of a sudden I’m seized with a terrible understanding. I slow down and bring the cart to a complete stop on the side of the road. The idea of not getting creamed doesn’t seem quite so important right now. I whip my head around, and I see it.
My wedding dress.
In all of our bickering, neither of us noticed the garment bag blow off the back of the golf cart and into the middle of the highway.
“My dress!” I scream. “We have to go back for it!”
I slam the cart into reverse and back up down the side of the highway. I know that earlier I had almost wished my dress would blow off the back of the cart, but I didn’t mean it. Wishes made in the heat of the moment aren’t supposed to actually come true. What kind of a world would that be? I suppose it would be a world where I’m about to Frogger myself across a highway full of elderly drives.
My adrenaline pumping, I tell Mom to get out of the golf cart and stand away from the road where she’ll be safe. As I wait for there to be a break in traffic, I hear her yelling to me that I’m going to get myself killed. Then something about how I should wait for her to call Dad. Yes, because Dad is who we want darting out into traffic right now. I ignore her and wait until I see no cars are on the road. Then I run into the middle of the highway and grab the garment bag. My heart sinks at the sight of it. It looks as if it’s been run over by a thousand trucks. Which, it has. But at least the dress inside might still be protected. I run back to the grassy area where Mom is sitting, possibly having a nervous breakdown. I unzip the garment bag and, amazingly, the dress appears unharmed—just in need of some ironing. I zip it back up and lay it down on the ground. Then I walk over and flop down
next to Mom, breathing hard, and looking up at the sky.
“That was insane,” I say.
Mom doesn’t respond. Maybe she’s passed out. I close my eyes.
“Summer?” Mom finally whispers.
“What?”
Again, she doesn’t respond. I raise my head slightly to look at her, but she’s just staring at something in the grass, her eyes like saucers. Suddenly she grabs me by the hand, pulls me to my feet, and practically drags me back to the golf cart.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. “We left the dress!”
Instead of answering, she just shoves me into the golf cart and then points in the direction that we came from.
There’s an alligator a couple of feet from where we’d been sitting. He’s at least five feet long, chock full of teeth, and eating my garment bag.
Dress and all.
10
Clearly, Mom and I are not going to make our appointment with the wedding planner.
I call Babette from the side of the road—explaining how we witnessed her friends fornicating in a golf cart, how I then drove my own golf cart onto a highway, and how my dress was subsequently eaten by an alligator—and tell her and Tanya to go ahead without us. When she finally stops laughing, she gives me directions from the highway to a small shopping plaza where she and Tanya can meet up with us later and lead us back home. It turns out that the exit is only about a half mile up the road. The rest of the drive is relatively uneventful, with only one horn honk and no more middle fingers (that guy could easily have been scratching his nose).
I pull into a parking space at the shopping plaza and fist pump the air in relief. Then I reach over and squeeze Mom around the shoulders. She looks like she wants to get out and kiss the ground. She could, too. The streets down here are immaculate. We sit in silence for a few moments, just soaking up the relief that comes with the realization that your life is no longer in imminent danger. The fact that my wedding dress now resides in the digestive tract of a large reptile is momentarily forgotten. But all too soon, the memory returns.
“Mom,” I say, tears prickling my eyes. “What am I going to do about my dress? I’m getting married in a few days!”
“That alligator didn’t ruin your dress,” she says, with a sigh. “I did. If it weren’t for me, it wouldn’t have even been in the cart with us at all. I’m sorry, Summer.”
Wow. I don’t know if Mom has ever apologized to me before. Or admitted that she may have been wrong. Not even the time she cut the label out of a vintage Chanel dress Graham bought for me because she thought it looked “scratchy.”
“That is true,” I say. “But you meant well, and I’m sorry that I yelled at you earlier. I guess we’re even.”
She takes a tissue out of her purse and dabs at her eyes.
“It’s just that you bought that dress with Tanya,” she says, looking at me with eyes full of hurt. “You went wedding gown shopping with your sister-in-law rather than your own mother.”
I look shamefully down at my lap.
“It wasn’t like that, though,” I say. “We were out shopping—just for clothes, you know?—and we walked by this dress shop, and it was just there. I saw it in the window and we went in to try it on. It all happened so fast. It’s not like I planned to go without you. It just sort of...happened.”
Like the free wedding in Florida just sort of happened, I think. A fresh wave of guilt quickly washes away any trace of my previous high. What kind of a daughter am I? First, I don’t let her plan her only daughter’s wedding, and now I find out that she’s been lonely and having problems with Dad ever since I moved out—a discussion that we never got to finish, thanks to Lorraine and Gil. But, now is not the time.
Mom snorts in a way that conveys the fact that she doesn’t believe me at all.
“You know, I’m not the only one in the wrong here,” I continue, my guilt making one last ditch effort to assuage itself. “When I told you that I wanted to have the wedding down here, you said that it was a huge weight off your shoulders. Why would you say that?”
“Oy, please,” says Mom, waving her hand at me. “Of course I would say that. I wasn’t going to force you to do something you didn’t want to do.”
I look at her with my eyebrows raised and a lifetime of sweaters, rain boots, and violin lessons flashing through my mind.
“It just would have been nice if you fought for it a little,” I say. “You’re not the only one who felt hurt.”
Mom shrugs. “If you wanted the wedding in Florida, I didn’t want to make you feel guilty about it.”
“When in your life have you ever not wanted to make me feel guilty about something?”
“I’ve missed you since you’ve moved out,” says Mom, quietly. “I guess I just didn’t want to start a fight.”
Tears well up again in my eyes, and I fiddle with the steering wheel.
“We just have this history that sometimes makes things difficult,” I say. “Take my Bat Mitzvah, for example. Do you remember that you almost canceled it because Aunt Helen requested a vegetarian meal? How can you blame me for thinking something like that might happen again?”
“It was chicken or steak! Those were the options!”
I sigh.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “I may have overreacted that one time. But I was planning everything on my own back then. You were only thirteen. You’re a woman now, Summer. We could have planned this together. I wouldn’t have done anything to stress you out.”
Somehow I doubt that. But that’s not the oddest part of what she just said. Mom just referred to me as a woman. It sounds so old and matronly. But I suppose that’s what I will be—a married woman. A married woman with a bosom. I shake my head to clear my thoughts. Then I smile at my mother.
“You’re here now though, right?” I say. “And there’s still plenty of things left to do that I would love your help with.”
Okay, I can’t think of a single thing.
But then, like a gift from above, I see the words Martha’s Bridal in tall red letters on the side of the shopping plaza in front of us. I blink a few times to make sure it isn’t a mirage, but it’s still there. A second chance at making this up to my mother is right there in front of us, sandwiched between a Subway and a Winn Dixie. I can see all kinds of dresses in the window and a big sign advertising fifty percent off.
I look over at Mom to find that she’s also spotted the sign. She looks back at me. We give each other a series of affirmative shrugs and nods, and then we go inside.
***
It doesn’t take long to discover that Martha’s Bridal caters to the mature bride. Not surprising, considering we’re in a retirement community where most people getting hitched are doing it for the second or third time. One wall of the store is covered with pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, celebrating all eight of her marriages.
My reject pile is soon filled with off-white suits and sheaths—absolutely nothing that I would be caught dead in, never mind wear to my wedding. I mean, they’re all beautiful dresses, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I’m not Rue McClanahan.
“No way,” I say, staring in horror at my reflection.
“Why not?”
“Just, no.”
I twirl around in front of the mirror, only the dress doesn’t move. Actually, it’s a two piece peplum skirt suit, with so much beadwork that I can barely bend at the waist. It’s probably for the best though, since the Martha’s Bridal consultant has also balanced a feathered pillbox hat on my head.
“I think it looks nice,” says Mom, patting the shoulder pads and tugging on the sleeves. Always with the sleeves. I give her a look.
“I look like my husband is running for office.”
She clears her throat. “Well, how about this one?” She points to a pale blue A-line dress covered in sequins.
“Blue? How did that even get in here?” I ask, rifling thru the rack. “No. Maybe we should just leave. We can take the car and go to a different store later.
”
“Oh,” says Mom, stiffly. “You mean later with Babette?”
“And you.”
Mom still looks disappointed. Martha’s Bridal may suck, but I suppose here she feels that she has me all to herself.
“Okay, fine,” I say, randomly grabbing another dress off the rack. “Give me some privacy.” Mom smiles as I shove her out of the changing room. I step into the dress, and look at myself in the mirror. I gasp.
“Terrible?” asks Mom.
Hardly. I can’t stop smiling at myself in the mirror. Where did this dress even come from? It’s short, with a very gently pleated skirt and a sweetheart neckline. But it also has this gorgeous, deep V-neck lace overlay with, of all things, three-quarter length sleeves.
Sleeves!
The funny thing is that the sleeves totally make the dress. The sleeves are what give this dress its old Hollywood glamor. Or is it its Victorian elegance? I have no idea—I’m a librarian shopping in a retirement community, for Pete’s sake. My point is that the dress is amazing.
I throw open the door and spin around.
“Oy, God!” yells Mom.
“What?” My stomach drops. She hates it. I feel a bit more devastated than I expected.
“It’s beautiful!”
Oh, right. I forgot that ‘Oy, God!’ can occasionally be used to express great joy.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” I gush. I turn around in the three-way mirror. The back is almost as lovely as the front.
Now we’re both kind of jumping up and down and I’m actually glad that the alligator ate my other dress. This is the dress that I was meant to walk down the aisle in. This one, right here. The one that I picked out with my mom.
We beam at each other in the mirror, and a small piece of my wedding that I didn’t even realize was missing, clinks into place.
GRAHAM
11
Summer’s going to kill me. Much like everybody else on this golf course.
We’ve been letting people play through out of courtesy, but there’s a limit. At some point we just have to play. We’re on the fifth hole, and we’ve been out here for nearly two hours. Not to mention that polyester golf pants made in Taiwan—no matter how fantastically hideous the print—are never worth wearing in Florida heat. Lesson learned, though I’ll never admit it to Summer. I pish-poshed her this morning when she told me I was going to die in these things.