To Have

by M. L. Pennock

  I feel Brian and Steph watching from the doorway as I watch my dad’s face and whisper, “I was fine until I had to face you because I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  Getting up from his seat, Dad picks up his water glass and walks around the end of the table to sit beside me.

  “You see this cup, Stella?” I nod my head. “Now, let me show you something.”

  He sets the cup in front of me and picks up the pitcher of water in the center of the table.

  “This was my heart before you got here this afternoon. It was there, kind of empty, but beating. But then, I got a good look at you, at your face, at your eyes, at the man you love, and this ... is what happened,” he says as he begins pouring the water from the pitcher into the glass until it’s almost full.

  “And then I saw how your mother looked after the two of you had your powwow in the bathroom and this happened,” he says as he continues pouring the water into the glass, and it overflows, water rushing down the sides and spilling across the table. “If you want to know how okay I am that you and Brian are giving me another grandchild, take a look at this. This is my heart, Stella, and it is overflowing.”

  Stella

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Spring: The Wedding

  It’s my wedding day. Again.

  The only difference is, this time, there is no fear — no worry that I’m making a mistake. Today is just another day that I get to celebrate with my best friend, the love of my life and the father of my children.

  Today, I’ll finally say “I do” to Brian, just like I did when we were little kids playing house. I’ll kiss him in the barn and shove cake in his face and dance until the sun goes down, as close to him as my expanding belly will allow me.

  “You almost ready?” Steph’s voice at the bedroom door brings me out of my memories and away from the thoughts of what today means for me and Brian. The cast finally came off and, though she still has a little limp, she’s walking better every day on the broken one with minimal physical therapy.

  I make eye contact with her reflection before turning from the antique cheval mirror Brian bought for our bedroom as an early wedding gift. I take her in, all of her, and notice for the first time in a long time a lot about my baby sister, my Stephie. My sister is gorgeous, and after months of no fire in her eyes she’s bubbling with life. Her cornflower blue dress hugs her figure and accentuates the curve of her waist. Her chestnut colored hair is pinned at the back of her head and falling in soft waves down her back. Her eyes sparkle.

  “Almost,” I say smiling, taking a step toward her. “Come here and turn around.”

  With her back to me, I drape my arms around Stephanie’s neck and slide my fingers around her throat to secure the necklace in place. A small token of my appreciation for all she’s done for me in the last year, the small butterfly that dangles precariously from the thin chain is a symbol of the changes we’ve drifted through — side by side, hand in hand —and how we came out on the other end of them. Beautiful and graceful.

  She reaches up to touch the pendant before stepping around me to look in the mirror.

  “You didn’t have to get me anything,” she says, locking eyes with me in the glass. “But I love it.”

  “I didn’t have to, but it’s customary that the bride purchase the jewelry for her attendants. That’s not why I bought this piece, specifically, though,” I say. “Remember what Nana used to tell us? That butterflies were the most beautiful of all God’s creatures because they had to endure so much to get to that point, to be able to show who they truly were? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.”

  Steph turns from the mirror and takes my hand in hers, pulling me over to the bed where we both try gracefully to sit among the mounds of silky fabric surrounding our legs.

  “She used to get this wistful look on her face when she talked about springtime and butterflies,” Steph says, like she can see our grandmother’s face.

  “Yeah, she did. It’s like she was trying to prepare us for our winters. Think about all the shit butterflies have to go through just to get their wings, Steph.” I pull her hand into my lap and look into my sister’s eyes before continuing. “I think it’s time we acknowledge we deserve our wings and I want you to be able to always wear yours close to you, to remind you how much you’ve endured to get here.”

  “We have been through a lot lately. Like, a lot ‘a lot’,” she says, biting her lip in deep thought.

  “I think you need to add an extra ‘a lot’ to that.”

  Steph pulls me into a hug that resembles a death grip and a laugh mixed with a cry escapes her throat as we sit on my bed holding one another.

  “Dear Hustler. There they were, the bride and her sister. I’d always dreamed of sisters.” Tommy’s voice draws a low, annoyed moan from Steph as she pushes herself away from me.

  “You’re a pig, you know that right?” she tosses the barb at him and I foresee the beginning of a verbal sparring match.

  “I’ve been called worse,” he quips from the doorway.

  “You realize I’m marrying your brother and, if you hadn’t noticed, am increasing in size because I’m carrying his child, right?” I point to my abdomen as I stand from the bed, turning to face him just as he claps his hands and rubs them together.

  “Hadn’t noticed one bit, but even better since I’ve heard pregnant fantasies are all the rage.” His sarcasm and crooked smile make me laugh out loud while Steph stays seated on the bed looking like she might vomit. Pointing at my sister, Tommy says, “I see my work here is done. Okay now, in seriousness, do you know where Brian is? I need to talk to him.”

  “You lost your brother? That’s an awesome Best Man thing to do, Tommy,” Steph says in response, her nose wrinkling like she just got a whiff of dirty socks.

  “I didn’t lose him. He’s just temporarily misplaced is all.”

  Watching the two of them is like watching a nearly dysfunctional couple love each other. Or siblings. I’d rather think of them in terms of siblings because I just can’t imagine my sister and Brian’s brother ever being more than family in the most platonic sense.

  “I haven’t seen him since he left last night to go to the other house. Check the back of his workshop and if he’s not in there, go check at the coffeehouse.” It’s Brian. It’s a big day. He’s either going to be working on something made of wood or something made of dough. “Let me know if you can’t find him in either of those places, though.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tommy’s playful eyes have turned serious. I’m not used to seeing that expression on him and it makes me nervous.

  “Tommy, is everything alright?”

  “Nothing that can’t be handled. You worry about getting down that aisle and I’ll take care of everything else. I can’t wait for him to see how beautiful you look today.” Before I can say anything else, Tommy turns and rushes out of the room.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Steph is staring at me as I’m staring at the door wondering the same thing.

  Brian

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  “I checked the workshop. You weren’t there. I went to the coffeehouse. Nada. Locked up tighter than a nun’s habit. But here? This is where you are on your wedding day?”

  I twist my neck to look behind me. I’m silent as I watch Tommy walk up to the swing beside me, grabbing the chains and lifting himself over and into the seat like he used to when we were kids.

  Tipping my cup of coffee, I point to the gazebo across the lawn from the playground.

  “That wedding Stell and I talked about back at Christmas? That’s the gazebo it was in. I just wanted to come back here and remember how I felt watching her face that day,” I say, pushing back and letting go to swing gently with the crisp April breeze.

  “And how did you feel?” he prods.

  “Like she was the only other person in the world I wanted to spend forever with.” Tommy pushes off and matches my tempo. “Today I’m finally going to get that.
”

  My brother and I swing quietly for a while. If anyone else were here, I don’t want to know what they’d think — two grown men in tuxedos acting like children on the playground? Mental cases, probably. I don’t care though. We pump our legs until we can’t anymore and then glide gracefully to a stop.

  Tommy clears his throat, breaks the silence.

  “I ...” he adds in a few um’s and uh’s as he stutters and stumbles through whatever it is he’s going to say before finally clearing his throat again. Reaching into his jacket pocket, I watch a white envelope appear. “I need to tell you something.”

  “If you tell me you can’t stand up there with me, I will never forgive you, so it better be something like cancer. I can forgive cancer. Maybe. No I can’t. What’s up with the envelope?” I can’t stop my mouth from saying stupid shit. He’d never not stand as witness to my marriage and if he had cancer, Tommy’s not the type to tell me right before my wedding. “Seriously, T, what’s with the envelope?”

  “It’s from Emily.”

  “Emily?” But she left. She left me and Britt and didn’t even give me an explanation. “What do you mean it’s from Emily?”

  “Bri, don’t get mad.”

  “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” At the sound of her name I dropped my coffee cup in the stones beneath my feet and began feeling the heat creep up my neck, flaming hot as the anger of her leaving our son hits me like it did the day she walked out on him. Not even me. Him. She left Britton and never so much as called to see if he was okay. I reach for the envelope, demanding, “Give me that.”

  Tommy pulls his arm back.

  “Let me explain.”

  And I let him.

  For nearly an hour, I let him talk as he explains that he was somehow able to convince my son’s mother to stay in contact with him when she abruptly left Britt and me. For six years he’s been giving her updates about us? He looks pained.

  “More about him, and not all six years. I let her know what was going on with you simply because you were an extension of Britt,” Tommy says. “Emily admitted to me that she wasn’t in love with you, just like you weren’t in love with her. You were with her for Britt, and she was with you for Britt, but neither of you were with one another. Not like a couple should be. She loved you because you gave her Britt, but she wasn’t in love with you.”

  “But she loved him? It was so hard. She made it look like he was draining her of every ounce of her energy. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to tell her to just suck it up because that’s what babies do. They drain you, but instead of dealing with it, she left,” I yell. I yell it at my brother because he’s the only one here and though our parents know what I went through, I never fully opened up to Tommy about the end of my relationship with Emily.

  “She was sick, Brian,” he yells back. Then quietly he says, “She was sick. It wasn’t just emotionally and mentally draining her to be a mom. Emily left you and Britt and started chemo a week later because she was afraid to let her son watch her die. She moved back to Mississippi with her mom to start treatment for leukemia.”

  “You aren’t making any sense. She wasn’t sick. I would have known,” I say more to myself than to Tommy.

  “Would you have?”

  Tommy is looking at me, sadness in his eyes like I’ve never seen before.

  “I’d like to think I would have. How did I miss this?”

  “You were tired. You were working, trying to make a relationship work that wasn’t meant to work. You were a new dad, and it was exhausting. More than that, though? She hid it from you, as best she could anyway. Emily told me she had been in remission for a long time, since before you met her, but they found cancer cells when she had labs drawn when she was about six months pregnant,” Tommy says staring at the gazebo. “It was routine blood work for her oncologist, to make sure she was still in remission. I found all this out after she left, Brian, but she swore me to secrecy. She could have undergone treatment before Britt was born, but she didn’t want to put him at risk.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” I can feel the tears start to seep out from the corners of my eyes and I can’t stop them from coming. “I could have helped her. I could have been there for her.”

  “You needed to take care of the baby. You did what she wanted you to do — you took care of Britt. You hated her for it because you didn’t know why she did that to him, why she left him,” Tommy says quietly.

  I sit in silence, contemplating what my brother told me.

  “Why now? Why are you telling me all of this now? First I hear you have a letter for me from her, then you tell me she had cancer and now what? Is she going to pop out of the bushes and say hello and that she wants us back? Because that would just make my wedding day even more memorable.” I feel, rather than hear, my voice rising again until I’m yelling, my chest vibrating with the anger.

  Tommy looks away and I barely notice him brush his hand against his face.

  “No, Bri, she’s not going to be popping out of any bushes,” he reaches over and grabs my shoulder. It’s in that moment, in the look in his eyes, that I understand my son’s birth mother will never attempt to see him. She can’t. “She passed away shortly after Britt’s second birthday. The envelope has a letter in it for you, and one for Britt for when he’s older. There’s one for you and Stella to read together. It’s everything she wanted to tell you and whomever you deemed worthy enough to be Britt’s mom. Emily never told me exactly what the letters say, just that on the day you found her I was to give this to you.”

  Tommy looks back at the gazebo as he silently passes the envelope to me.

  “I waited until today because I got to know Em enough in those two years she was fighting the cancer to know those letters contain nothing more than her blessing. I know things weren’t always great for you guys when she was pregnant, but she was really trying to keep it together, which I think also meant pushing you away so you wouldn’t look for her after she left,” Tommy says, sorrow muffling the sound of his voice. “She loved you so much simply because you gave her the chance to be a mom, even though she gave it all up. I think she knew you needed to have a purpose, too, and that purpose was my nephew. So I’m going to leave you to absorb all of this for a little while and I’m going to go find some alcohol. I’ve been holding this in for four fucking years and I just ... I need a beer.”

  Tommy gets up from his swing, grabbing one of the chains and pulling it back as he walks off behind me, leaving me all alone on the playground.

  I stare down at the envelope in my hand — it’s tattered and the corners are worn and I can only imagine it’s from Tommy taking it out to look at it before pushing it back in a drawer somewhere while he waited for the right time to give it to me. My name is scrawled on the paper in blocky cursive writing. There’s no denying Emily’s penmanship. It demands to be recognized like she’s screaming at me from beyond the grave, telling me to tear the damn thing open and read her final words to us.

  “I can’t open this.” I know no one is here, no one is within earshot, but I’m not talking to anyone physically here. “Emily, why would you do this to me? I could have handled the truth, I could have dealt with this. I could have helped. At least you would have been able to see him take his first steps and hear his first words. You deprived yourself of all of those moments.”

  And I let myself cry for the girl I loved but wasn’t in love with.

  Stella

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Tommy what the hell are you doing?”

  He’s leaning against the refrigerator, tipping back a bottle of beer at 12:30 p.m. and the wedding hasn’t even happened yet.

  “If anyone in this house needs liquid courage, it’s me. Since I can’t have any, you certainly can’t have any yet. What is the matter with you today?” He pulls the bottle away from his mouth and his bloodshot eyes catch me off guard. He’s quiet and contemplative. “Earth to Thomas Stratford. Hello? What’s gotten
into you? What happened?”

  Instead of answering me, he tips the bottle again and drains its contents before reaching into his tuxedo jacket pocket and pulling a full beer from within. I resign myself to the losing end of this battle and lean against the counter to watch him cautiously as he wallows in whatever pain it is lurking in his blue eyes.

  “You’re just going to stand there watching me drink beer?”

  “You look like someone kicked your dog. Yes, I’m going to stand here and watch you drink your beer,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. “When you’re done with that one, though, I want you to talk.”

  Tommy nods.

  We understand each other.

  The wait is over quickly and he deposits both empties on the counter next to me and turns to lean against it.

  “I hate being the bearer of bad news —” he holds his hand up to stop my mouth. “It’s nothing to do with the wedding or Brian. It’s the reason I needed to find Brian, though.”

  “Spill it. What’s going on? You don’t just down one beer right after like that, not even on a let loose and party kind of night.” I’ve only ever seen Tommy party once since he moved up here and that was shortly after Steph was attacked because he was drinking his feelings. Even then it wasn’t like he was mainlining the liquor. I’ve heard the stories about his wild past, though, and the word “epic” doesn’t do him justice from what Brian has told me.

  A deep breath and then, “After Britt’s mom left them, I was able to stay in contact with her ... until she passed away about four years ago. I needed to clear my conscience and tell Bri.”

  I know I didn’t just hear him correctly.

  “Emily’s dead? I know Brian hadn’t talked to her since she walked out, but ...” my voice trails off. I couldn’t fathom a mother willingly giving up all rights to her child, but to learn she’s dead now? “Was she on drugs?” It’s the only logical explanation I can come up with, but I have a limited frame of reference for what she was like other than the little bit Brian has told me about her and the trouble she had adjusting to parenthood.