“Correcting, then,” I said. “Rebuking? Remonstrating?”
He opened his mouth but I held up both hands. Time to end this stupidness. “Never mind. I need to go. Can we just forget we had this conversation?”
“I’m good with that.” Soft places appeared around Seth’s eyes. “You know this is about respecting you.”
Respecting. Not lecturing?
I didn’t say it. His sudden attempt to lighten up was glaring in my face.
“You meeting the Bridesmaids?” he said.
“Just like every Sunday afternoon,” I said.
He followed me through the dining room and then the living room, where I grabbed my purse from the mantel and shoved my feet into a pair of black ballet flats.
“What minutia are y’all down to at this point? Who’s gonna wear what color on which fingernails?” He reached for a curl but I shook him off.
“It’s like a thing now,” I said. “See you tomorrow?”
I pecked his cheek and turned to go toward the foyer, but he wrapped his fingers lightly around my wrist. “Not later?”
I put my face close to his. “Aren’t you afraid we’ll start something we shouldn’t finish?”
Another peck and I was gone. I’d just extinguished the twinkle again.
TWO
It always seemed ridiculous to drive in the Savannah historic district when everything was so close to everything else. I could have walked to the Distillery on Montgomery in fifteen minutes. But I’d arrived at our townhouse on Jones earlier with a carload of everything I’d even glanced at on my last trip to Pottery Barn with my mother, and which she’d insisted I had to have if I were going to be even slightly content as a new bride, so I was saddled with her Beamer SUV.
Still, as I wended my way around Pulaski and Orleans Squares—two of the twenty-two charming spaces that gridded Savannah—I wished I’d left the car and walked. Even with the rain slanting down in sheets, I could have sorted things through more easily. I knew the predictable nineteenth-century rowhouses with their Georgia grey bricks and the clapboard homes with their high stoops would whisper . . . You’re making life more complicated than it is . . . Come in . . . Have a sweet tea. Driving, I had to pay too much attention to what I couldn’t see between slaps of the windshield wipers.
By the time I pulled into the parking lot at the Distillery, all I had in my head was how the scene between Seth and me should have played out.
ME: (presses hand to chest, pretending astonishment) You’re eating another one? Look out, now, darlin’—you won’t fit into that tux.
SETH: I know, right? (selects another cookie) It was only a matter of time after I put the ring on your finger that I would let myself go.
ME: Well, give me one, then.
TARA reaches for a cookie. SETH redirects her hand around his neck and kisses her tenderly. FADE TO BLACK
It needed editing. Even I wasn’t quite that sappy. It should definitely take a more Austen-esque tone. But what did go down wasn’t any closer to reality, at least as we knew it. Again, Seth could do “Never mind—forget it—I’m going to pout” with the best of the male population. But testy? Scolding? Holier than freakin’ thou? That right there—that was a first.
The rain was pounding by then and the wind wailed so wild I ditched the idea of using the umbrella and bolted from the car and splashed across the parking lot. A total of fifteen seconds and my feet were squishing in my flats and my hair stuck in tangled hunks to my face. Give it fifteen minutes and it would be frizzed out so far I wouldn’t be able to pass through an antebellum doorway. I stood inside to drip and regroup.
When the Distillery wasn’t being touted as “Savannah’s Only Craft Beer Bar,” it was advertised as “A Prohibition-Style Pub.” The Bridesmaids and I met there because it was close to the SCAD bookstore where Lexi worked on Sundays and because it had the best alligator tail in Georgia, beer-battered and fried Southern-swamp style, with a honey jalapeño remoulade. That wasn’t on my prenuptial diet, but the first time we came here after the wedding, I was so ordering it.
The other reason was the ambience. The building went up in 1904, which is new by Savannah standards, but the folks who turned it into a local watering hole in 2008 had done a fabulous job of making the cement floor and the brick walls and the steel posts work with remoulades and ganache and caramelized onions. Lexi, Jacqueline, Alyssa, and I were retro-and-remoulade kinda gals.
That Sunday, just a few days after Thanksgiving, lit garlands festooned the bar and the railings on the stairs I climbed to get to the Bridesmaids. I knew they’d be up there at our usual round table in the corner, the one that rocked and had to be shimmed with several folded napkins so Jacqueline didn’t lose her mind. Stuff like that drove her right up the crazy tree.
Seth was right. We’d planned all the bridesmaidsy details of my wedding over the last six months, right there in that corner every Sunday afternoon. We’d discussed and debated and decided everything from the pros and cons of false eyelashes to whether they should go down the aisle in descending or ascending order of height. I had drawn the line at them wearing matching lipstick. But the four of us got so used to meeting, we just kept showing up. Once Lexi asked if we’d still be doing it after Seth and I were married. The responses were, simultaneously:
JACQUELINE: Well, yeah. Why not?
ALYSSA: Only if Seth lets her out of bed long enough.
What does that tell you about their personalities?
As I headed for them, Vic, the ponytailed server who even had freckles on his lips, called out, “What are ya drinkin’, Tara?”
“Coffee,” I told him. “With cream. No, hold the cream. Skim milk. Okay, maybe two percent.”
“This isn’t Starbucks, sweet cheeks. All we got is half-and-half.”
I nodded and moved on to the corner. I heard him tell a table of Guinness drinkers, “Dude, I’ll be glad when she finally gets married.”
I was halfway out of my trench jacket when I got to the table. Alyssa stood up to reach across for a hug and stopped when her hand slithered down my arm.
“Geesh!” she said. “You look like a shampooed poodle.”
“Nice.” That came from Lexi, who politely pretended I wasn’t dripping on her like said dog.
Jacqueline blinked very bright brown eyes as I hung the jacket on the back of my chair and sat.
“You’re the only person I know who wears a pink trench,” she said.
Alyssa shook her head. Precisely blonde shoulder-length hair dared not fall into her eyes. “Leave her alone. She looks amazing.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t amazing. She’s just . . . pink.”
I glanced almost unseeing at the table and barely registered their already half-empty glasses and the hummus plate that had apparently only recently arrived because the pita points were still steaming. My head was still teeming with the scene I’d just walked out of.
Lexi gave my hand a squeeze. “You okay?”
“Clearly not.” Alyssa brought her very round, very blue eyes down into slits. “Something’s wrong. What’s wrong?”
“Cripes, give her a chance to answer.” Jacqueline squinted at me too. “Yeah, you do look vexed.”
Alyssa raised a pair of tailored eyebrows at her. “You did not just use the word vexed.”
I was fine with her and Jacqueline getting into a discussion of J’s lexicon because I wasn’t ready to discuss what was now defined in my mind as the Seth Scene. I snatched up a menu, stuck it in front of my face, and said, “What’s everybody having?”
Twelve years of friendship—nearly half of our twenty-five years of life—hadn’t been wasted on them. Alyssa grabbed the menu and tossed it aside. Jacqueline leaned into the table, arms folded over her appetizer plate, and Lexi rested her wide, soft, creamy face on her hand, smushing her short honey-brown hair into her cheek. I wasn’t getting off without at least a vague explanation—if not a detail-by-detail account of my last two hours. That must be what
comes from going through middle school and high school together and landing back in the arms of your hometown after the obligatory I-want-to-see-something-of-the-world-besides-this-place foray into the larger world.
“Someone tried to mug you,” Alyssa said. “Right? No.”
“No,” I said. “Seth and I just had a . . . discussion.”
“Discussion.” Jacqueline tucked the sides of her fudgy-brown bob behind her ears. One strand got caught in a gold hoop and hung there. “No, see, a discussion doesn’t leave you looking like you just got knocked sideways.”
“He hit you?” Alyssa said.
I was aware that the Guinness drinkers had stopped talking, foam unwiped on their lips.
“No!” I said and waited for them to go back to their pilsners. “We were just talking and it got weird and I left.”
Jacqueline edged closer to the table. “Weird how?”
“Maybe it’s none of our business,” Lexi said.
Alyssa waved her off. “Of course it is. Isn’t it?”
“It’s no big . . . I mean, the thing is . . . I’m just—”
Jacqueline waved both palms. “Stop. Just stop, and then start from the beginning.”
“If you want to,” Lexi said.
“She wants to,” Alyssa said. “You do, right?”
I told the story and tried to go with the slant that I was only doing it so they’d get off me. Truthfully, I did want to talk it out, and although I could have predicted their responses, there would be something comfortable about hearing them.
Alyssa, I knew, would say some outrageous thing. She was always the most out-there friend I had. Beautiful in that sexy-but-not-slutty way, she was the kind who made the girls in high school think she was trampy because all her friends were guys and all of them wanted to date her. She definitely played them but they knew it. I was basically the only girl who was friends with her back in our Veritas Academy days, and that was probably because I wasn’t a threat to her in the boy competition. As in, I didn’t even enter. She made me laugh and at times made me go, “ALYssa!” especially when she was describing her escapades as a concierge at the Mansion Hotel. I suspected she did it on purpose, just to get me to show some shock-and-disapproval. Because her parents never did.
Jacqueline, on the other hand, would come up with a practical solution for me. Though cute as a bug or a button or any of those other things often referred to as adorable but in actuality are not, she was far from cutesy. She was the smartest of the four of us and had gone straight from grad school at Auburn to a job in PR at the Savannah Tourism Bureau and could out-Google the Internet. She had an in-your-face style that would have been a downer if it wasn’t for the thousand-watt smile that flashed on just when you were thinking, Get OFF me.
As for Lexi, she probably wouldn’t give me any advice at all, which was why I considered her my best friend. She had been a “scholarshipper” at Veritas and couldn’t afford to get anything lower than a B. In fact, she couldn’t afford much of anything, but her not being in our socioeconomic class—i.e., a few pegs lower than Bill and Melinda Gates—made no difference to me.
I was spot-on about their responses.
“You have to go back over there right now and fix this,” Alyssa said.
“How?” I said.
“Seduce him.”
“What?” Jacqueline said.
“I’m totally serious. He says he wants to wait until your wedding night, but this whole testy thing? He’s just sexually frustrated—”
“I am so not going to do that!” I said.
“Did you miss the part where he was practically shaking his finger at her?” Jacqueline said. “You should go with the other issue.”
“There’s another issue?” Alyssa said.
“The deal with him not fitting into the tux. Take him a dessert. Take him one of the double-chocolate, deep-fried moon pies.”
“He got mad when she teased him about a second cookie,” Alyssa said. “He’s not gonna eat caramel sauce.”
Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “That’s the point. It shows him that she thinks his body is awesome no matter what he eats.” She turned to me, tucking her hair anew. One strand was still wrapped around an earring. “You attacked his manhood. The boy pumps iron like he’s going out for the Falcons.”
“How do you know?” Alyssa said.
“We work out at the same gym. I’m not saying he’s vain, but he does like to keep himself in shape.”
Alyssa wiggled her eyebrows. “Yes, he certainly does. Which brings me back to my suggestion—”
“Y’all come on.” Two red blotches had formed at the tops of Lexi’s creamy cheeks. “Tara’s not doing either one of those things.”
“What have you got then?” Alyssa said.
“I got nothin’. I think it’s just pre-wedding jitters.” Lexi shrugged. “Guys get freaked out too. They don’t cry because you can’t get daisies in December, but they have to show their stuff somehow.”
“She could have a point,” Jacqueline said to me. “You have been like the total opposite of Bridezilla this whole time, but something could just hit you wrong and you could get snappy.”
“Nothing ever hits Tara wrong.” Alyssa pointed a manicured finger at me as if she were making an accusation. “You’re like the poster child for patience. If I didn’t love you so much, I’d hate that about you.”
I suddenly noticed that Vic must have brought my coffee, and I cupped my hands around the lukewarm mug. “I wasn’t all that patient tonight. He tried to make up with me and I just left.”
“All the more reason to get over there now and make it up with him,” Alyssa said. “You don’t even have to try to seduce him—”
“Thank you,” I said drily.
“I agree with Lyss,” Jacqueline said. “Put your little pink coat on and go back to the townhouse.”
“But put your hair up first,” Alyssa said. “You’ve got that whole Irish girl ’fro thing goin’ on right now.”
I laughed and got up and hugged them each in turn. Then I pulled on my jacket as I trotted down the stairs and dodged the puddles toward the car.
But I didn’t put my hair up. Seth liked it down, where he could tug on my curls.
The rain had stopped when I got to the townhouse and went up the sideways front steps. They were the nineteenth-century owners’ way of avoiding taxes on front yards. As in, there were none. I stood on the small square-pillared porch the rowhouses were known for and got myself into this-is-our-home mode again.
I really did love everything about it. The traditional front door painted red, ostensibly to ward off evil spirits. The dolphin down-spouts found only in Savannah. The windows long as the doors with the shutters we would close when a storm threatened.
My favorite part, however, was the memory of Seth surprising me with the keys in May, the day I graduated from Duke. We both got tangled up in my master’s mantle and my hair and the unending promise of our life together. And why shouldn’t we?
We’d been in love for three years. Much longer than that for me alone.
Our families loved and supported us and each other and had since before I was even born.
On Thanksgiving Day, when we went around the table while Dad was carving the turkey, telling what we were thankful for as fast as we could so the mashed potatoes wouldn’t get cold—because according to my brother, Kellen, there is nothing on this earth worse than cold mashed potatoes drowning a slow death under congealed gravy—Seth nonchalantly said he was thankful that he had just been promoted to CFO of Great Commission Ministries. Which meant I could focus on my doctorate without having to work.
We were going to seal it all with a wedding that rivaled the British royals’. My father pretended to wince every time my mother and Seth’s mother and I regaled him with another layer of plans—a coach and two, a reception at the Harper Fowlkes House, a five-piece orchestra for the dinner followed by a jazz quartet for the dancing—but with tears in his eyes the day Set
h and I were engaged, Dad had whispered, “Have your fairy tale wedding, sugar. Have everything you’ve ever dreamed of. This is a good man.”
So why was I turning one ridiculous discussion into the Lincoln-Douglas debates? I could wait twenty-one days and have the happily-ever-after honeymoon night to go with the Cinderella wedding. Seth’s motivation was admittedly more biblical than mine, but that was a gift, too, right? Son of a pastor—the pastor I grew up with—spiritual head of the household and all that. Granted, I probably wasn’t as godly as he was, but I was trying to get there. I’d have more time to devote to that after the wedding. The last time I tried to read the Bible—the story of Jesus turning the water into wine—I found myself thinking if those people had hired the right caterer they never would have run out of cabernet in the first place. Yeah, it was a little hard to focus at that point, but Seth and I had plans to make quiet time a regular part of our life together.
Right now the only thing in my head was the impending scene. I previewed it as I let myself in and peeled off my soggy shoes in the marble-floored foyer and soundlessly closed the red door behind me.
SETH: Tar! You surprised me!
ME: That was my plan. I hope it’s a nice surprise.
SETH: The best. Come here.
SETH takes TARA into his arms and sighs into her hair.
ME: Sorry I was snitty.
SETH: I was the snitty one.
ME: Love me?
SETH pulls TARA out to look into her eyes.
SETH: You can ask me that as many times as you want, but just know this: You never have to ask. It will always be true.
ME: Do you want a cookie?
SETH: No. I want you.
ME: Twenty-one more days.
SETH: I’m counting the minutes.
It didn’t quite achieve Pride and Prejudice status, but I was getting closer.
I wriggled out of my jacket and tossed it with my purse on the one piece of furniture we had downstairs, the Frances Herrera console I’d fallen in love with at a home show in Atlanta, the fourteenth item my mother had deemed “a wedding present from your father and me.” I shook out my hair a little, imagined a long finger twirling a curl, and only then noticed that the place was strangely quiet.
One Last Thing Page 2