The Wedding Plan

by Abby Gaines

  “Maybe you’re not looking through the front picture properly,” she said.

  “It’s a book—it’s impossible to look through,” he said.

  “Ah, I think we have our problem.” She thought for a moment, her forehead creased.

  Lucas sat on his hand so he wouldn’t reach out and smooth that crease.

  “I know!” she said. “Pull your chair out from the table and turn it around.”

  Since she’d already proved rather smart this morning, he obeyed without question.

  “Now hold the book at the height you normally would.” She appraised his posture. “That’s about right. I’m going to stand in front of you, so the book is between us.” She moved into position. “Now, bring the book closer to your face and try to look through the image.”

  “I already I told you, I can’t look through— Merry, what are you doing?” He started to lower the book, but she grabbed his wrists, held them in place. His pulse thudded beneath her fingers.

  “Now you’re going to have to start over,” she scolded. “It’s very important to keep the book at eye level.”

  “That would be easier to do,” he said, “if you weren’t taking your shirt off.” What on earth was she up to?

  And why was he complaining?

  She gave him a saucy grin. “Here’s the deal. If you hold the book up and try very hard to look through the image, I’ll take off my shirt. And by the way, I’m not wearing a bra.”

  He groaned.

  “And when I believe you’re trying as hard as you possibly can,” she said, “I might just give you a reward.”

  “Might just isn’t much of a promise,” he complained.

  “Take it or leave it.”

  Lucas took it, of course. He held the book to his eyes.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you when to start. You need to know I’m undoing the second button. Now the third.” From the corner of his eye, he could see small movements. “Now look right through the picture, trying to see my breasts as you slowly move the book away.”

  “You’re insane,” he said. “And this is getting painful.” He didn’t mean for his eyes.

  “You do look like you’re trying very hard,” she said admiringly. “For that, I’m undoing another button.”

  He cursed. “It was going fuzzy, then I lost it.”

  “Fuzzy’s good,” she said. “Now, look hard through the image, Lucas, because I’m undoing the last button.” A moment later she murmured, “Now I’m holding on to my lapels. You need to start moving the book away.”

  Slowly, he did so. If it was possible to actually see through this page, he was looking hard enough to do it.

  “Now—keep looking through—I’m pulling my blouse open.”

  “I got it!” Lucas yelled. “I can see a snowman. With a hat and a pipe.” He shifted the book. “It’s still there, even when I move.”

  “Congratulations,” Merry said. “I’m so proud of you.”

  He lowered the book and there she was, her blouse wide open, no bra.

  “My breasts are getting bigger, don’t you think?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he croaked. “But they’re incredible.”

  She grinned. “I suppose I did promise you a reward.” She slipped the blouse off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor.

  Lucas was with her in one stride. “Merry, honeybun—”

  “What’s going on?” said a voice from the doorway.

  His father.

  Merry screeched and crossed her arms across her breasts. Lucas, moving faster than he would have thought possible, dived for her blouse, tossed it to her then stood in front of her to shield her from his parents, who were standing in the dining-room doorway.

  “What are you doing?” Dwight asked.

  Stephanie doubled over next to him, in paroxysms of laughter. “What do you think they’re doing?” She tugged on his arm. “Dwight, we need to leave.”

  “I thought they were getting a divorce,” he said.

  Behind Lucas, Merry whimpered.

  “Dad…” Lucas’s voice wobbled, and he knew she’d make him pay for that later. “Listen to your wife. You need to leave.”

  Ten seconds later, they were alone. Lucas burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. Merry was half laughing, half crying, fumbling with the buttons of her blouse.

  “Here, let me.” He took over the buttons, reminded of when he’d helped her with that wedding dress.

  “Your father saw me naked,” she moaned.

  “Not quite, honeybun. And he’s old—in another ten years or so he won’t remember a thing.”

  “Lucas, I’m so mortified.”

  “Don’t be, honeybun. Dad and Stephanie are probably in the living room, so we’ll sneak you out the back door, like a respectable stripper.”

  She groaned.

  “But first, I just need to…” His mouth found hers. She melted against him, rising to his kiss. After a few minutes, he had to stop, because next thing, his dad and Stephanie would be walking in on something far more embarrassing.

  Reluctantly, he pulled away. He tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear. “Thanks, honeybun. You might have just saved my bacon with that Magic Eye trick. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Happy to help. Even if I can never face your parents again.” She planted a quick kiss on his mouth. “This is kind of ironic,” she said. “If you pass the test, and I’m in some way responsible, then I just helped you leave me and our baby.”

  She was gone, out the door, before he could respond.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  LUCAS’S EYE TEST WAS SCHEDULED for eleven o’clock on Friday morning. He’d found he performed better in the mornings, presumably because his eyes hadn’t had time to get tired.

  On this Friday, he woke at seven, and did something he often meant to do, but seldom did. He called his brother.

  Garrett was still at home. Unlike Lucas, he wasn’t a morning person, so didn’t usually get to his Madison Avenue office before nine.

  “What’s the problem?” Garrett asked, after they’d exchanged greetings.

  Which was an indication of how infrequently they spoke. There had to be a problem for one of them to pick up the phone. We should probably work on that, Lucas thought.

  “How did you know you were in love with Rachel?” he asked, then grinned, as he could almost hear his brother thinking, Whoa.

  But Garrett took the question seriously. “Mainly, I found myself fantasizing about putting a ring on her finger. Scary stuff, I tell you.”

  “Merry’s already got a ring on her finger,” Lucas grumbled.

  “She’s your wife,” Garrett said, sounding confused. “You’re supposed to know you love her by now.”

  Another good reason to call his brother more often. To fill him in on such trivia as his upcoming divorce.

  “It’s not that simple.” Lucas gave a concise version of the saga to date, from forced wedding to separation. Then he waited for…he wasn’t sure what. Advice?

  “Sorry, little brother, but you’re in trouble,” Garrett said.

  “How do you figure that?” Lucas demanded, irritated. He realized now he’d wanted his brother to say there were plenty more fish in the sea, or something else typically blasé.

  “You’re in that denial stage where you think you can get the girl without having to change a thing about yourself,” Garrett said.

  “And why not?” Lucas asked, though he didn’t agree with the assessment. “What happened to loving someone as they are?” Merry had said herself, when she’d laid her cards on the table and trumped him with the scale of her love, it was for better or for worse.

  “That works for about five minutes,” Garrett said. “Then you realize love changes you and it changes her, and you have to keep adjusting.”

  It sounded complicated. And risky.

  “I’m going back to the Gulf,” Lucas said, unsure if he was changing the subject or not. “As soon as I pass my
retest.”

  “That’ll screw things up on the home front,” Garrett observed.

  “Merry’s pregnant,” Lucas blurted.

  His brother started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I find it amusing that the favorite son can make such a mess of his life,” Garrett said cheerfully.

  “Shut up,” Lucas said. Then he realized why he’d called.

  “What’s up?” Garrett must have sensed a change in the quality of the silence.

  “When Mom died,” Lucas said. “When you were there, at Clark’s.”

  “What about it?” His voice had cooled.

  As kids, they’d talked about their mother all the time. As adults, not so much.

  “I’m not sure if I’m trying to confess or apologize,” Lucas admitted.

  “If this is about you thinking I didn’t do a good enough job of trying to save Mom…” Garrett sounded weary.

  Hell. “You knew I thought that?” Lucas said, appalled.

  “You weren’t exactly subtle at twelve,” Garrett said. “It wasn’t hard to figure out why you kept asking me for a blow-by-blow description of every breath, every compression that I and the paramedic and that other guy did.”

  Lucas groaned. “I’m sorry.”

  “I just didn’t realize you still thought that way,” Garrett said.

  “I don’t,” Lucas said. “For the last dozen years or more, it’s been myself that I’ve blamed, not you.”

  His brother snorted. “Stupid.”

  “Yeah. But not anymore. It was one of those things, Garrett. It happened.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It happened.”

  Silence fell, a comfortable one. Then Garrett said, “I better get off the phone before all this touchy-feely crap wrecks my Real Man Ale campaign.”

  “Seriously, there’s a beer called Real Man Ale?” Lucas asked.

  “You don’t need to tell me you don’t drink it,” Garrett assured him.

  Lucas hung up the phone, feeling drained but invigorated. Catharsis had its pluses.

  Why stop now? He checked his watch. Eight o’clock. Plenty of time before his eye test, and Merry wouldn’t have left for work yet. He picked up the phone again and called his wife.

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER HE PULLED into the parking lot at Clark’s Deli, Lucas still hadn’t let go of the steering wheel of Stephanie’s car.

  Merry tapped on the window, startling him.

  He unwrapped the fingers of his left hand from the wheel, rolled the window down.

  “Why am I here?” she asked. It was cold out. She chafed her arms as she spoke, and her breath came in visible puffs.

  “Because I don’t want to go in on my own,” he said.

  “We’re going in?” She smiled and put her hand over his on the wheel. “Thanks. I’m honored.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve been so great at pointing out my insecurities,” he said. “It’s only right you should live with the consequences.”

  Maybe because he had Merry at his side, walking into the store didn’t prove as difficult as he’d feared.

  Clark’s didn’t appear to have changed in all these years. The store was long and narrow, with four aisles of shelves, coolers and freezers holding a mix of fancy deli food and grocery staples. Clark’s was convenient and quick to get around, but not cheap. When Lucas’s mom was alive, she’d done her main shopping at the big supermarket a mile away. But there were enough emergencies and incidentals that she’d stopped here frequently, and Lucas had often come with her.

  Had they played Muzak back then? Lucas couldn’t remember, but right now, something jazzy was playing through the speakers.

  “I take it we’re not here to buy beer,” Merry said.

  He couldn’t quite smile. “It happened… Mom was at the checkout.”

  The store still had just two checkout counters, with a wide aisle between. Right now, there was no one at either register.

  “Can I help you?” asked the clerk on the right, a girl with a pale face and dyed-black hair.

  Lucas rubbed the back of his neck. “Uh, is there anyone around who used to work here seventeen, eighteen years ago?”

  “Only Mr. Clark, but he’s not in today.”

  “In that case, we’re just looking,” Lucas told her. To Merry, he said, “Mom always used to go to the checkout on the left, even if the line was longer. The clerk on that side was way more efficient.”

  “So you think she would have been in that line that day?” Merry asked.

  “She was at the front of it. The clerk was scanning her items when Mom collapsed. The store delivered the groceries the next morning.” He frowned. “I don’t know if anyone ever paid for them.”

  Merry touched his arm, as if to tell him it was okay to be quiet. He didn’t need to entertain her.

  He stared down at the speckled linoleum floor, picturing the scene, the way he had so many times. His throat clogged.

  Merry leaned in close. He let go of her hand and put his arm around her, pulling her closer still.

  His vision blurred. “I couldn’t have brought her back,” he murmured.

  “No,” Merry agreed.

  He lifted his head, scanned the checkout area. Then higher, gazing at the ceiling, with its acoustic tiles and fluorescent lighting.

  “She’s not here,” he said. The words just fell out of his mouth. Thanks to his lack of thought, it was about the stupidest thing he’d ever said. Quite clearly, my dead mother isn’t here.

  “You don’t need this place to be some kind of—of shrine to her.” Merry got right to the essence of what it was he’d meant. “Your mom’s in your heart. She always will be.”

  He drew a deep breath, suspiciously shuddery.

  Then a customer pushed past him. She hadn’t bothered with a basket, and had her arms full with two cartons of milk and a pack of eggs. A loaf of bread dangled in its plastic bag from between two fingers. She shifted her burden, trying to put something down without dropping the rest. Just as Lucas stepped forward to help, she lost the battle. The eggs fell to the floor; the carton burst open. The very spot that Lucas had been regarding, as Merry said, almost as a shrine, was now smeared with egg: yolks, whites, shells.

  As the checkout girl came out from behind her counter with a roll of paper towels, Lucas started to laugh.

  “What on earth…?” Merry said. Then, laughing too, she wrapped her arms around him, went up on tiptoe and kissed him.

  The initiative was all hers—demanding lips, seeking tongue—and she set Lucas alight. His hands moved down to her butt as he kissed her back, ferociously. Voraciously.

  “Excuse me.” The woman who’d dropped the eggs paused in her assistance with the cleanup. “This is a public place, and that’s inappropriate.”

  Lucas pulled away from Merry, still snickering.

  “You were amazing,” Merry said. “I don’t mean the kiss, though that was amazing, too. I mean coming here, doing this.”

  “It’s not that big a deal,” he lied.

  “I hate to scare you,” she said, “but you’re evolving into a man who’s in touch with his emotions, right before my eyes.”

  “Garbage,” Lucas said. He recalled his brother’s words from earlier. You think you can get the girl without having to change a thing about yourself.

  Dealing with a couple of his outstanding issues wasn’t changing or evolving. He wasn’t trying to get the girl; he wasn’t even in the running. He couldn’t be.

  “We’re done here,” he told Merry. “I have an eye test to get to.”

  * * *

  WHITE LIGHT. SO BRIGHT, JOHN could see it with his eyes closed.

  This was what he disliked most about being in the hospital, having no choice about when lights went on and off when he ate.

  Small complaints, given that the doctors were committed to saving his life once again. The life he’d “started over” six weeks ago today.

  Not such a big deal, sa
ving it this time. This was his third day in the hospital, three days of heavy-duty medication with side effects like vomiting and headaches. Unpleasant, but he was going to be fine.

  Noises filtered into his consciousness. The occasional clank of metal penetrated first, then distant voices. Last time, at a moment just like this, he’d decided to ask the first woman he saw on a date. And had ended up with a sharp-tongued, shy-smiled, full-breasted nurse.

  He missed her. A complete life wasn’t lived alone.

  I need someone. No, not someone. He didn’t want to date the first woman he saw, or any woman. Except Cathy, who hadn’t been out of his head for more than five minutes since she’d had the good sense to dump him nearly a week ago.

  He heard footsteps next to his bed. With a surge of excitement that made him feel twenty years old, he opened his eyes, already smiling.

  “We’re in a happy mood, Mr. Wyatt, aren’t we?” Nurse Barbara Kay was sweet, jolly, patient and always cheerful.

  He didn’t want her. “Is Cathy Martin working today?” he asked.

  She shook her head good-naturedly over his lack of a greeting. “I believe she is, Mr. Wyatt, but you know how it is.”

  He knew. Cathy had asked not to work with him. The news had hurt him, even though he’d understood why.

  He’d been a jerk.

  “This has gone on too long,” he told Nurse Kay as she flashed a thermometer into his ear.

  “How about I get you some nice breakfast?” Nurse Kay thought everything was “nice.”

  “How about you get me Nurse Martin,” he said. “Tell her I have something for her… No.” Inspiration struck. “Tell her I have something of her sister’s.”

  Nurse Kay looked skeptical.

  “Tell her now,” John said. Meekly, he added, “Please.”

  While he waited, he brushed his teeth—you never knew when you might need fresh breath—and replaced his pajama top with a T-shirt. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. Was this all he had to offer? He must be joking.

  He did have something else to offer, he reminded himself. The art folio that Merry had brought in at his request, along with his paints and brushes, was propped against the wall. He unzipped it, retrieved the watercolor he’d spent most of the past two days on. The conditions hadn’t been ideal—harsh hospital lighting, a drawing board propped against his knees, and even Nurse Kay’s endless patience tried by the clutter. But the picture had been so clear in his head, it hadn’t mattered.