That quote and the picture that popped into Gracie’s mind caused her to blush even more. She found it hard to imagine something like that being in the Bible.
“Look.” Nicole opened the cover, and tucked inside were two tickets. Nicole explained that the tickets were to a seminar for women at her church, where her mother was a deacon. She said that she and her mother and sisters and Kim were all going. “We thought you and your mother would like to go, too.”
“Oh, yes. Thank you,” Gracie said, thinking there would be no way in this life that her mother would go to such a thing. A glance at her mother confirmed this.
Just then Kim stood and announced, “And now, one last gift.” Producing a child’s plastic horn, she blew on it, and music started. I’m gonna love you…
A man appeared from the hallway. It was Kim’s husband, with his hair slicked back and wearing a shiny silk shirt and tight jeans. He danced into the room and right behind him came Nicole’s boyfriend, wearing the same sort of outfit, both of them looking like something out of an old disco movie. It was hilarious. The two men danced in between chairs and into the center of the living room in a manner that brought hoots and laughter. They went around to the back of Gracie’s chair, and then here came a third man dancing into the room—Johnny!
Gracie could not believe it. He wore a cowboy hat, black silk shirt unbuttoned halfway down and black skin-tight pants. She did not think he had ever worn a silk shirt in his life, and she had never seen him in any pants but blue jeans, and she certainly had never seen him dance in such a manner. Her eyes got wider and wider as she watched him come across the room with an enormous bouquet of roses.
He paused in front of her mother, and in a very courtly manner in which he removed his cowboy hat and gave a little bow, he presented her with a single rose from the bouquet.
Then he turned toward Gracie. She pressed her hands to her burning cheeks as he came gyrating his hips toward her with the big bouquet of red roses. His face was the same color as the roses, too, but he came on, and when he got to her, he went down on one knee and laid the bouquet in her arms. Then he took her hand and kissed it, and when his blue eyes came up and looked at her, she felt like her heart burst inside her chest. Through tear-blurred vision, she watched him and the other two men retreat out of the room.
In a stunned state, Gracie looked around at her friends, then burst out crying.
Nicole started to go over and put her arms around her, but remembered Gracie’s mother was there. Stuck halfway between sitting and standing, Nicole looked uncertainly at the other woman.
Finally, hesitantly, Gracie’s mother rose and went to sit on the arm of Gracie’s chair. She patted Gracie’s back, saying, “Come on now…its not anything to cry about.”
Nicole found a box of tissues and passed it around, because everyone seemed to be tearing up.
After that, everyone sat around in a relaxed and lively atmosphere, having more cake and punch and perusing the gifts, and going on about how fortunate Gracie, Nicole and Kim were to have such men in their lives. There was a great deal of talk about Gracie’s promising future. Gracie was in a frame of mind—helped on by the large bouquet of roses—to believe all the wonderful predictions.
When the party broke up, Gracie hugged each of her friends in a manner that she had never before hugged people. She was hugging everyone right and left. She found herself hugging her mother several times when they got home, too. While the bridal shower had not been anything on a grand scale, it was about the best thing that had ever happened to her. She would remember it for all of her life. She was amazed to find that she, a painfully shy girl, had somehow blossomed into a full woman who not only had friends but also a man so fully and passionately in love with her that he would make a fool of himself and display it for everyone to see.
Now, Gracie thought, her mother had been shown what a special man Johnny was. There was no way her mother could continue to object to him. There was simply nothing she could say, so now her mother would surely go home.
Gracie was fully ready for her mother to leave. With Johnny’s concrete display of love, Gracie, who had been suffering some small doubts of her own, was eager to get on with her wonderful life with him. She wanted to be with him every minute, and to talk over and over about their wedding and honeymoon and all of their grand plans for the future. She could hardly wait for her life with Johnny to come roaring at her.
But she could not do any of that as long as her mother was ensconced in her apartment and demanding her attention.
As it turned out, however, her mother continued to linger. She changed her air-f light reservation after a phone call from Emma Berry, who told Gracie that the florist in Valentine had a new catalog of wedding decorations and asked if Gracie might want to come down and look through it sometime that week. Gracie said that she would, and also that she would like to view the church, to get an idea of arrangements. They had quite a long conversation, in which Gracie told her of Johnny’s most wonderful display of love at the bridal shower. Emma was delighted, as Gracie had known she would be.
The entire length of this conversation, her mother came in and out of the room. Once she stopped as if surprised and said, “Oh, you’re still talking.” When Gracie hung up and relayed the plans she had made to meet with Emma on Wednesday morning, her mother said, “You know, there’s nothing that won’t wait a few more days. I think I’ll change my f light and go with you.”
Gracie did her best to appear pleased and tried not to be nervous about being around the two women. She really had no idea why she was nervous. Her mother and Emma had been polite and cordial to each other during the Sunday dinner at the Berrys’ home. She told herself that she was being silly.
Wednesday morning, Gracie and her mother met Emma at the Valentine First Methodist church. Within five minutes, Gracie began to wear her neck out from turning her head back and forth between the two older women, as she attempted to make decisions about decorations, and using the hall and lawn for the reception. She could not quite figure out why she felt so nervous. Her mother smiled a lot, and so did Emma. Gracie did carry a lot of guilt about having the wedding so far away from her mother’s home territory, but she was a practical girl and knew that her future lay in Valentine.
Emma, who was much more sensitive than Gracie and knew the lay of the land immediately, quickly realized that Sylvia was not happy when she hugged Gracie, nor when she put in any suggestions for the wedding plans. She stepped back and said several times, “This is your wedding, Gracie, and up to you and your mother.” She tried not to jump up and down and clap when Gracie was delighted with the church lawn, and decided that the church hall and lawn would be perfect for the reception.
There was some relief for each of them when they took separate cars to the florist on Main Street, where the owners made a fuss over Gracie and praised Johnny at length. Gracie checked her mother’s face to see the effect of this. She had to admire how her mother’s smile never slipped as she gave every evidence of praising Johnny herself, while not really saying anything.
After reserving decorative items and ordering the f lowers, they crossed the street to the Main Street Café for lunch. Gracie and Emma both got the hamburger special, and Gracie’s mother, after some deliberation, got the chicken salad plate. This turned out to be mayonnaise-y chicken salad on a bed of iceberg lettuce, very pale and certainly nothing like the fresh leaf-lettuce salads with exotic fresh herbs served in the restaurants where she normally ate. Gracie saw her mother look down at the salad for a full minute, as if trying to identify it, then slowly begin to eat.
“How’s your salad, Sylvia?” Emma inquired.
“Fine…just fine, thank you,” said Gracie’s mother, with the smile she had been giving all morning.
A few minutes later, two of Emma’s friends stopped by their table—Belinda Blaine, who wore a blouse that displayed deep cleavage and the most impossible crystal high-heels, and Naomi Smith, who turned out to be the wife o
f the pastor who would marry Gracie and Johnny. In the course of the conversation, when Belinda slid into the booth beside Emma and stole some of her fries, the subject of the Glorious Women’s seminar came up. The pastor’s wife told of something called the Ladies Circle filling two vans to drive up to the church where the seminar was to take place, and Belinda said that she and Emma would be driving themselves.
Belinda said, “I couldn’t possibly stand that many women for a forty-minute drive. Could you?” she said directly to Gracie’s mother.
Taken by surprise, Gracie’s mother at first stared, then replied, “No, I don’t believe I would appreciate it, either.”
“I have tickets to that,” Gracie told Emma, forgetting her mother’s presence and getting excited. “I got two tickets as a wedding gift.”
With this, Emma enthusiastically asked Gracie if she might want to go with her and Belinda.
Right then Gracie’s mother said, “I plan to go with Gracie.”
Emma looked at her. “Well, that’s nice. We can all meet up there.”
Gracie didn’t say anything until she was driving home with her mother. “I thought you didn’t want to go to the seminar, Mom. You really don’t have to.”
“Oh, I want to. It sounds interesting, and I’ve already stayed this long, I might as well stay until next week.”
Her mother changed her f light reservations again, and Gracie wondered if there was a limit for that sort of thing.
By this time, Gracie was getting very tired of so much togetherness with her mother as well as her future mother-in-law. She thought her neck might just twist off if she had to be with both of them for an entire day. She also began to have a little fear that should she and Johnny take up residence anywhere near Emma Berry, her mother would straight away move down from Baltimore.
That night, with the excuse of having to go down to the store and handle some piled-up work, she slipped over to Johnny’s apartment for two hours. She felt silly having to make up some story. After all, she was a grown woman and Johnny was her fiancé. She told herself when she drove home that she was going to have a frank talk with her mother. They were going to have to reach an understanding, seeing as her mother had decided to take up temporary residence in her apartment. There was not only the problem of Gracie having private time with Johnny, but she also did not like the way her mother threw towels on the floor and tea bags in the sink.
But when she came in, she could not say anything to her mother. She did not know why she had thought she could.
25
Amen, Sister!
Belinda called twice that week to remind Emma not only of the women’s seminar but to press her to finish the new set of greeting cards. The sets they had placed at the gift store had sold out. Emma was amazed.
“Sugar, I do not know why you would be amazed,” Belinda told her. “Your cards are delightful. And we need to ride the momentum.”
Emma agreed to do two more designs. But when she hung up the phone, she was highly annoyed.
She had done the same thing she had done when she had learned that she had won two tickets to the Glorious Women’s seminar. She had gotten all excited about winning something and told Belinda that they could go together. About an hour later, when she really thought about it and realized she did not want to go, she wished she could learn to say no first. If you could say no first, you could always back up and say yes. But if you said yes first, people got very disappointed if you backed up and said no.
The idea of being in a mass of religious women was a little disconcerting. Emma had never considered herself especially religious, although she was spiritual. She found her communing with God best done alone and in quiet. There were too many distractions in a church setting. And who knew what all way-out stuff might go on at this Glorious Women’s thing. Her mother had said the Servants’ Whatever Church was a fundamentalist congregation. Now that Emma thought about it, she did not know what that meant, and she didn’t especially want to learn at this point in time. Not only that, but she did not care to again come face-to-face with Sylvia Kinney. That had not been working out well. It put her under a lot of strain.
She had enough strain in her life at the moment. What Catherine had said about Emma’s tendency to get preoccupied with Johnny and other things and forget about her marriage to John Cole was very clear to her now.
After finding those few early photographs of her and John Cole for her mother’s album project, she had gotten curious and gone digging through all their old photographs. She found a small cigar box full of snapshots of herself throughout her childhood, up until she married John Cole. She concluded that it was evidence of her grandmother Maisie’s picture-taking passion, as well of her father’s absence. He showed up in only a few of those childhood pictures, and always a little off to the side.
The fancy camera had been put to good use after Johnny’s birth. There were many shots of him and the three of them—her and John Cole with Johnny standing in between them. There were many of Emma and Johnny together. But there were very few pictures of her and John Cole. Even more telling, she found only two of herself alone.
For years Emma had held out hope that marriage counseling would prove the answer. It had not worked as she had expected. She and John Cole were little changed, except they were a lot more agreeable to one another. They rarely had so much as a cross word now. Neither of them seemed to have much to say at all. The only time they were together enough to talk was during supper, which was when John Cole came home, and afterward he would fall asleep in his recliner. When he did come in to bed, Emma had given up wearing her sexy nightgown.
Things appeared to be about as good as they were going to get. Emma pretty much felt she had failed, and it was a lot easier to turn her attention to where she could succeed and knew she did well.
She threw herself into planning and executing the family bridal-shower barbeque, and designing things for the wedding reception. She was making up hand-lettered cards with uplifting quotes on marriage, a different one for each table, to be displayed as part of each table centerpiece. And she had drawn up the prettiest thank-you cards for Gracie. There were also the invitations to the barbeque, which required printing the announcement with the computer on parchment, then putting that on wonderful cover-weight linen, and adorning each with a ribbon and concho.
Saturday morning, while she was putting on her face for the seminar, another thank-you card idea—this one for the bridal-shower barbeque—came to her. She often had her best ideas while showering or putting on makeup. She dashed to her worktable to sketch out the idea, and that was where she was when Belinda arrived.
“What do you think of this?” Emma showed Belinda the invitation and the thank-you card mock-up. “I’m so excited.”
Belinda was suitably impressed. “I like it.” Then, still studying the cards, “I would like some for a Christmas party I’m plannin’, and I know two other women right now who would snatch these up. We could take orders.”
Emma felt a rush of heady delight. Then she caught herself. “All right, but not any time soon. Here are the new designs, and that is it until after the wedding.”
Whew, she had said no first—and cleverly, without actually using the word “no.”
Belinda took that well, then peered at Emma. “Do you intend to go to the seminar with eyeshadow only on the right eye?”
“Ohmygosh.”
While Emma ran to finish getting herself together, Belinda lingered in the workroom, looking around. She took note of the curious sight of family photographs stuck around the edges of the drawing table and haphazardly scattered out on a table, atop some books, and even a couple taped to the wall. It seemed the work of a distracted woman—which fit with Emma.
Wandering into the kitchen, Belinda poured a cup of coffee, then rinsed the coffee pot and wiped up so that Emma wouldn’t be tempted to do any of that and get further behind. Belinda had known that Emma would be running late. She didn’t think the two of them had
gone anywhere that Emma had not been running late. It was her highly creative nature to get distracted, and Belinda, being of a practical nature, always came early to keep her friend on track.
It was sort of like Mary and Martha in the Bible, she reflected as she leaned back against the counter, sipped her coffee and perused the brochure for the seminar, where a title of one of the talks was given: Like Mary in a Martha World.
Mary, the spiritual one, and Martha, the busy one. Mary was supposedly the better one, but Belinda had always felt that Martha had been maligned. How would those men, who hogged the writing back then, have liked it if Martha had not been concerned with making their dinner? Maybe Jesus could make his own bread, but those other men would have been ordering Martha right and left. And Belinda would be willing to bet that Martha had been good in the bedroom. Women who got things done generally were women of action.
In that moment, she imagined Mary at the feet of Jesus. Something dawned on her. She thought about Lyle’s attraction for Giff Phelps. Just as Lyle had been attracted to Belinda for her intelligence, so was he to Giff. Although to Belinda’s mind, Giff simply played the part of being smart and was not so much so in fact. This was clearly illustrated in that he had allowed his wife, Penny Lane, to drag him down to Valentine from Seattle, just because she was lonesome for her sisters. Any man who would leave a place like Seattle just to come down and live among the passel of Lane sisters could not be all that intelligent.
Glancing at her watch, she put away the brochure and went to Emma’s bedroom. “Time check. You have ten minutes.”
Chin Up, Honey Page 24