Measure of Love

by Melissa Ford

  Chapter Seventeen

  ARIANNA HELPS push the comb of my veil into my hair while Emily helps fasten my old diamond engagement ring around my neck as my something old as well as my something new with a chain she picked up while running to the ceremony. It sparkles as she looks at me over my shoulder in the mirror that Alex has kindly set up in his office for the occasion.

  “Did I tell you that Anita is taking us to Papillon next week?” Emily tells me. “Lisbeth read that it’s even more exclusive than Mrs. John L. Strong.”

  “The invitations are gorgeous,” I agree, thinking back to my own outing with Anita, which is obviously much better suited for Lisbeth and Emily.

  “Thank you,” Emily says, bending down to kiss my cheek and then rubbing away the lipstick mark.

  There’s a knock on the door, and Lisbeth cracks it open to check before opening it all the way to let Rebeccah into the room. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t Adam trying to sneak down and see Rachel before it’s time.”

  “So, do you think you’re ready?” Rebeccah asks me.

  “You have your something old and your something new, and your sash is the something blue,” Lisbeth counts off while my sister tries to stop Penelope from spinning around wildly to make the layers of her chiffon dress go airborne. “Wait, you don’t have a borrowed! You need to borrow something.”

  We all freeze and look around the room. “Here’s a paper clip,” my sister says, unhelpfully.

  “What am I going to do with a paper clip?” I ask.

  “Take one of my bobby pins,” Arianna tells me, sliding it out of her blond hair.

  “If it doesn’t mess up your look, would you like to wear my mother’s bracelet?” Rebeccah questions. She slides it off her wrist, the vintage white gold bracelet studded with blue stones. Rebeccah holds it out to me, and I take it self-consciously, worried to be holding something clearly so precious to her.

  I slip it on, remembering admiring it back in our cooking class. It does make me feel like a princess.

  I take a deep breath, catching one final glance at myself in the mirror. I look pretty—it’s impossible for anyone to be this pampered and not look beautiful—but more importantly, I look okay. I look better than okay, in fact, as if I have somehow been infused with peace. If I had known that I would get to this place of calm, I could have saved myself a lot of anxiety these past few months. And then I rethink this because without that anxiety, I would have never realized how much I am ready to make this promise. I cannot qualify it with “for real this time,” because I meant my vows the first time too. But maybe now I understand those vows a bit better. I know more of what it means to be an individual who is part of a couple, a matryoshka doll marriage where we fit into each other until we become whole.

  We step into the hallway, giggling, with Lisbeth leading the way on the lookout for her brother. I can hear most of the guests moving around the front room, drinking pre-ceremony champagne, but we veer toward another back room that Ethan decorated for the badeken.

  Since Biblical times, every Jewish wedding begins with the lowering of the veil over the bride’s face, a ceremony called the badeken—a nod to the time when Jacob was tricked into marrying Leah instead of her sister, Rachel, because he couldn’t see the bride’s face. We didn’t do this the first time we got married, but I told Adam that I wanted to do it this time around once I read about it on a wedding website. I like the idea of starting out the marriage with openness and honesty. With looking at the bare facts before us.

  Before he sees me, I catch a glance of Adam standing nervously with my brother and Richard, his hands clasped behind his back. He looks up as I step into the room, and his entire face breaks into an enormous smile, the sort of which we lost over the years, that I promise not to lose this time around. Every day won’t be filled with that level of wonder, but I silently vow to myself to create moments where we can feel like this at least once in a while, when we can look at each other and think to ourselves, I am so damn lucky.

  I look around the room, noting how few times this happens in life that all the people you love come together in one space. There is Penelope dancing in the center with Beckett, who is dressed like a mini-Ethan, while Sarah reminds her that she’s over twice his size just seconds before Penelope accidentally knocks him down to the floor. There is Lisbeth and Emily, standing next to Anita and Edward, and my parents who are talking to Richard. Ethan has his arm wrapped around Arianna’s waist, and he kisses her neck as she smiles. They are my family—both the ones by birth and the ones I chose.

  Rebeccah offers a few words about marriage and invites anyone else to give their thoughts. Arianna draws the two of us close, wrapping her arms around us until our three foreheads are lightly touching, and I’m afraid that I’m going to cry. And then all she whispers is a simple, “I love you two.” And that is enough. Adam gives me a kiss and lowers my veil, and then time begins to speed forward as Ethan and Richard lead him out of the room and down the hallway to the chuppah, the wedding canopy.

  “This is it,” I tell Arianna, more to confirm it as if my brain needs everything said aloud to believe it.

  “It is, and you’re ready. My little girl is all grown up,” she tells me, and Emily gives off an indelicate half-laugh, half-snort which makes Lisbeth drop her bouquet as she cracks up.

  “Can we all please calm down?” my sister asks, wrangling Penelope who has squeezed all the petals in her basket until her hands are rose-stained.

  “I am calm,” I tell her and give my sister a kiss on the cheek.

  The wedding begins, and after Adam travels toward the chuppah, my bridesmaids line up out of the sight line. Though as I’m shuffled toward the back, I can see at the end of the aisle Adam pausing to wait for me. As Sarah steps forward, a hush falls over the room, and the violin players change the song, performing a duet of Haydn’s Serenade, which has always sounded to me like two people talking even when it is played by one violin, but with two, it sounds as if someone is telling a love story.

  Sarah goads Penelope down the aisle, and Ethan brings Beckett halfway up to meet her. Beckett grabs the basket of rose petals and dumps them on the floor, and then sits down to try to take off his shoes until Ethan whisks him away. And then there is a parade of my bridesmaids: Sarah and Emily and finally Lisbeth and Arianna, until it is down to me, with my parents on either side of me, waiting to escort me down the aisle.

  Everyone in the room rises as I walk slowly into the room, and even the people on the Manhattan streets outside pause from wherever they’re racing to in order to gawk through the windows. And I don’t care. I almost want to open the doors and let them in too. I make myself wait a moment to meet Adam’s gaze, and I look to either side, finding one of my cousins and Adam’s coworkers and my great-aunt and Jared, who has brought along Michael as his plus-one, their hands entwined together to let me know that there is a story there. That I’m not the only one who is trying again.

  And then I look up at Adam, and everyone else somewhat disappears from the room. In the background, the violins separate and harmonize, just like a couple. I meet him under the chuppah, the Jewish wedding canopy, and I circle him, and then he circles me, creating our marriage space, the tiny island in the larger ocean of all our friends and family, all the people who surround us.

  I am a stronger person than I was the first time I stood under the chuppah with Adam. I have to be. Life shapes you, smoothing out the rough edges like the Atlantic Ocean rubbing down the beach stones. And love strengths you. Despite what I feared in those first days after the divorce, I have been surrounded by love this entire time.

  (Please continue reading for an excerpt of Melissa Ford’s Life from Scratch.)

  Meet Rachel, Adam, and Arianna from the beginning...

  LIFE FROM SCRATCH

  Her life’s a mess. And so is her kitchen. Divorced, heartbro
ken and living in a lonely New York apartment with a tiny kitchen, Rachel Goldman realizes that she doesn’t even know how to cook the simplest meal for herself. Can learning to fry an egg help her understand where her life went wrong? She dives into the culinary basics. Then she launches a blog to vent her misery about life, love and her goal of an unburnt casserole. To her amazement, the blog’s a hit. She becomes a minor celebrity. Next, a sexy Spaniard enters her life. Will her souffles stop falling? Will she finally forget about the husband she still loves? And how can she explain to her readers that she still hasn’t learned how to cook up a happy life from scratch?

  Excerpt

  JUNE CLEAVER beat the crap out of me with her rolling pin.

  In my dream, Martha Stewart, June Cleaver, Bree Van De Kamp, and Marion Cunningham (whom they were all affectionately calling “Mrs. C”) were baking a pie together in my kitchen and arguing about the best way to pit cherries. They hadn’t really noticed me lounging around by the sink until I pointed out what a waste of time it would be to pit your own cherries when there were perfectly decent ones that you could get in a can when June Cleaver turned with a maniacal gleam in her eye and started beating me on the face and shoulders with her flour-dusted rolling pin.

  Just imagine what she would have done to me if I had suggested frozen pie crust.

  Which brings us to my latest self-improvement project. I fear that you will all cease to believe me, that I’ve become like the girl who cries post-divorce-finding-myself project, but this one is for real lest I become a spinsterish, batty cat-woman without the cats that I’ve been fearing that I’m morphing into all year.

  Unlike that stint with transcendental meditation (it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t concentrate! Could you meditate in a room while smelling the most divine marinara sauce wafting in through the air vents from the restaurant below?) or the time I mused about life as a zumba instructor or considered becoming a femivore and moving to a farm in Upstate New York so I could raise my own chickens, I’m really going to do this for longer than the typical three minutes I’ve dedicated to past life-improvement projects:

  Rachel Goldman is going to learn how to cook.

  This is the point where I publicly admit that I don’t really have a lot of skills in the kitchen. What I really mean is that I don’t have any skills in the kitchen. I can make ramen noodles like a pro, but I’ve never really followed a recipe (which is what happens when you don’t own any cookbooks). I’m more of a jarred sauce kind of girl. I consider toasting the English muffin on par with making my own bread.

  Before the divorce, we ate out almost every night or brought in take-out. If they offered a degree in Carryout Curry, I would have a PhD. Unfortunately, even if I am now only ordering for one, I quickly learned after we separated that while Hunan Chow is affordable on a lawyer-and-graphic designer’s joint salary, it’s prohibitively expensive for a living-off-the-money-I-got-from-my-half-of-the-condo-while-I-find-myself budget.

  So, I am going to learn how to fry an egg without breaking the yolk. And do more than boil noodles. I might even . . . gasp . . . make my own Pad Thai. And this, my friends, is how I’m finally going to find myself during my Year of Me. I can’t believe I frittered away weeks of my life sabbatical on ideas such as becoming a pet sitter (yes, it turns out that you have to like dogs in order to walk dogs.) You live and you learn.

  Okay, enough whining, it’s time to get cooking. I have armed myself with cookbooks from the library, a healthy stock of wine, and my best friend, Arianna, to be my co-taster. Please stick around; I need you guys.

  (Please continue reading for more information about Melissa Ford.)

  Acknowledgements

  Books may begin with a solitary writer, but by the time they reach the reader’s hands, they’ve been touched by a lot of important people along the way. Once again, thank you to the entire BelleBooks team for bringing Rachel and friends to life: Deb Smith, Deb Dixon, Brittany Shirley, and Danielle Childers. You take such amazing care of these characters.

  So much of Rachel’s world was shaped by the amazingly creative mind of my agent, Katherine Fausset who endlessly debated and brainstormed plotline with me. Thank you so much for breathing energy into this project and for always supporting me.

  A huge thank you to Jill Katz and the entire cast and crew at the Daily Show for giving verisimilitude to Noah Reiser’s world, and to Nina Callaway for planning the best fake New York wedding ever.

  Thank you to the very real Rebeccah Gan, for the hand-holding and advice. Thank you to all of the readers who tweeted, Facebooked (yes, it’s a word now!), blogged, and reviewed Life from Scratch. You got me excited to write the sequels, and I hope you enjoy the continuation of her adventures because I wrote them for you. Rachel may have come to life inside my mind, but it’s your interactions with her that have shaped her world. I can never thank you enough for that.

  Thank you to Scip Barnhart who kindled my love of printmaking and taught me how to hand-wipe my plates, and thank you to Frances Myers for telling me to stay in her class as well as not getting cranky with me when I got pine needle juice on the felts. (It was, in retrospect, a really bad idea.) Thank you, as always, to Ron Kuka and Jay Neugeboren for giving me the tools to become a writer.

  Thank you to my favorite New Yorker—Randall—whose stone-cold brilliant storytelling advice translated writing-wise into Sarah’s frank talks. Thank you to the Boston crew—Wendy, Jonathan, Olivia, and Penelope—whose family-sized collective talent with the camera became Ethan’s passion. Thank you to my parents: we could not do any of this without you.

  Thank you to superhamster Cozy Jackson for listening to my plotline brainstorming sessions while you munch on a lab block. You are quiet and furry but very wise.

  To Josh, who inadvertently gave me the bones of this story by proposing over and over again with my engagement ring in various public places. He is the person who creates my secret smile when he slips his hand into mine in the movie theater, and I think about how lucky we are that we’ve found each other in this world with seven billion people and millions of missteps knocking our paths out of orbit. I love you.

  And thank you to the twins who patiently waited for me to finish writing so we could play together on Pottermore. I love seeing you stepping into fiction (even if you make me brew all your potions), stretching into your writing talent with your own creative ideas. You continue to grow and amaze, and I am the luckiest mother in the world that I get to hang out with you every day. I love you to mieces and bieces of pieces.

  About the Author

  An amateur chef and popular blogger herself, Melissa Ford is the author of the award-winning website, Stirrup Queens. Melissa completed her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is also a section editor at BlogHer. Ford lives outside of Washington, D.C. with her writer husband, Joshua, and their twins. She is currently at work on a novel about Rachel’s best friend Arianna, Apart at the Seams. Visit her at http://melissafordauthor.com