Twice Upon a Wedding

by Jean Stone

  With Cassie safely ensconced at the stables for her Sunday trail ride, Andrew sprawled across the living-room floor and poked through the Sunday styles section of the New York Times. Lily said it was required reading for the success of their business. Not that they’d need much inspiration for the Benson event. Irene Benson had been at the top of the social register for years and the woman always knew what she wanted. She hadn’t, however, known that she’d be renewing her vows.

  It had been Andrew’s idea. The Bensons were his friends. John was the editor of Buzz, Andrew’s boss in his “other” life. The women of Second Chances needed a high-profile wedding to get their business off the ground.

  It had seemed easy, harmless.

  However, the women didn’t—couldn’t—know that Andrew knew John and Irene, let alone that they were Cassie’s godparents, or that Andrew had more than a disinterested hand in the gala. The women didn’t—couldn’t—know about Andrew’s past or his present, his two lives spent in one body. Sometimes it even confused the hell out of him.

  He scanned the photos of the brides and grooms and brides and brides and grooms and grooms. He didn’t recognize the names, but committed a few to memory for Lily’s Monday-morning quiz.

  “Did you read the profile about the couple that was wed in New Paltz?” she was sure to ask, and to which Andrew could definitively respond, “Yes. The arrival of the bridal party on an old steam train was a wonderful idea.” The bride’s great-grandfather had been an engineer on the old Boston and Albany; indeed, the couple had met on a commuter train that they both rode each day in and out of Manhattan, to jobs at opposite ends of that island.

  “If it weren’t for a train, we never would have met,” the groom said while toasting his bride.

  It was that kind of detail Lily said would help set Second Chances apart from their competition. “It’s not unique enough that we plan second weddings,” she said. “We must get to know each couple and make the wedding special for them, special for their story.”

  If nothing else, John Benson would laugh and say the exercise helped Andrew get in touch with his feminine side.

  He’d made it through the first page and on to the second when his cell phone rang.

  “Speak of the devil,” Andrew said when he heard Lily’s voice. “I was just thinking of you.”

  “Good thoughts, I hope.”

  “Indubitably.”

  “Wonderful. They’ll have to hold you for about a week.”

  As usual, Andrew found it difficult to keep up with Lily’s brain. “Explain, please.”

  “Elaine and I are off to Laurel Lake Spa for a few days. Don’t count on us until Friday. Or maybe Monday.”

  He closed the paper; the quiz apparently would be skipped until next week. “Feel a need to get away?”

  “You won’t believe this, but I’m at Shavonne the Stylist’s right now.”

  Sometimes it was best to keep quiet and let Lily ramble.

  “Elaine is having highlights.”

  He recalled Elaine’s pronouncement last night. “She mentioned wanting to make changes. I didn’t realize it meant going blond.”

  “That’s not all it means, dear Andrew. Oh, this will be so much fun. For years, absolute years, I’ve wanted to lend a helping hand to our poor Elaine. She is so much more attractive than she ever let herself appear . . .”

  He grunted an agreement, because Lily would want him to. He picked up the Sunday sports section and skimmed the article about the Giants beating the Jets.

  “. . . so I’m treating her to Laurel Lake. She’ll come out of this a whole new person. It will be so wonderful for our business. Isn’t it just divine?”

  Andrew wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with wedding planning, but he muttered, “Yeah, it’s great.”

  “So we won’t be there this week. And Sarah is taking the time off because her troubadouring musician-lover is home right now. It looks as if you and Jo will have to hold down the fort. Or I should say ‘the wedding chapel.’ ”

  “Mmm,” he said, turning to page two. Then he stopped. “What?” Had she really just said what he thought she’d said?

  “I said you and Jo will have to work alone this week. Think you two can handle it?”

  The ink on the sports section blurred just a little. Alone. With Jo. Just the two of them, every day, for a week.

  “Andrew?” Lily asked. “Did you hear me?”

  He cleared his throat. “Don’t worry about a thing, Lily. Jo and I can handle everything.”

  He hung up quickly and wondered if it was time to leave mild-mannered Clark Kent at home and go to work posed as Jo’s hero.

  “My daughter will never speak to me again,” Elaine said later that day as she unlocked the door to her room, stepped inside, and genuflected at the first mirror she saw—a tall one across from the bed.

  “Stop looking at yourself,” Lily said with a laugh. “It’s not ladylike. Besides, you’re not the first woman in the world to go blonde.”

  Elaine flicked her eyes from the mirror to the newly laminated Laurel Lake photo ID in her hand. “But Karen will think I’ve flipped my old-fashioned lid.”

  “You have,” Lily said. “Thank God.” She backed out of the door. “Dinner is at seven; your massage is at eight. I’ll be at the pool.” She swept out of the room.

  “Well,” Elaine said, looking again at the photo, then back to the reflection that was supposed to be her, “you asked for it.”

  With a small sigh she turned from the glass and surveyed the large room. It was decorated in shades of celery and cream with touches of aqua—solid, soothing colors in soft, touchable textures, perhaps blended to evoke an aura of peace. A telephone sat on the bureau; next to it was a tray with an ice bucket, a pitcher, and two tall glasses. Elaine plucked Lloyd’s roses from her tote, inverted a glass, and quickly plunked them in. She carried it to the bath that was equally, quietly restful.

  She wondered how many women had begun new lives—or reinvented their old ones—in this room, in this bath. She wondered if she’d waited on any of them at Saratoga, so many years ago.

  After filling the glass with water, she returned to the room, set the flowers on the bureau, then dropped onto the bed. Suddenly, Elaine was tired. But when she shut her eyes, images danced within the darkness.

  “I’ll have the lemon sorbet with your raspberry crème,” a wide-brim-hatted lady was saying.

  The raspberry crème had been made from the wild berries Elaine had picked in the morning on the slopes of the back track, where the mist met the dew and the only sounds in the stillness were the soft neighs of the thoroughbreds and the muted hoofbeats that circled the practice track at the top of the hill.

  Each autumn, after the horses had left and the berries had, too, it was near those same slopes that Elaine gathered chestnuts for holiday stuffing and for preserving for her father’s special quail sauce next season.

  She had loved her life in Saratoga. But then she’d gone off to college, had met Lloyd, and her happy memories soon became buried under layers of shame and guilt.

  She missed her father sometimes. She missed her mother, too.

  Turning onto her side, Elaine thought about her once fun-loving father, how lonely he must be since her mother died a decade ago. He’d closed the restaurant the next year, claiming, “By George, I deserve an early retirement.” But Elaine knew that without the presence of his daughter, then without his gentle, steady wife, Bob McNulty had no doubt lost his spirit. An old horse no longer part of the race.

  Over the years they’d drifted apart—more guilt on her part, Elaine knew. He sometimes traveled the two hours to West Hope for holidays, but Elaine had always been too busy to go to Saratoga. Too busy with the kids, too busy with Lloyd, too busy with the library board and the PTO and the Fourth of July parade committee.

  Too busy or maybe too guilty, the good daughter who’d had a good life, who’d repaid her parents by getting pregnant when, no matter who said t
hey didn’t, people still talked.

  Too busy because she missed her mother so much, and it was too hard to think about all the times she’d meant to tell her she was sorry but hadn’t and now couldn’t. She could still tell her father, but it would not be the same. Besides, it was too long ago now, too over-and-done-with. It was easier just to forget.

  She rotisseried to her other side, hating that she was thinking these things when it was the beginning of her brand-new life.

  Then from the corner of one eye, Elaine spotted Lloyd’s roses. She sighed. She closed her eyes again and wondered if, despite what we do and how hard we try, the hooves of our past are never far behind, trotting us toward a future already determined by those things we’ve already done.

  Her last date had been in April in Boston, the night she and Brian had gone to McNally’s and Jo had gone home alone.

  Six months later here she was, sitting in a red-and-gold-glowing Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, with a man named Jack Allen who lived in the apartment building where she lived, and whom she’d almost run down in the parking garage.

  She hadn’t seen him since the “fortunate incident,” as he called it. They had, however, swapped a few notes, tucked under wiper blades, slid under doors. It was playful and sexy and safe. She’d learned that, as a kid, he’d broken his leg in a soapbox derby. She’d learned he was a pilot and that he was from Brussels.

  She’d thought he was relatively good-looking, and he was, with very black hair and very light skin and very dark, liquidy eyes. But she hadn’t really expected that they’d be well-suited, though his notes made her laugh and that had felt good. Nor had she expected she’d feel such an attraction as they’d driven to the restaurant, that between-the-lines thoughts would now have her thinking about sex when she should have been reading the menu.

  It was foolish, of course. She hardly knew him.

  She was on the rebound, after all, vulnerable to a quick way to dust off the ashes of Brian.

  It didn’t mean anything that her palms had grown moist and her mouth had gone dry and her brain didn’t seem to know what to say. She’d simply had too many months between dates.

  He passed on the wine. “I’m flying tonight,” he explained, his accent lightly French. “But please, get something.”

  She ordered Chardonnay because she was nervous. She’d overdressed in a short fawn suede dress and high coffee-colored boots. He was in faded black denim and sneakers. She’d spent hours getting ready; he hadn’t shaved.

  “So how did you get from soapbox derbies to jets?” Jo asked, when her wine had arrived and she began to settle down.

  “The derbies didn’t pay much of a living,” he said.

  It took Jo a few seconds to realize he was joking.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m out of practice. I haven’t been on a date in a long time.”

  He smiled but didn’t say that he hadn’t either.

  “Really,” she asked, “how long have you been flying?”

  “Twenty years for Global Paper. Only eight months out of here.”

  “Well. You must love it.”

  “What about you?” he asked without giving an answer. “What’s a girl like you doing in West Hope?”

  She sipped her wine. She wondered what her friends would think if they saw her now, trembling like a teenager.

  “It’s home,” she replied.

  He picked up his water glass and raised it in a toast. “To home,” he said. “Be it ever so humble.”

  She supposed he was referring to the building in which they lived, to the working-class tenants that came and then went, to the white plastic chairs on the balconies and the rows of philodendron that lined the windowsills, struggling to survive like everyone else there.

  “Humble,” she said. “Yes.”

  He smiled. It was a nice smile. “Perhaps you need some adventure in your life.”

  “Adventure?” she asked with a laugh. “Yes, maybe that’s what I need.”

  He studied her face. “You’re lovely,” he said.

  She reminded herself that she didn’t know him. “Thank you,” she said as she lowered her eyes, embarrassed that his words were so easily welcome.

  “So,” he said, as he leaned toward her slightly and brushed the edge of her hand where it touched her glass. “How would you feel about a weekend in Brussels?”

  6

  The dining room was decorated in the same shades as the three sets of “sumptuous silk lounge pajamas” (Lily’s words) that Lily had given Elaine before dinner—one of which (the cream-colored one) Elaine was wearing now. Celery, aqua, and cream were apparently spa trademarks.

  Rich mahogany furniture and thriving green plants completed the backdrop for fifty or sixty other ladies who were dressed in attire similar to Elaine’s, and sipped mineral water between smiles that revealed scarcely a wrinkle, thanks, no doubt, to Botox and a steady hand. Lily fit right in.

  Dinner itself wasn’t much to write home about.

  A small broiled lamb chop. A fresh mint salad. A few baby carrots. It wasn’t exactly a gourmet feast at Elaine’s father’s restaurant, but the flavors were good and she wasn’t hungry, anyway. She’d never had a massage and wasn’t sure it should be done on a full stomach.

  “You’re a hoot,” Lily said.

  Elaine was afraid to ask what she meant. She popped a baby carrot into her mouth.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Lily continued, “I’m all for makeovers. But, Lainey, you’ve got an ex-husband who simply still adores you. Why else would he send you flowers? And you had Martin. You never explained why you called off the wedding. Wasn’t Martin nicer than Lloyd?”

  She swallowed the carrot whole. Thank God it went down. “Lloyd wouldn’t have sent roses if Beatrix hadn’t left him. As for Martin . . .” She pierced another carrot. “I don’t want to talk about either one of them,” she said. “I want a new life.”

  Perhaps because the topic was men, Lily was not eager to let it go. She leaned across the small table. “But you seemed so happy with Martin. What happened, Lainey?”

  Elaine reminded herself that romance was Lily’s life, Lily’s world. Lily had never had to concern herself with teenagers or unfaithful husbands or whether or not the alimony check would last from one month to the next. There would be no getting around it, through it, or past it. Not until Elaine told Lily what she hardly understood herself.

  She dabbed the corners of her mouth with the linen napkin. “All right,” she said. “But the truth is, nothing happened. In fact, when I said it was over, Martin was wonderful. He never tried to force me to change my mind.” Once or twice, Elaine had wondered what she’d have done if he had. There was no point in telling Lily that, though.

  “Well, something must have been wrong.”

  Elaine shook her head. “No. Maybe that was the problem. He’s nice and he’s loving and he was good to my kids. He has his own business—the Chevy dealership out on Route 7—and he acts in Shakespearian plays in the summer. He’s solid and dependable. And he’s not bad to look at, though he’s almost sixty.”

  “Was he good in bed?”

  “Lily! Life is about more than sex.”

  Lily smiled a smug grin but didn’t reply.

  Elaine set the napkin next to her plate. “I changed my mind when the four of us started planning my wedding,” she said quietly. “It was such fun to be together again.” Lily, Sarah, Jo, and Elaine. The Four Musketeers, her father had called them in their early college days, when the world had been nothing but fun.

  “When you decided to open the business, well, I thought about my life and how boring it was compared to yours. All of yours.”

  Lily’s eyes grew wide. Her upturned mouth turned down a bit.

  “Think about it, Lily. You’re still so pretty and vibrant. You’ve had three husbands and you have lots of money and you can go anywhere in the whole world and do absolutely anything you want.”

  Lily didn’t comment, s
o Elaine continued. “And Sarah. She’s so successful with her jewelry designing. She has a famous guy who isn’t her husband, but they’ve made a wonderful life and have a wonderful boy. She has that great Native American heritage, and she grows herbs and eats health foods and has all that inner peace.” Lily might not agree with Sarah’s choice of a life, but she couldn’t argue with the tranquility Sarah had found.

  “And Jo! Good grief. She’ll always be gorgeous. She could have any man she wants. And she’s so smart. She’s so sophisticated. No matter what she wants or what she does, she’ll be successful. That’s intoxicating to others.”

  Lily set down her fork but kept her eyes on Elaine. “Shame on you, Elaine McNulty Thomas,” she said. “Shame on you for thinking for one single second that any of us have a life that’s better than yours.”

  Elaine was surprised and embarrassed. “I didn’t mean better, Lily. I meant more exciting. Less tedious.” She wasn’t sure if that was what she’d meant at all.

  Lily picked up her fork again and played with the mint. “More exciting to you, maybe. But we’re all so different, Lainey. That’s why we’ve stayed friends. That’s why our business will succeed. Because we each bring something different to it.”

  Elaine shrugged again. “I don’t want to get philosophical, Lily. I just knew if I married Martin my life would keep on being conventional. Predictable. Sane. And I’d never have a chance to experience the other side.”

  Lily’s expression turned a tiny bit sardonic. She moved her eyes around the room. “Well, honey, we’re in the right place for that.”

  Elaine’s gaze followed Lily’s with a tingle of anticipation, a glimmer of fear. Then she shrugged a what-the-hell kind of shrug, kissed Lily’s cheek, and left the dining room in search of her first massage.

  “Gunter, without an ‘H.’ ”

  He was tall and broad-shouldered and built like a boulder, a very big boulder. He wore navy sweatpants and a form-fitted tank top that hugged every muscle like a long-lost best friend. And when he turned to lead Elaine into the massage room, she couldn’t help but notice that Gunter (no “H”) had an awesome ass.