Twice Upon a Wedding
Page 23
Lily clapped her hands. “And I’ll pay!” she exclaimed.
All eyes turned to Lily. Elaine broke the stunned silence. “But you live in New York.”
“Don’t be silly,” Lily said, dismissing Elaine’s comment. “It’s a three-hour train ride from Manhattan. It isn’t Timbuktu. Besides, it would be such a hoot to be together again! And how better to squander a chunk of Reginald’s money if not with my friends?” Lily had recently become a widow when her much older, wickedly wealthy husband had sadly succumbed, leaving his beloved wife, Lily, (and his “beastly old sister, Antonia”) a portfolio that probably bulged with more stocks and bonds than Lily could count. She laughed and said, “Think of it as a loan you won’t have to repay. Think of it as your second chance.” She raised her glass in toast to poor, dead Reginald.
Elaine gasped. “You mean it.”
Sarah nodded. “She means it.”
Jo held up her glass. “To second chances,” she said, and they clinked all around. Jo had little idea what had just happened. But for the first time in months, her spirits had lifted and she thought that maybe her life wasn’t over after all.
She had been named “Most Likely to Succeed” by her high-school class. Josephine “Jo” Lyons had also been the captain of the debating team, the president of the student council, and the editor of the yearbook. She had been those things once. Now she was just a middle-aged woman sitting on the edge of the bed in her childhood home, wondering how it had happened that life had come full circle, with Elaine getting married while Jo was not, nor was Lily (perhaps to her chagrin), nor was Sarah, who no doubt preferred it that way.
They had always been different, the Winston College roommates. Lily said they were friends because of that, because they never were attracted to the same types of men, so there was no competition.
Jo had been the studious townie who had saved her money from waitressing during tourist season so she could live on campus and feel she’d left town, as if at last her life could begin. Jo had been attracted only to one man, Brian Forbes, who was tall and handsome, gregarious and a bit of a bad boy. He had been like her father, she supposed.
Elaine had been the domestic diva wanna-be (despite her dubious taste) long before such a label had been coined by a questionable marketing guru who might have had close ties to Martha Stewart or Pottery Barn. Though Elaine had come from Upstate New York, she and Lloyd had settled in West Hope because his family was there and she’d been embarrassed by the “premature” baby and all. Although Lloyd had gone to law school, Jo had thought of him as rough around the West Hope edges, a small-town boy without the polish, destined for a mediocre life.
Lily had been the orphan raised by a wildly eccentric, rich aunt. A fun-loving, cheerful city girl, Lily knew all the latest fads—like shawls and boots and the resurgence of miniskirts—long before West Hope got wind of them. Lily had been attracted to lots of men, mostly older, mostly wealthy, mostly those who doted on her with great sincerity.
Sarah had been the exotic roommate, having traveled from the West, a Native American with a mysterious ancestry that she’d turned her back on. She’d remained in the Berkshires, in a town even smaller than West Hope, deep in the woods. She never shared much about the men she dated in college, or about the now-famous musician with whom she’d shared her life for many years. He, too, kept their private life private.
Jo’s mother used to say she could tell the difference between the roommates by the way they walked. Marion said that even with her eyes closed, she knew that Lily had the light steps of a ballerina; Sarah, the long strides of a slow yet deliberate woman; and Elaine, the short, clipped gait of a majorette. Marion knew Jo’s steps, of course, because she was her daughter. She often described them to the others as steady and sincere, if not always heading in the right direction.
Throughout the years, it had been Elaine who had kept the friends together. It had been her idea to meet in New York City each year in the fall for a weekend of girl stuff. New York, after all, was the best place to shop and to eat and to go to the theater. And to laugh. Despite all their differences, they always loved to laugh.
“Third weekend in September,” Elaine announced every year, first by mail, then by phone calls, now by e-mail, though Jo suspected none of them needed a reminder.
Other than that, their meetings had been few. Lily’s weddings. The birth of Sarah’s son. The death of Elaine’s mother. An occasional lunch or a quick “Hello” when Jo was in West Hope visiting her mother.
And now, another wedding, a second for Elaine, while Jo had not yet had a first. She’d been too busy being mature, responsible, dependable. Never a carefree kid.
Jo lay back on her bed now and stared up at the ceiling.
“Josephine!” she could almost hear her mother call. “Get a move on. Time’s a-wastin’.”
Time was always “a-wastin’ ” according to Marion Lyons, whether it was a school day or a Saturday or time for church.
“As pretty as your mother,” Ted, the butcher, said on Thursdays when Jo stopped by to pick up hamburg and flank steak and pounded veal chops for the week while her mother was at work as the clerk at the town hall.
“Such a smart girl,” Mrs. Kingsley at the bookstore always commented with a knowing nod when Jo bought one of many books.
“A wonderful sermon,” the congregation said, one after another, each month when Jo delivered the “children’s” message from the purple-draped pulpit.
How Jo had hated West Hope.
She turned onto her side now and picked at the chenille dots that covered the twin bedspread, the same bedspread that had been there since the sixties and seventies, yet, unlike her, did not seem to have aged. How many nights had she picked at these same dots, dreaming of the day she’d escape the claustrophobic town and its smothering people for a real life of her own?
She had escaped, of course. The “Most Likely to Succeed” had succeeded for a time, in the big city, Boston, where she had a fancy condominium and a to-die-for wardrobe and men, so many men, who loved her, but Jo Lyons was too busy succeeding to bother to love them back.
She had succeeded, and then she lost everything, though she hadn’t yet admitted that to her mother, to her friends, or, most of all, to West Hope.
And now Jo had a choice.
The closing on her fancy condo was next week; her movers awaited word as to where her worldly possessions should be shipped; the brass nameplate had been removed from the Back Bay office door: JOSEPHINE LYONS AND ASSOCIATES, PUBLIC RELATIONS SPECIALISTS. The “associates” were gone, the office was, too.
She could stay in the city, in a crowded apartment like the one where she’d started out, in a dark office building with no windows and no clients, and now with a reputation to repair and a bruised heart to mend.
Or she could go home. She could move back to West Hope, open a new office, and capitalize on the Berkshires’ tourism as she had suggested. She could help plan Elaine’s wedding; she could stay a year, maybe two, until her pain had subsided, until her strength had returned.
“Josephine!” her mother called up the narrow, steep stairs. This time the voice was not a memory. It belonged to the robust woman who was just past seventy and who hardly needed Jo’s help to get through her busy days and her bingo-playing nights.
TWICE UPON A WEDDING
A Bantam Book / April 2005
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Jean Stone
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
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eISBN: 978-0-553-90137-5
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