Before Sammie or I could answer, he said under his breath, “Why is it that no one in this house refills the ice trays?” He pulled out six empty ice trays, carried them to the sink, filled them, and returned them to the freezer. He flopped into a kitchen chair and picked up one of the invitations. Then he read it. “It’s this Sunday?”
“Yeah, um, that’s just kind of how it worked out,” I muttered.
“So who’s the guy?”
“His name is Chuck. We don’t know anything else about him except that he’s in the army, too,” I said as I started stacking the invitations.
“If he’s in combat training, then that at least will prepare him for your family, especially Lucy,” Walker snickered.
I wasn’t in the mood to hear how nuts my family was. I changed the subject. “I know you want me to go to the beach but I can’t today. We have too much to do.”
Walker softened. “Okay, sorry. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised by anything Lucy does after, you know . . .”
I did know. He meant Lucy suddenly dropping out of school to join the military. It was something that was hard for a Princeton undergrad to understand. “I’ll just go to the beach myself,” he continued. “Plenty of other people will be there to hang around with. If you think you can get away later, just let me know.” He gave me another hug, kissed the top of my head, and left.
Sammie divvied up the invitations and handed me half. “Okay, let’s get started.”
Shaking my head, I took her stack from her and sat down at the table. “If we don’t organize them we’ll be driving back and forth all over town.” Methodically, I arranged them by street and street number. “See, now we just start at the east end of town and make our way west down Ruddiman, then back up Mills Street, and you get the idea.”
Sammie and I took the truck, lurching and screeching up and down the streets delivering the invitations. We really could have just walked. The truck, however, allowed us to hide more easily. If we were lucky, we could just stick the envelope into the mailbox out by the road unseen. But a couple of people caught us.
“Yes, Mrs. Petty, that’s right. Lucy’s getting married,” I stammered on the Pettys’ front walk. I backed up as she started to open the envelope, but she was quicker than me.
I was almost trotting back to the truck when she called after me, “Honey, this Sunday?”
“Yes! Sure hope you can come.”
“But . . .”
I had already slammed the truck door. Let Mom handle the phone calls. Sammie didn’t have a much better time on her side of the street. We finally made it home, exhausted from outrunning the questions. Elizabeth and Mom were upstairs. They yelled for us to come up and help them.
“Jeannie, you are going to be the maid of honor,” Mom started out.
“Why me?”
“You know you’re the one Lucy would choose if we let her know about this.”
“Why can’t Terri Worthington do it?”
“Because Terri Worthington is not family and it would be too hard to explain anyway.” Mom reached into the closet and pulled out a dress.
“Oh God. Not that.” It was Sammie’s high school prom dress. It was about eight years old and made out of silky polyester stuff with big red roses printed all over it.
“You’ll look lovely in it.” Mom was smoothing the fabric and holding the dress out to inspect it.
“Let’s just hope everyone is still drunk from Evan’s wedding the night before,” I sighed.
“What is Lucy going to wear?” Sammie asked.
“I’m not sure yet.” Mom pursed her lips.
“Why don’t you call the June Wedding?” I asked. It seemed logical, as it was the one and only bridal shop in town.
“I already did. Nothing is available in her size, and it’s obviously too late to order one.”
It wasn’t like we had an old wedding dress in the closet. Elizabeth volunteered hers, but it was in California. Not to mention that Elizabeth is about five inches taller than Lucy. Sammie had ceremonially burned her wedding dress in a Weber grill. I remember we had all barely flown back from her California wedding before she divorced the guy. Apparently he made some remarks about how she should get her family under control and that was that.
“What about Anna’s wedding dress?” I asked. We all stared at each other. They were about the same size, but this might be pushing things a bit too far with Anna.
“It’s not like she’s going to need it after Saturday night,” I added in defense of my idea.
“So we track her and Evan to their hotel room on their wedding night, wait outside, then knock and ask if they’re undressed yet? That seems very not right,” Elizabeth said.
“So who’s going to ask her?” Sammie asked. Nobody volunteered for this duty.
“I guess I’ll call her mother first,” Mom finally said. She turned and went downstairs.
“Does anyone else think this is crazy?” Elizabeth asked. Sammie and I didn’t even bother answering.
I went out into the hallway and opened the hall closet. As I figured, it was jam-packed with towels, blankets, old curling irons, squashed boxes of tampons, and my brother’s free weights. On tippy toes I reached up and began pulling the mess from the top shelf. Blankets cascaded on my head and fell to the floor.
“No way, Jeannie!” Elizabeth rapped out behind me. “Mom will kill you if she sees this mess!”
“Just this one shelf,” I pleaded. “It will only take a second.”
Elizabeth simply glared at me until I reluctantly gathered up the blankets, climbed up using the bottom shelf, and shoved the whole pile back onto the top shelf.
Deprived of cleaning, my normal method of calming myself, I went downstairs. The caterers were spreading out brochures in the kitchen. Dad had the sprinkler heads apart on the kitchen table and grumbled that they were getting his parts all out of order. Mom was pointing to various photos of food while she spoke on the phone. “Yes, Helen, I know this may be difficult for Anna, and you should absolutely not ask her if you aren’t comfortable with it.” There was a long pause before Mom said, “That’s a good idea; think it over and let me know. We’ll come up with some other idea in the meantime.” She hung up. “This is some fine welcome for Anna into our family.”
“Do you want cheese balls or the crudités?” the caterer asked.
“Crudités. Where else could we get a dress? Jeannie, get the phone book.”
“Chicken, fish, or steak?”
“Chicken and steak. We should give them a choice, right, Harold? I’m so worried about Anna. I should call Helen right back and tell her not to bring it up. That poor child, we are just running roughshod over her.”
“Palate-cleansing sorbet?” the caterer continued.
“Yes, but lime.”
I paged through the Yellow Pages and found something. “Here’s a store that sells costumes. They list wedding dresses,” I said.
“Give them a call right now. Lucy is a size six.”
The caterer thrust another photo in Mom’s face. “Now for the wedding cake, you can have either marble or white with, I assume, white frosting.”
“Marble with white frosting. Harold, aren’t we supposed to put a sixpence in the cake or something? Or is that in her shoe? Isn’t there some English family tradition we’re supposed to follow?”
“Yeah, post banns in the church six months before the wedding. But it’s a little late for that.”
“They’ve got a dress,” I said to Mom with my hand over the mouthpiece.
“What’s it look like?”
“It’s white, high-necked, full skirt.”
“Perfect. We’ll take it.”
“But it’s a size ten and it has fake blood all over it.”
Mom shook her head and I hung up the phone. She finished up with the caterer while Dad and I went outside. The sun was setting over Bear Lake and the water carried its red reflection. For once the lake was quiet, without speedboats and water-skiers. A
lone Butterfly sailboat was making its way home. Dad and I sat for a long time without speaking. We could do that, while everybody else seemed to make endless chatter. When it was almost too dark to see him, he said, “I hope she’s happy.” His voice cracked just the littlest bit. I nodded in the darkness and we rocked on the porch, swatting at mosquitoes, until the streetlights came on.
Chapter Six
Friday, June 27, 1986, 10:00 a.m.
The day started with an airport run. Dad does these because he can get out of the house for some length of time and into the quiet of the car. One time I was talking to him about the life expectancy of men versus women and told him that statistics show that men die off a lot earlier. Dad said they probably did it to get away from the women.
That morning, he took off in the Oldsmobile for the hour trip to Grand Rapids to get Grandma, who was landing at 11 a.m. We were a bit worried about her flying by herself. Last time, she got lost making her connection in Chicago and didn’t show up for about four hours. She told us that she became disoriented by the hallway of neon lights between United terminals B and C and just kept going back and forth.
Lucy and Chuck were coming in to Muskegon at noon, and Sammie, Mom, and I were going to get them. Elizabeth, after much cajoling, had returned the Caddie. Of course it fell to me to drive her back over to Evan’s house and drop her off. It was Sammie’s idea to make the signs and buy the confetti. I went up to Keefe’s Pharmacy and bought a bottle of Korbel sparkling wine. The lady at the counter didn’t card me but she did say, “Hi, Sammie.” When I got back, I called Evan to see if he wanted to go, too.
“Nah. I’ve got to go pick up my tuxedo. Plus, I don’t want to be around when Lucy sees what you all have in store for her. She might just turn right around and get back on the plane. Let me know what the guy is like. God knows what he’ll think of us.”
“Okay. See you tonight at the rehearsal dinner. I wouldn’t come by here today if I were you. Dad has the crew coming to put up the tent. And the new crisis is that Pete from next door told Dad we have big gopher holes, so he’s trying to figure out what to do about that.” Elizabeth and Ron were going to the beach, as Ron had announced that without Vitamin D from the sun he would become depressed. More likely he didn’t know what to do without a tanning booth nearby.
Muskegon County International Airport is composed of one runway and one small building. The only planes that came in there were twin-prop deals. All bags were off-loaded from the plane and you picked them up right on the tarmac. Lord knows where the “International” part of its name came from. They must have counted the fact that you could make connections in Chicago or Detroit to exotic destinations like Canada. The runway was set among cornfields, and the farmers kicked up such a fuss when the airport went in that the county commission didn’t have the heart to take the land away from them completely. In August, the planes had to change their schedules to accommodate the machinery and the workers harvesting the corn near the runway.
We positioned ourselves at the chain-link fence just off the tarmac. I saw the plane first. It emerged from the clouds, then disappeared into them again, as if it were scared to show itself. It finally descended and touched down. Sammie handed me a sign and started to uncork the champagne.
“I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” Mom said as she held the fence as though it might fall down.
I put my arm around her. “We can stop if you want.”
“I want all my kids to be happy. I want them to marry good people and lead good lives. And I want to do right by Lucy. I need to do right by my little Velvet.”
The plane rolled to a stop in front of us. The props were starting to slow down.
“You’re doing this because you love her, right?” I asked.
Mom nodded mutely. I could see that she was thinking hard. Then there was a discernible straightening of her back and her chin came up. “Okay, girls, let’s welcome Lucy and Chuck home.”
The door opened, and Lucy was the fourth one to step out. I had never seen her in uniform before, much less her dress uniform. I thought she looked pretty snappy. I held up the sign as Lucy looked over at us. She stopped in mid-step. Her smile came and went like a flickering lightbulb as she read it, WELCOME HOME, MR. AND MRS. CHUCK. Sammie popped the champagne and whooped as it sprayed over the fence. A few other people waiting next to us smiled and clapped, not knowing what they were clapping for. Lucy turned and said something to the man behind her. He looked over at us but his face was hidden by the shadow of his hat. She came down the steps with, we assumed, Chuck, but she didn’t come over to us at the fence. Instead, she headed straight for the arrivals door. I was holding Mom’s hand and it went limp. When Lucy was almost at the door, she turned and gave the briefest of waves. Mom took her hand out of mine and clutched the handles of her purse.
Sammie stared at the door Lucy had gone into. “There’s not another plane leaving for California right now, is there? She might be buying a ticket.”
Then the door leading from the terminal to our side of the fence opened and Lucy stepped out. She might have stayed right there, but people poured through the door behind her, forcing her toward us. Chuck was struggling with a piece of pull-luggage that didn’t want to be pulled. Mom covered the space between her and Lucy and cupped Lucy’s face in her hands. “Welcome home, sweetheart.” She touched her forehead to the brim of Lucy’s army hat and smiled at her daughter.
“Did I . . . are you . . . I mean . . . omigod.” Lucy didn’t seem able to put a sentence together. She blinked at the signs as though she had just learned the English language and was unsure of her reading ability. Sammie shook the champagne again and it sprayed across Chuck, but he didn’t seem to mind. He shook our hands and called Mom “ma’am.”
“Aren’t you embarrassed for yourselves?” Lucy finally managed to say as she wiped champagne off her chin.
Sammie just threw confetti on her. “It would take a hell of a lot more than this to embarrass us.” Chuck lugged the baggage to the car and we all squished in. Mom drove, with Lucy in the front. Sammie, Chuck, and I sat in the back. I craned my head back so I could see the sky and trees fly by the back window. A flock of seagulls took off overhead in a single arcing motion. I thought about the fact that a bunch of larks is called an exaltation. That made me smile. Somebody way back when had had a sense of joy when naming them.
Lucy sat erect in the front seat. Her dark hair was pinned up under her hat. Mom studied her profile at the stoplight. “So, honey, you’re married,” she said, half question and half statement.
“Yes,” Lucy said, but didn’t look at her.
We drove in silence for a few miles. Mom tried valiantly with Chuck. “Where are you from originally, Chuck?”
“I’m from Needles, California, ma’am.”
None of us knew anything about Needles, and that kind of killed the conversation for a while. “And your parents?” Mom struggled. I’m not sure what the question meant, but I was interested in Chuck’s answer.
“Jackie and John Tanner, ma’am.”
Ah, now we had a last name: Tanner. What kind of name was that? We were from the land of the Worthingtons and Prescotts or maybe the occasional Van Owen.
“And do they know about your, ah, recent marriage?”
“No, ma’am. Only Lucy’s friend Fudgie knew about it.”
Lucy slunk down a bit in her seat, her hat over her eyes.
“Fudgie Shaw?” Sammie asked, perplexed.
“Yeah, Fudgie Shaw,” Lucy answered.
How the hell did Fudgie Shaw know about it? Fudgie had been a good friend of hers in high school, but he certainly wouldn’t be the first person Lucy would call.
“Oh, Lord, I don’t think we invited the Shaws,” Mom fretted. “Jeannie, check the guest list when we get home. Lucy, do Fudgie’s parents know about this?”
“I don’t know. I asked him not to tell anyone. Which he apparently already has.” Lucy scowled. “And a guest list for what?” Silenc
e fell over the car again. It was one of those moments when you’ve been going hell-for-leather to solve a problem and think everybody else is up to speed, only to realize how completely wrong you are. The three of us in the know pondered the answer. Chuck was looking increasingly uncomfortable between Sammie and me. I tried to lean up against the car door to give him more room. Mom took a drag of her cigarette.
“Can you put that thing out? It’s really bad for you, in case you didn’t know. And it’s really bad for us, if you care,” Lucy stated flatly.
Mom rolled down the window and flicked the butt out. Since she gave no response, I knew she was still thinking.
“Lucy, your father and I have always wanted the very best for you. We were startled to learn of your marriage. But we wanted you to have happy memories, shared with your family, memories that you could always look back on. So we’re giving you a beautiful white wedding on Sunday. It’s because we love you, honey.”
Lucy didn’t look like someone who had just found out how loved she was. Her blue eyes seemed bigger than normal and her mouth was slightly open. “This Sunday?”
“Yes, sweetheart. But if it’s not what you want we don’t have to do it. It’s nothing that can’t be undone.”
“Except for the invitations being out. But I suppose we could just call everybody,” Sammie muttered.
“Everybody?”
“Just all of your high school friends and their parents. And your old teachers, people like that,” Mom said.
Lucy was ramrod stiff in her seat, speechless for the first time since I’d known her.
“When did you find out that we were married?” Chuck asked.
“On Sunday. We’ve been working on the wedding ever since. It will be beautiful.” I could tell Mom desperately wanted a smoke.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Lucy demanded. “You know, pick up a phone and communicate with me and ask if it was okay for you to marry me off!”
“I tried to, honey. I did. But you were out on maneuvers.”
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