Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (2 page)

“Fish!” the voice exclaimed and Fish realized it was Rose. “You sounded so suave I didn’t recognize you.”

“Good morning,” he said blandly. “It’s the voice I use for speaking to ladies of more mature years.”

“You mean Mom? I’ll get her. Mom!” Rose sang out without moving the phone from her lips, and Fish winced.

“I think she’s talking with a delivery man,” Rose informed him.

“Can she use any help?”

“Oh definitely. All sorts of friends-and-relations are over here helping, but they’re all women. There are a few things I know she needs a guy to do. Could you and Steven come over and take things to the hall?”

“Of course,” Fish said good-humoredly. “Tell your mom we’ll be right over.”

As he and Steven were walking out the door, they spotted Bear coming over a far hillside. He waved at them and bounded down the hill to meet them.

“Great morning!” he shouted as he came closer.

“So is the bridegroom ready then?” Fish asked, noting his brother’s exuberance.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Bear’s grin was contagious. “I’d better get to the church.”

“You want us to come with you?” Steven asked, checking his watch.

“Nah—Blanche and I agreed to make sure we both had some alone time today before everything gets in motion. Want to make sure we’re prepared.”  

“Father Raymond would approve,” Fish said.

Bear nodded. “Probably gave us the idea himself from heaven.”

When Fish arrived at the Brier’s house, he and Steven met a flurry of girls, women, and babies, all dressed in various kinds of wedding finery, and all bustling about with distinct and sometimes contradictory purposes. Most of the wedding children—and there were quite a few flower girls and pages—were dressed or half-dressed and were running around outside on the lawn of the old farmhouse, or jumping off the porch steps, or swinging from the branches of the apple tree. Their mothers and older sisters were chasing them, reprimanding them, and trying to keep them somewhat polished. Fish noticed that most of the children and quite a few of the adults were of Asian descent. He recalled that the Briers were good friends with a large family whose mother was Vietnamese and supposed these were some relations of those.

He and Steven edged their way into the house and found Rose in jeans and an apron tying wildflowers into nosegays for the children to carry.  Steven paused to greet his mother, who was poring over a list of guests. Jean Brier in her best cream dress, was talking on the phone to a relative who appeared to be hard of hearing. There was no sign of the bride.

“Where’s Blanche?” Fish asked Rose over the tumult after waving hello to Mrs. Foster.

“Upstairs in her room.”

“Getting ready?”

“She was ready,” Rose informed him, “at seven this morning. But she told me she wasn’t doing anything today except getting dressed and marrying Bear. She said to me, ‘That’s it. If there’s any crisis about the flowers or the catering or the place settings, I don’t want to know about it, so don’t tell me. It will all work out.’”

“She’s probably right,” Fish observed, watching the minor hysterics of one twelve-year-old and her younger brother on the porch. The boy had gotten a streak of mud down the front of his page-boy outfit.

Rose finished tying the ribbons with a flourish and indicated the table, stacked with table settings, flower arrangements, and covered dishes. “Mother wants everything on the table brought over to the hall before we go to church. Can you princes spirit them over there and still make it to the church on time?”

“On my flying carpet,” Steven assured her, hefting up a large box of napkins and vases of flowers.

“Wonderful. I have to get dressed,” Rose sighed, pushing back a strand of her tangled hair.

“Oh? You’re not wearing that flannel shirt?” Fish sounded disappointed.

Rose made a face at him. “You look very handsome this morning, Fish.”

He bowed again. “No doubt I’ll be able to return the compliment later.”

“Yes, later. I’m just Cinderella now. At least the bride is stunning.”

As Steven and Fish packed the boxes in the car, Steve surprised Fish by asking him, “So what’s going on between you and Rose?”

Fish was slightly annoyed. “Nothing.”

“Really? That’s a surprise. I thought for sure she liked you.”

“You asked if there was anything
between
us. I thought you meant reciprocal affection,” Fish answered dryly, starting the engine.

“Eh. So she likes you but you don’t like her? She’s a cute kid.”

“Exactly,” said Fish, inching the car down the driveway in reverse, watching the rear window carefully. Having so many children running around made him cautious.

“So what’s keeping you from dating her?”

Fish glanced at Steven, amused. “Why don’t you date her yourself if you’re so interested?”

“Oh, I don’t want to intrude on the family,” Steven said lightly. “After all, your brother is marrying her sister. It seems too perfect a scenario. I just can’t figure out what’s stopping you from pursuing her.”

Fish wasn’t inclined to go into the matter, even with an old high school friend. “You said it yourself,” Fish said. “She’s a cute kid.”

Hers

It was a beautiful day. Rose, whose many duties as maid of honor had included praying for good weather on May 25, gave thanks to God that she could check one more thing off her list, as she looked out the bedroom window. The sky was a pale robin’s egg blue, with only a few tufts of cloud in the sky.

The wedding children and bridesmaids were piling into family cars and driving over to the church. Only she and Mom and Blanche had yet to leave.

 Blanche was uncertain, as usual, about how she came off as a bride, but Rose had taken one look at her in the white linen-and-silk gown and pronounced that she had turned into a princess for real. Blanche had flushed pink and checked the mirror again.

Her gown was beautiful—simple yet sumptuous, as a proper wedding gown should be, Rose thought. It was pure white, with a textured sheen to the material—a simple bodice, a curved neckline that showed off Blanche’s lithe neck, simple elbow-length sleeves, a full skirt embroidered in a few places with the delicate shapes of flowers and leaves. No heavy beaded lace, no exaggerated flounces, no plunging necklines, no drippy pearls. Just a lovely, simple dress that didn’t compete with the bride’s natural grace.

Blanche's black hair was pulled up into a soft chignon, not one black strand out of place. It glistened softly in the morning light, and her fair skin had a radiant glow. Silver filigree earrings and a silver cross were her only jewelry. Her veil cascaded down her back in translucent white folds.

“You are perfect,” Rose declared. “There's nothing you can do to make yourself look prettier—most of it you're not responsible for anyhow.”

Blanche smiled self-consciously. “Do you think I should wear any lipstick?”

“No. But it probably wouldn't hurt if you feel you want some on. Do you need anything else?”

“I’m good,” Blanche picked through an open cosmetic case. “Go ahead downstairs. I’ll come soon.”

“As you wish.” Rose tucked her silk pouch of a purse and her bridesmaid’s bouquet of wildflowers into a basket, and stole out to the porch for a few quiet moments to just sit and feel utterly beautiful.

Partly it was because of her dress. It was long, sweeping, and palest pink, lightly trimmed with silk roses and trailing ribbons. Sitting on the steps of the battered wooden porch, feeling the spring breeze play over her long red hair, she closed her eyes and felt as though she were part of a large, gorgeous painting.

As she sat, she wondered if Bear was already at the church. Probably. He was a little anxious about whether or not he would be a good husband and father. Rose felt he shouldn’t be worried. He and Blanche had been dating for two years, and it was obvious to everyone that they were perfect for each other. Still Bear was concerned: his parents hadn’t had a good marriage. “But at least he knows his handicaps and can deal with them,” Rose assured herself. Her gut instinct was that Bear would be a terrific husband and father. She knew Blanche thought so too—obviously.

Probably Fish was at the church too. There was the usual faint flutter in her stomach regarding that personage. He had looked so—regal this morning in his tuxedo. She wondered to herself why she was still so fascinated with Bear’s younger brother after all this time.

How long had she known him now? Almost three years. Her family had come to know Bear first, back when the brothers were poor and living on the streets and the Foster’s living room couch. She had only met Fish, through various circumstances, a few months afterwards. “Then I rescued him,” she thought to herself, still with a touch of awe. He had been kidnapped, and she had stumbled into the criminal’s lair, and found him. One would think that rescuing someone from Certain Death would cause some romantic feelings—he had rescued her, too, before that unusual episode was over—but apparently, the only thing it had done was make Fish perennially concerned for her safety and not the least bit interested in anything beyond it.

She sighed heavily. While Blanche and Bear had soon discovered their mutual attraction, she and Fish had always remained careful friends, Rose’s daydreams not withstanding.

He seemed much older than she was, even though he was only twenty-one, and she was nineteen. He was extremely intelligent, and most of the time they had known each other, he had been at school, engrossed in catching up on his delayed education. He was also wealthy, but since his experience of prison and poverty had shaped his living habits, it was only rarely that Rose remembered that he actually had quite a lot of money.

Their conversations alternated between intellectual discussion and his tormenting her with his superior mind. Despite this, she’d had a fabulous crush on him. For a long time after she met him, she had written down almost everything he said to her in her diary. Every occasional letter he sent her she still filed carefully in a fabric-covered wish box under her bed. She had even printed out his emails. Usually she sent him six-page letters and he wrote her back a meager page, but at least he wrote. Once, he had been in a mood, and had drawn a fish at the bottom of his letter instead of signing his name.

She had cut out the fish and taped it on her bulletin board over her desk. Once she had toyed with the idea of putting it in her locket, but that seemed a bit ridiculous, even to Rose.

Trying hard not to anticipate seeing him today—and what would he think of how she looked in her bridesmaid’s dress? —she rose to her feet, dusting off the barest fragments of dust from that lovely skirt.

“Blanche?” she called. “It really, really is time to go.”

His

The Brier’s parish was a simple country church that had gone through far too many renovations to make it more modern, with painful results. The abstract art banners around the altar were appalling, even though their colors were no doubt liturgically correct. Fish speculated what the church had looked like a hundred years ago when it was first built, and wondered why the artistic choices of those ancestors hadn’t been respected, or at least investigated.

He tried to ignore the surroundings as he sat in the pew next to his older brother, waiting, along with the congregation of friends and family—mostly Brier friends and family—for the celebration to begin. He had glanced over his shoulder at that brightly dressed throng once or twice. There were senior citizens from Blanche’s New York parish and waitresses from the banquet hall where Blanche had worked. The home schooling crowd of Warwick, New Jersey, was also present in numbers. It was true in this case, Fish thought wryly, that the congregation was more artistically appealing than the church building.

Eventually there were soft chords of organ music, announcing that the bridal party was arriving. Fish looked at Bear, but his older brother had already risen and was moving to the front of the church where he would meet his bride. Fish and the other groomsmen followed him.

Fish was amazed at how many people were in the wedding party. The procession of priests and altar servers at the beginning was lengthy—Blanche was friends with an order of friars and they had all come to the wedding. He counted at least seven men in religious garb in addition to other priests, mostly fairly old or fairly young. There were four altar servers of various sizes, all Vietnamese. And then the bridal party began with a flock of little girls and boys in white, carrying flowers and candles. The older ones walked with a slow practiced pace, while the little ones bounced along behind them, trying hard to resist the urge to push and shove the slow ones in front.

Then came bridesmaids, all young girls dressed in pink gowns. The last of them must have been Rose, but Fish didn’t recognize her at first. She had undergone a complete transformation from the wild-haired girl of this morning. Her hair was up in the front and fell in a cascade of curls down the back. She moved so slowly and regally that she seemed like a different person, serene and composed. Then she caught Fish’s eye with an eager grin. He raised an eyebrow at her.