All Dressed Up (21 page)

Lainie messed
up the introduction. “Mac, I should introduce you…” The stranger
had already reached the gate and Angie had her foot on the first
step. Angie messed it up, too, because the name wasn’t familiar and
yet Lainie kind of acted as if it should be, and he didn’t seem
like a client or a neighbor and she couldn’t believe that Lainie
had a new boyfriend or at least some kind of a date.

They got
through it, just a few awkward nods and words, and the stranger
drove away, and then Lainie seemed to have forgotten why Angie was
here and Angie had to remind her, “We’re going over to Brooke’s to
help her with the favors for her bridal shower, Lainie, you have to
remember, it’s been arranged for weeks.” She sounded snippy, she
couldn’t help herself.

Lainie clapped
her hands to her mouth. “I can’t believe I forgot. Angie, I’m so
sorry!”

“You had other
things on your mind, I guess.”

But Lainie
didn’t rise to the hint. “Just give me two minutes,” she said, and
Angie spent the whole of those two minutes sorting through all the
possible ways to ask about the man, the date. Joking? Accusing?
Shy? Excited? Warm? Indignant? Or just straight out busybody.

So what was
that about? Who is he? Was it a date? Why did you say his name as
if I ought to know it?

Oh, but she
zipped her lips in the end, stitched them shut.

At Brooke’s
they had so much fun. They really did. Brooke hadn’t made up her
mind exactly what she wanted. She was using an idea she’d seen on
the internet, of giving each shower guest a chocolate rose in a
pretty little white bud vase decorated with gold ribbon.

She’d bought
so much chocolate. “Do you think just the dark, or the white, or
some of each, or do I try to mix?”

“Do you even
know how to make chocolate roses, honey, because I sure don’t,”
Angie had to say. “Won’t they bl too brittle?”

“You make
chocolate clay,” Brooke explained, as if a YouTubl video was the
same as having done it before. “You have to add corn syrup to the
melted chocolate and then it kneads like clay. And it says you can
mix the white and dark but that it’s tricky.”

“I think you
should just go with the white, it’s more bridal,” Lainie said.

“I think
you’re right.” Brooke opened the bags of white and poured them into
a metal bowl sitting over a pot of boiling water. “But I’ve opened
one bag of dark already. Hey, what a pity, we’ll have to eat
it.”

Ashlyn put a
dark chocolate button in her mouth when she thought no one was
looking. Angie shook her head, no, Ash, honey, and they shared the
secret with a smile and Ash didn’t do it again. She wanted to help,
which was kind of a disaster when she tried. She unspooled the
ribbon from the roll, got glue on her fingers.

“How many are
you making, Brooke, for heck’s sake?” Angie said. “There has to be
three pounds in that bowl.”

“I thought
thirty.”

“You have that
many people coming to your shower?”

“If they all
show. I only just mailed out the invites a couple of days ago. Plus
we need extra for the ones we mess up.”

They melted
the white chocolate buttons and added the syrup and the air smelled
sweet. Scott sat in the living room watching sport on TV, talking
to the players as if they could really hear him, drinking his
beers. He wasn’t a heavy drinker. Enough, though, that he went up
the stairs more than once to use the john, his tread heavy on the
creaking stairs. Brooke cooled and kneaded the chocolate while
Angie and Lainie finished gluing the ribbons on the vases.

Ashlyn went to
bed after some protesting. “But Momm-eeeee, I wanna help more!”

Lainie, Brooke
and Angie settled at the kitchen table. “We have to roll it out on
wax paper, and cut circles with the cookie cutter.”

Angie keyed
herself up to ask about the visit to the cleaner to decide about
what to do to fix Emma’s dress, and finally managed it. The more
you rehearsed some things, the harder they were to say. A couple of
things – one thing – Angie hadn’t managed to say to Lainie in over
twenty years. “What did you decide about the dress, Lainie?” The
words seemed thick to her own ears, gluggy.

“We’re trying
the new feathers. If it doesn’t look good enough, we’ll show it to
Emma and see what she wants. Who knows if she’ll ever wear it. It
seems doubtful, I have to say.”

Brooke made a
stricken sound, hating that anyone’s wedding should be called off,
as if she herself was the happiest, luckiest girl in the world.

Angie shut her
mouth.

Brooke showed
how they had to press the edges of the chocolate circles flat, then
furl them into petals, adding more petals and twisting them into a
rose shape, opening the petals out. This was the tricky part, the
part where youahad to have such neat fingers and a good eye. Brooke
swore a few times, the “oh, she-oot,” she’d gotten into the habit
of saying after the time Ashlyn had come out with a string of bad
words at day-care. Brooke was such a good mom, even if she didn’t
always think things through.

“Can we make
it back into a ball and roll it out again if we need to?” Lainie
asked.

“I’m not sure,
I’m thinking they might harden up or crack if we roll it out more
than once.”

“I think
they’re getting better,” Angie said.

“Do you
remember your wedding, Angie? Doesn’t this remind youaof the night
we made all those cream cheese candies?” Lainie laughed.

“That no one
ate.”

“People ate
them.”

“We had about
a thousand left.”

“Well, it was
so hot in that room, people didn’t eat as much as we thought. Do
you remember how the rice from the church went down your neckline
and cooked inside your bra?”

“Don’t laugh
about it, Lainie. It was my wedding day.”

“Oh, Angie, it
was more than thirty years ago, can’t we laugh?”

“Laugh? When
the dress you made me buy – ”

“Made you
buy?” Lainie cried out. “It looked lovely on you! How could I know
it would bl that hot in September?”

“ – barely fit
because I was showing so much with Ben. It was so tight I could
barely breathe. And then when Wade pulled it off that night and
started kissing me, kissing my – He got a mouthful of that sweaty
rice. Can you imagine? I never understand why you think it was
funny.”

“Why, what did
he do?”

“He spat it
all over my stomach. My entire wedding was an embarrassment.”

“Oh, Mom, and
you’re still mad at him about it?” Brooke said, just like
Lainie.

“No, of course
I’m not still mad at him,” Angie quickly answered. They’d been
divorced for so l="e. They never saw each other. “But you know
what, it’s the little things that you can’t get over in a marriage,
Brooke, you’ll learn. That you can’t forgive. They’re the things
that start the rot. Not just in a marriage, with anyone. One moment
when it should have gone one way but instead it goes the other, and
if the other person is blind to how they’ve hurt you, how they’ve
laughed when you needed them to cry, how they’ve continued on
oblivious, while you’ve had it eating away at your heart…” She
pressed her mouth shut before she said too much.

Well, she’d
already said too much. Lainie would never understand and Angie
didn’t understand, herself, why that terrible velvet wedding gown
and the stifling heat of the Rod and Gun Club and the rice cooking
inside her gown still bothered her so much, why she felt she’d been
conned into marrying Wade, thinking that he was the big prize for a
pregnant bride, but he wasn’t.

As she’d said
to her cousin and her daughter, it was the little things, but why
was it the little things? And how did Lainie look past them, step
over them as if they weren’t even there?

When they had
thirty-four roses sitting in their vases, some of them a little
flawed, Angie said – because it should have been true – “Hasn’t
this been fun?”

And Lainie and
Brooke agreed without the slightest idea.

“Or it could
have been the lake water you drank,” Mom said to Dad, after Billy
had gone to bed.

“I don’t think
it was the water.” The water would never betray Dad like that, when
he was so happily bound for the Rio Grande, crewing for Magellan or
John Cabot.

In his bed,
where Sarah checked on Billy twenty minutes later, he had no
further explanation, and no further complaint. He’d always been
such a healthy kid, despite being born six weeks early to a
seventeen-year-old who’d smoked half her pregnancy. Sarah had no
idea if this stomach-ache thing was bad and he was playing it down,
or if it was nothing and he was playing it up.

She didn’t
trust Emma’s diagnosis, and knew that Emma didn’t trust it herself.
He rolled himself in the covers and apparently slept, but the next
morning the stomach- ache was still there. Mom vented her
uncertainty on Sarah, this time, sought her opinion and left Emma
alone. Emma had gone to buy paint for the canoes this morning. Mom
and Sarah were both afraid she’d come back with a puppy.

“Do you think
Emma could blang="e?”

“She said
herself she could blang="e.”

“And the
sailors say, “Brandy”…” Dad sang. Sarah thought it might be time to
nudge him into shutting up.

“I don’t know
if I should take him to the E.R.”

Dad stopped
singing, came back from his sea voyage, took off his coon-skin cap
and put his arms around Mom. “Okay.” You could almost see him
taking a metaphorical deep breath and rolling up his metaphorical
sleeves ready to do the hard metaphorical yards involved in getting
her to relax. “First, is it getting worse?”

“He says
not.”

“And he hasn’t
vomited,” Dad reminded her.

“No…”

“And he
doesn’t have any fever. He’s not complaining, he’s just quiet. Kids
get stomach-aches. There’s nothing on his mind, is there?”

“Nothing
obvious. Sarah?”

She shrugged.
“Interpret for yourself. I don’t know why I’m the authority.” She
hugged Mom, too, to soften the rebuff.

They left
Billy with the stomach-ache all day, and he seemed fine with that.
He didn’t seem to expect or want to be taken to the doctor. He ate
and drank, if less than usual, and he reported in a satisfactory
way on his bathroom visits. Dad left for Jersey as usual, at around
four, with the words to Brandy still on his lips.

That evening,
Billy felt warm but when Emma took his temperature, it was just on
a hundred degrees. “Mild fever,” she said. “But if he’s not better
in the morning…” She hadn’t bought a puppy, but confessed she’d
gone looking for one. “None of them were right.”

Sunday later
seemed so significant in hindsight, it was strange that it had been
so bland to actually live through. Thinking back, Sarah wished she
could go back and paint the day of Billy’s ambiguous stomach-ache
in designer colors, so to speak. Plump up its emotional pillows. At
the very least adorn it with a spectacular, museum-quality
confrontation between herself and Emma, or herself and Mom.

On Monday
morning, Billy’s stomach-ache was still there. “Should I make a
doctor’s appointment?” Mom wanted to know.

“Direct to the
E.R. at this point, I think,” Emma said. “Something’s not right.”
Billy lay on the couch on the screened-in porch. He still seemed
listless rather than in much pain. “Billy, we’re going to take you
to the hospital and get you checked out.”

“You mean
Mom?”

“I mean
whoever you want. Mom, Sarah, all of us.”

“I want
Mom.”

Mom looked as
if she was about to cry. “Just let me talk to the girls for a
second, honey.”

The three of
them went into the kitchen but this didn’t seem private enough so
they went out the side door and arranged themselves in a triangle
under the bought-for-Billy-as-a-baby wooden fort and swing set.
Emma hung onto a length of chain above the yellow plastic swing
seat.

Mom said with
a tight face and tears still threatening in her voice, “Who should
be the one to do this? It doesn’t have to be me.”

“You’re the
one he says he wants, Mom,” Sarah said.

Emma said
nothing. Mom touched a hand to her upper arm, then took it away.
“I’ve been thinking lately. Did I steal him from you? I know this
is the wrong time.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew
her nose. “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since you called
off the wedding and I have to ask.”

“No. No. I
mean, I let it happen. I wanted it to happen. I didn’t want it
ambiguous. I wanted him to be yours.”

“You never
told Charlie, did you? Is that why the wedding – ?”

Emma closed
her eyes and said, “Probably. One of the reasons. Yes. The
reason.”

“You were
allowed to tell Charlie, Emma!” Mom burst out. “My God! I never
meant it had to be so secret that – ”

“No. I didn’t
allow myself to tell people. I didn’t allow myself to remember he
was mine. It wasn’t ever you forbidding me.”

“I think I
did, in the way we handled it. You’re right, I think I did forbid
you.”

“I’m not
saying that.” She repeated more urgently, “I wanted you to have
him, I wanted to be able to pretend he was nothing to do with me.
It was a relief, I was such a coward. It was a total cop-out. I
trusted you with him. You’re a good mother, Mom.”

“Not always.”
She winced, as if she understood only too well the things Sarah
saw. The lack of steadiness. The swinging energy levels. “I did
steal him. I pushed you toward what I wanted for my own reasons. If
you want to be the one to take him to the hospital…”

“We can’t do
this now. We can’t unstitch it all now. Sarah’s right, you’re the
one he wants, and that’s what matters. Just get him there.”

Mom nodded.
“Oh God, why does the crisis always erupt at the exact wrong
time?”