“Caroline is why we took so long,” Miss Zula said. She took a sip from the wineglass her sister had pressed into her hand. Then she sat down and patted her lap. Louie jumped up and settled there with a contented sigh.
“Harriet, your sister decided to go to her bridal retreat, after all,” she said. “So we dropped her off there on the way home.”
“She
what
?” Harriet squeaked.
Rivera shot Angie a look. “A retreat? Like to a convent?”
“The Benedictine order has a retreat house about eighty miles from here,” Miss Zula said. “She’ll be back in a few days.”
“Days?” Harriet looked like she was about to choke to death on the word.
Miss Maddie said, “It’s a tradition, isn’t that so, Harriet? All y’all went on bridal retreats before your weddings.”
“Well, yes, but not five days before, not with so much to do. And she’ll miss the Jubilee, and what about the bridal shower? What would make her do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, dear,” said Miss Zula, completely absorbed in the massaging of Louie’s ears. “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
“I would,” said Harriet. “If they had a telephone. You’d think those nuns would have an emergency line at least. I’ll have to cancel the shower. What am I supposed to tell people?”
“I expect Caroline trusts you to handle all that.” Miss Zula gave her a serene smile. “You’ve done this four times before, after all. Exactly the same wedding, for all of you.”
“But this is her wedding, not mine,” Harriet wailed. And then an expression of complete dismay came over her face. “What about her picnic basket and her auction ticket?”
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Miss Maddie. “Neely Ogilvie is next on the list, and if I know her, she’s got a basket together just on the hope one of us would drop dead.”
Kai said, “A time of quiet reflection before a wedding seems to me a very good idea.”
She was pulling books down from shelves and sorting them into piles. John thought again, as he often did, that Kai’s approach to the world was as elemental and clear as water. He wondered about living in Japan, what that would be like; he thought of a quiet room on a mountaintop somewhere. Isolation seemed like a good idea just now, but then that would mean leaving Angie behind, again. He glanced at the phone, and then forced himself to concentrate on what his brother was saying.
“So what do they do all day long on a bridal retreat? I take it the nuns don’t put on a lingerie show.”
Kai said, “Nuns don’t wear underclothing?”
“I have no idea,” Rob said, straight-faced. “In fact, I don’t particularly want to know.”
“There is a bridal luncheon for Caroline on Thursday,” Kai said. “Do you think it will be canceled?”
“And the bachelor party,” said Rob. “What about that?”
“Hell if I know,” John said.
He felt vaguely nauseated and completely hollow, in spite of the fact that he had eaten the entire dinner Kai put before him. He spent more than five hours behind the wheel today, which was part of it, but mostly his mental state had to do with Caroline, and the fact that he had never had so much as five minutes alone with her all day. Not even when she had announced her intention of going off to the retreat for the rest of the week. Junie Rose had been delighted, Miss Zula had seen it as a reasonable thing to do, and thus it had been settled.
There had been a moment, a mere fraction of a second, when Caroline had looked at him and he could have objected. For any number of reasons he could have objected, the first and most important being the fact that they were getting married on Saturday. He could have asked to talk to her in private for a few minutes—he should have done just that—but instead he had met her gaze and then let his own slip away, across the parlor of Miss Junie’s summer cottage to fix on the view out the window and a single sailboat on the lake.
Two hours later she had climbed out of the car in front of the convent with a small suitcase—John had time enough to wonder when she had packed it before she had come around to his side of the car and kissed him, a brief touch of her mouth.
“Thank you,” she said to him. “Thank you for understanding. This is what I need just now.”
But he didn’t understand, and how could he? The last real conversation he had had with her was at Rob’s open house, which was less than twenty-four hours earlier and seemed at least a year. Because, of course, that party had been before the disaster on the baseball field and the mass exodus to the emergency room. It had been before he kissed Angie. Just now the world and all time could be qualified by the direction in which it flowed: up to the moment when he kissed Angie and she kissed him back, and then away from that moment.
As he turned the car toward Ogilvie and home, he realized that he remembered very little of that conversation in the crowded living room when Caroline had wanted to dance. He searched his mind and came up with no more than fragments:
bridal jitters
and
everybody has doubts
.
He had wanted to confess his own doubts to her; it had been his sincere intention to tell her everything. Caroline Rose, utterly meticulous and uncompromising in her scholarship, would ask hard questions and he would answer them honestly, and when that conversation was over, he would no longer be engaged. That would be the worst of it, though he knew the week would bring many difficult conversations: with each of the Rose sisters, with Miss Junie and Father Bruce and every male in Ogilvie who was in any way related to Caroline. But together they would come to an agreement on how to handle that, he and Caroline. They could work together still.
“John Grant,” said Miss Zula. She was sitting beside him in the car and he had been so lost in his thoughts that he had forgotten her completely.
“Yes, Miss Zula?”
“You know I love Miss Junie like a sister, and her girls are like daughters to me. Caroline most especially.”
He cast her a quick glance and saw that she was sitting as she always did, straight of back, hands folded. He had never seen her in anything but neat dresses, most of them in somber colors; he had known her all his life, and he had the idea that he didn’t really know her at all. Now Miss Zula was looking straight out the window, and didn’t turn her head toward him.
“Yes, ma’am, I know you do.”
“You did a good thing today, letting her go without making a fuss. You did the right thing.”
There were many questions that came to mind, but John couldn’t think of where to start without revealing too much of his own mind-set, something he could not do out of fairness to Caroline. Something he would not be able to do until Friday, when she came home. The day before the wedding. Until that time he would have to pretend that everything was just fine, which would be one of the harder things he had ever done.
It occurred to him just then that maybe Miss Zula was trying to tell him something else.
He said, “You make it sound like she’s not coming back.”
At that she did turn to look at him. “She’s coming back,” said Miss Zula. “Sad to say, but she will most certainly come back as she promised.”
The rest of the way home John had tried to think of ways to ask Miss Zula to explain that
sad to say.
He was good with words, and always had been. Students and colleagues both gave him high marks for his lectures, for the way he led seminars, for his ability to make the complex clear, to argue his point. He had made a career out of the careful weighing and arrangement of words until they sang on the page. Words were tools that could be used to uncover the truth, but this time they would not work for him.
Because, he must admit to himself, he was afraid of what Miss Zula might say if he could think of a way to ask her.
Now John half listened to Rob and Kai as they moved boxes. They were talking about curtains and telephone calls that needed to be made, address-change cards and utilities. They needed an answering machine and long-distance service, which made John think of his own telephone, because, he realized, it had been ringing for a while.
“John,” said Kai, passing him with her arms full of books. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”
By the time had had crossed the room, the machine had picked up.
“John? This is Eunice. What is this silliness about Caroline going on retreat five days before her wedding? Mama’s no help, she says it’ll do Caroline good. Except Mama’s up there at the lake and we’re down here with a list a mile long of things to get done before Saturday.”
The machine clicked off. John looked at Kai, who blinked at him with the same look she got when she was working out the next ten or twenty chess moves: intrigued.
He got up and started filling an empty moving box with books from the pile on the floor.
For the next hour he and Kai packed books and carried the boxes out to the porch, listening to one message being recorded after another. John would have turned the machine off, but he had the idea that if he did people would start showing up at his door.
“Dr. Grant? John? This is Patty-Cake, in case you don’t recognize my voice. I’m worried about you, John, and I’m worried about Caroline. Is everything all right? I can’t get ahold of Junie, and there are rumors going ’round. Folks are saying Caroline’s run off and the wedding’s canceled, and I’m calling you direct, out of respect, you understand, because you should know what people are saying. I’m not one to spread rumors, but my daddy always said speak the truth and shame the devil, and so I’m speaking some truth here. The question is, who exactly is the devil in this situation? A few weeks ago everything was fine, and then . . . I just don’t know what to think, Tab in the hospital and Caroline run away to those nuns. I do wish you’d pick up.”
John stood there for a long moment after the machine had clicked off, sweat running down his face and body, feeling a little faint for the second time this summer, though this time a trip to the emergency room and a few stitches wouldn’t fix the problem. Kai was watching him, her small heart-shaped face tilted to one side.
She said, “I wonder that Caroline didn’t tell her family about her plans.”
“She made up her mind all of a sudden,” John said.
Kai nodded thoughtfully. She said, “Patty-Cake is thinking of Angie and her friends, that they have something to do with . . . whatever is going on between you and Caroline.”
“I got that, yes.” John managed a smile.
“It would be best if Angie stayed out of her way, I think,” Kai said.
“Probably.”
The phone began to ring again.
“Dr. Grant? Professor Grant? This is Jean Marie Stillwater? I’m Caroline’s second cousin once removed on her daddy’s side? I do the book-keeping for Abby Shaw, the florist? I’m calling because the balance is due on the bill for the flowers, the corsages, and arrangements for the church and all that? And I can’t get hold of Caroline. Her sister Eunice said I should call you direct? I surely would appreciate it if you’d come by the shop tomorrow and take care of business. Bye now.”
In the silence John could hear Rob singing to himself while he lugged boxes to the car, lots of volume and enthusiasm, but what song it might have been was known only to him.
“Mama always said Rob couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket,” John said. It wasn’t often he thought of his mother, but she seemed very close at the moment. Lucy Ogilvie Grant Bradshaw Butler Chatham Black would know how to handle this situation. She would look Patty-Cake Walker in the eye and say just the right thing, words as pretty as oleander and twice as deadly. If John were to ask her for advice, she would cluck sympathetically and offer anecdotes from her many ventures into matrimony. Who else of his acquaintance had as much experience with weddings, and the multitude of ways that the whole thing could go wrong?
“You must be very distressed if you are thinking of asking your mother for advice.” Kai was watching him, her arms filled with books.
John was getting used to the way Kai sometimes picked up his thoughts, but this made him jump. He said, “The one person I need to talk to is the one I can’t call. No phones at the retreat.”
He wanted to talk to Angie, too, but he couldn’t say that aloud, not even to Kai. And he had made a promise to himself: he would stay away from Angie until he had something concrete to say.