“The garden. Did I mention that I wanted an outdoor wedding?”
Rebecca’s jaw dropped.
For starters, they didn’t have a garden. They had a scratchy little three-foot plot of rosebushes at the front of the house, for show, and a slightly larger plot of mostly weeds at the back of the house that ended where the kitchen building began. And since it was the hottest and driest summer in living memory, the weeds were not even green. They were a parched and frizzled beige, and the azaleas under the dining-room window had turned into dead brown twigs. Besides which, who in her right mind would want an outdoor wedding when the average heat index was a hundred and five degrees?
But NoNo said, “I am a florist, after all,” as if that explained everything.
“Well, then,” Rebecca said, “maybe, as a florist, you can tell me how to get a halfway decent garden inside of two weeks.”
“Don’t you have that lawn-mowing boy? Rock, or Stone, or whoever?”
“Brick,” Rebecca said. “He hasn’t been here since early July. There’s nothing for him to mow.”
“I’m sure he can think of something. Lay down sod, bring in a few container plants…”
Rebecca had always considered NoNo to be the easiest, the most compliant and obliging of the four Davitch girls. But now she wasn’t so certain.
And then came the food issue. All at once, NoNo decided she didn’t want Biddy to cater. This was after Biddy had planned out her menu and lined up a non-family wait staff. NoNo said she would hate to make Biddy work on her sister’s wedding day. Biddy said, “I’d work before the day. That was going to be my gift to you and Barry. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger during the actual wedding. I would show up in a dressy dress and behave like a regular guest.”
“I was thinking about the people who catered that shower last weekend,” NoNo said in a musing tone. “The Guilty Party, their name was. I have a copy of their menu.”
Biddy looked over at Rebecca. She said, “You just so happen to have a copy of their menu.”
“They do such nice, straightforward, uncomplicated food,” NoNo said.
Biddy’s eyes grew pink, and she turned and flounced out of the kitchen. A moment later, they heard the front door slam. All NoNo said was, “Hm-hm-hm!”—a little three-note humming sound — as she poured herself another cup of coffee.
Oh, Rebecca didn’t look forward to this wedding in the least.
And the worst of it, from her own point of view, was that Tina was attending. NoNo’s mother, Joe’s ex-wife, all the way from England, where she lived now. Because she had so far to come, she arrived three days ahead of time. A whole caravan of cars went to meet her at the airport — Biddy and Troy, Patch and Jeep, NoNo and Barry, and every available child — but even so, several pieces of her luggage had to ride back in people’s laps. She traveled like a movie star, with one suitcase devoted to shoes and another to cosmetics. And she didn’t carry a thing herself but sailed ahead of her struggling bearers, bestowing a smile to her right and her left as she entered the house. “Rachel, dear!” she cried. Rebecca said, “Rebecca,” and let herself be engulfed in a perfumed embrace. “What a sweet outfit!” Tina told her. Rebecca had given some thought to her outfit — a plain white blouse that she had gone so far as to iron and a conservative, non-Bag-Lady, navy A-line skirt — but now she saw that what she most resembled was an overweight flight attendant. Tina, on the other hand, looked gorgeous. She was tall and slim, with masses of auburn hair piled on top of her head, and all her features were stunningly exaggerated: large, long-lashed eyes, pillowy red lips, confident prow of a nose. Her blurry, clinging dress could have gone straight to the wedding, but Rebecca knew, from earlier occasions, that Tina’s attire at the wedding would outshine the bride’s. It was obvious that she was nearly sixty, but she made sixty seem sophisticated and sexy.
Rebecca sank into a depression, all at once. She folded her arms across her stomach and watched bleakly as Tina dove into her luggage, pulling forth lavish presents for every member of the family. (Her second husband — ex-husband, now — was a very wealthy man.) French colognes, Irish crystal, a genuine badger shaving brush for Poppy, a regiment of lead soldiers for her new grandson… and for Rebecca, an apron. “Thanks,” Rebecca said tonelessly, but her voice was lost among the others.
It had occurred to her, often, that the way to win your family’s worshipful devotion was to abandon them. Look at how Tina’s daughters clustered around her! The men acted bashful and smitten — especially Barry, who was meeting her for the first time — and the children were dumbstruck. Even Min Foo, no relation at all, wore a look of breathless expectancy when she arrived. “Minerva, darling!” Tina cried, sweeping her into her arms, and then she gave her a pair of carved ivory chopsticks for her chignon. Tina never used nicknames; it was always Minerva, Bridget, Patricia, Elinor with her. Rebecca supposed that was significant. Distance was the key, here: the distant, alluring mystery woman whose edges had not been worn dull by the constant minor abrasions of daily contact.
“Well,” Rebecca said, “I guess I’ll go see to dinner.”
Nobody offered to help.
In the kitchen, Alice Farmer was slicing tomatoes. Her angular, blue-black face was generally unreadable, but there was no mistaking the sardonic arch of her eyebrows. “Come to hide out, have you,” she said. (She’d been working here long enough to have witnessed several of Tina’s visits.)
“I’ve a good mind to eat at a Burger King,” Rebecca told her. “Let them get their own damn dinner.”
Alice Farmer gave a whistling hiss of a laugh and handed her a bag of corn to shuck.
Rebecca wondered how Joe would have behaved in this situation. She had never had the chance to observe him and Tina together. (The two women had first met at his funeral — probably a bizarre encounter, although Rebecca had been too numb with grief to notice.) Of course she had quizzed him about Tina while they were courting. “I suppose she’s very attractive,” she had ventured, and Joe had said, “Sure, if that’s the type you go for.”
“And she must have a beautiful voice.”
“Tina? She’s got a crow’s voice.”
“But if she’s a nightclub singer…”
“So-called singer. Quote-unquote singer.”
She had felt a wave of relief that must have been visible, for Joe had smiled at her and said, “Have you been fretting your head about her?”
“You did choose to marry her,” she reminded him.
“She did happen to be pregnant, Beck.”
“Well…”
“Do you think we’d have married if she weren’t? Either one of us? We were miserable together. At the end of that third pregnancy, she was counting the days till she delivered so she could leave.”
But now Rebecca heard the girls’ laughter clear back here in the kitchen — louder than usual, and merrier. You would think they’d had the world’s most doting mother.
She unraveled the tassels from an ear of corn and let herself return to her true real life, where she and Will had one child between them, one biological child. A boy, let’s say. (Girls were so complex.) A boy like the one on the train. They would have named him something dignified: Ethan, or Tristram. Something that couldn’t easily be shortened. He would be a solemn type even when he was very young — a watchful, focused baby, content to sit for long periods of time studying his surroundings. A quiet toddler. An inquisitive little boy. The kind who might take a clock apart out of scientific curiosity. “Tristram! What have you done?” she would ask, coming upon a heap of sprocketed innards. But she would feel secretly proud of him.