Edith
They wanted daisies in jelly jars. Local daisies in fifty or so jelly jars they’d collected after they were engaged. Seemed childish to me, especially since June Reid wasn’t exactly putting her daughter’s wedding together on a shoestring. But who was I to have an opinion? Putting daisies in jelly jars is hardly high-level flower arranging, more like monkey work if you want to know the truth. Still, work is work, and the flower business around here is thin, so you take what you can get.
The jars were at June’s place, stored in boxes in the old stone shed next to the kitchen. I was supposed to bring the daisies that morning and arrange them on the tables in the tent behind the house once the linens and place settings had been laid. I’d picked them the day before, from the field behind my sister’s house, which is chock-full of the things. I’ve never been much a fan of daisies — they’ve always struck me as bright weeds more than actual flowers. Never mind that they’re cheap, but for a wedding, they’re not appropriate. Roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, even tulips and lilacs if you’re going for something less fancy — but daisies, no.
I remember when the two of them came into the shop. Hands held, dripping with dew. She looked like her mother, but curvier. June has, at least as far as I can remember, more of a boyish figure. And he was just fine, perfectly handsome, I suppose, in the way that nice, clean-cut boys who went to college can be.
They were young. That was the strongest impression they made on me. I didn’t think people got married that young anymore. At least not from well-to-do families. Local girls with no plans and knocked up, that’s one thing, but a Vassar girl with a job at a magazine in New York and a law student at Columbia, these are not the types of kids you see rushing willy-nilly to the altar. But they certainly were sweet together and had a cloud of luck and love around them that not only stung a little, old, bitter spinster that I am, but surprised me. That kind of affection is not something you see so much around here. Local couples, even the young ones, are worn-out from two jobs, school schedules, family obligations, and too much debt. And the older ones, with their late mortgage payments to make, propane-gas tanks to be filled, and sons and daughters skipping school and smashing cars and getting in fights at the Tap, are too tired, not to mention too busy performing their roles as jolly country folk on the weekends for the pampered and demanding New Yorkers, spending every last drop of civility and patience on these strangers with none left over for their wives and husbands. The weekenders from the city not only take the best houses, views, food, and, yes, flowers our little town has to offer, but they take the best of us, too. They arrive at the end of each week texting and calling from trains and cars with their demands — driveways to be plowed, wood to stack, lawns to mow, gutters needing cleaning, kids to be babysat, groceries to be bought, houses to be cleaned, pillows needing fluffing. For some, we even put up their Christmas trees after Thanksgiving and take them away after New Year’s. They never dirty their hands with any of the things the rest of us have to, nor shoulder the actual weight of anything. We can’t bear them and yet we are borne by them. It makes for a testy pact that for the most part works. But every once in a while there are some slips. Like when Cindy Showalter, a waitress at the Owl Inn, spat in the face of an old woman who muttered something insulting under her breath when Cindy did not understand the type of cheese the woman was asking for. Who has ever heard of an Explorer cheese?!? she asked me at church. I shook my head and later went on the Internet to find a cheese called Explorateur, which I’m sure has never been served in any restaurant around here. There was also the fire that broke out in the barn at Holly Farm and killed three horses. No one ever proved it, but we all know it was Mac Ellis, the former caretaker, who set the place ablaze after being fired by Noreen Schiff for padding the receipts each month. He’d done it for years, apparently, and her accountant in the city finally caught on. He never got arrested but word got out and he lost a few jobs. There’s a lot of resentment simmering underneath the smiles and so good to see yous and no problem, happy to do thats of this town. So when someone crosses the line, it can get uncomfortable.
Many people, the younger girls mostly, felt June Reid had crossed a line when she started up with Luke Morey. They always made a fuss about him. He was good-looking, I’ll give you that. Not a surprise since Lydia’s father was devil handsome in his day, and Lydia has always been what men seem to find attractive. Even so, much of Luke’s looks came from the fact that he didn’t look like anyone else around here. He was like a wild orchid growing in a hayfield. No one ever knew who his father was, but they sure knew he was black. I hate to say what it suggests about this town that there is virtually no one who could have been the father. The older couple in Cornwall, dead now, were retired scientists from Boston, and mixed — her black, him white; and the principal’s adopted son, Seth, he’s black but was only six or seven when Luke was born. This was our town at the time, which no one much thought of to be honest except in instances that exposed it like when Lydia Morey had her baby. It’s been at least three decades since that boy was born, but nothing much — at least on that front — has changed. More weekenders, of course, fewer local families, who one by one have sold their farms and land and houses to people who spend maybe a few weeks total in them every year. Saturdays and Sundays, a week or two in the summer. The truth is that most of the houses in this town stand empty. They blink with security gizmos, are scrubbed and dusted and jammed to the ceiling with beautiful furniture, but there’s no one home. I drove down South Main Street a few months ago — middle of the week, nine o’clock in the evening after supper at my sister’s house — and not a light on anywhere. The moon was out, so I could see the chimney tops and the dormers, but one after the next, all the way down to the town green, dark. It occurred to me that night and since that we no longer live in a town, not a real one anyway. We live in a pricey museum, one that’s only open on weekends, and we are its janitors.
It used to be that most of the big, old houses in Wells were owned and lived in by local families. I ought to know because I grew up in one. Granted, it was the rectory at St. David’s where my father served as rector for over thirty years, but back then the job came with a six-bedroom house with four fireplaces and a barn down in back. Now there’s a rector — some woman called Jesse, if you can believe it — who splits her time between three churches and lives in an apartment in Litchfield. The church rents out the rectory to a young family from the city who come up, yes, you guessed it, on weekends. Of course they have never, not once to my eye anyway, stepped into St. David’s. Which is hardly surprising since there are only fifteen or so of us who still come Sunday morning. Like the houses along the green, the old church sits empty save for a handful of hours on weekends. My father retired years ago, and died not long after, but I still go every Sunday. I kept his old key, so I let myself in early and set up the altar flowers with whatever is unsold from the shop and on its way to the garbage. No one can see wilting petals from the pews.
It might shock some of the old-timers at St. David’s to find out that I gave up on God a long time ago, when my mother started to disappear into Alzheimer’s, which has to be the slowest, cruelest way out there is. She started to go when I was in high school and died a week after my fortieth birthday. By then and for a long time before she was unrecognizable. Angry, awful, and completely dependent on me. My sister went to college and I stayed home to help with what my father was too proud and cheap to hire anyone else to do. Not that I needed one, but it’s not exactly easy to find a boyfriend let alone a husband when you’re living as an unpaid round-the-clock nurse in your parents’ house. I don’t waste my time wishing things had gone differently, and I don’t pretend that if I’d prayed any harder it would have. I’ve been on my own without God’s help or a husband for a long time now.