But, after all, her cousin Bill was no ballplayer, and she loved him as much as Duncan. They would sit in the room that had once been her grandfather’s study — this up at Pear Hill, the old family place — playing chess. He’d sit with his horn-rimmed glasses in one hand and would talk about books she would really like, he was sure. (She would promise herself faithfully to get them from the city library in Slater, but always she would forget the titles.) Bill was going to be a lawyer and maybe go into politics, like Uncle Earle. He was only twenty-two, but already he was a member of the steering committee for some organization that had something to do with Indians. He and Duncan were like brothers, and always it had been sad to her that she was younger. Even grown up they were as splendid as ever, “professionals,” her father said — the two prides of the family. (Her father, the family failure, in a way — he’d left off farming to work in a factory — was even prouder of Duncan and Bill than the rest of the family.) Bill had given her a subscription to the Columbia Record Club. When Cousin Mary Lou had said, “Who’s the cheap one?” fingering it, Callie had bristled with anger. Bill gave away money to every charity there was and probably some that had gone out of business fifty years ago, and one time he’d given Callie a book worth fourteen dollars, pictures of famous places. He gave presents because they seemed to him right, just like Uncle Earle. He would have given her the same present whether it cost him fifteen cents or a thousand dollars, practically. “That just shows how little you know,” Callie had snapped. Cousin Mary Lou had been hurt. And immediately Callie had seen that Mary Lou was right, everyone who didn’t know him well would think the same thing Mary Lou had thought: so that even the wedding presents weren’t hers, it turned out, but everybody else’s; she decided to put his present out of sight.
“You don’t really like me,” Mary Lou said, tears in her eyes.
“Don’t be stupid,” Callie said. “If I didn’t like you would I choose you for maid of honor?”
“Your mother made you do it,” she said. One of the tears rolled down her fat cheek toward the fold between her chins.
“Oh, really, Mary Lou!” She took her hand, feeling guilty (it was true, Mary Lou had been her mother’s idea), and she said, “Mary Lou, I feel closer to you than to anybody else in the world.” She was amazed, hearing herself say it; but Mary Lou believed it. If she didn’t like Mary Lou, she ought to. Mary Lou had hardly eaten a bite since the morning Callie had asked her to be maid of honor, dieting ferociously to look pretty for it. She hadn’t lost weight; she’d gotten circles under her eyes.
Mary Lou wiped her eyes and blew her nose and said, “I really was proud that you chose me, Callie. I always loved you more than anything, and I didn’t think you knew I was alive. Do you remember the time the Griffith boys threw stones at me and you came and caught my hand and we ran home?”
Callie gave her hand a gentle squeeze. She didn’t remember.
Mary Lou said, “I was four-and-a-half and you were six.” Suddenly she was weeping rivers. “Oh, Callie, I do love you.”
“Dear Mary Lou,” Callie said softly, standing thousands of miles away, shaky at the revelation. How had she not realized? And how was it that her mother had known? How was it possible that one could be so incredibly, selfishly blind? And so that night, busy as they were, they had talked for hours, or rather Mary Lou had talked, Callie listening intently — in secret feeling trapped and bored — as if the two of them had just got engaged, or as if she was catching up on the life of a friend after years of separation.
A long, low truck carrying a big orange machine that looked vaguely military passed on the highway in front of the house. It was time now, but still no sign of Uncle John. She heard her mother shouting into Aunt Mae’s good ear, in the front parlor, and then she heard Cousin Rachel calling in the children from outdoors.
She smiled to keep from crying. It was supposed to be the groom that ran out at the last minute, not the bride. (She saw herself slipping quietly out the cellar door — she could reach the cellar from the pantry without anyone’s seeing her — and she saw herself lowering the cellar door again gently behind her, then going down swiftly toward the haylot and the woods beyond, carefully holding up the train and raising the skirts of the wedding dress.) Henry Soames would not run out, of course. He would be there in the church coat-room now, sweating in his tight collar, pulling nervously at his upper lip, wiping his forehead again and again, nodding and smiling whenever anyone spoke to him, no matter what it was they said. Aunt Anna was perhaps at the organ already, playing the favorite old hymns very softly, dragging her feet a little on the pedals, playing slowly, slowly, scowling at the page with her mouth bit shut as though she had pins in it. The ushers would be taking people in, the friends of the groom on one side, the friends of the bride on the other. Robert Wilkes would be fitting himself to a choir robe. The Griffith boys and John Jones and Ben Williams — maybe even Cousin Bill and Cousin Dune — would be behind the church tying tin cans and shoes onto Henry’s car, and putting signs on it, or worse. Again Callie smiled. Henry loved that car, beat up and old-fashioned as it was. He loved it as much as Uncle Grant loved his cream-colored hardtop. When they came out of the church and all the people were throwing rice and confetti and she was getting ready to throw her bouquet, there would be the car, poor Henry’s pride, at the foot of the walk, pushed around from where he’d parked it so that it would be the first thing he saw when he came out. It would be fixed shamefully, all its square antique dignity mocked by streamers and vulgar signs (they wrote on one car, “Hot Springs by sunset”), and Henry would gape, having known all along it was going to happen, for all George’s caution, but still not prepared, deeply shocked, feeling as though a whole part of his life had been torn from him and trampled. He’d stand frozen, staring in disbelief and sorrow. And then what? she thought. And then he will smile.
The bakery truck was still outside, and around the corner, out of sight, the man was saying, “Lady, I don’t care who signs it, I don’t care if a two-days-old baby signs it, but when I check in all the slips are supposed to be signed.” Aunt Joan’s voice said, “Don’t you sign it, Priscilla. Never sign for merchandise till you’ve checked it.” The man said, “So check it. I’m stopping you?” Aunt Joan said, “There might be nothing inside, only rocks. He might be a thief that came here to steal the jewels.”