Five Tuesdays in Winter(33)

The night after my date at the candy factory with Jeb—he’d kissed me at a stoplight and shot me little grins the rest of the way back—Wes, Mandy, and I were woken up by a piercing scream—a howl, really—like someone had been bitten by something. It was the youngest, A. J., who’d dreamt he’d been attacked by a kitten.

“Kittens can be terrifying,” Wes said after he’d brought all three kids up to our kitchen and was heating up some milk. “They have very pointy teeth and if they are mean then their cuteness is even creepier.”

Little A. J. was looking down at his hands on the table and nodding. His face was red and sweaty. The oldest looked like he wasn’t really awake yet, and the girl was walking around saying about nearly everything in the room: “Mumma has one of these.” Wes told her he needed help getting the honey from the high shelf and set her up with a stepladder and held her hand as she climbed to the top. When they all had mugs of sweetened milk in front of them, he reached for the salt and pepper shakers on the table and turned them into two friends named Willy and Nilly who were lost in the woods. By the end we all believed those small ceramic shakers were actual children, the way he made them move and speak and duck down when the eagles came looking for them, and that the toothpick he pulled out of his pocket was their mother come to find them. Mandy had tried to enter in with a spoon meant to be the father, but her voice was all wrong and I was glad when A. J. told her there was no father in the story and took the spoon out of her hand. We brought the kids back down and tucked them into bed.

The little girl looked at the clock on her nightstand. “Only three more hours till Mumma is back.”

I stroked her forehead.

Her eyes flashed open. “How many hours did I say?”

“Just three,” I told her.

We locked them in and went upstairs.

Sitting on the girl’s bed, stroking her hair had made me feel breathless and too light, like gravity had stopped working properly.

I stayed awake until Stacy came back. I heard her front door open and shut but she was quiet after that, needing those couple hours of rest before she had to get the kids up. I fell into a deep sleep and when I woke up she’d already taken them to school.

I drove down to Saskia’s wedding. I couldn’t afford a room at the resort hotel, so I’d gotten out of the rehearsal dinner the night before. That meant I had to get to the church an hour early for some last-minute instructions. Someone named Caledonia met me at the church door. She made it clear she’d taken over my maid-of-honor duties. She’d even bought all the other bridesmaids—there were eight of us—sterling silver bracelets engraved with the date. It would have taken me several shifts at the restaurant to pay for just one of those bracelets. She gave me mine. The box was wrapped in a tight blue ribbon with a double knot. She waited for me to undo it and lift the lid. It was too big. Bracelets always are. I have abnormally narrow hands. I slid it up close to my elbow and followed her to the nave.

Saskia was unrecognizable as she walked down the aisle. When we were kids she’d had this crazy electrocuted hair and now it was all smoothed down and folded into petals that splayed out like a peony and made her face seem very small. I wasn’t sure if she was nervous or angry at me, but she only glanced over once and her expression did not change. I hadn’t seen her in thirteen years. I suspect she chose me as maid of honor so she didn’t have to pick a favorite among her real friends.

When it was over and the best man and I had walked back down the aisle, I saw William, not in the back but close to the front, on the groom’s side, as if he were family. He was whispering with two aunties on either side of him. He was wearing a vintage white tux, absurdly overdressed for this afternoon wedding, but the cut was perfect and he so beautiful in it with his sheepish glance at me. He must have seen the invitation at my apartment in Cambridge before I’d left.

“Fuck him,” I said.

“Another lovely touch, No Show,” the best man said and detached my arm from his as soon as we reached the church doors. Caledonia had turned the whole wedding party against me.

As much as I wanted elegant William on my arm at the reception where everyone hated me, I told him to leave.

He brushed the back of his hand slowly up the side of my neck to my earlobe. “Let me just have a few hours with you.”

“Please go.” It was really hard to say these words.

A few of the other maids were watching but turned away when I came back across the parking lot. We got into limos that took us to a country club where we posed for photos on the golf course as the sun dropped, the light flat and orange across our faces, the way photographers like it. The entire wedding party minus me had gone to the same small college in Upstate New York. Saskia and Bo had met at freshman orientation. All the toasts contained words like “foretold” and “fate” and “meant to be.” The women at least varied in height, weight, and hair color, but the men were enormous and indistinguishable, varsity oarsmen. Every time one stood up in the same suit to say the same thing the last one had said, I put him in a bloodred kimono or a lemon yellow wrap.

When I couldn’t avoid it any longer I stood up and told a story about when Saskia was six and her dog got sick. When I sat back down everyone at my table was crying. Caledonia reached across and grabbed my hand. We had matching bracelets. After that people spoke to me and the elongated men asked me to dance. Saskia hugged me and said she loved me and we all threw bird-seed at them when they left. They’d changed out of their wedding clothes and looked like they were going off to work in an insurance office. Someone told me they were catching a flight to Athens. I got a ride back to the church from a guy I’d had a crush on in high school. He pulled up next to my car and I could see him deciding if he had the energy to try something, but I slid out before he came to a conclusion.