The Dutch House(59)
I would have asked her how she knew my father, but then a man was there saying it was his girlfriend I had just scoped. I was taking him into the hallway, wondering if he in fact had strangled her. I’d been in the waiting room for less than a minute, and by the time I had the chance to wonder about the woman with the gray braid who’d called me by my father’s name, she was long gone, and I was no longer interested. I didn’t wonder if she’d been a tenant in one of the Conroy buildings or if she was someone he had known in Brooklyn. I certainly never thought about my mother. Like everyone else who worked in an ER, I pressed ahead with what was in front of me and made it through the night.
To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing—there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.
The contractor was waiting for me in the lobby when I got back and we talked about the window frames that were pulling away from the brick in the front of the building. He was still there taking measurements an hour later when Celeste came home from school. She was so buoyant, so bright, her yellow hair tangled from the wind that had kicked up. She was telling me about the children in her class, and how they had all cut out leaves from construction paper and printed their names on the leaves so she could make a tree on her classroom door, and as I listened, less to what she was saying and more to the pleasing sound of her voice, I knew that Celeste would always be there. She had proven her commitment to me time and again. If men were fated to marry their mothers, well, here was my chance to buck the trend.
“Ah!” she said, dropping her book bags on the floor and reaching up to kiss me. “I’m talking too much! I’m like the kids. I get all wound up. Tell me about the grown-up world. Tell me about your day.”
But I didn’t tell her anything, not about the Pastry Shop or Fluffy or my mother. I told her instead that I’d been thinking, and I thought it was time we got married.
Chapter 13
I wished my part of the work hadn’t all fallen to Maeve, who drove to Rydal to have lunch with Celeste and her mother and talk about napkin colors and the merits of having hard liquor at the reception vs only serving beer and wine with champagne for the toast.
“Frozen vegetables,” Maeve said to me later. “I wanted to tell her that would be my contribution. I’ll flood their backyard with little green peas, which would spare me having to sit through another conversation about whether the lawn will still be green enough in July.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”
Maeve rolled her eyes. “Well it isn’t like you’re going to do it. Either I get involved or we have no representation at the wedding.”
“I’m planning on representing us at the wedding.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not even married and I understand.”
Celeste said it was hard for Maeve to watch me get married before she did. Celeste said that, at thirty-seven, there was pretty much no chance of Maeve finding someone, and so the wedding plans were no doubt filling her with something less than joy. But that wasn’t it. In the first place, Maeve would never begrudge me any happiness, and in the second place, I had never once heard her mention even a passing interest in marriage. Maeve didn’t care about the wedding. Her issue was with the bride.
I tried to explain to my sister that I had dated plenty of women and Celeste really was the best choice. I hadn’t rushed into anything, either. We’d been going together off and on since college.
“You’re picking the woman you like the best from a group of women you don’t like,” Maeve said. “Your control group is fundamentally flawed.”
But I had picked the woman who had committed herself to smoothing my path and supporting my life. The problem was that Maeve thought she was taking care of that herself.
As for Maeve’s love life or lack thereof, I knew nothing. But I will say this: I’d watched her test her blood sugar and inject herself with insulin all my life, but she didn’t do it around other people, not unless it was a full-on emergency. When I was in medical school, and then later in my residency, I tried to talk to her about her management, but she would have no part of it. “I have an endocrinologist,” she’d say.
“And I have no interest in being your endocrinologist. I’m just saying as your brother that I’m interested in your health.”
“Very kind. Now cut it out.”
Maeve and I had endless reasons to be suspicious of marriage—the history of our youth would be enough to make anyone bet against it—but if I’d had to guess, I wouldn’t have put the blame on Andrea or either of our parents. If I’d had to guess, where Maeve was concerned, I would have said she could never have allowed anyone else in the room when she stabbed a needle into her stomach.
“Tell me again what my not being married has to do with you marrying Celeste.”
“Nothing. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Trust me,” she said. “I don’t want to marry Celeste. She’s all yours.”