The Last of the Stanfields(11)

“All the pounds I’ve got to lose to fit into the old dinner jacket!” our father exclaimed, slapping his belly.

I looked to Maggie, but she seemed equally perplexed. Michel swooped in to save the day.

“He means: for the wedding. The dinner jacket for your wedding,” he explained with a sigh.

“That’s why you called us all here tonight, isn’t it?” Dad said, smug and satisfied. “Where is the old chap anyway?”

“Who’s that?” Maggie asked, once more looking to Michel.

“Good old Fred,” he replied drily.

“Okay. I say give it a half hour, and if you two are still talking nonsense, we’ll take you to the hospital,” said Maggie.

“Good lord, Maggie, we’ll be taking you to the hospital if you keep on like this. What is up with you? Forget the whole thing. I’ll just wear my suit. It always was a bit large for me, so as long as I can keep my breathing to a minimum, I should be able to close the jacket. Though it is brown. They say you shouldn’t wear brown to a wedding, but I’ll tell you what else they say: desperate times call for desperate measures. After all, this is England, not Las Vegas, so if we don’t have time to get all our ducks in a row, that’s just the way it is, and we can leave it at that.”

Once more, my sister and I exchanged a dumbstruck look, until the sheer absurdity of the moment made me burst out laughing. It was an uncontrollable fit that soon proved contagious. Dad was the only one to hold out, but he never could resist a good case of the giggles and was soon in stitches with the rest of us. By the time Maggie managed to catch her breath, sighing and wiping the tears from her eyes, Fred’s unexpected arrival caused everyone to burst out laughing once more. Good old Fred’s bewildered look was the icing on the cake.

My father cleared his throat. “So, how about you tell me just what we are doing here if the two of you aren’t getting married?”

The word made Fred freeze halfway through taking off his jacket. Maggie saw his worried eyes and blurted out, “Don’t worry!”

“Dad, everybody . . . We are gathered here for the sheer pleasure of being together,” I interjected, trying not to sell it too hard.

“As far as reasons to gather, that one is far more commonplace,” Michel stated. “From a statistical point of view, so I’ve been told.”

“I don’t see why we couldn’t have done this at home,” Dad grumbled.

“Well, we would have missed out on all these laughs,” Maggie insisted, and then went in for the kill. “Can I ask you a question? Was Mum well-off when you met her?”

“At seventeen?”

“No, later. When you got back together.”

“Not at seventeen, not at thirty, not ever! She didn’t even have change to get the bus from the railway station when I picked her up . . . you know, when we reunited,” he added, choosing his words carefully. “Just think, if your mother had been a few pence richer that night when she got off that train, she might have never even called me. You know, it’s high time I confessed something to you kids. Fred, since you’re not officially part of the family yet, I’d ask that you keep it to yourself.”

“Confess? Confess what?” I asked.

“If you save the questions till the end, you’ll find out. Children, your mother and I may have somewhat embellished the circumstances under which our relationship was rekindled. Truth is, your mother did not just miraculously reappear, hopelessly and desperately in love with me, after being spontaneously struck with the epiphany that I was her one true love, despite that being how we may have described it, from time to time.”

“Always described it, every time,” Michel corrected.

“Fine, every time, I grant you that. Truth of the matter is, when your mother came home to England, she didn’t have anywhere to stay. I was the only person she knew around here. She looked up my name in the telephone directory from a phone box. This was before the internet, mind you, so that was the way we found people back in those days. Donovans were few and far between in Croydon. The only other one in the whole damn phone book was a sixty-eight-year-old woman—never married, no children, for those of you keeping track. Anyway, you can imagine my shock at hearing your mother’s voice on the other end of the line.

“It was the end of autumn, but already cold enough to chill you to the bone. I remember what she said like it was yesterday. ‘Ray, you’d have every reason to hang up on me right here and now, but you’re all I’ve got, and I just don’t know where else to turn.’ What in the world does one do when a woman says, ‘You’re all I’ve got’? I knew at that very moment that destiny had brought us back together, this time for good. I leapt into the Austin—yes, indeed, the very same one parked outside right now, don’t give me that look, it’s still running just fine, thank you very much—and went to pick up your mother. Now, I’ve every reason to believe it was the right choice, seeing as I’m lucky enough to find myself thirty-six years later sharing a hysterical pizza night with my three wonderful children and my not-quite-yet son-in-law.”

Silence. The three of us siblings exchanged looks around the table until Dad cleared his throat and declared, “Maybe it’s time I took Michel home.”

“Wait—why did Mum say you had reason to hang up on her?” I cut in.