“I never said that!”
“No, you aren’t saying it, but it’s true.”
“I’m the only one who’s done anything about this damn wedding! I’m the one who has met with the wedding planner three times now—and all three times Charlene stood me up!”
“Not in love with her the way you were with Sarah,” she persisted.
“But I’m not the one in denial. In avoidance.”
“It’s you,” she said again. “And you’re frustrated because you can’t get Charlene alone long enough to convince her to agree you shouldn’t be planning a wedding right now. Then, when things settle down, you’re going to tell her you shouldn’t be planning one at all.”
“What is it you think you know?” he demanded angrily.
“You,” she said, and she said it firmly and calmly. “When was it? Two, three weeks ago? Four? When did you realize that it wasn’t right, that it wasn’t going to work?”
He seemed to suddenly deflate. He let out his breath in a huff and looked down. “Almost immediately,” he said.
“Oh God.”
“I knew right away. The day after we agreed to get married, I knew. We had no business planning to get married. Two people who see each other two or three days a week? Who are so independent they don’t even want to live together? But I’m fifty, Gwen. And I don’t want to be alone. I thought maybe the most anyone should ever ask for is to marry a good friend. You and Dick are good friends.”
“Denny, we didn’t start out as good friends. We started out hot as pistols.”
His cheeks began to color. “I met someone.”
“Oh Denny. Oh God.”
“And that’s when I knew that it wasn’t okay to go along with the wedding idea. I have to end this, but I can’t get Charlene alone long enough to even talk to her about the issue.” He looked at his watch. “She’s supposed to call me. We’re supposed to get together for dinner tonight. But every time we try, she has to cancel.”
“This is going to be so awful. This is going to kill Charlene.”
“No, Gwen, that’s what I’m saying,” he tried desperately to explain. “She’s doing the same thing I was doing. She’s going along with the marriage thing for whatever reason—because she doesn’t want to be alone or because she thinks she needs me to help her make decisions about her mother or whatever—but not because she’s in love with me and wants to marry me. Don’t you see, over the past few weeks I’ve gotten closer to the wedding planner than to my own fiancée! We’re practically best friends!” He took a long pull on his beer. “Shit,” he said.
Gwen took the bottle out of his hand and took her own deep swallow. “Hmm. Lunch tomorrow should be a real gas.”
Fourteen
Dennis was good enough to call Gwen and warn her that he had not been able to talk to Charlene. Some incident with Lois had commanded her immediate attention. Gwen lunged at the phone every time it rang that morning, praying Charlene would call and cancel lunch, but no such call came.
On her way to the restaurant, the oldies station on her car radio played, “Oh, girl, I heard you’re getting married, heard you’re getting married…” Denny had refused to tell Gwen who the woman was, no matter how she’d begged. He promised she would be the first to know, once things were settled with Charlene. All Gwen could think was that this was going to be a mess.
When she got to the restaurant, she found her brother’s fiancée waiting at a table set for six.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Charlene explained. “It’s just that I’ve been so remiss in my share of the wedding chores, I thought lunch today might be a good way to break the ice and get some things done.”
“Get some things done? What kind of things, Charlene?” Gwen asked. “Who are the others?”
“Well, its mostly the wedding party. There’s my mom and Stephanie. My assistant, Pam, is going to sneak away from the office for an hour. And if she can, Agatha Farnsworth, the wedding consultant, is going to stop by for dessert and coffee. She sounds like an absolutely delightful young woman. Dennis said he’s enjoyed meeting with her and thinks she’ll be very helpful.”
“Full speed ahead,” Gwen said, then she gulped.
“I thought we’d just toast the engagement, throw out some ideas about what would make an interesting wedding, and by the time we’ve had some fun and some food, Agatha will be here. How does that sound?”
“Bring on the wine,” Gwen said with a nervous shrug.
Gwen began to sense some of what Denny was trying to explain. Charlene was going through the motions. But why? She’d had the fortitude and courage to resist the conformity of marriage all these years. Why tumble into it all now, if it wasn’t genuinely what you yearned for?
“I just have one question, Char?”
“Hmm?”
“Why marriage? Why now? You and Denny could certainly live together if you chose…and Lord knows, you have a great relationship now, with this sort of separateness and intimacy all at once….”
“Well, why did you get married?” Charlene countered.
“We wanted to have children, because we had no idea how messy and expensive they were.”
Charlene laughed, and it had a hollow sound. Gwen frowned. One of Charlene’s great gifts was a laugh that was deep and rich and contagious and from the heart. And Gwen, who had a wicked sense of humor, always found it so easy to make Charlene laugh, and so enjoyed the task.
“Wait till I tell you what my mom was up to yesterday,” she said, not answering the question about marriage, but instead imparting this sad but sweetly funny story about Lois’s purchase of thousands of dollars’ worth of books, and Charlene and Stephanie’s exhausting attempts to return them all. “How she managed to buy and transport all those books without dropping from fatigue is one miracle. How we were able to get them all back in the stores by closing time is another.”
“Just you and Stephanie?” Gwen asked.
“Well, mostly. I had called Jake earlier, before we found my mom, because I thought we might be able to use the help of the police…so he was on hand to help out a bit. You’ve met Jake? Stephanie’s father?”
“At her graduation, I think. A long time ago. Now, is Lois aware that she—?”
Before Gwen could complete the question, Stephanie and Lois migrated toward their table. Lois was animated, happy, lucid and excited to be talking about a wedding. The answer to Gwen’s question was that between these periods of dementia, Lois was very nearly her old self. But it was apparent she was tired; perhaps it was the strain of illness and confusion showing on her.
And…speak of the devil, it was Jake escorting them. Stephanie kissed her mother’s cheek and said, “Dad dropped us off. He’s going to take my car to the garage to check the brakes…so they don’t gouge me.”
He pulled out Peaches’s chair, told Stephanie to call him to be picked up and and joked a little with Gwen by asking, “Do you think it would be too much if I offered to give Charlene away?”
“You never gave me anything before,” Charlene said in good humor.
Jake made the motion of a strike to the heart by pounding his fist against his chest.
No one else caught how their eyes twinkled. Gwen blinked to clear her vision, but even with the second look, it was there. The way they looked at each other. Jake and Charlene gazed at each other—though very briefly—with some kind of secret, and Gwen was left to study them, knowing something, but not knowing what.
Pam arrived, looking harried and pressured and less than her usual radiant self. She was wilting under the pressure of running Charlene’s office with very little help, Gwen assumed. Wine came to the table and Pam waved off the glass, opting for water, while Gwen consciously instructed herself not to guzzle.
Then things adjusted. After a glass of wine and some good food they melted into the experience. They became five women—friends—talking about men and weddings and houses and dresses. Gwen found herself forgetting, for the moment, that this wasn
’t really going to happen. Instead, she got into the idea of a wedding party. Together, they came up with some fun ideas—a black-and-white wedding, a swing band for dancing, theme weddings from Mardi Gras to western. Before long they were a bunch of loud women, laughing at lewd jokes about the wedding night. Gwen completely dismissed any suspicion of Charlene and her ex-husband, and quit worrying about the fact that Dennis was probably going to break up with Charlene that night.
Then she walked in.
“Nothing could please a wedding consultant more than seeing the wedding party having a glorious time ironing out the details.”
“You must be Agatha Farnsworth,” Charlene said, half rising from her chair.
The waiter pulled out her chair for her, but before sitting she stretched her hand across the table and took Charlene’s. She smiled pleasantly, somewhat shyly. “Ms. Dugan, the pleasure is entirely mine.”
“So glad you were able to come. My mother, Lois Pomeroy, my daughter, Stephanie Dugan, my assistant, Pam London, and—”
Gwen’s eyes fell on Agatha’s face and things began to come together for her. I’ve met with the wedding planner alone so often we’re practically best friends! She frowned. Do you continue to take meetings with a wedding planner if you knew you weren’t going through with the wedding? Not unless you were taken with the wedding planner! She hadn’t taken a breath, so stunned was she by this turn.
“Well, this is Gwen, my fiancé’s sister. Gwen? Is something wrong?”
Oh God, they were all with the wrong people! If you put them in a room and played a little sexy music, they’d leave their partners and gravitate toward the people they were meant to be with. And the only thing in the world that could have her brother this screwed up would be if he’d already discovered the secret pleasures of the wedding consultant.
“Gwen? What is it? Gwen?”
“Jesus Christ, someone slap her!”
“Is she having a seizure or something?”
Gwen shook herself, took a sharp breath…and inhaled an olive. Her hands went to her throat. She couldn’t breathe in or out. She first turned bright red, her eyes watered, her lips became blue around the edges.
“She’s choking! She’s choking!”
“Hit her in the back!”
“No, do that thing where you get her from behind!”
“Anybody know how? Get the waiter!”
“Help! Help! She’s choking to death!”
Gwen stood on shaking legs and the room started to sway. Her eyes bulged and she felt as though she was looking at the women through a curved glass. Then their voices began to fade even though they were standing, shouting, waving hands, jumping up and down. The room began to darken as though she were entering a tunnel.
“Step aside, step aside,” a deep growly voice instructed. The women parted and a huge man moved against Gwen’s back, put his arms around her, his hamlike fist in her sternum, and gave a sharp, powerful squeeze. She felt the olive move in her throat. He did it again, harder, and the olive popped out of her mouth and shot across the table right at Agatha.
Agatha leaned right as the little green missile shot past her head. Gwen went limp in the big man’s arms and he gently lowered her to the restaurant carpet.
“She’ll be all right. She’s breathing,” he said. “But someone should call 911. A little oxygen wouldn’t hurt. And sometimes I don’t know my own strength. Maybe you’ll want to X-ray those ribs.”
Gwen’s eyes fluttered open and she looked into the face of her savior, a fellow named Stan who was an off-duty fireman and paramedic. She began to sit up, and winced.
“You better stay down,” he advised. “You actually lost consciousness.”
“I’m fine,” she said, trying again, wincing again. “Ugh.”
“And I squeezed you pretty good.”
In the end she was taken by ambulance to her brother’s emergency room.
When Dennis looked down at his sister, her mascara running in rivulets down her cheeks from the choking and watering eyes, he said, “Gwen, what the hell happened?”
In a weakened and scratchy voice she whispered, “The wedding consultant came to Charlene’s little luncheon.”
“And?”
“What do you mean and?” She grabbed a fistful of his scrubs, and by the twisted look of pain on his face, perhaps a little chest hair as well, and pulled him closer. “Denny, I know what you’ve done.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said while his cheeks began to slowly grow crimson.
“You’d better tidy this thing up, Denny, or a lot of people are going to get hurt. Or killed!”
Charlene waited in the E.R. She stood from her chair when Dennis came out.
“She is going to be all right, isn’t she?”
“She’ll be okay, but you can go. I’m going to tape up her ribs, which are only bruised, but still painful, then take her home. I’ll be off in another hour, by which time she’ll be wrapped and the X-rays, which we ran only as a rule-out precaution, will be back.”
“I sure know how to throw a bridal luncheon.”
“You didn’t mention you were going to do that,” he said, annoyed.
“You didn’t expect to be invited, I hope. It was a girls’ thing.”
“Charlene, I want to see you tonight. No excuses, no last-minute cancellations.”
“Dennis, I told you, I’m very sorry about yesterday. First Peaches was lost, then we had to deal with over three thousand dollars’ worth of—”
“I know that, but we really must talk about this wedding business. We haven’t even had a discussion about it in weeks. I’ll be at your place at seven. I have a cell phone. If you’re not going to make it—”
“You’re still angry. I said I was sorry I was too preoccupied to call you—I was frantic. I don’t want to get together if you’re just going to yell at me.”
“I never yell. At anyone.”
“Well, I’ll have to check and see if Peaches—”
“Seven!” He turned and walked away.
Charlene stood frozen, staring at his back as he disappeared. Then she gathered up her purse and keys and left. She’d never seen that side of Dennis. This was a new aspect to his personality. She’d seen him angry a couple of times, but it was so mild and so quickly gone it was almost fleeting. Dennis was too civilized to lose control. Nothing like Jake, who was like a white-hot flash of light.
Jake. He just kept turning up. Gwen had probably mentioned that Jake had been at the restaurant; that had probably turned the heat up under Dennis’s impatience. It seemed that every time Charlene had to cancel or forgot to call, Jake was in the vicinity. It was pure coincidence, of course. Today he had offered to take Stephanie’s car to the garage for her; something about brake pads being replaced. He often did that. Come to think of it, he’d done it for Charlene before Dennis. Men, just by virtue of being men, fared better at the auto repair. It had nothing to do with being together.
There also had been no sex between her and Dennis since the official engagement, which was a very strange turn.
Charlene had heard that planning weddings brought out the weirdest behavior in people, but she never would have been convinced of this bizarre turn of events. The first and probably strangest thing in her mind was the simple fact that she and Dennis had not grown closer in the past three weeks, but had clearly drifted apart. Stranger still, she had been with Jake. Where had her brain been that night? And to put the frosting on that cake, she dreaded tonight. Dreaded. But what was there to be afraid of? Dennis had always been kind, easy to talk to, understanding.
She would have to make amends, grovel a little, promise a lot and ultimately put out. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever danced to that particular tune and wondered if this is what marriage did to women.
Stephanie’s car wasn’t ready at three, nor was it ready at four, so she talked Jake into going to the coffee shop in the mall across the street while they waited. “There’s so
mething I’ve been trying to work up the courage to talk to you about,” she said.
“I hate when you want to talk to me about something that requires courage.” They sat in a coffee shop that gave the illusion of being a sidewalk café, with a little fence around the perimeters, but it was inside the mall. Shoppers hefting their purchases hurried past, going from store to store. Muzak played in the background and potted trees dotted the indoor landscape.
“I haven’t talked to Mom about this, yet, but I’m going to—soon. I just don’t want to screw up her wedding plans.”
“I have my own opinion about that, but go ahead…drop your bomb.”
“It’s not a bomb, Daddy. I’m going to make a major lifestyle change. I’m going to do it whether anyone approves or not, but I want you to know the details, up front.”
“Let’s see,” Jake said, rubbing his chin. “This would be the ninth major lifestyle change for you in the last two years, right?”
She just smiled indulgently. “Something like that, yes. I’m taking a leave from teaching.”
“Really?” he said, his eyebrows shooting up. The one thing that had been constant with Stephanie since childhood was her love of literature and her desire to either teach or follow her grandmother’s direction and become a librarian. “To do what?”
“To take care of Peaches.”
“Aw…Stephie. First of all, Peaches doesn’t really need you to—”
“Here’s what I want you to do, Dad. I want you to listen to my whole plan. Then you can say whatever you want.”
“Okay. You give it to me. Then we’ll talk.”
“Peaches does need someone around, which is why she’s staying at Mr. Conklin’s house right now. She’s having these spells…and has been having them for a long time. Much longer than she told Mom. It started out as just not being able to remember where things were, but not like your car keys—like your car. Sometimes she couldn’t even remember where she was. She’d look around the grocery store and get all confused about where, exactly, she was. But you know what? Clever Peaches faked it. She just didn’t want anyone to impose any…I don’t know…limits on her. She shouldn’t have done that, you know. She should’ve started medication to slow down the progression.”