I Take You Read online

  “My memory is terrible these days,” she laments.

  “Do you maybe need to, I don’t know, get that checked out?”

  “Doctors can’t do anything for me, dear. It’s the Change.”

  “The Change?” I repeat. “That sounds very dire.”

  “Menopause. It’s relentless. The hot flashes. The metabolic shifts. The forgetfulness.” Her hand flutters to her forehead and flutters away again. “My mind is … oh, what do you call it? The thing with holes.”

  “A sieve?”

  “Yes! A sieve.”

  I laugh. “You forgot the word that you wanted to use to describe how forgetful you are. That’s funny.”

  She just looks at me.

  “You’re right,” I say. “It’s not funny.”

  Duval Street looks a lot less seedy in the morning light. The bars are shuttered. Tourists wander around sipping smoothies and Cuban coffee. The sidewalks are damp and clean.

  “Do you see that church over there?” Mattie says, pointing at a white clapboard chapel.

  “I have an idea! Let’s have Bloody Marys at the rehearsal dinner!”

  Mattie cocks her head. “Isn’t that more of a morning beverage, dear?”

  “Maybe we could do a breakfast-for-dinner theme,” I suggest. “With pancakes!”

  “No,” she says. “Now, as I was saying. There’s a new pastor at that church. People adore her. I thought you might be interested in having her officiate on Saturday.”

  Mattie launches into a story about the pastor while I watch a family of tourists buy palmetto hats from a ragged hippie. Teddy and I wove hats one spring break, when we were eleven or twelve. Our hats were terrible, but we were so cute. We made a killing. Then we blew all our earnings on ice cream and firecrackers.

  “Lily?” Mattie says.

  I turn. She’s waiting for me to say something. “Sorry. Don’t we already have a pastor?”

  “Yes,” Mattie says reluctantly. “Leonard Garment.”

  “Right. Will talked to him on the phone. He really likes him.” Actually, I think Will just wants our marriage certificate to be signed by someone named Reverend Garment. But he made the decision—I can’t overrule him.

  “The last thing I want to do is second-guess your choices,” Mattie says. “But I think Len would be a serious mistake.”

  “Why?”

  Mattie slams on the brakes just in time to avoid crushing a small electric car puttering ahead of us. “I see your wedding as an elegant, storybook kind of affair,” she replies. “Quite formal and traditional.”

  I have to laugh. “You’ve got me pegged, sister.”

  “Len is so … countercultural.” Mattie frowns. “He’s very irreverent. I think he’ll send the wrong message.”

  I gaze out the window while she keeps talking. We’re on Margaret Street now. Marriage certificates. Officiants. It all sounds so very … official.

  “Lily?” Mattie is looking at me intently.

  “What? Oh, sorry.” I roll down the window. It’s really warm in here all of a sudden. “If you think it’s a big deal, I’ll talk to Will about it.”

  “Wonderful! You’ll be glad you did.”

  My phone rings. I answer. “Hola, madrasta bonita!”

  “If you marry that poor boy, you’re both going to regret it for the rest of your lives,” Ana says.

  I lean back against the headrest. “Will you please fuck off?”

  Mattie jumps a little in her seat. “Sorry!” I whisper. Back to Ana: “I’m not changing my mind. Deal with it.”

  “Then how about this,” she says. “Postpone. Give yourselves time to get to know each other better. If you still want to get married, we all reconvene here in six months. What do you say?”

  I have to be careful—Ana’s persuasive as hell, and her inner conviction can be contagious. When I was little, she was always conning me into doing things I didn’t want to do—attending rallies, campaigning with her, trying weird foods. She’s passionate and dramatic and always, always right. Which often makes her very, very annoying.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Not doing it.”

  “Dammit, Lilybear. You’re so stubborn.”

  “Wonder where I learned that.”

  “You worthless piece of shit!” she cries loudly.

  I hold the phone away from my ear. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Not you,” she says absently. “I’m reading an e-mail.”

  “Yeah? Glad to know you’re maintaining a single-minded focus on my concerns.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she hisses, and I hear the clatter of keys as she starts typing angrily.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “No,” she says, her mind clearly elsewhere. “I mean yes. Give me your friend’s number. The designer. I need help finding a dress.”

  “You don’t have a dress for the wedding?”

  “When do I have time to shop?” she protests. “And frankly, I didn’t think you’d actually go through with it.”

  I give her Freddy’s number.

  “Now,” Ana continues, “if you start having second thoughts—”

  I hang up on her as Mattie pulls up to a weather-beaten grey house with purple trim. The crooked front porch is bursting with plants and flowers. The hand-painted sign reads ROSE’S FLOWERS AND GIFTS.

  “Here we are!” Mattie chirps.

  I gape at her. “You brought me to a sex shop?”

  She looks mortified. “No no no! This is—”

  “Mattie, that’s disgusting! I don’t go for that sort of thing!”

  “I would never—”

  I pat her thigh. “Relax. I’m only teasing you.”

  “Oh,” she says, slightly mollified. “Well, that’s—”

  “This is obviously a funeral parlor,” I say.

  “What? No!”

  Three drinks on an empty stomach and I’m tormenting this poor woman. I apologize, and we go inside, where I meet Rose, a pleasant woman with pink cheeks and a halo of frizzy white hair. She has a folder of paperwork spread on the counter in front of her.

  “These are the plans Martin worked up,” she says. “It’s a lovely start. But I think I can make a few improvements.”

  Rose and Mattie bend their heads together. I check my e-mail and work voice mail. My phone pings with a text.

  —Hw do I tzpe on ths fubking thig,

  It’s Gran. I type back:

  —pls stop spamming me

  About five minutes later, I get:

  —Y7 idio8

  This is fun.

  —youre one of those internet perverts, arent you. im going to report you to the FTC

  —ths sht

  —youre sick, mister, you know that? sick

  She finally calls, sputtering with rage.

  “Texting is supposed to save time,” I tell her. “It doesn’t make any sense for someone in your condition.”

  “What the hell?” she snaps. “What condition?”

  “One foot and all ten fingers in the grave.” I pull a couple of sprigs of baby’s breath out of a vase and start crumbling them between my fingers. “What’s up?”

  “I need to add a guest. Assuming you’re still going through with this wedding nonsense.”

  “Of course I’m still going through with this wedding nonsense!”

  Mattie and Rose stop talking and look up. “Prank caller,” I explain. To Gran: “Sorry, aged relation. We’re at capacity.”

  “You can fit one more,” Gran insists. “My all-time favorite client just got paroled.”

  “Mazel tov. What was he in for?”

  “She,” Gran replies. “Ran her husband over with a speedboat.”

  “Did he deserve it?”

  “They all deserve it,” she says darkly.

  I start poking holes in a block of dank, squishy green florist’s foam. Rose is eyeing me. I make a Sorry! face and push it away. “Your friend sounds like a super-fun addit
ion to the party, Gran, but—”

  “Dawn’s a gas. And she’s lonely. I thought maybe she could meet someone.”

  “You want to use my wedding to help a murderer find a hookup?” Rose and Mattie look up again.

  “Manslaughterer,” Gran says. “She took a plea.”

  “Oh!” I say. “That’s fine. Consider it done.”

  We gab awhile longer, then I hang up. Mattie is in raptures over whatever floral wizardry Rose is performing. I listen to them idly. Rehearsal dinners. Stepmother-of-the-bride dresses. Last-minute guests. Since the moment Will and I got engaged, the wedding has been a little bit unreal to me. Slightly theoretical. I was in New York, working hard, living my life. Most of the planning was going on down here, in the hands of people I’d never met. All I had to do was send guest lists, listen to Mattie yak, and say yes, or no, or let me ask Will.

  Now it’s all very real.

  “—and a lovely spray of daisies here,” Rose says, sketching rapidly. “Some people say that peonies brown too quickly, but I entirely disagree, so we could have some there …”

  Real! That’s good! Realness is a good thing. I think about Will, how he was in bed this morning. If it takes a wedding, with its vows of faithfulness and constancy, to get a lifetime of that? No problem. No problem at all.

  “I have something else to show you.” Rose leads us to a small table covered with scraps of cloth. “Mattie said that you need gauze bags to hold the wedding favors.”

  “The what?”

  “Candied almonds, stamped with your and Will’s initials,” Mattie explains. “In a drawstring bag sealed with a ribbon and a spray of silk flowers. I left you a voice mail about it?”

  “I picked out a few fabric samples,” Rose says, “but I wasn’t sure which one matched the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  “Do they have to match?” I ask.

  “Everything matches,” she replies.

  “Everything?”

  “From a visual perspective, a wedding is all about symmetry and cohesion and continuity,” Rose says earnestly. “That’s why we want the flowers at the ceremony and the reception to be foreshadowed by the flowers at the rehearsal supper, and to be echoed, you might say, by the flowers on the tables at the Sunday brunch.”

  Foreshadowed? Echoed?

  Brunch?

  Mattie chimes in. “That’s also the reason why the font used in the programs matches the font on the invitations and on the place cards for the meals.”

  “So,” Rose continues, “the fabric used for the wedding favors should match the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  “Which also matches the lining of the envelopes that held the invitations,” Mattie concludes.

  They’re staring at me.

  I’m staring back.

  I’ve been kidnapped by a couple of obsessive-compulsive space aliens.

  They’re waiting for me to say something.

  “Ladies?” I clap my hands together. “Let’s match some motherfucking gauze!”

  Rose looks a little startled, but recovers and presents me with six squares of champagne-colored fabric.

  I gaze down at them. “These are completely identical.”

  “No they’re not,” Rose says.

  I turn to Mattie. “Rose be trippin’.”

  “Take your time,” Mattie urges me. “Hold them up to the light.”

  I look at her, then at Rose. “Ladies? To say that I do not give two shits about this vastly overestimates the value I place on shits.”

  They puzzle that one out for a moment. So do I. Those Bloody Marys must have been pretty strong.

  “It’s the second swatch,” Mattie tells me.

  “It’s the second swatch,” I tell Rose.

  She sweeps the others away with a smile.

  “You’re an easy bride.”

  “Honey,” I laugh, “you have no idea.”

  “I have a few thoughts about how to decorate the restrooms at the Audubon House,” Rose continues.

  “Where?”

  “The Audubon House,” Mattie murmurs. “Where you’re holding your reception.”

  “Right!” I cry. “Wait. We have to decorate the bathrooms?”

  “It’s customary,” Rose informs me. “Tea candles, scented soaps, embroidered hand towels. Perhaps a posy.”

  “A posy.” I nod. “But only perhaps.”

  She’s rooting around in a plastic bin. “I have just the thing.”

  My phone pings with a text from Will.

  —Where are you?

  It’s one fifteen. I’m late for lunch.

  7

  I leave Mattie with Rose and hurry to the restaurant. As I turn onto Simonton Street I nearly collide with a woman leaving a salon. She’s wearing shorts and flip-flops, but her hair is swept up elegantly and topped with a veil. Another bride, doing a dry run for her big day. She looks so happy.

  My phone rings. I answer. “Yo, dawg!”

  “Lily?” Jane says. “I need a favor.”

  “For you, mon cherie? Anything.”

  “I take it you haven’t changed your mind about the wedding?”

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

  “We suffer under a collective delusion that you might someday do something sensible.”

  “Ha! When pigs freeze over. When hell flies.”

  “Indeed,” Jane says drily. “Now please listen carefully. Two couples are coming to the wedding. They’re friends of mine. The Gortons and the Heydriches. They need to be seated at separate tables.”

  “Uh-oh! Who bonked who?”

  “Whom,” she corrects me, then hesitates. “Donald Heydrich and Mitzy Gorton.”

  “No!” I cry. “Not Donald and Mitzy!”

  I actually have no idea who these people are. I don’t know half the people my parents have invited to the wedding.

  Jane sighs. “I’m afraid so.”

  “You run with a fast crowd, Janey. Hey, that reminds me. Are the swingers coming?”

  “As I’ve told you numerous times, Bob and Gloria are not swingers,” she says sternly. “It’s a vicious rumor started by that insufferable Sloane Kittredge.”

  “I hope so. I’m trying to run a clean family wedding here.”

  “Have you been drinking?” she demands.

  “Oh, Jane!” I laugh uproariously. “The very thought!”

  “Let me finish, please. The worst is over now, thank God. It was all so tiresome—the tears, the recriminations.” Jane sighs again, and I can just picture her, reclining on the sofa at Gran’s house, hair fanned out on the pillows. Admiring the rings on her fingers, looking down her long, elegant nose at these naive little people and their tedious tantrums. When I first met Jane, I thought of her as the Snow Queen—the beautiful fairy-tale bitch who steals children and makes them forget their friends and family. I thought she was deliberately wrenching me away from Ana, but of course that’s not what she was after at all. Eventually, she became fascinating to me—I’d never met another woman like her, so urbane and knowledgeable about things I’d never taken an interest in: power and money and beauty and relationships between men and women.

  “You would have thought it was the end of the world, instead of some silly fling,” she continues.

  “People can be so dramatic,” I agree.

  “Now, their spouses have forgiven them, and everyone is moving on. Nevertheless, I promised that I would do my best to minimize contact among them this weekend. Can you help me?”

  “No problemo.”

  “Of course, the entire issue is moot if you—”

  “The wedding is happening, Janey. I’m not changing my mind.”

  “But Lily darling, think of—”

  I’ve had enough of this for one morning. I hang up and turn onto Duval, where the heavy foot traffic slows me down. There’s a middle-aged couple walking ahead of me. They’re daytrippers off one of the big cruise ships. He’s wearing a Cubs hat, a camera slung around his neck. She’s got
one of those no-nonsense midwestern haircuts. They’re fighting. I can tell. Walking side by side, but with six inches of militarized distance between them. Not speaking, not touching, not looking at each other. They should be enjoying themselves. They’re on vacation, for God’s sake!

  I bet Mitzy and her husband had ragingly hot morning sex at first. I bet Donald couldn’t get enough of his wife in the early years. These two ahead of me? Probably went at it like bunnies during those first heady days in Milwaukee or wherever. So what happens? Time passes. Boredom grows. The pressures and routines of daily life flatten the romance. And one night, after a few too many glasses of chardonnay at some fancy shindig, Mitzy glances at Donald across a room, and he glances back, and a spark ignites.

  Or maybe it’s even worse—not physical temptation, but the slow, relentless accretion of slights and misunderstandings and annoyances and accommodations, until you find yourself walking down a street in paradise next to a stranger who you kind of hate. Love, gone. Affection, gone. Whatever brought you together in the first place, gone.

  Jesus. Kill me now.

  I find the restaurant and stop in the bathroom to freshen up. I have a quick drink at the bar to steady my nerves. From where I’m standing, I can see Will sitting on the deck with a pleasant-looking bald guy and a dark-haired woman in pink capris. Will says something, and his mom smiles widely. Gran wasn’t the only one to warn me about her. A few of the partners at my firm have gone up against Anita Field in white-collar cases. They told me to watch out for that smile. It’s how she bares her fangs.

  I have one more drink and head out.

  Halfway across the deck I bellow, “Hi there!” The men rise. The toe of my sandal catches on a slat and I pitch forward. Will catches me. He smiles as he guides me to my seat. “Easy, tiger,” he whispers.

  We introduce ourselves. Will’s dad, Harry, seems like an amiable, easygoing guy. His mom is more high-strung, but pleasant. Hardly a—what was it? A killer? That was just the defense lawyer in Gran talking, with her reflexive mistrust of prosecutors.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I say. “Our wedding planner had me running all over town.”

  Will’s mom laughs. “I remember that so well,” she says. “Harry and I had a much smaller wedding than you two—only fifty guests or so. But the planning was endless! And it’s all up to the woman, right, Lily?” She zeroes in on me with her blue eyes.