Accompanying Alice (36 page)

Once in a while.

Wherever he was.

How long had it been? Night before last—a long time ago when you had too many questions to answer on your own and nothing definite to answer them on.

She raised her chin defiantly. Maybe he would come. And maybe he wouldn’t.

It occurred to her that no one could live a sane life squandering all of her thoughts on “maybes”.

She dabbed the foundation brush down her nose. After all, why should
Gabriel
come to the wedding? What was four days out of an entire life? Nothing, really, except a vague memory, a bittersweet smile to take out on February evenings when the television shows got too boring, and the post-Christmas blues became too much. Certainly, four days was not enough to base an entire future on.

Certainly not.

And yet at the deep end of her heart, against the odds, for no rhyme or reason, Alice hoped.

“Mom?”

Alice turned and caught her breath. Pale and nervous, Rebecca fidgeted in the doorway, gloved hands locked at the waist of the washed silk cream-on-cream two piece suit they’d found for her yesterday. The matching cloche with its tiny half veil perched atop her head. Her hair was brushed to a fine sheen and French braided down her back. She looked sophisticated and sure, beautiful, ready to face the world. A woman, a wife, not Momma’s little girl. Watery-eyed and wordless, Alice opened her arms, and Rebecca threw herself into them.

“Momma, I’m scared.”

“I know, baby. I am, too.”

“This isn’t like eloping was, this is really thinking about it. This is really getting married, Momma.”

“I know.” Alice stroked her hair, her cheek, held her daughter away from her. “You don’t have to do this, Becky. If you want to wait, if you’re not sure, I’ll be here for you whatever you decide.”

“I know, Ma, but I’m sure.” Rebecca used a gloved finger to brush the moisture carefully from the corner of her eye. “I get confused about me, sometimes, but I’m sure about Mike. He fills me up and he makes me whole and he sets me free. Running away with him made me feel funny, like I was doing something wrong that hurt everybody, but this...” She drew a tremulous breath, smiling. “This is right, Ma.”

How can she know what I’ve only begun to learn at twice her age? Alice wondered. Rebecca was so young to know, so positive. But at eighteen, that’s what the future was: bright, positive, optimistic. There for the taking. Optimism as a revolutionary concept. Doubt grew with age. Doubt deterred love. Doubt was the thing Alice most wanted to do away with. And soon.

With sudden decision, she headed for the phone to try to find Gabriel.

*

The church vestibule was crowded with relatives who preferred to talk rather than find their places. Chaos ruled.

“No, Aunt Bethany,” Julia Brannigan soothed
her
mother’s sister in front of the double doors at the interior entrance to the church. “I think you look beautiful. How could anyone know you’d buy the same dress as Phil’s mother? Twink—” she caught daughter number six’s arm “—tell us honestly, dear, what do you think? With the hat and her corsage, do you think anybody’s going to notice—”

“No, no,” Grace moaned, blocking the stairway to the church’s vestibule. “I knew I shouldn’t let anybody talk me into this. I can’t walk in these heels and everybody’s going to see I have brown bobby pins with a white veil. I’m going to fall fiat on my face in the middle of the aisle and Phil’s parents will have heart attacks and you guys’ll all laugh and—”

“Shh,
Grace,
shh.” Meg patted her arm. “You’ll get through it. You won’t fall. Alice is bringing the white bobby pins. You’ll be beautiful.”

At the steps on the other side of the vestibule, Helen supervised the delivery of three mammoth bags of birdseed.

“Yes, I know birdseed isn’t traditional, Aunt Kate, but it’s better for the ecosystem. We don’t want the little birds that come down to clean up the church steps after the wedding to start dropping out of the sky dead because the rice we tossed swelled in their stomachs and—
No!
” She turned hastily and poked a commanding finger at Mamie’s boys who were chasing Edith’s children up and down the steps to the choir loft. “Don’t run through there, the birdseed bags
are—”

There was a thud and a hundred pounds of birdseed spilled across the crowded vestibule.

“—open.” Helen rubbed two fingers across her eyes, took a deep breath and hollered, “Broom!”

Julia Brannigan looked at her feet, watching the seed drift in around her shoes. She shook a vehement finger at Alice and Helen. “You two,” she said, “promise me. If you ever get married, you’ll call me five minutes before the ceremony. I’ll come, bring a friend, we’ll stand as your witnesses, but you’ll
elope
.”

Headed toward the bride’s stairs, Alice danced out of the birdseed’s path and swallowed a chuckle at the familiar scene and the things her mother didn’t know. It was amazing that anyone in her family survived their weddings and willingly attended the next one. Well, she amended, Grace wasn’t exactly willing, but who was counting?

While Edith and Meg helped Grace skewer on her veil, Alice pushed open the church’s side door a crack to review the stragglers still on their way into the wedding.

“Do you see him?” Sam asked at her shoulder.

“No.” Alice swallowed and shook her head, hating herself for allowing herself to be at the mercy of a single absent man she hadn’t even known last Sunday. When she’d finally decided that the best person to call about Gabriel would be the local FBI director, it had already been late. When she’d gotten through to the office, they’d told her the director was unavailable on Saturdays. They’d also politely informed her that they’d never heard of Gabriel Lucas Book and were not in the habit, in any case, of giving out information on agents. “No,” she said again. “I don’t see him.”

Sam rubbed Alice’s back above the scoop neck of her dress. “Don’t worry,” she said positively. “He’ll be here. He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d break a promise. ‘Specially not to you.”

“I know,” Alice said, and she
did
know. “Unless it’s something beyond his control—”

“He’ll be here,” Sam-the-pregnant-volunteer-fireman said firmly.

Torn between fuming at Gabriel for not being able to tell her how she could get in touch with him and worrying that he might be lying somewhere swathed in bandages or worse and unable to contact her, Alice tried to believe Sam.

The chaos in the vestibule sorted itself out slowly, but finally even the brides’ and grooms’ parents were seated and only the ushers, Becky, Alice and her sisters remained in the entryway, listening while the guitarist and the flutist played wedding preludes, and the singer tested her mike.

“Look,” Edith whispered, peeking around the doorway. “There’s Phil and Mike, don’t they look great?”

“Phil sure looks nervous,” Twink observed, poking Becky, “but Mike looks like somebody just gave him a canary. Did you feed him—”

“Shut up.” Meg slapped her sister’s arm. “Quit making tacky jokes in church. That’s what the reception’s for.”

“Oh, God,” Grace wailed suddenly, “my veil’s gone and I think my heel’s just ripped out the hem of my train.”

“No, no, here’s your veil,” Alice assured her, plucking it off her back. “And here—” she bent over to straighten Grace’s train “—lift your foot.”

There was a buzz at the back of the church.

“They’re ready for us,” Helen whispered. “Everybody set?”

“Hold on a sec.” Still silently cursing Gabriel for being absent and pleading with him to be all right, Alice reached to help Edith re-secure Grace’s veil and froze, eyes locked on the open outside church door.

Looking sleepy-eyed, self-conscious and slightly rumpled, Gabriel dashed up the outside steps and paused, blinking in the sudden dimness. Alice caught her breath and looked him up and down, from his yet unfocused brown eyes to the slightly off-kilter set of his tie, to the spit-and-
polish shine on his shoes. Her heart swelled with her lungs. He looked incredibly wonderful.

His eyes found Alice finally. Inhaling, he straightened, telling her what he saw when he looked at her by the quick half-quirk of his mouth, the awed satisfaction in his face, by his inability to look at anyone but her. He took a step toward her.

“Gabriel, there you are!” Helen bustled forward, grabbing the last boutonnière off the table at the side of the foyer. “Here, let me just pin this on and—”

Alice slipped forward and gently traded Grace’s veil for Gabriel’s flower. “This one’s mine,” she said firmly. “I’ll do that.”

“Yours?” Gabriel queried softly, looking down at her with laughing eyes and an expression that said
just checking.

Alice stabbed the flower pin into his lapel with decision, nodding. “Absolutely mine,” she affirmed, shoving his chin out of the way so she could adjust his tie. Then she lifted her eyes to him anxiously. “I mean if that’s all right with you?”

Gabriel brushed her lips with a finger and went to get in line with the rest of the groomsmen. “I think,” he said thoughtfully, looking back at her and grinning, “that maybe for the next seventy-five years or so I could just about handle that.”

Epilogue

S
unlight filtered through the funnel of maple trees, spread in lacy shadows over the ground. A summer breeze drove the scent of charbroiling hamburgers and hot dogs into neighboring yards, lifted the dangling curtain of blue oilcloth that was spread over the long picnic table, sending
paper napkins and plates flying. Alice’s mother, sisters and daughters reached hastily for them, collided laughing, then weighted the flyaway utensils with pickle jars and mustard pots before turning their attentions back to the babies—Grace’s six-month-old daughter and Becky’s six-week-old son—tented in mosquito netting, sleeping in the shade.

Deeper in the yard, young voices rose and fell, shrieking, laughing, bickering; the swing chains and trapeze rings on the play structure clanked to the rush of children through them.

“Look what I did! Bet you can’t do it.”

“Bet I can.”

“No, you can’t. You’re too little.”

“Can!”

“Dare ya! Dare ya, dare ya, dare ya!”

“Mom!” The word was a singsong aimed at Twink. “Sarah’s teasing me. Make her stop.”

“Sarah,” Edith admonished her eleven
year
old youngest, “quit teasing your cousins. Act your age.”

“Oh, that’s good, Edie.” Meg swatted her sister playfully. “You never could figure out what that meant when Ma said it to us, and now you’re saying it to your kids?”

“Just wait.” Edith said slyly and patted Meg’s burgeoning belly. “You’ll learn. Sometimes it just comes out. I get lost trying to think of new things to say all the time.”

“Sure.” Helen grinned. “That’s what they all say.” She turned to her own mother beside her. “Right, Great-gram?”

Julia Block Brannigan, mother of seven, grandmother of ten, great-grandmother of one and, at age sixty-one, two weeks away from beginning a twenty-four month stint as a teacher in the Peace Corps, folded her hands in front of her and smiled serenely. ‘‘I’m just glad they’re yours,” she said, and her daughters laughed.

Above them in the bedroom window overlooking the backyard, Alice smiled, gaze pausing briefly on each sister in turn. A lot had happened to all of them in the past two years; a lot more was about to happen. Meg was pregnant for the first time and nervous as hell about it. Helen...