All Dressed Up (34 page)

“I just wish
you would have been honest long ago.”

“Oh, so it’s
not even good enough that I’m being honest now?”

“If our
friendship is too hard for you… Angie, don’t you think I’ve been
jealous of you? Don’t you think I ever feel like I mess up compared
to you? I feel it all the time, and I even confess it – like about
storing Emma’s dress in the attic – and you never do, you never
confess. And then I feel stupid, and that you want me to feel
stupid, and to me that’s not friendship.” She was so stiff, leaning
away even though the room was so crowded.

“It is
friendship! Don’t you say it’s not friendship! We’re friends,
Lainie, we are,” Angie said, with a sudden panic frothing inside
her at the thought that Lainie really might conclude they weren’t
friends and stop seeing her, and be all the-one-who’s-in-the-right
about it. If they ever stopped being friends, which Angie didn’t
want in a thousand years, it would be Angie who held the upper hand
and made the decision. And don’t you ever dare suggest life’s not
that complicated, Lainie Keogh! It is! She clutched her cousin’s
arm. “Please don’t ever doubt that we’re friends.” She enfolded her
in a tight hug. “Don’t doubt how important you are in my life!
Don’t doubt how much I care about you. If I didn’t care about you,
don’t you think all of this would be easy? When I felt this way, I
could just walk away.”

Oh, she was
going to cry! Really cry, too, not just Lainie’s attractively
shimmery eyes. She let it come. Pushed it a little bit, to get her
point across. She did not want to lose Lainie. After all they’d
been to each other. All the things that Lainie knew. And the things
– just those couple of tiny things – that she didn’t.

“Oh, Angie…”
Lainie hugged her back. “If this is a fresh start… If you could be
honest like this more often… I would love that so much!” She was
too soft for her own good.

“Mom?” Brooke
made a face at her. Everyone had gathered their bags ready for the
restaurant.

“What, my
daughter’s getting married in a week and I’m not allowed to cry?”
Angie dabbed at her eyes, feeling a lot better.

“Come to the
dinner,” Lainie urged, and Brooke joined in, and Nicole, and Angie
made them cajole her for just the right amount of time before she
said yes, and she actually felt wanted and loved and right for once
– a good person, a happy person.

Emma accepted
a third glass of wine before the entrees arrived. She didn’t
usually drink this much, Sarah knew. Or this fast. She lifted the
new drink to her lips and Sarah saw the level in the glass drop by
three-quarters of an inch. Lainie sat across the table from them,
and Sarah thought she had seen it, too. One of Brooke’s friends
asked Emma something and she nodded so energetically that her chin
jerked up and down like a hole punch cutting through twenty sheets
of paper. She took another heroic slurp of wine.

Sarah said
quietly to her, “You don’t have to get pass-out drunk, Em, it’s not
a requirement.”

“I want
to.”

“To prove you
can let go? You didn’t have to bite the head off the penis
lollipop, either. They like you. Brooke is doing fine. You’re not
the sole support of her good time.”

“But I’m the
sole support of mine. Let me do this.” She smiled, sweet and
tight.

“Let you get
drunk?”

“For
once.”

“You won’t do
it by halves, though, will you?”

“Probably
not.”

“You’ll get
naked on the table dancing drunk.”

“Straight A
drunk. Valedictorian drunk. I get what you’re saying, Sarah. It’s
me, okay? There are no baby steps. I have relapsed into taking
giant leaps for mankind. I’ll try to get back to the baby steps
when I can, but I doubt there’ll ever be a permanent cure.”

“Are you
bringing a date, next Saturday, Sarah?” Brooke asked her, after
Emma had turned away to say something supportive and complimentary
to one of Brooke’s friends across the table.

“Oohh, no, not
back in that game, yet.”

They began to
talk about it. Brooke got curious and pushy about Sarah’s love
life, which turned out to be the right attitude, when it would most
definitely not have been a few months ago.

“So what are
you looking for? Like, a doctor? A lawyer?”

“I don’t care
what he does,” Sarah said without even thinking, “As long as he’s
honest about it, an honest soul, simple in his belief systems, you
know. Like, too simple would be better than too complicated.”

“Yeah, me,
too, with Scott. What else? Come on, the wish list.”

“He knows how
to do something really, really well with his hands. I don’t care
what it is, whether it’s playing an instrument or fixing a fence.
Just something. Someone who…oh… likes fire and laughing and
sometimes eating with his fingers and lets the juice run down his
chin. Someone who doesn’t – you know – think he’s good-looking, but
he is to me. Someone who… who doubts and distrusts himself
sometimes, not someone who thinks he’s always right.”

“Mm,” Brooke
said thoughtfully. “Mm, we’ll have to see what we can do.”

But Sarah,
feeling ill and unprepared, told her, “No.”

Emma reached
across the table and patted Lainie’s hand with an untidy gesture.
“You! Stop feeling sorry for me!”

Which wasn’t
quite what Lainie was doing, but related, maybe. She’d realized
something that Emma had in common with Charlie. They were both hard
to love, but after you’d made the effort, pushed through the
demanding part, you reached the place where it was worth it, the
diamond beneath the daunting carapace.

And it said
something about you, when you reached that place. It said you had a
certain kind of strength. You were strong enough, planted solid
enough on the ground, to love someone who required that much of
you.

“She’s trying
too hard.” Angie said in Lainie’s ear. She studied Emma critically,
with the corners of her mouth unconsciously turned up and glints in
her eyes.

She was right.
Emma laughed too hard at every joke, passed drinks around like a
parent at a party for three-year-olds, gushed syrupy praise of the
other guests’ outfits and hair, and Angie relished every one of
these well-intentioned mistakes. You could see it in her face. You
could see how she would relish pointing them out to Brooke
afterward.

Oh, Angie, you
don’t need to be this way.

Brooke would
hate it in her mother, too. But Lainie answered, “Yes, she is, a
little,” because she’d asked for Angie to be honest, and so she
shouldn’t fling the honesty back in her face.

Emma told
Sarah two hours later, “I am going to throw up.” They’d left the
restaurant. In fact, they’d left the first two bars and arrived at
the big, loud, breezy one on the water in the center of Lake George
Village.

“No!” Sarah
drawled. “Really?”

“Take me
outside. I can’t make it that far on my own.” In the parking lot
when she was finished, she said, “I can’t believe people do this on
a regular basis. I can’t believe Billy threw up thirty-six times.
Once is too much.”

“And you’re
not done yet. Remember there’s the hangover, too.”

“Oh no, I am
not having the hangover. I’m a doctor. I know I’m dehydrated. I can
drink water.”

“That’s the
theory.”

“Take me back
inside so I can get water.”

Emma leaned on
Sarah, a woozy, extravagant sack of potatoes. She staggered a
little and they wove their way together in the direction of the
entrance at which point, one of the men in a group of people about
to intersect their route said, “Hi, Sarah,” and turned out to be
Luke. God, how many weekend breaks in the Adirondacks did he plan
on taking this summer?

When Emma
caught sight of him, Sarah muttered, “You know what? My next
boyfriend? I’m not bringing him up here. I’m not introducing him to
this place until we’re married.”

And this time
it wasn’t that Sarah felt bad… angry… back to square one… she just
felt so conscious of herself. Her skin went hot and stingy. Her
heart galloped. She knew her nose must be red and shining, her hair
out of place, her make-up smudged. Probably worse. She probably had
her skirt caught in her underwear, food spilled down her front,
leprosy and visible fleas.

But at least
I’m not wearing the dress.

The dress that
he, like Emma, knew nothing about.

At least when
I told Brooke what I was looking for in a man, the details were
different.

“Hi,
Luke.”

He explained
as if he’d forgotten a similar thing had already happened just
three weeks ago, “I’m up here for the weekend with some friends,
we’re at the Craigmore.”

“Well, you
would be.” Because you stole the entire Craigmore Adirondack
experience from me when we split. Amongst the three women in his
group, Sarah picked out the same redhead from three weeks ago.

“Sar?” Emma
whispered, urgent and still very drunk. “How do you want me to
behave? Badly?”

“Oh…”
Decisions, decisions, and so little time. “Badly. But with
dignity.”

“Coming up.”
Emma began to detach herself from Sarah’s support. Could she even
walk on her own? “Luke,” she said to him, sounding deliberately
kind and deliberately loud. She managed an impressive performance
of not seeming as drunk as she actually was. “Luke, my friend. I
think you want to find another bar.”

“Uh…”

“You want to
find another bar,” Emma repeated.

His group was
watching, the redhead especially. Sarah had felt that look on her
own face – intent while pretending to be casual. “My sister is
right, Luke,” she said. “You do want to find another bar. We’re
having a lot of fun at a friend’s bridal shower and we’re going to
get really embarrassing soon.”

The
self-consciousness had begun to settle. There was less sting. Less
flush. She felt almost okay. The redhead came and put her arm
around Luke and Sarah still felt okay. The pain in her heart had a
distant quality to it, and she knew it would quickly ebb once the
actual trigger for it had gone. Trigger, please go find another
bar?

Emma just kept
communicating the find-another-bar message with her skinny, tensed
up, drunken body language and Luke smiled. “Really? That bad?”

“People will
scatter for their lives,” Sarah said. “I mean, it’s up to you.
Emma’s exaggerating. We’re not that drunk.”

Emma grinned.
“Well… Sarah’s not. I am.”

“Maybe we
should find another bar, Luke,” the redhead said, looking up into
his face. “Or go back to the hotel? The two of us?” She tightened
her arm and led Luke away toward a distant parked car. To her
friends she said over her shoulder, “We’ll see you, okay?”

The rest of
the group went inside. Emma and Sarah let them have a head start.
“Well, that’s that,” Sarah said. “The big scene.”

“Not
perfect.”

“No.
Significantly flawed. I needed another couple of months’ distance
to be able to just ask him how he was and totally not care. The
dignity and facing off was somehow… ehh…”

“…was a little
too dignified.”

“Exactly.”

“Because you
don’t have to be dignified or face him off if you really don’t
care,” Emma said.

“Right. You
are so right.”

“But, hey,
we’re all works in progress.”

“We are. And
you were good, Em.”

“We both were.
Can I stop rising above the alcohol now and lean drunkenly on you
again?”

Inside, Brooke
was reading out people’s answers to the quiz How Well Do You Know
The Bride? The answers should have been written at least two bars
ago for them to have any coherence. “Pack rat? Whose is this? Mom,
is this your writing?”

“I have to
call it how I see it, honey,” Angie said with a smile.

“Pack rat?
What do you have in your shed and your basement, then? A pristine
concrete floor and a couple of laundry baskets next to the dryer? I
don’t think so!”

“This is not
relevant.”

“Just for
starters, the four thousand styrofoam cups and two thousand rolls
of toilet paper that Grandpa stole from Ticonderoga Village when he
worked night security.”

“Don’t say
this, honey, you’ve had too much to drink.”

“Yup! That’s
when the fun stuff comes out. Let me see what else. Whose is next?
How many previous boyfriends…” She let out another big laugh.
“Fifteen, but they’re all from the same football team. Who put
this?”

“Oh, me,” Emma
said, sitting down hard and reaching for the water. “I didn’t know
enough about you, so I tried to make it funny instead.”

“Never mind,
when you do know me, you’ll still be able to make it funny.” Brooke
tried to hug her across the table, but had to wrinkle her nose and
reel back when she got close. “Did you throw up already?”

“I’m very
competitive,” Emma said happily. “I wanted to be the first.”

Chapter
Fifteen

By the
following evening, Saturday, Billy had tolerated Seven-up, orange
juice, soda water and Jell-O. The N.G. tube end still dangled from
his hospital gown, but it hadn’t been suctioned out since Thursday
night.

His incision
had almost healed, and he played Monopoly on the computer with Mom
for hours. After twelve days of having menu cards dropped in his
room by the food service staff, he actually had a reason to fill
one out, and chose crumbed fish fillet and potato wedges for Sunday
lunch like a kid choosing the menu for his birthday party. “And
chicken noodle soup? And fruit cocktail? And ice-cream? And hot
chocolate?”

“Order
anything you like,” Emma told him, and had this rush of wanting to
hand him the moon and stars on a gold plate that was so powerful
she had tears stinging her eyes and shaky legs. She didn’t want the
feeling to leave, because she knew that wanting to give him the
moon and the stars was the easy part.