Going Vintage (31 page)

2. They are here, at the house, where no one else knows about Candace.

“Thank you,” I say. “I can’t believe you did this for me.”

“Of course I did,” Grandma says. “Although, for the amount of work we put into that today, we could have finished your original dress.”

“No, this is better.” I stroke the fabric. Tears spring to my eyes and I can’t say why. It’s like this dress is The List epitomized, everything I’d hoped to accomplish, everything I’d hoped to forget. “This means more.”

Grandma doesn’t notice the emotion in my voice, or if she does, doesn’t acknowledge it. “I’m going to drop Candace off at the airport. She’s flying out again in a couple of weeks. We’ll have Rodney come down, set up a dinner or something with the whole family then.”

“It’s been a little overwhelming.” Candace gives a timid smile. “But I’m glad I had the chance to meet you, Mallory. Have fun at the dance.”

I should hug her, I know I should. She’s my aunt and she just spent the last day with her birth mom sewing my dress. But I am like my grandma in that respect, not great at showing emotions. So I stand there like an idiot and say, “You too.”

You too
. That’s all she gets. I suck.

The front door opens and Ginnie pops out her head. “Aren’t you going to invite—Grandma! You’re just who we need. Come inside—this Jell-O mold isn’t setting up right.”

I know I look as guilty as Grandma, and Candace is slack-faced, staring at Ginnie’s hair—Candace’s hair. I motion to Grandma, hoping for a signal or cue, but there’s nothing there.

Ginnie isn’t an idiot. She’s going to ask who this woman is. So I do what I should have done earlier and link my arm into Candace’s. “Ginnie. This is going to be a total shock and I just found this out too, but this is Candace. Grandma had her, like, uh, birthed her in high school and gave her up for adoption. So Candace is our aunt and she’s here visiting and she sewed the beads onto my homecoming dress.”

Yep. That covers it.

Ginnie sticks her hand over her mouth. “Seriously?” she asks Grandma.

“I wasn’t perfect,” Grandma says in a broken voice. There it is, her reason for keeping this a secret from us. She thought she’d lose our respect because she gave some stupid boy her
pieces a long time ago. But really, seeing her in such a raw light, I respect her so much more.

My grandma has always seemed mythical, someone bigger than everyone else. But she’s only a girl like me, a girl who once loved a boy who probably didn’t deserve it. And the “proof “ that her teen years didn’t go as planned also helped redesign my homecoming dress. There’s sweet serendipity in that.

My brain might come up with cozy thoughts in moments like this, but it sounds so stupid and cheesy when I try to say what I’m feeling. So although I don’t have the voice to tell my aunt how much I appreciate her, or tell my grandma that she’s the strongest woman I know, I grab my grandma’s hand and give it a squeeze. Emotionally, it’s all I can do right now, but she squeezes back. She doesn’t need to say anything, either. The dress tells me plenty.

“Grandma, I’ve seen you play tennis. Of course you aren’t perfect.” Ginnie hurries down the front steps and gives Grandma a hug. “That must have been a hard secret to keep.”

“It was,” Grandma whispers. “But I’m very glad it’s out now.”

Ginnie hugs Candace next. No talking, she goes right for the hug. “It’s good to meet you. We’re having a party tonight. I hope you can stay.”

Candace is frozen in the hug. “My flight leaves at eight.”

“Great! That gives us two hours. Do you know my dad yet?”

Candace shakes her head.

“Oh, you’ll like him. Well, he’s your brother, so you’ll have no choice. And we have all this retro food if you’re hungry.
Or, if you’re like me and prefer not to destroy your insides with animal flesh, I’ll make you a smoothie.”

She lets go of Candace and I’m ready for my squeeze when Ginnie punches my arm instead. “And that’s for not telling me.” She punches me again. “And for not inviting them inside.” She pulls her arm back. “And this is for your stupid list.”

I hold up my arms and block the blow. “I was going to tell you, but I didn’t want to steal your first-kiss thunder!”

“First kiss?” Grandma grins.

Ginnie rolls her eyes. “Come inside. I’ll tell you before my date gets here, but don’t act weird around him! Aunt Candace, you’re about to get to know me very well very fast.”

Reason #40,345 I love my sister: see above.

Having never attended a soiree, I have no idea what to expect from one. I would assume most soirees do not begin with a long-lost aunt showing up on a doorstep to deliver a bedazzled version of the homecoming dress your grandma wore fifty years earlier, only to have your parents drive up twenty minutes later to the shock of their lives, followed by lots of questions and tears and deep discussions as everyone hurriedly cuts the celery and stirs the punch and, yes, sticks toothpicks in all the party food.

The stuffed mushrooms, as you can imagine, are a little anticlimactic after that.

Candace is at the door, hugging my dad, hugging my mom, hugging
her
mom … You get the point. It’s hug city.
My mom has already taken twenty pictures of Candace, one of just her hands entwined with Grandma’s, which I’m sure is going to be the feature in her next blog post. Dad keeps patting Candace on the top of the head like she’s a newborn infant left on our doorstep.

“We’ll see you in a few weeks!” Mom calls as Dad pulls Candace away for a private good-bye. When he first met Candace, he bawled like a baby, which made the rest of us tear up at his open emotion.

Grandma sticks her head on my shoulder. “So this list you told me about the other day. Did you finish it?”

“Almost.”

“I know you had this ideal of what you thought my youth was like. I hope my big secret didn’t spoil that for you.”

Spoil
isn’t the word. I’m a little bothered that my hypothesis wasn’t entirely right. I thought The List was going to take me back to a simpler time, but in some ways it’s just made my life more complicated. “It’s not that different now, is it? Being sixteen?”

“Adolescence is the same tragedy being performed again and again. The only things that change are the stage props.”

I finger Grandma’s ring, tucked under my shirt. She’s right. The props—my computer, my phone—they’re not the main conflict in this play. I mean, fifty years ago my grandma experienced these same messed-up emotions. The Internet might not have existed yet, but love and heartache did.

Do I even need to finish The List? What am I proving now?

Dad shuts the hatch to Grandma’s Mini Cooper. “You better hurry, Mom.”

Grandma kisses the top of my head. “Candace is flying out of LAX, so I won’t make it back in time for your grand reveal.”

“I’ll take pictures.”

“It’s just as well. Not sure if I can handle much more déjà vu.”

“I’ll do your dress proud,” I say.

She smiles, eyes wet. “Mallory. You do me proud every day.”

Hug central convenes, and then they’re driving down the street, and Ginnie and I only have thirty more minutes. I shoo her upstairs to get ready and finish up the final preparations. I’m still in my white oxford and gingham capris when the guests start to arrive. Grandma already did my hair in a slick chignon, my fake eyelashes and black eyeliner heavy on my lids, but getting a stain on a vintage dress, even with vintage food, is a housewife’s horror in any decade.

Besides, the soiree is for Ginnie’s friends. Paige, Yvonne, and Cardin come. I never got around to inviting Oliver. Our most recent conversations have ended rather abruptly.

When Bennett gets there, corsage in hand, Ginnie stages an entrance down the staircase. Bennett gawks, obviously a fan of my sister’s short green dress. Or maybe just her legs in that short green dress.

Cardin finds me in the kitchen cutting more vegetables.

“Where’s your dress?” she asks.

I chop off a celery limb. The cream cheese sticks were a surprise hit. “I don’t want to have a run-in with the punch. You look awesome.”

Cardin brushes something off her chest and shrugs. “I
wore this two weeks ago to a dance in Laguna. It’s the fourth homecoming I’ve been to this year. I need more dresses in my rotation.”

“Or less boys in your rotation. I don’t know how you do it.”

“You’ve been on the shelf for the last year, honey. If you got out there more, the boys would be dropping left and right.”

“Doubt it.”

“I saw Oliver Kimball drooling over you by the float yesterday. What’s that about?”

“He just gave me a pom-pom,” I say.

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Sure, sure.” She sticks her elbows on the counter. “I’m still dying to hear about that fight he had with Jeremy.”

“Don’t ask
me
about it. I wasn’t there.”

“Well, I was.” She dips her celery into the cream cheese. “And it wasn’t pretty. Lots of yelling and defending of Mallory’s honor.”

“Really?” I stop arranging the food. Half of me finds this news horrific. And the other half … the other half wants to know every single detail. Oliver could have told me more, but that whole kiss-in-the-shed episode got in the way of the full recap. “What did you hear?”

“Well, first there was the basic stuff. Oliver was mad that Jeremy would take another girl to homecoming so soon after your breakup because it wasn’t respectful to you. And Jeremy said he wasn’t taking that girl from Iowa—”

“Illinois.” Or was it Indiana? Weird that I would forget.

“And then Oliver said it was only because she couldn’t get off work to fly out, so then Jeremy got—”

“Wait, what? So Jeremy didn’t cancel on her, she canceled on him?”

Cardin is quiet. “Didn’t Ginnie tell you that part?”

I can’t be mad at my sister. She didn’t tell me for the same reasons I haven’t told her about Mom. Love. Protection. And we were fighting, and … So was I Jeremy’s default girl
again
? Jenny couldn’t make it, so he told me the whole lie that he’d never really asked her? This is getting to the point where it’s almost comical. Almost.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Jeremy and I broke up. He can do whatever he wants.”

“And so can you.” Cardin aims her celery stick like a gun. “All I’m saying is you’re single and Oliver Kimball is a hot boy who—”

“Is Jeremy’s cousin,” I finish.

“No. A hot boy who is interested in you. The relationship you just got out of was a dud anyway. If you’re feeling it with Oliver, do something about it. Cousins, friends, brothers … there are no rules when it comes to love.”

“There are rules to everything,” I say.

Cardin’s date pokes his head into the kitchen. “They’re doing pictures.”

She waves him off. “I’ll be there in a second, sweetie.”

“He’s your sweetie?”

She winks. “They’re all my sweetie.”

We head into the empty living room, which looks like a
Dixie cup graveyard. Ginnie rushes in, all made-up and glowing. I want to pinch her cheeks, say something about how womanly she looks. She scrunches her nose at me.

“Mallory. You have cream cheese in your hair. Get ready. I have a surprise for you coming in ten minutes.”

“Better not be Eduardo,” I joke, but Ginnie’s already back to her friends. Seriously. It better not be Eduardo.

I run up the staircase before the couples start taking pictures, which I’m glad to skip. There’s a deep sense of dread filling my stomach. This dance has been the end of my plan for the last two weeks. Two weeks is nothing—there are colds that last longer than two weeks—but I’ve been going on survival mode this whole time, and tonight was always unofficially The End. I just hope there’s a
happily ever after
beyond this point.