How Tía Lola Ended Up Starting Over (8 page)
“Where’s one of my favorite kindergartners?” Ms. McGregor keeps asking. It is odd that Cari hasn’t come down to say hi to her beloved teacher. On several occasions, Papa calls up the stairs. But Cari is sitting in the front parlor, listening to Colonel Charlebois snore in his rocking chair. Finally, when the cleaning crew comes downstairs, all finished with their work, and no Cari is along, Papa goes in search of her. He spots her, crouched by the dark fireplace, holding on to Valentino as if he were her life raft.
Papa motions for her to come out to the hall so as not to wake the colonel. “Caridad Espada, I’ve been calling and calling you. Why don’t you answer?” Papa never calls her by her full name unless he means business.
Cari shrugs. She doesn’t answer because she doesn’t want to go into the kitchen and hear about her kindergarten teacher’s stupid wedding all over again. That’s like having a boo-boo, bruising it once, and then bruising it a second time. How’s it ever supposed to feel better if she keeps bumping up against this wedding everywhere she turns, even when she comes home from school?
“A shrug is not an admissible reply,” Papa says in his
lawyer voice. But then, in his nicer Papa voice, he adds, “It’s Ms. McGregor, your favorite teacher, remember? Don’t you want to come say hi to her?”
Cari shakes her head. “I don’t want to go in the stupid kitchen.”
“I think there’s been far too much use of the word ‘stupid’ in the last few days,” Papa says, his lawyer voice back. “I think it’s time we put a moratorium on the word ‘stupid’ and try to come up with nicer ways of expressing what ails us.”
Cari doesn’t know what a “morontorium” is. But she’s not going to ask Papa to explain, because if she opens her mouth, she will burst out crying.
After getting that big word out of his system, Papa comes down on his knees so he’s eye level with Cari. His face is full of concern. “I know something’s bugging you, Cari Cakes. But how can I or your sisters or Tía Lola or Ms. McGregor help you if you won’t tell us what’s wrong?”
Valentino ambles over and licks Cari’s hand. He wants to be included on the list of those willing to help Cari with whatever is upsetting her.
Cari’s head is bowed so low, her chin is almost touching her neck.
Papa hesitates, and then in a sad voice, he asks, “Is it that you don’t like Vermont? That you want to go back to Queens?”
Oh no, that’s not it at all. Cari shakes her head. She never wants to go back to Queens. She loves Vermont. She loves kindergarten. She just doesn’t want anything to change. When things change, it can get scary and sad. Like
when their mother died, even though Cari doesn’t really remember. Or when Lupita, her beloved babysitter back in Queens, moved away to North Carolina because she also was getting married, to someone in the military.
Just thinking of all these sad changes, Cari starts sobbing so hard, her father has to wait until Cari calms down so he can make out what she is saying.
“I just don’t want Ms. McGregor to get married. I want her to be my teacher forever. I don’t want to call her Mrs. Magoon.”
Instead of consoling her, Papa is laughing!
“You said to tell so you could help. It’s not nice to laugh.”
“I’m not laughing at you, Cakes. But here’s the honest truth: sometimes there’s just nothing we can do to stop change from happening.” Papa’s voice suddenly sounds a little wistful. “The good news is that time is a great healer of boo-boos great and small. Helping others is also a big help when we’re sad. So, what do you say you come out to the kitchen and help us out?”
Cari enters the kitchen sheepishly, hidden behind Papa’s legs. Everyone gives her a rousing welcome, as if she has been around the world and just got back, safe and sound. Ms. McGregor even swoops down for a big hug. Then Papa gives Cari her very own job: polishing a velvet-lined box of tarnished silverware that the colonel hasn’t used since he was a boy in his mother’s house. In case Rudy needs extras, it’s good to be prepared.
“Cari is excellent with silverware,” her father brags. He sets her up with a rag and a big jar of polish at one end
of the long table. At the other end, Victoria and Ms. McGregor are finishing up the invitations. Cari is amazed how much fun it is, rubbing and rubbing the dusky forks and spoons and knives, like Aladdin with his magic lamp. When Cari finishes the last spoon, she holds it up, and like a fun-house mirror, she sees her brooooooooad brown face smiling stupidly back at her.
Friday, when Cari gets home with Essie on the bus, they find Colonel Charlebois napping in the parlor. Papa is gone and Victoria’s not yet back from her slightly longer school day. But there is a note on the refrigerator that Essie reads out loud: “ ‘Hey, B&B crew. Out coaching. You know what to do! Be back by six. Love, Papa.’ ”
“What do you think Papa wants us to do?” Cari asks Essie.
Her sister shrugs. “Do our homework—what else?”
“I don’t get homework in kindergarten.” Cari has to keep reminding everyone. Maybe people who get homework don’t get any smarter.
“Hello?! It’s also Friday! Papa’s just in one of his states,” Essie pronounces in a grown-up voice. “He’s so happy coaching, he’s like a kid in a candy store.”
“Do you think he’ll ever be a lawyer again?” Cari knows that was Papa’s job in the city. But here in Vermont, Papa has changed his mind about what he wants to be as a grown-up. That’s a change that could be scary, but somehow it isn’t. Cari isn’t sure why.
“No way Papa’s going to be a lawyer anymore. He detests being a lawyer.” Now that Essie is in sixth grade, she
has begun using an awful lot of big words. “Besides, Papa loves coaching and helping run Tía Lola’s B&B. I haven’t seen Papa this happy since—I don’t know, since …” And then Essie blurts out the one comparison she has been avoiding: “Since before Mama died.”
Suddenly Cari understands why all the recent changes haven’t been scary: because they’ve made Papa so happy, it makes everyone else feel happy, too. So maybe when Ms. McGregor gets married, she and her husband will be so happy, there will be a lot of leftover happiness for them to give everybody, including Cari. She’s not sure why, but somehow over the last few days, being so occupied polishing silver and helping Papa, and seeing Ms. McGregor so excited at school, Cari has stopped moping. At night, Victoria has to remind her about the wishing candle. But Cari is all done with wishing her teacher won’t get married.
“Your turn,” she tells Victoria. “You wish for something.”
It is Saturday afternoon, and the wedding guests are assembled in the front parlor.
The big grandfather clock clangs three o’clock. Then ticks to three-ten, quarter after. The guests grow restless.
Upstairs, the bride is pacing her bedroom, trampling rose petals underfoot. “Where is he?” she keeps asking no one in particular. Periodically she sends her little flower girl down to check on the arrival of the groom and his family.
Every time Cari races back upstairs with the news that there is no news, she dreads seeing the unhappiness on
her teacher’s face. It is a face Cari knows by heart after a month in kindergarten. Ms. McGregor is looking even more unhappy than when she has to remind Leo Pellegrini for the fourth time in one morning that he has to raise his hand and wait to be called on before he can have a turn at talking.
Finally Ms. McGregor marches down to the kitchen to call her husband-to-be and remind him that he is getting married this afternoon. But nobody answers at his house, and he doesn’t have a machine, so Ms. McGregor can’t leave a message.
“Maybe there has been an emergency, you think?” Papa ventures. After all, with a sickly father and a sister in a wheelchair, anything could happen.
“He could at least call and tell us so,” the bride says with a temper that Cari has never heard in her teacher’s voice before.
“I just can’t believe he doesn’t have a cell,” her sister says, shaking her head in disbelief. That should have been a red flag right there. Everyone in L.A. has a cell.
“I’m really sorry.” Ms. McGregor is apologizing like it’s her fault. “I guess he wasn’t ready to marry me.” Her voice breaks. Tears are streaming down her beautiful face.
Cari is feeling so guilty. She knows who is responsible, and it’s not the groom. It’s Caridad Espada, who spent a week wishing on a non-quitting candle that her teacher wouldn’t get married. And even though, in the last few days, she has stopped wishing this, it was probably too late for the wish fairies. They already had it in the works, Ms. McGregor will not be getting married.
Cari can’t bear one more minute of watching the consequences of her selfishness. She lets herself out of the house without a coat and sits down on the front steps, shivering in her thin party dress with her little crown of silk roses. Maybe she will die of poohmonia, or whatever it’s called. Before she knows it, Cari is blubbering away herself, not caring that all the traffic coming into town gets to see her being a big baby.
Such is her despair, eyes clouded with tears, that Cari hears before she sees the huge red pickup with a wheelchair in the back pulling up onto the front lawn. A young man is leaping out from behind the wheel, leaving the other passengers inside. He’s holding a white envelope and breathing in a rushed way, like he might have a heart attack before Cari ever finds out why he’s so upset. “Is this where the wedding is? Is Maisie here? Maisie McGregor?”
Cari pops right up. “Yes! Yes!” She races down the last couple of steps and grabs the groom’s hand. Together, they rush into the house, the man hollering over his shoulder, “I’ll be right back soon’s I explain!”
It is an astonishing moment Cari will never forget: the groom bursting into the kitchen, looking sick with worry; a teary Ms. McGregor standing up, half relieved, half mad, and another half that Cari can’t know adds up to more than a whole because she hasn’t learned fractions yet—that other extra half ready to cancel the wedding even if it kills her, which it would: all three halves of her dying of a broken heart.
The groom doesn’t even try to explain. He hurries over and folds his bride in his arms, kissing the tears away.
Everyone tiptoes out so that the young lovers can have their private moment of making up. Everyone except one wedding-party dog with a white satin ribbon round his neck and a little flower girl who stays to keep him company under the kitchen table.
Later, when the whole story is told, the question will remain: who changed the address on the groom’s family’s invitation? Right now what Cari learns is that Boone’s family got the invitation, but the address it gave was not Colonel Charlebois’s house in town, but an address out in the country. (He shows Ms. McGregor the invitation as proof.) Boone figured he’d misunderstood, and the wedding was actually out at the colonel’s old place. So he drove to the address on the invitation: a ramshackle, unpainted house with a B&B sign on the front lawn. He knocked and knocked. Nobody answered. By now it was almost three in the afternoon, and he was in a panic. He didn’t have a cell phone, so he couldn’t call Colonel Charlebois to see where the heck he should go. He decided to just drive through town, hoping and praying that he’d spot a house with lots of parked cars that might signal a wedding party.
“Then, remember that cute picture you showed me by one of your students, a pretty little girl holding your hand? Well, I saw that same little girl in a party dress with a flower crown sitting in front of this house, so I pulled in. And sure enough, she said you were inside.” He lets out a long sigh. “You will still marry me, won’t you? Maisie, please?”
Before Ms. McGregor can refuse him, Cari jumps out from under the table. “Say yes, Ms. McGregor, please. It’s all my fault for wishing you wouldn’t marry!”
Both the bride and groom are rendered momentarily speechless by this outburst from an unexpected witness. Then her teacher’s face relaxes into a soft smile. “It’s not your fault, Cari. Look, he’s right.” Ms. McGregor shows Cari the invitation, forgetting that Cari is in kindergarten and can’t read handwriting. But she does know what her big sister’s handwriting looks like, and the writing on that card is definitely not Victoria’s. It looks like someone painted over a mistake and wrote on the whited-out part with a fine-point marker.
