Step-Ball-Change (13 page)

“Yes,” I said dimly. I was thanking God for Taffy because if I had been wearing my purple dress at this moment, I would have had to excuse myself, go to the rest room, and try to climb out of a window. I had been to the restaurant before, though I’ll admit not knowing they served lunch. The hostess said, “Welcome, Mrs. Bennett.” The waiter said, “It’s always good to see you, Mrs. Bennett.” Even the busboy nodded to her as he spooned the star-shaped pats of butter onto our plates. I would not have said that Lila Bennett was beautiful or homely or heavy or thin. All I could say was that she looked like money, extremely subtle, extremely old money. Everything about her was tastefully elegant, expensively compiled—her jewelry, her hair, her manicure. Wearing the nicest outfit that I had probably ever had on, I was just breaking even.

“I should tell you right away, of course, that we simply adore Kay.”

Again I was scooped. “We think the world of Trey.”

“And we couldn’t be more pleased about the wedding.”

I was absolutely going to say that. Dammit. Salads arrived. Suddenly I felt unsure of my fork. This was insanity. I was a perfectly well-mannered person. I wondered how Kay managed whole dinners, entire long evenings at the Bennetts’. I wondered how
Trey had managed it for a lifetime. “We’re very happy,” I parroted back. Why hadn’t I insisted the four of us get together, husbands and wives? Why didn’t I think to demand that Kay and Trey be included as well? I had spent my life dancing in front of strangers, and now I couldn’t eat a salad or navigate the simplest patterns of conversation?

“I think they should wait a year.” Mrs. Bennett gently pierced a bit of endive but did not bring it to her lips. “I know they’re in such a rush, no one can wait for anything these days, but what they forget is that it takes so much planning. It would be simply impossible to manage it in six months, even if we all work together. I have a woman, Mrs. Carlson, who is a wedding planner. She did my daughter’s wedding. Mary Hunt’s wedding was only six hundred people, maybe a few more, and we spent a year on that.”

“Only six hundred?”

“A few more.”

I picked up my glass. When the wine arrived, my original thought had been that it would be better not to drink, but now I could see that wouldn’t be possible. “And how many people are you thinking about for this wedding?”

“Trey’s?” she asked, making sure we hadn’t moved on to a discussion about some other wedding.

I nodded, sipped.

Mrs. Bennett (and I will make a point to explain to Tom why Kay can’t imagine calling her Lila) tilted her head. “I think a thousand would be the cap. I’d like to see nine hundred, but these things never turn out exactly the way you think they’re going to. But that’s just me guessing at your list. I don’t know your numbers at all.”

“Fifty?” I offered.

She nodded. “So then it would be nine hundred or a thousand.”

I
DROVE AROUND
the corner to a gas station and called Tom from a pay phone. I did not chat up Alison, his secretary. I told her to put me through. “Can you meet me in the parking lot?” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

An old man with seven teeth and an oily rag in his pocket smiled at me. It must have been my suit. “I need to talk to you.”

“Can’t you come into the office?”

“I don’t want to run into Kay. Just come outside. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

W
HEN
T
OM GOT
into the car, I was trying very hard not to perspire. I had one arm propped up on the window and the other one draped over the back of the passenger seat. He kissed me with some enthusiasm.

“You look fantastic,” he said. “Where did you get that outfit?”

“It’s Taffy’s,” I said flatly. “It all goes back to the closet this afternoon.”

Then he remembered where I had been. “This is about lunch,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“This is not good news about lunch, either.”

“Right again.”

Tom stared out the window and exhaled. He didn’t pressure me. Whatever I was going to say, he was in no hurry to hear it.

“Lila Bennett is thinking a thousand people, maybe nine hundred. She pointed out that traditionally the bride’s family pays for the wedding, but given that their guest list was so much larger—
she was very tactful about all of this—given the enormity of their guest list, she thought it would be fair to split the whole thing down the middle. With them paying for the rehearsal dinner, of course. They would insist on paying for the rehearsal dinner.”

Tom continued to stare. I wasn’t entirely sure he had heard me. We both sat in silence while cars shot past us on the street. I wondered if we could run away. I wondered if Tom knew someone who could get us into the witness protection program. Wasn’t there a branch of the witness protection program that was for parents who couldn’t pay for their daughter’s wedding?

Finally Tom’s head dropped forward onto his chest as if his neck had just spontaneously snapped. It was very startling. “I’m not going to be able to retire,” he said.

“You’re not going to be able to retire? Do you think that’s the answer to this? You’re going to have to join a corporate law firm and make full partner in the next six months if you want to pay for this thing.”

“What are we going to do?”

I looked at the heavy gold bracelet Taffy had lent me. Pawning that would be a start. Maybe I could pawn the suit, too. “Realistically, we have two options: We assume a level of debt that would crush us until our death if we were able to borrow that much money in the first place, or we tell Kay and the Bennetts the truth: We simply can’t do this.”

“Maybe we could offer to pay a smaller percentage.”

“It’s possible. But what if the wedding costs a million dollars? Do we offer to pay ten percent?” The image I had of us standing on the coast of the Mediterranean vanished, or, I should say, the sea was still there, but Tom and I had been excised from the picture. We had put all four of our children through college. We hadn’t
paid for anyone to go to law school, but all four times we had helped. It had not been easy. It had taken a lot of planning and creative financing. We weren’t living on the edge, but the edge was in plain sight. We had saved up for the Florida room, but we still didn’t have a Florida room. Having the bottom of our house rebuilt had shaken us up some, and now to think that after a lifetime of work we could be finished off by one large party, wiped out over cake and a dress, we were stunned. “It’s my fault,” I said. “I should have just told her no. I should have said it straight out the second she brought the whole thing up.”

Tom blinked. “I might be able to get us a spot in the witness protection program.”

I will say it: I have never felt closer to another human being in my life. I told my husband how much I loved him.

He reached over and held my hand and we sat there, two married people in the life raft of their car.

“H
OW WAS THE
suit?” Taffy asked. She and Woodrow were sitting in the kitchen eating their own late lunch, with Stamp tied to a table leg between them. He growled at me and wagged his tail at the same time, which seemed like progress.

I sat down and took off the earrings and the bracelet and put them out on the table so as to return them before my baser instincts got the better of me. “The suit was a big success.”

“It’s a great suit,” Woodrow said.

“It’s mine,” Taffy said. “Did she ask you where you got it?”

I nodded.

“I knew it. I knew she would ask.”

“What’s wrong?” Woodrow asked. “You don’t look so good.”

“What are you talking about?” Taffy said. “She looks gorgeous.”

“No,” Woodrow said. “Look at her.”

And that was all it took. I put my elbows on the table, my face in my hands, and I cried.

“My God,” Taffy said. “What happened at lunch?”

I told them everything and they both listened carefully.

“You can’t do what you can’t do,” Woodrow said. “There’s no sense torturing yourself over it. Pick up the phone right now and call her.”

Taffy shook her head. “Wait awhile. It’s a big decision. You need to think it over. You’re not going to pay half, but you need to look at what you can pay.”

“These people have more money than some countries,” Woodrow said. “Why should she have to pay anything?”

“If it were one of your girls, you wouldn’t want the other family taking care of everything,” Taffy said to Woodrow. “Just because somebody has more than you doesn’t mean that you have no responsibility. Think about Kay. How is she going to feel if you don’t even make an effort?”

“Will she feel so different if we offer to pay five percent?” I said. What did Taffy know, anyway? Her daughter wasn’t married, and when she got married, she and Neddy would have all the money in the world to spend. Holden had plenty of her own money, as far as that was concerned, and she tended to date movie stars, who weren’t the kind of people who expected the bride’s parents to pay for the wedding anyway.

“Maybe I was wrong,” Woodrow said, his voice sounding disillusioned. “Maybe this business of marrying rich people isn’t as great as I thought it was.”

I thought about Jack the D.A. in his rumpled suit and scuffed shoes. He was probably the kind of guy who would talk a girl into going to Vegas. He’d want to be married by an Elvis impersonator with hired witnesses you had to tip later. And God bless him for it.

I had a class to teach at three o’clock, though my head was so full of numbers I didn’t know how I’d ever make sense out of music.

“Ah-ah,” Taffy said when I went to get behind the wheel. “Give me the keys, I’ll drive.”

“It would be different if I were completely convinced that Kay wanted to marry him in the first place.”

“How would it be different? You’d have more money?”

“No, I’m just saying, it’s one thing to destroy your entire financial future if you know they’re going to stay together and be happy, but to destroy it and then have the marriage fall apart … I think that would kill me.”

“Oh, who the hell knows? When I married Neddy I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. I’m getting divorced now, but if someone had suggested it to me then I would have socked them in the jaw. I was absolutely sure that there was nobody else for me, and I guess, if I was going to be perfectly honest, for a while it was true.”

“You loved Neddy?” I don’t know why this surprised me.

“Sure I loved him.”

“Do you love him now?”

Taffy cut across two lanes of traffic and got in the left-hand turn lane. Taffy was a dynamite driver, I would give her that. “You spend all those years with somebody, how do you know? Do you love them now or is it just that you used to love them? Is it that you
get into patterns—How did you sleep? How was your day? What sounds good for dinner? It has something to do with love, but I don’t know what, exactly. All I’m saying is, if Mother and Dad were still alive, I don’t think they’d be entitled to a rebate on my wedding. I think even though things didn’t work out in the end, I got their money’s worth out of it.”

Taffy pulled up in front of McSwan’s. “I really don’t think I can do this,” I said.

“You can do this,” she said. “You always do.”

But I wasn’t doing it well. The class was Tap One, which came after the Bumblebees and Introductory Tap. These were seven- and eight-year-olds and they had a keen eye for mistakes.

“Mrs. McSwan! You keep saying, Shuffle shuffle flap
ball
change, but you keep doing shuffle shuffle
step
ball change.”

I looked at my feet. What were my feet doing? They could fly on autopilot. I should be able to do this stuff when I’m dead. I tapped my toes together and stood there feeling utterly lost. Then suddenly the seas were parted and a leader stepped forward.

“Okay now, girls,” Taffy said. “I’m Mrs. McSwan’s sister. I’m the other tap teacher.”

“You’re Mrs. McSwan, too?” asked a suspicious eight-year-old with a fat red braid.

“For now, yes.” Taffy clapped her hands. “Get in line, girls, because we’ve got work to do.” She rattled off a routine: “Starting on the right, flap, flap, flap, heel, heel, pick up heel, toe, heel, shuffle heel, cramp roll, and then repeat.” It was nothing they knew. It was more complicated than what they were used to. Taffy accepted no mistakes. I went to the side of the room and watched for a change. She made them go over it again and again. In the end, they all got it.