Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? (12 page)

E
mmett was staring out the back-seat window of our rented beige Chevy, grim-faced as usual. Charla was singing “This Land Is Your Land.” And I was biting the inside of my lip and counting trees. I’d gotten up to five hundred million. Having been a city kid all my life, I’d never seen so many trees in a row. For the past twenty minutes, there had been nothing but trees. Highway and trees and the occasional green sign indicating where the heck we were. Weigh Station. Next exit 14 miles. Speed Limit: 55 (and sometimes 65).

We’d been driving for an hour and a half and were still in New Jersey. I had no idea New Jersey was so pretty. Given all the jokes about “which exit” and smokestacks and Jersey Girls, whodathunk there were acres and acres of untouched land, snowy white and unpolluted by eight million people and eight million taxi cabs. I saw more cows and horses in the half hour than I’d seen in my entire life.

We were on our way to Boonsonville, Pennsylvania, population 4, 600, which, according to Yahoo Maps, was in Bucks County. My grandmother thought Bucks County, with its historic towns and artsy, charming, woodsy atmosphere, fit with what she remembered of Theodore Leo Manfred, Writer. According to Facts About Boonsonville, if you lived in town, either the historical district or downtown, you could get along without a car if you were the type who could. From what my grandmother told me and the little my mother mentioned over the years, Theo Manfred was the type who would get along without a car.

We didn’t exactly have a plan about what we were going to do when we got there. We had a name that matched, a state that matched and an address. That was where we were headed.

“Are we just gonna knock on the door and see if a man resembling us opens it?” Emmett asked.

“I guess,” I said.

“You’ve really planned this out,” he said.

I ignored him.

“I’ve been to Pennsylvania before,” Charla chirped. “When I was a kid, we went on a school field trip to see the Liberty Bell. And I’ve also been to Hershey Park. It’s like a chocolate wonderland. God, I miss chocolate!”

Emmett reached into his pocket and handed her a Snickers bar.

She beamed but wagged her finger at it. “Chocolate contains caffeine. The baby can’t have any.”

Emmett paled and took back the candy bar.

I tried to imagine how Emmett felt about the baby, but I couldn’t. I had no idea how he felt about
Charla.
Four years? And he’d never even mentioned her? How was that
possible? If I hadn’t gotten a glimpse of her myself last year in my doorway, I wouldn’t have known she even existed.

“I have no idea how I’m going to get along without coffee,” Charla said. “I can’t have coffee, chocolate, farmed salmon, tuna, swordfish—”

Emmett looked at her quizzically. “Fish has caffeine?” he asked.

“Mercury,” she said.

“Oh,” he said.

“I can’t have soft cheese or bacon either,” she added.

Emmett nodded again, and that was the extent of his contribution to the conversation.

I peered at Charla in the rearview mirror. She was trying very hard. For the first hour, she’d steered clear of pregnancy talk, but Emmett hadn’t responded any better. From the moment we put on our seat belts and pulled out of the garage, Charla had tried her best to lighten up the tension. She’d tried chatting (“So, were you two close as kids?”) and games (“How many girls’ first names can you come up with that start with the letter V?”) and then a running monologue about how many deer are hit on rural highways.

Finally, Emmett handed me a CD. Charla announced that it was her favorite, which got her smiling and Emmett what he wanted, which was her silence.

I popped it into the player. I could take the noise for about a minute, then turned on the radio instead.

“You always had bad taste in music,” Emmett said. “Totally commercial stuff.”

“I could sing,” Charla suggested, and before we could say,
No, that’s really okay,
she launched into folk favorites. She’d finished “This Land Is Your Land” and was now on “Blowin’ In the Wind.”

She stopped singing. “I really have to pee,” she said.

She really had to pee a lot. Apparently, pregnant women went to the bathroom every twenty minutes. Between the last two rest stops, she’d explained exactly what pressed on the bladder.

“I think it’s the baby’s tush,” she said.

“Victor,” Emmett said fast before she could elaborate.

“What, honey?” Charla asked.

“Names that start with V.”

She laughed. “Okay, I’ll change the subject. But Victor isn’t a girl’s name.”

“Victoria,” he said.

I laughed spontaneously, and we caught eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked away.

Our mother used to play the name game with Emmett and me. Emmett and I would come up with names she’d never heard of, like Danae (there were two in my sixth-grade class), and our mother would challenge us with names we’d never heard of, like Gertrude and Milt.

“I can barely hold it in,” Charla managed to say as I pulled onto the service road leading to a McDonald’s. “Maybe it’s the baby’s head pressing against my bladder—”

“Vera,” Emmett said. “Vanessa. Valerie. Vania.”

I laughed, but if you thought about it, it really wasn’t funny at all.

Twenty-five minutes later, Charla needed to stop again.

“How do you feel about the pregnancy?” I asked Emmett as she disappeared inside another McDonald’s.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

Hey, that was my line.

Forty minutes later, we were lost and Charla needed to stop again.

She held the map up to her face. “I can’t even concentrate on this tiny type. I have to go sooooo bad!”

“Emmett, can you figure out where we are and how to get back on the highway?” I asked him.

He had his headphones on. Charla nudged him. He took them off and grudgingly took the map. He peered out the window for a street sign.

“Make a left,” he said. “And just keep going.”

I did, and signs for the highway appeared.

So that was what constant travel was good for.

According to Emmett, we were now in the same McDonald’s we were in a half hour ago.

When you were born, raised and lived in New York City and didn’t have a car (7.5 million of the population?), you had to rent one when you needed to go anywhere. Highways, maps, rest stops were all new to me.

Charla came back to the car eating a McVeggie burger and slurping a vanilla shake.

“Ready?” I asked the two of them.

Emmett put on his headphones and closed his eyes. No one could ever accuse him of being a side-seat driver.

“Want some company?” Charla asked, nodding at the passenger seat. “Chatty here is giving me an earache.”

I laughed. “Sure.”

A moment later we were back on the highway, this time headed in the right direction.

Exit: Boonsonville. One and a half miles.

I now knew what a rush of blood to the head felt like. My heart started pounding.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
How could Charla not hear it?
Boom. Boom. Boom.

But she was talking about baby names she liked. Thelonious for a boy.

Thelonious? Was that a name?

“I wouldn’t use a name that started with ‘The,’” I said. “Bad luck.”

“Huh?”

“Our father’s name is Theodore,” I pointed out.

“Ah. But do you like the name Thelonious?” she asked. “I think it’s really musical and meaningful.”

I glanced at her to see if she was kidding, but she wasn’t. Charla’s expression was perpetually hopeful, almost too sincere.

“Honestly?” I asked.

She nodded. “It’s a mouthful. Maybe a better name for a musician than a baby.”

“I also like Mike,” she said.

I laughed. “From Thelonious to Mike, huh?”

“Emmett likes the name Finn.”

That surprised me. “You and Emmett have discussed baby names?”

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I have, and he usually says, ‘Charl, you’re only
ten
weeks pregnant.’ But a few days ago, I asked him how he felt about the name Lorenzo and he said—”

She burst into tears.

I pulled over. We both glanced back at Emmett; he was lightly snoring.

I handed her a tissue.

She blew her nose and sniffled. “He said Lorenzo Gould sounded really dumb.”

Oh. Meaning Emmett was so mentally out of the picture as the baby’s father that he didn’t even
assume
Charla would give the child his name.

“Give him a little time,” I told her. “He’s only known for what, a couple of weeks? Maybe when he gets used to the idea he’ll start saying Lorenzo
Manfred
sounds dumb.”

“He’ll be hitchhiking his way to Texas by then,” she said. “He likes the idea of trying out Austin. He says there’s a great music scene there.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I assured her. “Vegetarians don’t move to cattle country.”

She brightened for a split second. “That’s true! El, I’m really sorry, but I really have to pee again.”

“There’s an exit coming up any minute. I’m sure there will be a rest stop.”

“We passed the last exit ten minutes ago,” she said. “Didn’t you see the sign that said Next Exit, 14 miles?”

Nope, I hadn’t.

“And that was the exit we needed,” I said. “Boonsonville.”

“Some say there are no accidents,” she pointed out.

“I don’t think there are,” I told her.

“I could go for a burger,” Emmett said at the next rest stop. “Anyone want anything?”

Charla burst into tears.

So much for being a vegetarian.

“Hormones,” I told him. “She’ll be okay. Go ahead. We’re fine.”

He looked at Charla, chewed his lip for a second, then ambled off toward the rest stop.

Two women in a little blue car smiled after him; one of them wolf-whistled. He didn’t even turn around.

I took off my seat belt. “Come on, Charla. Let’s hit the bathrooms just in case you need to go. I can ask for directions back to the exit.”

“’Kay,” she said, wiping her eyes.

Five minutes later, bathroomed, face-splashed and ginger-aled, we sat at a picnic bench, rubbing our hands together. It was cold. Thirty-seven degrees and overcast.

“I’m freezing,” I said. “Want to head back to the car?”

“My father bailed on me too,” Charla said suddenly.

I glanced at her. “Really?”

She nodded and took a sip of her soda. “He fell in love with someone else and that was that. He left when I was seven, moved to Oregon and I never saw him again until I went looking for him when I was twenty.”

“You found him?”

She nodded.

“I have a half brother and a half sister.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Did Emmett and I have half brothers and half sisters?

“What happened when you found him?” I asked.

“He acted all happy to see me, but it was more like I was a distant relative he’d met a few times and liked—and one he expected to go home and call in a few months or something. The whole thing was really disappointing. I guess I’m glad I found him, but it didn’t make me feel better.”

I looked at her. Her nose was red from crying, from the cold. “So why did you push Emmett to come with me?”

“Because it’s something you both need to do to move past a hump.”

She shook her head. “I feel like, if he’ll just confront this—” She started to cry.

I didn’t know what to say. She’d already been through the hardest part of what I was just beginning to do. I covered her hand with mine.

“It’s not that I think he’ll find his dad and suddenly have closure and be able to move on and settle down and
marry me and be father of the year,” she said. “But a girl can dream, right?” She let out a deep breath. “I love him so much.”

I suddenly realized how misguided it was to judge other people’s relationships. If I weren’t Emmett’s sister but just a friend of Charla’s, I might have said,
Why? Or…How could you love someone so immature? Someone who’s not even all that nice to you
?

But I knew how. I loved Emmett, too. Only because he was my brother? I didn’t think so. I loved him because I
knew
him. Yes, we were family. But blood and love could be mutually exclusive. My father had taught me that.

“It’s good that he’s here,” she said. “That you’re both here. Yeah, I think he’s going to be a huge mess that I’m going to have to deal with while I’m pregnant. I think it’s going to be very raw and very ugly for him. But do you just repress this kind of loss and pain and live like Emmett, or do you face it head-on like
you’re
willing to do? Like you’re
doing.
”

Suddenly I wasn’t sure whether it was worth it or not. Was it so terrible to repress pain and loss that you couldn’t do anything about? Was it so terrible to accept the shitty, gritty reality that our father had left us and go about our lives as best we could? What were we supposed to do? Spend tens of thousands of dollars on therapists? Just accept and forget it? Go find him and demand answers?

How did you know?

I was here and I still didn’t know.

“I’ve been thinking about the job your boss offered me” came Emmett’s voice.

Startled, Charla and I whirled around. I had no idea how long Emmett had been standing there. He was holding a McDonald’s bag in one hand and a shake in the
other. He’d left his jacket in the car, and his cheeks were red from the cold.

“Oh?” I said.

“Five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks, right?” he said. “Charla will need it to buy some stuff for the baby.”

Charla pressed a hand to her mouth. She flew up to hug him, and he awkwardly embraced her.

“I want to go home,” Emmett said to me. “Maybe next weekend we’ll try again, but I want to get out of here.”

I looked at him and nodded.

I wanted to go home too. We’d been gone four hours, and I’d never been so homesick in my life.