Wreathed (28 page)

“You might want to take that to go,” Sheldon said. “We’re burning daylight as it is.”

“Gotcha. Wendy, can I talk with you in the kitchen, please?”

“You mind?” I asked Vanessa.

“Is there coffee in it for me?” she asked.

“You’re lucky I let you pee,” I said. “This will just take a minute.”

I followed Adam into the far corner of the kitchen and gave him a slow, lingering kiss.

“You realize I have to go help Uncle Sheldon today,” he said. “It can’t wait.”

“Neither can this thing with Vanessa,” I said. “I have her over a barrel. I may just be able to save my job, at least for a little while.”

“How’s that again?” he asked.

“That’s right. I never managed to get around to telling you that part. It’s not important. But I can handle this. You go do what you need to do, and I’ll get rid of Vanessa, and I’ll meet you back here. If that’s all right.”

“I don’t have a problem,” he said. “I trust you.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. It sounded wonderful to hear him say it.

“Do you want to go to dinner tonight?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

Adam smiled. “Let’s go someplace romantic,” he said.

My heart soared. I was getting through to him at last. I had found a wonderful, adorable man, and we were falling in love with each other, and everything was going to be perfect from now on.

“I know this great little place on Route 9,” he said. “And I have a coupon.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”

Epilogue

Adam asked me to marry him at midnight on Christmas Eve, out in front of the big tree at Rockefeller Center. It was a beautiful, heartwarming, romantic moment, and it only happened because I had dropped several broad hints regarding how I thought he should propose. I had determined that Adam was, after all, capable of the occasional romantic gesture, if subtly led in the right direction.

It was a perfect evening. I wore the garnet dress I had worn on our first date. He knelt down and asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I think I heard sleigh bells ring when he put the engagement ring on my hand, but I couldn’t testify to that.

We told our respective families at a New Year’s Eve party at Pacey’s house. My brother Greg drove up from Philadelphia and brought a young, attractive Indian woman with him. Her name was Dayita, and she was an orthopedist that Greg had met at the hospital—which was fortunate for him, because he’d never meet anyone any other way. I was glad that he was seeing someone, but annoyed to lose my long-term bet with Pacey about whether the first person Greg would bring to a family gathering would be male or female. She was very charming and gracious, and I liked her right away. Unfortunately, Greg forgot to warn her not to talk politics with Mother. They got into a protracted discussion about immigration and affirmative action, and I finally had to break things up and take Dayita aside and plead with her not to say anything inflammatory about health care reform or Rush Limbaugh or Altamont.

Adam’s mother drove up from Point Pleasant, after Pacey and I had spent the last several days assuring her that there would be something gluten-free for her to eat. And Uncle Sheldon tagged along, although I hadn’t wanted to invite him. Adam, sensibly, pointed out that we wouldn’t be together without him and I couldn’t disagree. I did insist that he bring a change of clothes in case Mother decided to throw something else at him.

Pacey had taken the sensible step of hiring a caterer, for which everyone was grateful. We made our announcement just before dinner, and nobody was the least bit surprised except for Pacey’s husband and Greg’s new girlfriend. Pacey did let out an approving squeal once she saw the engagement ring, which was all I wanted to hear. We all sat down and heaped our plates with (gluten-free) gnocchi and roast beef and ginger-cilantro chicken, and I made a note to get the name of Pacey’s caterer.

At dinner, I made my other announcement, which was that I had quit my job in Morristown and was moving to Freehold. I’d had Mother pull a couple of strings in her South Jersey network, and one of her friends had gotten me a job clerking with a county probate judge, with an eye on me taking over the judgeship on his retirement.

We were almost done with the renovations on Adam’s house. We had decided against flipping it, at least for the time being. That left the wedding to plan. I had three different sites picked out so far, but Adam was trying to convince me to get married on the beach at Cape May. I was looking forward to ironing out all the details over the next few months. We both wanted to get married in October, and honeymoon in the Caribbean after hurricane season had blown through, and after that we would spend the rest of our lives together.

After dinner, I ended up on the overstuffed leather couch in the family room, with a glass of chardonnay in one hand and a Mo Willems book in the other, doing the funny voices for Elephant and Piggie for an adoring audience of two. When I was done with the book, Adam sat beside me and whispered in my ear. “Is there someplace we can go?” he asked.

“Pacey says there’s Linzer torte,” I said. “I am not going anywhere, unless you count maybe getting a chardonnay refill.”

“I mean, just for a short time,” he said.

“Seriously? Here? In my sister’s house?”

He explained, very quietly and discreetly, what he had in mind.

“Oh,” I said. “I see. Well, the basement is furnished, so that might work, if we’re careful.”

“That sounds fine,” he said.

“As long as we’re back upstairs by the time she’s ready to serve the Linzer torte.”

“I promise.”

The steps down to the basement were creaky, so I went down slowly, trying not to make a sound. Adam followed my lead. The light was on downstairs, which I attributed to one of the twins having left it on. I didn’t hear the voices until I got to the bottom step.

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” I heard Sheldon say.

“Relax, dear. Everyone is thinking about the lovebirds upstairs. They’ve forgotten we’re even here.”

My body froze in shock.

“They do make a cute couple,” Sheldon said. “It’s the one nice thing that’s come out of all of this.”

“Not the only nice thing,” Mother said. “Come here. This sofa folds out, you know.”

I looked back at Adam, whose shocked face must have mirrored mine.

“Oh my God,” I whispered.

“Back upstairs,” he mouthed. “Now.”

We made our way back upstairs as quietly as we could, and then closed the door behind us. Adam started making a horrible hacking sound, which resolved itself into a most unmasculine giggle.

“Stop doing that,” I said. “This is not funny.”

“Seems funny to me,” he said.

“Quit it. This is serious. What if they start dating again?”

“Well, then, good for them.”

“What if they get married before we do? Then we’d be related. Or something.”

“Relax. They’re not going to get married. They’re just, I don’t know, feeling romantic.”

Romance is the socialized expression of frustrated sexual desire
, I thought. “The whole thing is just creeping me out,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “But that’s not important. The important thing is you and me. And a whole new year to spend together.”

“And midnight. And a kiss.”

When the party was over, we walked out the front door of my sister’s house, hand in hand, into the welcoming night of the old year that was past and almost gone, into a new year that was bright with promise, and fulfillment, and love.

About the Author

Curtis Edmonds is a writer and attorney living in central New Jersey. His work has appeared in
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Untoward Magazine, The Big Jewel, Yankee Pot Roast,
and
National Review Online
. His book reviews appear on the
Bookreporter
website. Other short fiction appears online at his yet-to-be-award-winning website,

graph-definition>

http://www.curtisedmonds.com/

. His first novel,
Rain on Your Wedding Day

, was published by Scary Hippopotamus Books in March 2013.

A Brief Factual Appendix

In reading this book, you may have noticed that, at times, Wendy Jarrett’s story takes on the character of a country-western song. This is not an accident. Anyone who is an adept of country music will hopefully have noticed that the story makes specific references to various George Jones songs.

On April 26, 2013, the day that George Jones died, the critic Terry Teachout tweeted a recommendation for a book about George Jones, written by Jack Isenhour. I read the tweet and checked out the book on Amazon, which, as it turned out, was entitled
He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time
.

I am not the kind of person who can resist that kind of title.

About a month or so later, I was sitting in the Spartan waiting room of my car dealer, waiting on them to figure out, once and for all, why the God-damned check engine light in my mini-SUV kept going on. I had Isenhour’s book on my Kindle while listening to classic George Jones on my iPod. Isenhour is a talented writer, and the book is a careful deconstruction of both the concept of “authenticity” in country music and the classic work of art that is “
He Stopped Loving Her Today

.” I read the book, and reread it, and evolved the concept of writing a novel based on the song.

“He Stopped Loving Her Today” has a very powerful, evocative story. (If you’re not familiar with the song, feel free to take a moment and
check it out on YouTube

.) A man falls in love with a woman, who breaks off the relationship. He spends his days unhappily brooding over his lost love. Finally he dies, and his friends breathe a sigh of relief that his romantic suffering is at last over. At the funeral, everyone wonders if his lost love will show up, and she does. In a three-minute song, you’ve got love, romance, heartache, pathos, death, and a final dramatic reveal, and three memorable characters. That’s not a bad structure to work with, and build around.

The initial problem I had was finding the right protagonist to work with. “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” as told from the dead man’s perspective, is simply too depressing to tell—and having written a very depressing novel (
Rain on Your Wedding Day

) just previously, I decided to do something that was at least a wee bit lighter. The narrator’s perspective isn’t much easier to work with—he’s just a passive observer who watches his friend die by inches, and then goes to the funeral to mourn, and we never learn anything about him at all.

The next logical place to start is with the character of the woman who shows up at the funeral, the love of the dead man’s life who left him and caused him years of suffering. Her character is a bit more interesting, and compelling. However, telling her story posed me with a small problem.

One of the reasons it was so appealing for me to adapt the story of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” into a novel is that the scope of the story is universal—the people involved could be almost anyone. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, the great songwriter Guy Clark, years before “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was written, wrote a similar song called “Let Him Roll.” The story of Clark’s song (
again, feel free to check it out on YouTube

or Spotify) is exactly the same—there’s a dead man, a narrator, a funeral, and a lost love showing up at the funeral. But Clark’s dead man is a homeless wino, and the mystery woman had been a prostitute. You could tell that story—although not so well as Clark does—but it wouldn’t be as adaptable, and it almost certainly couldn’t be a contemporary romance.

The thing that tripped me up, initially, about “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is that there is exactly one telling detail in the lyrics. According to the song, the man and the woman were in love during 1962. (There’s no particular reason why that is, except that “1962” rhymes with “I love you.”) I wanted to preserve that data point, but I also wanted to set my story in the present. In order to tell the story of two young adults in the 2010s, I had to reach back and also tell a story of teenage romance in the early 1960s. I think that I managed to do justice to both stories, but the reader of course will have to judge how well I did.

Isenhour talks about how the producer of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Billy Sherrill, mixed in a passage of string music towards the end of the song. As Isenhour tells it, the string music is supposed to symbolize the soul of the dead man rising up to heaven. For a country song, this almost qualifies as a happy ending. I chose to have two happy endings in
Wreathed
, and while that may not be true to the spirit of “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” I think that the novel still manages to convey that feeling of redemption and hope.

I tend to set a lot of scenes in restaurants. I like restaurants. They’re good places to eat and meet people and eat and have important discussions and eat. I don’t think I mentioned specifically any of the restaurants where Adam and Wendy go on their dates, but they’re real places and you can go there. Delta’s in New Brunswick has excellent Southern food and questionable parking. Jack Baker’s Lobster Shanty weathered Superstorm Sandy (rather better than I did, all things considered) and has good seafood and a kids’ menu. I am (sadly) much more likely to be eating at the generic chain place where Wendy and their mother have their memorable dinner to start off the novel, though.

Acknowledgments

This story would not be possible without the late, great George Jones. I have been a fan of George Jones’s music since early childhood, listening to his lonesome baritone ripple across the North Texas prairies on WBAP-820 out of Fort Worth. Thanks to Terry Teachout for recommending Jack Isenhour’s book, and Jack Isenhour for writing his book, and the nice folks at Twitter and Amazon that helped steer me towards the book.