Beneath the Night Tree (21 page)

“This is a very special dress,” Liv was saying as she focused her attention on the three women seated beneath me in tawny leather armchairs. I could tell she hoped they would prove more invested in this fashion show than I was. “It’s a classic ball gown with a sequined bodice and a full tulle skirt.”

I ran my hands down my prickly, glittery waist and pulled self-consciously at the stiff material of the scratchy skirt. It felt like fishnet. “It’s not very . . . me,” I said, surprising myself by voicing the words aloud.

“Of course it’s you!” Liv chided. “Every girl gets to be a princess for one day in her life. Your wedding day is that day. If you look like a princess, you’ll feel like one.”

“I don’t feel like a princess,” I admitted. “I feel like the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

Grandma and Mrs. Walker laughed. I couldn’t tell if Mrs. Vermeer joined in, and by the time I caught her eye in the mirror, her mouth was arranged in a thin, neutral line.

“Try something else,” Grandma called. “I don’t think this is the one.”

Liv had me try on an A-line next, a smooth wave of fabric that clung from chest to hip, then swelled in a curve of satin that fell to the floor in the shape of a dinner bell. With the wired crinoline I was wearing, I could tip one way and then the other without disrupting the perfect circle of the beribboned hemline.

“Better,” Grandma said with a smile, but Liv did not seem impressed with the ticktock of my bell-like sway.

“I don’t like the flowers,” I said, indicating the champagne-colored roses that trailed in a meandering line from one spaghetti strap around my waist and all the way to the very hem of the skirt. “Too froufrou.”

“Froufrou?” Mrs. Walker chortled. “Yeah, you’re not exactly the fancy-Nancy type, are you?”

“Less sparkle,” I instructed Liv. “And no flowers or ribbons.”

“Now she develops an opinion,” Liv teased. But I could sense her irritation.

I paraded out in three more gowns, adding a new imperative with each: no sequins, no ruffles, and nothing strapless. Even after wearing the strapless dress for five minutes I was irritated by the constant need to pull it up. Liv guaranteed that it wasn’t going to fall down, but I wasn’t about to chance it.

My sixth and final dress was something I had pulled off the rack at the last minute. Liv tried to talk me out of it, and I wondered why until I caught a glimpse of the tag and realized it was about half the price of the other gowns I’d been trying on. Grandma had assured me years ago that my wedding would never be a problem—she had been saving up since I was sixteen years old. But I still wanted to try to be frugal, and the simple empire waist of the dress appealed to me. Best of all, the fabric was actually touchable, soft. It reminded me a bit of the dress that Janice wore when she married my father. Of course, their marriage hadn’t lasted, so maybe it was macabre for me to be drawn to the unpretentious throwback. But the skirt was like water in my hands, and I knew that the square neckline and straps would flatter my figure. Other than the hint of hand-stitched lace on the straps and at the waistline, the dress was unadorned.

“What is this fabric?” I asked Liv, reveling in the flowing shimmer.

“Crepe over a layer of sparkle organza,” she said. “You shouldn’t touch it so much. The oils in your hands will discolor the fabric.”

I folded my hands in front of me and walked out of the dressing room ahead of Liv so she could carry the chapel-length train.

“Ooh!” Grandma cried the moment she saw me. “I love this one, Julia. It’s so you.”

Mrs. Walker agreed, and for the first time since we arrived at the French Door, I actually started enjoying myself. The gown was gorgeous, and just wearing it made me seem pretty too. No, not just pretty. Beautiful. Liv had been wrong. I didn’t want to be a princess; I wanted to be me. Normal Julia, but amplified somehow, as if for once I could be seen as I was meant to be.

“What do you think, Mrs. Vermeer?” I asked, twirling so she could get the full effect of the classic, elegant dress.

“You don’t have to call me Mrs. Vermeer,” she protested, shaking her head so that the pearls of her drop earrings gleamed in the bright lights. “I’m going to be your mother-in-law. Call me Diane.”

“Okay.” I smiled. “Diane. Do you like the dress?”

She tilted her head and studied me with a shrewd eye. I had hoped she’d be as enthusiastic as Grandma and Mrs. Walker, but Diane wasn’t about to give me an easy thumbs-up. Running her fingernail against the curve of her lower lip, she finally nodded a little and said, “It’s pretty, but I don’t think that it would be Michael’s choice.”

My heart sank. I hadn’t even given Michael a second thought. Wouldn’t he be pleased with whatever I chose? When we had talked the night before, he assured me that I could show up in a flour sack and he’d still happily say, “I do.” Maybe I had misread him. Maybe he was only pretending not to care.

“Which one do you think Michael would like?”

“Oh, I don’t
think—
I
know
which one he’d like.” Diane laughed. “He’s been a groomsman in all four of his brothers’ weddings, and when you’re immersed in all the planning and hoopla, you learn pretty quickly what works for you and what doesn’t.”

I had been to two of those weddings with Michael, and he had never commented on any of the nuptial details, much less the bride’s gown. I just assumed he felt the same way I did about it all: mildly indifferent. But if he secretly harbored some wedding dream, I needed to know. After all, I was the only person who could make that dream come true.

“The strapless one?” I guessed, remembering one of Michael’s sisters-in-law’s gowns.

“No.” Diane smiled. “The first one. The princess one.”

The Sugar Plum Fairy one,
I thought. But it didn’t matter if I felt like a marshmallow in the dress. I gave Diane a slight nod of thanks, then turned back to the mirror. Taking a long look at the gown I was wearing, I forced a smile and balled the supple cloth in my hands. I crinkled the folds of crepe and organza, loving the feel of the fabric one last time and intentionally ignoring Liv’s muted gasp.

“The first one,” I mimicked, repeating Diane’s proclamation. “I’ll take the first one. When do I need to come back for a fitting?”

Second Chance

“It’s not too late,” Grandma said.

I peeked up from my paperwork and caught a glimpse of her frown before she snapped the newspaper to attention and disappeared once again behind the Home and Garden section.

“Not too late for what?” I pretended I had no idea what she was talking about. Maybe she’d get the hint and go back to her recipes. Of course I knew she was referring to the dress—it featured as the main course in most of our conversations these days—but I was hoping she’d realize sooner or later that I wasn’t going to budge and drop that hot-button topic once and for all.

I scribbled my signature on the bottom of our utility check and sat back to wait for Grandma’s response. Tried to prep the perfect comeback:
“The dress is a gift to Michael. It’s just one small way I get to say, ‘I love you.’ . . .”

But instead of starting in on the glittery cupcake that was to be my wedding gown, Grandma merely kept reading her paper.

The wise thing to do was just to let it go and focus on the stack of bills and mail at my fingertips. But it hurt me that Grandma thought I was making a mistake by buying the dress Michael wanted instead of the one that was so obviously meant for me. It was just a dress, after all. Yards of material and thread and beadwork. I almost groaned at the thought of all those sequins and beads, but I swallowed my disappointment instead and said, “It’s only a dress, Grandma.”

She laid the newspaper down carefully. “I know it’s just a dress. I wouldn’t care if you wore jeans and a T-shirt to your wedding. I just think it’s indicative of . . .”

We were finally getting somewhere. “What? It’s indicative of what?”

Grandma shook her head as if to clear it. “Nothing, honey. Besides, when I said, ‘It’s not too late,’ I wasn’t talking about your wedding gown.”

“You weren’t?”

“No.” She turned the page of her newspaper and lifted it, creating a wall of words between us. “I was talking about Daniel’s painting.”

Naturally. Why deal with one problem when there were a host of issues to confront?

I reached across the table for the rolled-up picture that Daniel had brought home in his backpack that afternoon. It was crinkled from drops of spilled water and smudged in places, but it was a clever rendering all the same. Of course, it was too early to tell if Daniel would have a gift for art, but if his kindergarten creations held any clue of what was to come, we had a little Picasso on our hands.

Carefully spreading open the construction paper with my palms, I surveyed Daniel’s bright scene for the hundredth time. In the center of the page was a pool of ultramarine poster paint, a glob so thick I could have peeled off the entire chunk with my fingernails. At first glance, I had thought the round centerpiece was a trampoline, but upon closer inspection it hit me that the sea of blue was a body of water. A pond, to be exact. And there were five people scattered around it. A stocky, yellow-haired Daniel; Simon, who was a skinny, frowning figure that stood taller than Daniel’s rather plain-Jane interpretation of me; a gray-haired, skirted lady who was obviously Grandma; and a final, grinning man with sunburst hair to match my son’s.

I didn’t have to ask who the fifth person was.

When I first saw Parker smiling from the middle of Daniel’s painting, I wanted to scream. He was still a stranger to us, a relative unknown when we were surrounded by friends and family who had been our help and support for years. Why did Parker have to round out the painting? What did Daniel see in him?

His daddy,
I thought involuntarily.
He sees his daddy.

But that was impossible. It was ridiculous to imagine that something deep inside of Daniel resonated with the man who gave him nothing more than a set of chromosomes. Sperm donation does not a father make, I decided with a sense of finality. Besides, hadn’t Parker proved his instability? One little fight on the porch and he was gone. No phone call. No e-mail. No apology. And best of all, no Parker. We hadn’t seen him or heard from him in weeks.

“It’s just a painting,” I told Grandma with a sigh. “Daniel drew it because of that day at the pond. Remember? He found a water bear. The painting is really about his water bear.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t he paint a microscope? or a tardigrade?”

I covered my eyes with my hands and let Daniel’s painting swish back into a loose roll. “Fine,” I groaned. “It’s about Parker. What would you have me do?”

“It’s not too late,” Grandma said again. “You can still call him.”

“Why in the world would I do that?”

“For Daniel.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I was being selfish, but I didn’t want to hear it.

Grandma continued softly, “Everyone deserves a second chance, Julia.”

“He just blew his second chance.”

“Then you give him a third and a fourth . . .”

“I doubt he’d even talk to me,” I argued, hoping that if I turned the tables, she’d realize I’d already done all I could. Hoping she’d let me off the hook.

“You could apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

My eyes were still pressed closed, my head cupped in my hands, but I heard the distinctive rustle as Grandma folded her newspaper and dropped it on the table. “Nothing, I guess.”

The legs of her chair squeaked against the laminate; then her slippered feet padded past. She touched my back, but before I could raise my hand to cover hers, she was gone.

“Good night,” I called.

The only reply was the soft click of her bedroom door as it closed.

“Call Parker,” I muttered to myself. “As if I don’t have enough on my mind. I’m planning a wedding, for goodness’ sake.”

Rather than picking up the phone, I gathered my stack of mail and deposited it in the drawer where I kept items needing my attention. It’d still be around tomorrow, I decided, and now that Grandma had brought up Parker, I certainly wasn’t in the right frame of mind for balancing our budget and sorting through paperwork. It was times like these that I could be convinced an online shopping spree was infinitely more important than groceries.

I would have gone for a walk, but the first snow of the season had begun to fall around noon, and though it was still technically autumn, winter was asserting its might. School had been let out early due to blizzardlike conditions, and I doubted if the boys would make it in tomorrow. At the very least they’d have a late start. I smiled. Just the thought of a snow day brought me back to my own childhood, to cold winter mornings huddled around the radio with my fingers crossed. There was nothing quite so sweet as hearing the words
Mason Elementary
and
canceled
in the same sentence.

When I was little and had a snow day, Grandma always made doughnuts for a treat. All at once I wished I were a more conscientious mother. I should have watched the forecast and stocked up on snowed-in necessities like hot chocolate and mini marshmallows. I threw open the cupboards and refrigerator and scanned our shelves for the necessary ingredients. Maybe hot doughnuts sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon would soften the boys toward me. And if we didn’t have dough for biscuits, I could try chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls, snickerdoodles, anything.