Hard to Hold (True Romance) (27 page)

“
Y
OU KNOW WHY
I
DIDN’T GET YOU A RING
, right?” he asked as they drove to her parents’ house.

Anne reached across to Mike and stroked his cheek, still high with happiness. “Because you know I’d want to have a say in picking it out.”

“Just wanted to make that clear,” he said with a decisive nod. “I don’t want your family to think I’m not serious about marrying you.”

Anne frowned. God, she was going to see every single one of her local relatives over the course of this weekend—the very same relatives who had peppered her with questions about her unmarried state practically since her
bat mitzvah
. Okay, not quite that long—but close. She had visions of her aunts dragging out their wedding dresses, her married cousins bombarding her with definitive assessments about which florist had the freshest peonies, and her mother making a list of caterers that ranged from casual barbeque to the swankiest five-star restaurant in the tristate area. The impending onslaught of wedding wackiness turned her stomach back to the unsteady state she’d been fighting all night.

“Michael,” she said, turning in the seat as far as her seatbelt would allow. “Do you think we could hold off on announcing our engagement? Just until I’m done with school?”

Disappointment skittered across his face. “But everyone is going to be together. Your side of the family, anyway. It’s the perfect time.”

“The perfect time for me to lose my mind,” she countered. “There’s so much going on right now. School. You living in New York City. My graduate assistantship and then looking for a job. It’s just too much for one person to think about—particularly if that one person is me. My family is going to go nuts. Your family is going to go nuts. Shane, Adele . . . Nikki! The minute we make the announcement, they’re going to descend on me with bridal magazines and start planning trips to the city to find my dress. I just can’t handle all that now on top of school. Can’t it be our little secret for a little while longer?”

Mike considered her reasons and then glanced at her with an indulgent smile. “You still want to marry me, right?”

She huffed impatiently. “You know I do.”

They’d arrived at a stop light.

“I’ll do anything you ask,” he confessed.

“Anything?” she asked, wagging her eyebrows suggestively.

He laughed, then leaned across and pressed his lips to hers. Their long, luxuriant kiss lasted until the cars behind them honked when the signal turned green.

To make up for keeping their engagement to themselves for over two months, Mike and Anne orchestrated a Sunday afternoon outing in July at a Yankees-Mets game at Shea Stadium with twelve of their best friends. During the seventh-inning stretch, Michael took out the ring Anne had chosen and slipped it onto her finger. Despite their plan to announce their upcoming wedding to everyone in attendance, when the rousing rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” stopped, they sat back down, silently wondering if anyone would notice the ring before they had to say anything out loud.

At the top of the eighth inning, a foul ball arched in their direction. The crowd surged toward the out-of-bounds hit, but neither Anne nor Mike made a move.

“You could have had it!” yelled Ben, seated in the row behind them.

“Honestly!” Adele agreed. “You didn’t even try for it!”

Anne gave Michael a knowing glance before turning around and holding out her ring finger proudly. “So sorry, but I was busy catching something else.”

Ben continued to grouse until Nikki, who was seated two rows behind them, let out a scream that made the entire section and even a player or two on the field turn in their direction.

“I knew it! I knew it! I’ve been telling them forever that they needed to get married! Oh, my Lord, girl! Look at that rock!”

And with that, the party started. Cheering, clapping, hugging, and a round of beer topped off the next few innings. Despite the fact that the Yankees had trounced the Mets in the two previous games in the miniseries, Anne’s preferred team (which was basically any team who opposed the Yanks) managed to eek out a three to one win over Mike’s boys in pinstripes.

And yet, Mike couldn’t bring himself to care. He’d hit a home run.

“What do you mean the rabbi can’t come?” Anne shouted into the phone.

She hadn’t meant to raise her voice. She hadn’t intended to send Sirus scampering off the couch and into her bed, where she pressed her head onto her paws as if she’d just been scolded for getting into the garbage. Anne winced and patted her thigh, calling the dog to her so she could soothe the pup’s frazzled nerves. The dog didn’t budge.

She supposed she didn’t blame her. After what her mother had just told her, she was severely tempted to crawl back into her own bed and hide under the covers.

“His message said the date conflicted with a conference he was scheduled to speak at in Virginia. Apparently, he’d looked at the wrong calendar when he’d agreed to do the wedding. I’m sorry, honey. We’ll find another rabbi.”

“Really? Where? Because last time I checked, Rabbis R Us was fresh out!”

Anne glared down at the latest printout of her to-do list. It was going on thirteen pages long now. Immediately following their ball-game announcement of their engagement, her life had evolved exactly as she’d anticipated—every second of every day seemed utterly consumed with wedding plans. Friends and family bombarded her with advice, offers of help, and contacts to various caterers, venues, and bands. Their parents started making lists of people who absolutely had to be invited to the ceremony. Mike contacted friends he hadn’t seen since his Phish days and Anne charted the names of friends from Albany whom she hadn’t talked to quite so often since she’d moved with Mike to the adorable brownstone apartment in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, but that she still wanted surrounding her when she and Michael exchanged their vows.

Anne flopped onto the deep purple couch she’d brought with her from Albany and dragged her computer off the stack of
National Geographic Adventure
and knitting magazines on the coffee table and onto her lap, then in deference to the fact that Mike would be home soon, she stacked the magazines neatly and even weeded out a few really old ones and tossed them in the recycling bin. After extracting a promise from her mother that she’d make a few more calls on her behalf, Anne disconnected the call.

She took a deep breath and with intense determination, decided to ignore the fact that with only six months to go until the wedding date they’d printed on their invitations, she still had no religious official to make their union legal either in the eyes of the state or God. Instead, she concentrated on a task that wasn’t so daunting—like finding the right bakery.

She thought of the ricotta-cheese mice she’d brought to Michael’s apartment on their first date and was glad they’d decided to do a dessert bar with a wide range of sweet delicacies. He’d taken charge of finding the perfect cookies. She’d decided to be responsible for the cakes.

By the time she’d set up tasting appointments, it was near dinner time. Anne decided to lose herself cooking, but the wedding plans had gotten in the way of shopping and the cupboards and fridge were bare. She improvised and whipped up pancakes. When Mike came home from work, he immediately sniffed the air and smiled.

“Either you had a really bad day and want to start all over again or I’m just a really lucky guy,” he said.

She uncovered the batter and threw a pat of butter onto a preheated griddle. “Both. Do you mind?”

“I’ll make coffee and change into my pajamas if you want me to.”

“No need,” she said. “But Sirus needs to go out. Then we’ll eat.”

When they returned, Anne stacked her infamously delicious homemade pancakes high on Mike’s plate and placed the bowl on the floor for Sirus to lick. The dog danced around for a second as if confused by the odd timing of her favorite treat, but in seconds, she was scooting the glass bowl around the kitchen while she licked away every last smear of sweet golden goodness.

Though Sirus still adored Michael beyond any human on the planet, Anne’s penchant for giving her the bowl to lick whenever she cooked had won her serious points.

“Want to talk about it?” Mike asked, swirling syrup over his pancakes.

Anne cut a triangle several layers deep. “We have no rabbi.”

“Again?”

“We’re cursed.”

“We’re not cursed,” he assured her, moaning in pleasure as he demolished a quarter of his stack of pancakes in two neat bites. “Weddings are always like this.”

“And you know this, how?”

He leveled her with an exhausted look. “You’re not the only one at the receiving end of hours of unsolicited wedding advice and matrimonial horror stories.”

“I can’t imagine anyone can top the absence of a rabbi at a traditional Jewish wedding.”

He reached across the table and though she thought he was going to pat her hand, instead he snatched the syrup for an extra drizzle. “We’ll find someone. We’ll tag team the entire Jewish community in the tristate area.”

“We’ll have to cast a wider net than that. We’re getting married in Delaware.”

They stayed up until midnight, but ended up with a short, but hopeful list of rabbis to contact on Monday. After collapsing together into bed, they spent an hour in the dark talking about their preferences for color schemes and which food items they absolutely had to have on the menu. By the time Anne’s eyelids rebelled and forced themselves closed, she was ready to dream long and luxuriantly about anything other than cake styles and place settings.

Unfortunately, she was jolted awake only a few hours later by Mike’s cell phone.

“Mike,” she said, shoving him in the back so he’d wake up. “Mike.”

Groggily, he opened his eyes.

“Your phone,” she told him, aggravated that anyone who knew his number would think it acceptable to phone him before six o’clock in the morning.

He cursed when his sightless grab for the phone sent his glasses tumbling to the floor. Anne forced her own eyes open wider. Her heart thumped in her chest. If someone was calling at this ungodly hour, something horrible had happened.

“Hello?” Mike said finally.

A split second later, Mike sat bolt upright in bed. “No way! You’re shitting me!”

That wasn’t horror or sadness she heard in his voice.

It was abject excitement.

“Mike, what is it?”

“When?” he asked the caller.

She flipped on the light, momentarily blinding herself. She put her glasses on and Sirus, who’d been dead to the world at Anne’s feet, gave a doggie growl that made it clear she didn’t appreciate being woken up before dawn.

“Tell me about it, sister,” Anne commiserated.

Mike’s voice grew louder and more enthusiastic, but Anne was too sleepy to make much sense of his end of the conversation.

“What was all that about?” she demanded once he hung up.

“You’re not going to believe this!”

He’d jumped up and was pacing the carpet in front of their bed as if Santa Claus had just arrived six months early. “That was Amy.”

Amy. Amy. It was too early in the morning for Anne to place names with faces or even identities. She needed coffee. No, actually, what she needed was more sleep—preferably without dreams of her walking down the beach to the location of her
chuppah
and finding it held in place by three beach bums and a chef in a baker’s hat.

“Amy. You know—she came to the game with us when we got engaged. Used to go to the Phish concerts with me,” he prompted.

“Right,” Anne said, not ashamed that she couldn’t make the connection before caffeine. “Is she okay?”

“She’s better than okay! They’re getting back together.”

Was it too much to hope that he was talking about Amy and a boyfriend?

“Who is getting back together?” she asked, though he was broadcasting the answer in the brilliant light flashing in his eyes.

“Phish!”

“Phish, the band?” she asked, not sure why she needed clarification. Probably because of dread. That emotion tended to clog up the brain.

He whooped, verifying that the band her soon-to-be husband adored, the band whose music seeped into his soul and made him dance so that he forgot completely about the twitches and tics that were a constant part of his life—the band for whom Mike had traveled thousands of miles and attended hundreds of shows— had decided to come together again for another tour.

Before their wedding.

She pressed her lips together, forbidding the grimace churning in her stomach from showing on her face. “Wow.”

The delight on his face died slowly.

“You’re not excited?”

“I’m excited for you,” she said. “But I’ve got to be honest, Mike, I’m tired and overwhelmed with the wedding plans. This isn’t exactly going to make my life any easier, is it?”

Mike frowned, but even her lukewarm reaction couldn’t squelch his excitement. In less than ten seconds, he was grinning from ear to ear again. “This isn’t going to interfere with the wedding. Their first shows will be in March and the wedding isn’t until August.”

Now wide-awake, Anne’s eyes darted to the bookshelves where at least a dozen of Mike’s scrapbooks, mostly filled with memorabilia from his Phish tour days, sat in places of honor next to her hardcover copies of
Pride and Prejudice
and
Kavalier and Clay,
her full DVD set of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and the photo album Mike had started shortly after their engagement, complete with the ticket stubs from the Jeff Tweedy concert where they’d met.

Guilt nudged her between the ribs. This was important to him. She respected his obsession, even if she didn’t fully understand it. The least she could do was let a little of his ebullient enthusiasm infect her. She had nothing to lose by being happy for him.

But first, she had to make one thing perfectly clear.

“Promise me, Michael,” she said, holding out both hands in loving invitation. “Promise me that no matter when or where Phish performs, you will not miss our wedding. Or our honeymoon,” she added, wanting to cover all her bases. “Or the birth of any of our children.”