I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (5 page)

Three Sondervans blinked at me.

“Jared said you like Caesar salad.”

Clearly, they tried not to laugh in my face, but, if they
had, I would only have minded my subsequent lifelong blush. They seemed more entertained—
turn pink here
—than derisive.

“Uh—no?” I asked.

Mrs. Sondervan slapped Jared’s arm the way she had earlier slapped her husband’s and said, “What did you tell her? She had to make Caesar dressing for us?”

“Yes, and all of Jared’s girlfriends have to mow the lawn every Tuesday,” Mr. Sondervan added.

Girlfriend? Did he say girlfriend?

Don’t boyfriends kiss their girlfriends?

Is there a kiss coming?

Am I the girlfriend?

Jared looked totally amused.

“Bronwen,” Mrs. Sondervan said, taking a bottle of dressing from the refrigerator and placing it on the counter in front of me. “This is where our Caesar dressing comes from.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” I said. “The thought of pureeing anchovies.” I shuddered.

“Bronwen, are you serious?” Jared asked. “I was only kidding.”

“Well, I didn’t know. So I Googled it, and I have to say that every recipe looks completely repulsive.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” he said.

“I can’t believe you told her she had to make salad dressing,” Mrs. Sondervan said.

“I’m impressed she was up for it,” Mr. Sondervan said.

“Hey,” Jared said, popping a cracker into his mouth, “it was this or pluck a chicken, and she already told me she was no good at that.”

Lauren Sondervan and her perpetually late fiancé, Spence Mollenkamp, finally arrived and entered talking, and the talking never stopped, and the talking never once excluded me. If a topic arose I had no knowledge of, someone quickly brought me up to speed. If I forgot a person’s name or relation, I asked, was answered, and the story continued at a steady pace. And they talked about real things—things that mattered to the people at the table—not just the news.

Lauren had just graduated from the University of Michigan Law School and was preparing to start work at the firm of Fransen, Hoff & DeVries. Mr. Sondervan’s smile practically radiated heat when he explained to me those things in his daughter’s character—mostly her regard for truth no matter what it was—that would make her a uniquely gifted attorney. Then he said he would be proud of her for the same reasons even if she worked in a diner for a living, and I believed he would.

Lauren’s fiancé was an attorney with Veenkamp-Roy, where he was part of the firm’s Business Transactions Group. I nodded as he explained to me what his work entailed—corporate and real estate transactions, estate planning, even some historic rehabilitation—but I already knew that.

Eleven years earlier, my father had just been made partner at Veenkamp-Roy, in the firm’s Business Transactions Group, when he died in the plane crash. It was a small, private plane, flown by a client who wanted to show my father and one other attorney in the firm a piece of land in the Upper Peninsula he was thinking
about buying. Strong winds blew the little plane out of the sky, and all three were killed. Portraits of my father and the other attorney hang in the lobby at Veenkamp-Roy.

I didn’t say any of this to Spence Mollenkamp or even to Jared that night. I would tell them eventually, at the right time, when it would come as part of a conversation, not its end. Instead, I asked loads of questions—I really did want to know how Lauren and Spence met, where they went to school, what they studied—and Mr. Sondervan told me I’d make a great reporter one day. This, after I said I was interested in news writing.

“You ask good questions,” he said. “Gets people talking about themselves.”

Jared leaned comfortably on his elbows and smiled at me.

From me, they wanted to know how long it took to write articles, where I got story ideas, if it was difficult finding sources or getting them to talk.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Definitely for the flushing article.”

So the steady pace of talk continued, blighted by only one thing.

Tenderloin.

The size of my fist.

It may as well have been my fist, or someone’s fist, because—
barf
—I dislike every single aspect of the entire meat experience. Taste, texture, sight, smell, the idea that this thing used to have legs, and now I wonder where the legs went.

Again,
barf.

And people don’t do this with tenderloin—or shouldn’t do this with tenderloin—but meat in general is the only reason ketchup was invented in the first place, which is one more reason I hate, hate, hate meat.

I hadn’t eaten it in four years, and vegetarianism was now such a natural part of my life that I completely forgot to mention it to Jared. And now it was too late. His parents had purchased and cooked this thing, meaning my options were either rudeness or revulsion.

I chose revulsion, a natural instinct since I was raised by a woman who would not announce at a dinner party that she was having a heart attack if, in fact, she were. “Heavens,” she would say. “Heavens, the soup would get cold, and the guests would be so upset.” Warm salad. Delayed entrée. Possibly burned while they waited for paramedics. All in all, a ruined party and all her fault.

Somehow, then, I actually managed to swallow without puking three small, feels-like-squishy-wet-leather-in-my-mouth bites. I dropped two forkfuls in my napkin and hid a couple large pieces under grilled vegetables I would have eaten had they not been necessary for camouflage. And I earned the reputation in the Sondervan family of eating like a bird, but I was starving, and clearly these people had never seen me with chocolate chip cookies and Diet Coke.

After dinner, Lauren and I talked at length about her wedding, by which I mean she answered my eight
hundred questions, and I eagerly listened. I loved weddings more than I loved kissing and gushed about both.

Lauren kept saying, “You are so cute to ask. You really want to hear it all?”

“Yes. All.”

It was one year away, next June 4. Everything was planned. Lauren’s dress was a strapless ivory silk gown with fitted bodice and straight skirt draping dramatically into a six-foot train. (Something new.) She planned on twisting her hair up and wearing her mother’s veil. (Something old, something borrowed.) She had five bridesmaids including her maid of honor, and they would all be wearing strapless silk dresses from Ann Taylor, in pacific blue. (Something obviously blue.)

I could picture it perfectly.

And Spence never once, during the entire discussion, made a face the way some guys do to show how cool they are—too cool to take an interest in their own weddings. In fact, Spence added those few details Lauren failed to mention. A couple times, while she spoke, he gently ran his hand over her back.

I could see why she was marrying him.

There were more hugs and handshakes at the end of the evening but no kisses from anyone, including Jared, who left me at my front door—I was leaning in for the kiss—with only a smile and “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I went inside, depressed. Maybe Jared really was just an Old Family Friend inviting me, an Old Family Friend, to dinner to catch up. He spoke with Mother and Whitt earlier the way the son of an Old Family Friend speaks—easily,
nice to see you
,
Hope’s great
,
thanks for
asking
,
tell Peter I said hi
, and
it’d be great to see him.
Handshake. Air kiss.

But Mr. Sondervan said
girlfriend
, and Jared clearly talked about me with his parents, so that must have meant something. I just didn’t know what.

Lights were on in the kitchen. It was a little after eleven, so Mother and Whitt, I knew, were probably in the den watching the news. Sam, of course, rushed to greet me, followed—less the rushing—by Mother, who asked, “Did you have a nice time tonight?”

“I did,” I said, and I tossed my purse on the counter and started to pour a glass of water. “I met Lauren’s fiancé.”

“Mm-hmm,” Mother said as she rummaged through one of the drawers in her desk.

“He works at Veenkamp-Roy.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. I waited for her reaction. “Roy who?” she asked without looking up.

“Roy?”

“Yes, Roy who?”

“Roy Mollenkamp.”

“Who’s Roy Mollenkamp?”

“Lauren’s fiancé. His real name is Spence, but I called him Roy all night because I like it better. I’m going to tell him to change his name next time I see him.”

“Honestly, Bronwen,” Mother laughed in exasperation. “Sometimes I don’t know where you came from.”

Join the club.

We may not have known where I came from, but I knew where I wanted to go—to my Real Family, i.e.,
people who listened to me when I talked, particularly when I was answering
their
questions, just like the Sondervans and Roy Mollenkamp did all night.

Mother could have learned a lot from them.

We all could.

I should say now: We were once a Real Family. A good one. Before my dad died, we were the Four of Us, and he was our heroic leader, as every perfect dad should be. Then his plane crashed when I was six, and the Four of Us broke into three separate pieces, and then those broke too.

After he died, Mother looked so terribly tired all the time, as if her whole body, including her eyelids, had somehow turned to lead. She packed up my father’s things and the best part of herself. She sobbed every time he was mentioned, so no one talked anymore about things that once were, things that were important.

We were better when she sobbed. I’m sorry she hurt—we all hurt—but we were better for the hurting, better for admitting it, better for just being honest about it rather than adopting this weird avoidance of sorrow everyone seemed to have tacitly agreed upon. Years later, these feelings were still there in all of us, and that night I thought maybe if I gave Mother the
chance, if I softly lobbed “Veenkamp-Roy” to her, she might be relieved to let a little of her Real Self out. I always was.

But she didn’t bite. She chose poise over pain. Picture-perfect at all times. That was my mother.

Not to be outdone by the Sondervans—which, in all fairness, was not their real motive—Mother and Whitt took Jared and me to the club the following weekend. School was out, and I was officially a senior in the fall, so that was definitely worth celebrating.

Cascade Hills Country Club is the site of all VanHorn-Oliver Celebratory Dinners and miscellaneous other No Special Occasion dinners too. Mother rarely cooked and never for celebrations.

We talked about college, which I was practically in, so that was fine. I could contribute, and it looked like a real conversation, not just a list of polite questions or an inquisition.

My parents are not actually the inquisition type, so that’s good. They’re the 1) remember to let the dog out; 2) remember to buy milk; 3) remember to tell daughter we’re proud of her type. And that’s good too. We never run out of milk.

“I’m told there’s a secret to the Roommate Questionnaire,” I said just after we ordered.

“That’s right,” Jared confirmed.

“I don’t remember that,” Mother said.

“No, there is, and I’m refusing to divulge it until Bronwen tells me her second most favorite place on earth.”

“Oh, that’s Hilton Head,” Mother said.

I blinked at her.

“Is it?” Jared asked.

“No,” I said as Mother said, “Yes. Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“You love Hilton Head.”

“I
like
Hilton Head.”

Peter loves Hilton Head. Baking in the sun. He and Mother are two of those rare blondes blessed with melanocytes. They don’t exactly bronze in the summer, but they do turn a gorgeous toasty brown. I use so much sunscreen I swear I’m waterproofing myself.

“So where is it, if I may ask?” Whitt said. “And what’s the first?”

“The beach,” Jared said, which made me smile.

“At Hilton Head?” Mother asked.

“No. Ottawa,” I said.

(Ottawa Beach is the name of the public beach in Holland where—
hello, Mother?
—we grew up going with both my dad and Whitt.)

Whitt remembered. He smiled at me.

I thought I might turn pink.

This brought the conversation back around to Hope—five short miles from Ottawa Beach—and then college in general and where Mother and Whitt each went.

I was pleased with the tangent because it directed
everyone’s attention away from my other Most Favorite Place on Earth.

Truth was, it wasn’t so much a secret as one of those things I just did not feel like talking about. It was too—I didn’t know—too something. Too much something I didn’t feel like poking around in, conversationally that is. I thought about it all the time. Passed the place all the time. But it was one of the things that was all mine—unlike my teeth and my interest in journalism, apparently, which
had
to come from someone else, couldn’t just be mine. So if I didn’t share this with the whole table, it would remain, beautifully, all mine.

And then as a non sequitur, Mother asked, “Jared, how is your sister? I understand she’s getting married.”

“She is. Next June.”

“Do your parents like her fiancé?”

“They do. We all do. He’s terrific.”

“What does he do?” Whitt asked.

“He’s an attorney. Like Lauren.”

“Same firm?” Mother asked.

“No. He works for Veenkamp-Roy. He’s in their Business Transactions Group.”

I looked at Mother, who was dabbing her lips with her napkin and nodding.

Come on. Come on, say something,
I privately rooted.
Your second chance.

Come on.

“Where does Lauren work?” she asked.

Aw.

So I’m not telepathically gifted.

From there we talked about all sorts of things, including journalism, including the news.

I rode back to my house with Jared, and we took a walk, and he held my hand, and he said he had a really nice time with my parents, whom he happily called okay, and I agreed that they were. Definitely, very okay.

“Family is everything,” he said of families in general. “I’m really blessed to have mine.”

“Hey, speaking of your family, did Lauren tell you where she and Spence are going on their honeymoon?”

“Don’t tell me this is another secret?”

“No. London,” I said, which got us talking about cities we wanted to visit, and eventually we made one long list—mostly of ridiculous-sounding places—and agreed to visit them together, alphabetically, starting with Amersfoort, the Netherlands.

(I did a whole Netherlands project for World Studies last year. They eat a lot of potatoes there, so, good, I wouldn’t starve.)

“You look like you’d be fun to travel with,” Jared said. “How about a day trip tomorrow?”

“France?”

“Holland.”

“The Netherlands?”

“Michigan.”

“Ottawa Beach or your place? See how I’m narrowing this down.”

“You’re very precise. Ottawa Beach,” he said. The Sondervans’ cottage was on a quiet, private beach maybe half a mile down the shore from Ottawa. “It’ll be more fun.” We were standing at my front door then. “You call Kirsten. Tell her to bring her boyfriend, and we’ll meet here tomorrow at ten.” He raised his wrist. “Here. We’ll synchronize our watches.”

“No watch.”

“Okay, then we’ll—” He shoved one arm into the air. “—synchronize our swimming.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Promises, promises,” he said. Then he trotted off to his car, calling back, “Pick you up tomorrow at ten. Good night.”

And I allowed myself to scrunch up my face all night long since I knew, from experience, that it would not freeze that way.

No kiss again.

This and the secret to the Roommate Questionnaire were starting to bother me.