I Now Pronounce You Someone Else (6 page)

Saturday, June 12, brought blue skies, temperatures in the seventies, and Jared to my house at precisely ten o’clock. And since I knew how Spence’s tardiness irritated him, I was dressed, packed—towel, cooler, sunscreen, extra sunscreen—and ready to go by nine forty-five.

Kirsten and her boyfriend, Charlie Frank—a terribly serious but otherwise normal guy—had arrived a few minutes before ten, and we were on the road minutes later, all four of us in one car, Jared driving.

Sand, sun, Frisbee, walking—
yikes, the water is cold
—along the shore. More sand. More sun. Lunch.
Did I fall asleep? Did we all?
It got quiet. Then we were talking again.

Around five thirty, long before the sun set, Jared asked me, “How about one more walk before we head back?”

And—
sure!
—because this was it. This had to be it. I knew he would finally kiss me, up the beach and away from people.

And he didn’t, and I tried not to look and sound
disappointed because I wasn’t disappointed—well, not disappointed being with him, just disappointed that he didn’t or,
erm
, wouldn’t kiss me.

“You’re going to have to ask him why,” Kirsten said to me as we shook sand out of our towels, far away from the guys, who packed up our things.

“I can’t ask him. How pathetic is that?”

“It’s not pathetic. But you’ve got to know. Maybe the guy has mono,” she said, and she was serious for a second.

But only a second.

“Okay, maybe not. Maybe he doesn’t like kissing, and if this relationship is going anywhere, you’re going to need to know that.”

“Maybe he’s a bad kisser,” I said, and we glanced over at him a moment, looked back at each other, shook our heads, and said simultaneously, “Noooo.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“See? You’ve got to ask him.”

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

“You’re going to have to.”

“I don’t
have
to. I could just wait to see if it happens. Can’t you just see us at our wedding shaking hands?” I said, and we laughed a moment before Kirsten asked, “Already thinking about weddings, are we?”

“No, it’s just from meeting his sister’s fiancé. We talked about her wedding a little.”

“Okay.” She dropped her towel in her bag. “But you won’t sleep again until he kisses you or until you know why he won’t.” She shrugged. “Up to you.”

I groaned.

Jared and I reconvened at my house around seven thirty. Mother and Whitt had left a note and two twenties for me for dinner. It was a weekend, and they were almost always out on weekends, and I loved that about them. Married nearly ten years, and they still had dinner dates.

Good for them.

The house was mine.

Good for me.

Jared and I decided that night to leave the money on the counter and cook spaghetti. Boiling water and doctored sauce from a jar. Not tough. Still, we worked so efficiently I told Jared I might even have time to bake cookies later on.

Within twenty minutes, the pot of water was nearly boiling and so was the sauce. I sprinkled a lot of extra basil in it. Two dashes of red pepper. A splash of good olive oil and a splash of red wine.

“Where did you learn that?” Jared asked.

“From Whitt. He’s the cook around here,” I said and tore a little piece of bread off the loaf of sourdough I took from the fridge. “Try this.” I dipped the bread in the sauce and placed it in Jared’s mouth. My finger touched his tongue, and it was so warm and soft.

I lost my breath a second or two.

Couldn’t think clearly.

Kiss me.

“Mm. It’s good,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said and turned back to stirring the sauce.

A few minutes later, when I pronounced dinner ready, Jared set the table out on the patio, and we dined by candlelight under a clear, pale sky. Afterward, after dishes were done, Mother and Whitt came home and chatted with us in the kitchen, when and where I decided it was much too late to start baking.

“So I have to wait for cookies?” Jared asked.

“You haven’t had Bronwen’s famous chocolate chip cookies yet?” Whitt asked. “Ah, you don’t know what you’re missing.” He winked at me.

“I’ll trade you cookies for the roommate thing,” I said to Jared.

He pretended offense and pressed a hand against his chest. “Do I look like the kind of guy who can be bribed?” he asked.

“Well, then you’ll just have to wait and wonder about cookies.”

Whitt leaned toward Jared to say, “They’re worth the wait.”

“Your grandmother is an excellent baker,” Mother said.

“I must get it from her,” I said with the enthusiasm that always made her happy. “Come on,” I said to Jared. “I’ll walk you out.”

And finally, by his car, I took a little breath and hazarded my question.

“Are you ever going to kiss me?”

“Yes,” he said, and he took my hand and, watching me the whole time, pressed the back of it to his lips and smiled impishly.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant.” He stepped closer. “I am going to kiss you, Bronwen. But not here.”

“Here at my house? Here by your car? Here in Michigan?”

“Not here,” he said again through the same smile, then kissed my hand a second time and left.

Well, so much for sleeping.

Kirsten and I could not decipher that, and
Here?
became a joke between Jared and me all day, every day for the next couple of weeks.

I had dinner at his house again and asked,
Here?
He said,
No.
At Rose’s, when it was just the two of us,
Here? No.

In the parking lot:
Here?

No.

In his car:
Here?

No.

I moved from the front seat to the back:
Here?

No.

Toward the very end of June, I asked, “Am I supposed to be figuring this out? I mean, is there some weird position or some special spot on earth I’m supposed to stand in before you’ll kiss me?”

“Weird position? No,” he said.

“You do want to kiss me, don’t you?”

“I want to kiss you, Bronwen,” he said very seriously.
He leaned close to me, so close I could feel the warmth of his skin and smell his Polo cologne. “I want to kiss you very much.”

I closed my eyes.

“But not here,” he said, and we smiled together when I finally opened my eyes again.

I worked that summer for a party-friend of Mother and Whitt’s at her flower shop called Lakeside Blooms, which created all the arrangements and bouquets for weddings and parties mentioned in local magazines and the
Grand Rapids Press.
Lauren Sondervan had already reserved Lakeside Blooms for her wedding the next spring.

I answered phones, took orders, stripped thorns from roses, and went home each night for weeks with tiny cuts all over my fingertips.

“You know,” Whitt said one night at dinner, “working in my office would have been much less hazardous.” He put his hand on my arm. “I would have been happy to hire you.”

“I know,” I said lightly.

“Nothing wrong with a little nepotism,” he said.

“Or, in this case, step-otism,” I said, mugging for my own joke, which didn’t make him laugh as much as I thought it would have.

Around that time, the Sondervans invited me to spend the upcoming Fourth of July weekend with them at their cottage in Holland. Mother almost didn’t let me go since Peter was coming home that weekend with his girlfriend, Jenna, whom Mother hated but would never say so. I could tell by how overly nice she was to her.

I got an e-mail from Peter the day I asked Mother about the Fourth.

hey, kiddo, i hear you’re going to holland with jared s. and his fam on the fourth. that’s cool. but i’ll miss seeing you. come down here and hang with us sometime this summer. jenna says hi. love ya—peter

He was going through an e. e. cummings phase. I preferred it to his ALL CAPS PHASE from a year before.

I wrote back:

Hi, Peter. I’ll miss seeing you and Jenna too. Tell her I said hi back. Maybe I’ll come down in August before school starts. What’s a good weekend for you guys? Love you, Bronwen

He wrote back:

cool. bring jared with you. i’ll show him what a real school looks like. ha. kidding. but bring him. be good to see him too.

I wrote:

Thanks. I’ll see if he’s up for it. Let me know what weekend works for you. Love you, Bronwen

And if Peter was true to form, he’d never get back to me about an actual date, so I wouldn’t have to go to Ann Arbor anytime soon. In the meantime—thank you, Peter—I was allowed to spend the long Fourth of July weekend with the Sondervans at their cottage, complete with sand and water and Jared.

In their house in East Grand Rapids, framed photographs of the cottage lined the walls up the front and down the back staircases. I breezed past them the first time I dined at the house but received a proper guided tour—with Mrs. Sondervan and Lauren as docents—the night they invited me to share the Fourth with them.

Many pictures were twenty, even thirty years old, some capturing the newlywed Sondervans renting what would, in the now-past future, become their summer home. There hung photos of sunsets on the lake, photos of pale moons above the water, photos of Jared and his sister, chronicling their sunny, blond infancies up to the present.

“Fifty years from now, don’t you think you’ll look back at these and crack up over the swimsuits and haircuts?” I asked later at dinner.

Mrs. Sondervan squeezed my hand. “I think I’m more likely to feel sad that fifty years have passed so quickly. You won’t understand that now, hon, but someday you will,” she said.

“But I think I do understand it. A little bit,” I said. “My
father’s been gone eleven years, and it may as well be a hundred.”

“I’m so sorry about that,” she said.

Jared gently ran his hand over the back of my head.

“That must be hard,” Lauren said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wreck the conversation.”

“You didn’t,” they all said in different ways, and it felt like the right time to tell them about Veenkamp-Roy and the plane crash and my father’s portrait in the lobby. And I told it all without crying, without even feeling like crying, and they seemed to listen the same way.

After dinner, in Jared’s car, in my driveway, Jared put his hand on mine before I opened the door, and said quietly, “You never talk about your dad.”

“No. None of us talks about him.”

“You can talk about him with me if you want,” he said. “I’d like to know about him.”

“His name was Percival, which he hated. He went by Pete, and he had green eyes,” I said happily. I nodded toward the house. “I’ve got to go in.” And I made a face that led Jared to believe I had drunk a gallon of water at his place and needed to uh, powder my nose, but I just didn’t feel like talking any more about my dad. I had said all I wanted to.

That night I forgot about our
Here-No
joke.

We arrived at the Sondervans’ cottage on July 2, midafternoon. Jared carried my bag up to the room I
shared with Lauren, and Spence made me cry when he remembered to say, “Hey, Bronwen, I looked at that picture of your dad at the office. If it weren’t for your blonde hair, you’d look just like him.”

I didn’t boo-hoo, snort, or make a big soggy mess of myself, but I did get teary and noticeably so. “These are good tears,” I said to reassure everyone as I wiped them away. Mrs. Sondervan hugged me.

“What’s this?” Jared asked, walking back down the stairs and putting both arms around me from behind. “I leave the room for thirty seconds and you all make my girlfriend cry.”

“Spence did it,” Mr. Sondervan teased as I—looking up and backward at Jared—insisted I was fine.

And I was. I liked that someone unrelated to me said I looked like my father. Of course, it meant that the Lilywhites probably weren’t coming for me anytime soon, as it was unlikely I was theirs. But that hardly mattered anymore, especially after that weekend.

After that weekend, I was on the fast track to becoming what I had wanted to be for so very long—Bronwen Someone Else, with a Real Family all my own.

After settling in, we hit the beach, right out the front door, until dinner, and then returned to the beach to watch the sun set at nine twenty-four. Mr. Sondervan knew the sunset schedule better than his work schedule, he said. He and Mrs. Sondervan, however, stayed behind on the porch, and Spence teased them about wanting to be alone. And they teased back that he was right.

Spence and Lauren chose to walk up the beach and invited Jared and me along.

“Sure,” I said, as Jared said, “No, thanks. I’m just going to sit here.” He dropped a blue-and-white striped towel in the sand.

“Oh. Uh, okay, then I’ll join you,” I said and helped him spread the towel out while Lauren and Spence walked off.

Jared sat. I remained standing, staring at the setting sun underneath a watercolor sky of blue and purple.

“You know what I’d be doing if you weren’t here?” Jared asked.

“No.”

“Racing Spence and Lauren up to this huge piece of driftwood that’s been there for years. We call it Seahenge.”

“You could still do that,” I said.

“No. I’m trying to look really cool and mature in front of you.”

I smiled. “You are cool and mature,” I said as he tugged at the back of my shorts. After I sat, I pushed my shoulder against his.

“Getting fresh?” he teased.

“No, I’m trying to steal your body heat.”

“You’re cold?”

“Not too bad,” I said as he got up and ran back to the cottage, returning a minute later with one of his Hope College sweatshirts—navy blue with bold orange letters just reading hope.

“For you,” he said formally as he took his seat on the towel.

“Jared,” I said. “You didn’t have to do this. I could have gotten my jacket.”

“Did I impress you with my speed?”

“Yes. Of course. That was very chivalrous.”

“I just didn’t want to miss the sunset.”

I put the sweatshirt on, breathed in the Polo cologne that clung to it, and told Jared how much I liked the scent.

“Yeah?” he said. “Lauren said chicks dig cologne. No, really. She gave it to me with strict instructions that I was to wear it, and she said I’d thank her later.”

“She’s right.”

“I knew it. You’re using me for my smell.”

“That and this cottage,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“This sweatshirt.”

“I feel so cheap.”

We laughed.

“You know,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning close to me. “We’re missing the sunset.”

He pushed a piece of my hair off my face that the wind had blown across it. He tucked it behind my ear and traced his finger along my cheek.

“Isn’t that better?” he whispered.

“Better,” I could barely manage to say, and he kissed me.

At last I felt the gentle pressure of his mouth against mine, his soft, warm lips and tender tongue. His hand lingered on my cheek and neck. I had no idea where my hands were—where the rest of me was—while minutes passed. Finally, Jared leaned back a little and looked into my eyes and called me beautiful. Quite spontaneously—happily, though—I began to cry.
Again!
With his thumb, he pushed a tear out of the way.

“You’re like no one I’ve ever met, Bronwen,” he said. “I’m falling in love with you, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

“Should I?”

“Should you?”

“Fall completely?” he asked.

“I have,” I whispered.

“Have you?” he asked.

And I thought a moment, really considered it, looking at him, his eyes—those beautiful eyes gently searching
mine. It hadn’t been three months, but this time, I knew—this was different.

“Yes,” I said. “I love you.”

And a smile, his smile just for me, slowly spread across his lips.

“I love you, Bronwen.”

And we kissed until the orange glow of the horizon cooled to an inky blue.

That became our spot, and we kissed our way through the next two sunsets. We stole other kisses throughout the day when we thought no one was looking—swimming, back at the cottage, in the morning outside our rooms.

“You guys are so cute,” Spence said one morning, startling us as he walked out of his room and started downstairs.

“So are you,” Jared said.

“I try.”

We swam in the Lake all day every day and made bonfires every night and cooked dinner together—burgers, steaks; I lost two pounds—and stayed up too late playing games. The weekend passed in a delirium of sun, water, sunsets, and kisses. Mrs. Sondervan and Lauren even took to kissing my cheek good night—a real kiss, sideways and a peck, but not faked. Not air kisses. Not here.

Mr. Sondervan swam a little in the Lake and splashed around some with Lauren and Jared. They threw a spongy kind of ball around and cheered one another’s good
throws and acrobatic catches. One afternoon, I lost myself just watching, taken back at once to memories of my dad, Whitt, different beach, same Lake, different family.

Entirely different family.

My dad took us to the beach every weekend in the summer, where he taught us to swim and tirelessly played with us for hours in the water, where he kissed Mother’s cheek as she sunbathed and called her You Gorgeous Thing, which made her blush.

We only went to the beach a few times after he died. It just wasn’t the same for a while.

And then came Whitt. He loved the beach the way my dad loved the beach, and he made it fun again, and he nearly made us a Real Family again, doing the beach things Real Families do. He swam with Peter and me, threw a spongy ball with us, helped me build sand castles. He took walks down the shore with us and often held Mother’s hand and sometimes held mine. He insisted on sunscreen for me and made a game of pretending to forget my nose. He carried all the heavy beach accessories—chairs, umbrella—and taught Peter to do the same.

I sat on my towel between the Sondervans’ cottage and the Lake, looking out over the water, seeing Jared and his sister and his dad but not seeing them. Seeing the clear horizon, two white dots of sailboats, and shades of blue and my dad and Whitt and
don’t forget my nose.

“Hey,” Jared said, a little breathlessly.

I looked up at him, silhouetted by the sun that I squinted into. He dried himself quickly with a towel, then spread it next to me and sat down.

“Where were you just now?” he asked, pressing a damp shoulder against mine. “You looked lost in thought.”

“
The Sun Also Rises
,” I said. “Summer reading. I forgot to bring it. Tell me something. Are English teachers trying to bore us to death over the summer?”

“Not a big Hemingway fan, are you?”

“I’d much rather read a book about his cats and all their extra toes.”

“How come you don’t have a cat? I know you want one.”

“Because Peter wanted a dog,” I said. “I always wondered what our house would be like if he had ever wanted a monkey.”

Jared and I started making lists of the best names for dogs, cats, and monkeys, and settled on Horatio, Moses, and Captain Stinky.

“Kiss me,” he said a little later.

“What?”

He leaned close.

“Your parents are right over there,” I said, pointing.

“Know what?”

“What?”

“I don’t care,” he said, and he pressed his lips against mine for several lovely seconds.

It was definitely easy to be happy at the beach.

Later, after that exquisite Day at the Beach Shower when you finally get to wash off the oil slick of sunscreen
and discover, by means of hot water on flesh, if you missed a spot and got burned—I didn’t—I moved among the Sondervans and Spence in the kitchen, helping prepare dinner and taking turns in three different conversations.

It was only our second night there—July 3—and already I knew where everything was and where everyone went, and we all had our places, and,
Ah, geez, it’s bratwurst tonight. Haven’t these people ever heard of pasta?

I made salad, and Jared kissed the back of my neck while I cleaned the lettuce. Everyone in the kitchen teased him—us—a little, and Jared just grinned as he swiped a cherry tomato from the bowl and leaned back against the counter next to me.

I had never found lettuce so fascinating, just kept staring at it, hoping, hoping, hoping I wouldn’t—you know—die of embarrassment.

“Okay. Just say it,” I happily relented, and four people hooted in different ways about the level of blushing I had achieved. Mrs. Sondervan called me darling.

“You really should go look in the mirror,” Jared said.

“Fine,” I said and dashed to the powder room with him following.

“See?” he said to my reflection.

“Yeah, I see.”

I rolled my eyes. Jared put his arms around me.

“I look ridiculous,” I said. “Eight gallons of sunscreen, and I’m still red.”

“You look beautiful.”

And just for a moment I heard my mother saying it to me—to my reflection in the salon mirror when I was thirteen and finally blonde enough for her.

I must have stopped smiling.

“Hey,” Jared said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

He turned to face me but kept his arms around me.

“You know we’re just teasing,” he said.

“No, I know, and I love it.”

“You’re sure? You’d tell me if you didn’t.”

“I would,” I said.

Would I?

Well, in any case, I loved it.

Loved Jared.

Loved his family.

Really wished they ate more fish.

The Fourth was nice. Great fireworks. We watched them from the water, from Mr. Sondervan’s ten-seat Boston Whaler. Three years earlier, when Mr. Sondervan bought the boat, he held a family contest to name the thing, and Lauren’s entry,
Liquid Assets
, was the unanimous winner. It was painted in black script letters on the back. Jared’s entry was
Fred
, and, conversationally, they all called it that.

Everyone in
Fred.

We’re taking
Fred
out.

Can I borrow
Fred
tonight?

After the fireworks, back at the cottage, we built our last bonfire, a small one, and sat in snuggled pairs around it.

The Sondervans were the first to return to the cottage, wishing us all good night. A few minutes later, Lauren and Spence followed.

“Are you headed to bed?” I asked Lauren, not wanting to wake her when I did the same.

“No. We’ll probably watch the news, then head up,” she said and then kissed my cheek and then her brother’s.

After they were inside, I said to Jared, “I love how close you and Lauren are. Peter would never let me kiss him good night.”

“Oh, well, I have no choice about it. She’s been doing that since I was born.”

“It’s cute, and you should appreciate it.”

“I’m sure it is, and I do.”

We bumped shoulders.

“Are you and Peter close?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say close, but we’re okay. He wants me to come down to Ann Arbor some weekend. Wants me to bring you too.”

“That should be fun.”

“Well, you haven’t met his girlfriend yet. She’s a ball as long as she’s not hungover, which is pretty much whenever she’s not drinking.”

“Eww. That’s bad. Why does Peter go out with her?”

“She has stripper boobs.”

“Stripper boobs?”

“Yeah. You know. It’s the first thing you notice. They’re like two baby heads. They should have names if they don’t already. And—” I shrugged. “—Peter’s a boob guy.”

“I’ve never been a boob guy.”

“That’s good, because you’ve seen me in a swimsuit.”

“I’d like to see you out of it,” he said, and I tried to conceal a quick and nervous breath.

“Hmm,” I managed, turning my face toward the little fire.

“Hey. Bronwen,” he said and put his hand on my cheek, and gently turned my face to him.

“Jared,” I said and exhaled slowly, “I’m not a sex on the sofa or, in this case, sex on the beach kind of person. It’s not—I don’t—”

“Bronwen, it’s okay.”

Jared was not a virgin. He had mentioned it once.

“I just want to be clear with you about this,” I said. “It’s important to me to wait until I’m married. I’m going to like saying that about myself someday. Not that I’m going to go around telling people, but I’ll know, and I’ll be proud of myself. I don’t have a whole lot of people telling me they’re proud of me for real things, you know? Mother and Whitt do sometimes, but it’s either over something stupid or it sounds like they read it in a book. Page ten, ‘Remember to tell son-slash-daughter you’re proud of him-slash-her.’ So this is something I can say to myself about myself, and it’s real. And I like that. So that’s it. That’s my plan.”

He took my hands.

“I think that’s a good plan,” he said. “I’m glad you told me, but I think I already knew that about you.”

“Yeah? How?”

“I pay attention,” he said, and he kissed me, and I whispered, “I love you,” and he whispered back, “I know.”