Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (33 page)

“But I
can’t
get married without Finney there.”

Mike and Zack exchanged glances. They thought she was overreacting. But I understood. Finney was the glue that held the family together. If he wasn’t there, Cami wouldn’t feel as if her family were. Rose, Guy, and Annie could be present, but the family wouldn’t. That was their weakness: all their connections went through Finney.

“What should we do?” Cami’s voice was a soft wail. “I just don’t know what we should do.”

So Guy said it. “Do you want to cancel the wedding?”

“No, no!” Annie shrieked. “You can’t cancel the wedding because of what I did. What about the flowers and the food and the chairs? Mom’s gone to so much work. We can’t cancel. Mom’s worked so hard.”

“This isn’t about me,” Rose said stiffly.

“But if we cancel it,” Annie argued, “everything you’ve done will be wasted.”

Rose flushed. She was mortified. Her family thought this wedding was about her.

When she spoke, her voice was light, but she wasn’t making eye contact with anyone. “You’re talking as if we were Marxists and believe that the value of something is determined by the amount of labor invested in it. This family is many things, but we are not Marxists.”

I was standing by Mike, and he nudged me. He loved it when people remembered what they’d learned in Econ 101. “Presumably you invested so much effort,” he said, “because this was important. You’re a rational being; you made a rational decision.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Rose put in, sounding a little more like her usual self.

As we had planned out in the hall, Jeremy now took over. “Let’s go ahead and have the party. Everything’s paid for, our friends are already on their way from the airport, and in fact, we do have lots to celebrate.” He had started off speaking to everyone, but now he was talking just to Cami. “But let’s postpone the wedding part—the actual ceremony. We’ll have a great time at the party, we’ll go on the honeymoon, and then we’ll get married when we get home. Finney will be better, and it will be just the two of us and our families. We don’t have to have a million people and a fancy cake. We can do it in a church in Park Slope.”

“Go on the honeymoon before we get married?” She had twisted in her chair to look up at him. She was bewildered and overwhelmed.

“I suppose we could get separate rooms if you think that’s necessary,” he said, his voice softly teasing; they had, after all, been living together for a year.

“Oh, Jeremy . . .” She let him pull her out of her chair and into his arms. “I don’t know why I thought I needed a wedding like this. I just want to be married. I want to be with you.”

He murmured something into her hair, too low for the rest of us to hear, maybe even too low for her to hear. We all looked away, wanting to give them some privacy in this crowded hospital room.

“So is this the idea?” Guy asked. “Party, yes; wedding, no? Rose, are you sure that you’re okay with that?”

“It’s not about me,” she said. “This seems like a good plan, but I don’t even know how to start thinking about it. What will we do about the favors, the cake? The—”

“You will leave it to us,” Mike interrupted smoothly. “You take care of Annie and Finney, and don’t worry about anything else. Claudia’s already working on the rehearsal dinner, and when we get back to the house, Darcy and I will get started on the rest.”

“Darcy has done enough,” Guy said.

“Try telling that to her.”

Cami lifted her head from Jeremy’s chest. “If there’s a lot to do, my friends—the bridesmaids—are getting in soon. They’ll do whatever you tell them, especially Trish and Jamie.”

Guy followed Mike and me out to the hall. He handed us a card. “Call Mary Beth at the office. She has the e-mail addresses for almost all the guests.”

Mike took the card, and we spent a moment thinking about cars. Rose’s Mercedes needed to be fetched from the restaurant. Mike took the keys from Guy and then tossed them to Zack. “Figure it out, son.”

“Sure thing.”

Zack’s tone had been casual, but I knew, I
knew,
what this meant to him, Mike turning a problem over to him, trusting him to solve it.

He put the keys in his pocket. “Do you need me to pick anything up for you?” he asked Guy.

“Probably . . . but I have no idea what.”

I had an idea. “Guy, are there bookstores nearby? Why don’t you have Zack get Rose some great big classic novel,
War and Peace
or
Crime and Punishment
?”

“
War and Peace
? Why? Don’t you think she would prefer
Anna Karenina
?”

I suppose I should have been flattered that he actually thought I had an answer to that. “I have no idea. Just anything to remind her that her brain is still working.”

“Fine,” he said. “But she’s not worried about that, is she?”

How could he not know this? Annie was right about their relationship: they needed to spend time together; they needed to be husband and wife, not only professional associates and parents of a special-needs child.

Zack set off for the bookstore, and I rode back to Mecox Road with Mike. I called Mary Beth on my cell phone while Mike called Claudia on his. Claudia reported that the owner, the manager, and the chef at the restaurant had been very accommodating. They were faxing over a menu for a more casual buffet, and Claudia had already talked to the florist about creating less formal centerpieces.

Mike told her about the plan for Saturday night, and by the time he and I got to the house, she had started thinking about that as well. “We should,” she said confidently, “acknowledge that a wedding was planned. We can distribute the favors, and while the groomsmen maybe shouldn’t be in black tie, the bridesmaids can wear their dresses. Cami should bustle her train and not wear her veil, but—”

“You’ve been a busy bee,” Mike interrupted.

She blinked. She wasn’t used to people interrupting her.

I spoke to Mike softly. “That wasn’t kind.”

He ran a hand over his face. “No, it wasn’t.” He could now admit to being wrong. “I’m sorry, Claudia, but you need to understand that people may not want to have much to do with you for the next few days. There may be a lot of anger.”

“Anger? No.” She gave her a head a little shake. “I may have erred, but everything turned out fine. We need to move forward. That’s what Guy said. He left me a phone message while he was waiting for the ambulance. He said that there’d been previous corn exposures. He sounded as if it had all happened before.”

“That was Guy being Guy,” Mike said. “You’re a guest in his home; he had to say something.”

“And that was before he knew the whole story,” I added.

“What do you mean, the whole story?” Mike asked.

I’d been referring to the cricothyroidotomy; while waiting for the ambulance, Guy hadn’t known about that, and it was definitely not something that had happened before.

But Claudia was struggling so hard to excuse herself that she was thinking only about her own actions. “Perhaps he didn’t know about the fanny-pack issue, but honestly, I didn’t know how important it was. If I had, I—”

Mike interrupted her again, insisting that she explain.

“It was the photographer who suggested it, not me, and . . .”

Mike listened long enough to get the general idea. He turned to me. “If Finney had had his fanny pack, would you have had to do that tracheotomy thing?”

“No. Not as long as his EpiPen had a second dose, and Rose said that it did.”

“You have to believe me, Mike,” Claudia protested. “I knew that the fanny pack was important, but I didn’t know it was this important. And it was the photographer’s idea.”

He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what to say.” His voice was flat. He put his hands on the arms of his chair and
slowly pushed himself up. “It’s going to be a long night. I’m going upstairs. I’m going to take a shower and change.”

Claudia and I watched him cross through the kitchen. “He doesn’t seem angry.” Claudia sounded relieved.

“I think he feels responsible,” I answered. He used to say that I embarrassed myself, leaving him with the need to apologize for me. But I had never, not ever, done anything this blameworthy.

“And you . . . you don’t seem angry,” Claudia said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m drained after everything that happened at the restaurant. I don’t think I feel anything.”

“What about the others? Mike’s wrong, isn’t he? They won’t be angry. They’ll understand that it was the photographer’s request, won’t they?”

I almost laughed. “When Rose realizes you took Finney’s fanny pack and didn’t keep track of it, the best you can hope for is that she’ll never speak to you again.”

It took Claudia a moment to understand what I’d said. “Rose not speak to me? That can’t be right, and you said ‘realizes.’ So she doesn’t know?”

“She knows, but it didn’t really register yet.”

“So who does know? Zack must. Do you think—”

I stopped her. “I’m not getting involved in a cover-up, Claudia. Accept that you made a terrible mistake, a whole set of mistakes, because your photographs were more important to you than Finney’s health. And don’t forget about Annie. You let the photographer ride her so hard that she felt that she had to take that pill. The rest of us love Jeremy and Cami, and we want them to be happy. But to you, their wedding was a chance to make yourself important. It was all social-climbing to you.”

I guess I was angry.

“I am not used to people speaking to me this way,” she said stiffly.

“No, of course you’re not,” I snapped. “You aren’t used to people speaking to you at all. Your whole life is on the Internet. All your ‘friends’ are online. You write that blog, and you’re in charge, you can control everything. No one interrupts you, and if someone answers back, you can delete their comment. I don’t know if those are real relationships or not, but they sure haven’t given you much sense of how to be in a family.”

“No, no.” For once, she was looking at me directly, her light eyes sharp and intense. She wouldn’t stop until I admitted that I was wrong.

And I wasn’t going to do that. I help up my hand, interrupting her again. “Over the next two and a half days, my first priority is my son Jeremy, and my second is my friend Rose. Talking to you is not going to help me help them, so I’m done.”

“But—”

“No, I’m done.”

I went into the library to call my brother, telling him that they were welcome to come out tomorrow as planned or they could wait until we rescheduled the wedding. “But I’m sure it will be at their home in Brooklyn.”

“To be perfectly honest, Darcy, that’s better for us,” Chuck admitted. “We kept thinking that it was such a shame to be coming all that way out and then not have time to show the girls New York City. They want to buy green foam Statue of Liberty crowns.”

What a relief to speak to someone who didn’t care about the Hamptons.

I left messages for the caterer and the florist, but before I heard back from them, there was a clamor in the front hall. It was Cami and her bridesmaids.

Just as Cami had said, they were a great group of girls. Educated under Title IX—the federal law requiring schools to provide girls the same athletic opportunities provided boys—these young
women had played organized sports since they were age four. They knew how to be on a team. The two who Cami had specifically mentioned had been varsity athletes. Trish had been captain of the women’s volleyball team, and Jamie had coxed a boat. They could lead.

They’d learned of the changed plans in the car on the way from the airport. By the time they got to the house, they’d decided on a policy, and they never wavered from it. Cami was not to worry about them. There was no reason to apologize for the canceled ceremony. In fact, the ceremony was the least fun part for a bridesmaid. The parties were the good part, and the parties were still on. As long as they got to wear their dresses—which were, by the way, the best bridesmaids’ dresses
ever
—they would be happy. Cami should look on the bright side. If something went wrong, if one of the groomsmen vomited in the swimming pool or a waiter crashed into the cake, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t her wedding. . . . Oh, and that dark-haired guy . . . was he Jeremy’s brother? Why hadn’t she told them about him? Was he really only eighteen? What a shame. He was hot.

After a half hour in their company, Cami was relaxed and giggling. If this is what friends did for you, then I did need more of them.

There was a light knock on my door. “Darcy, can I come in?

It was Claudia.

She had made herself scarce that evening, driving to the restaurant in the name of checking on the new arrangements for Friday night, lingering there so that she didn’t have to sit down to dinner with the rest of us.