That Summer (5 page)

When we got home my mother was out in her garden. It was falling into dark and I could just see her hunched over her rosebushes, pruning shears in hand. Before my father left we had the perfunctory subdivision yard, with straight edges and our weeds whacked away from unwanted places. My mother had a few geraniums by the back door that struggled each year to bloom and failed, maybe a sprinkle of red and pink in the early season before giving up altogether. After the separation, however, my mother was a changed woman. It wasn’t just the support group she joined, or her new interest in Barry Manilow, both of which she was introduced to by Lydia Catrell, our divorcee neighbor who moved in next door just about the same fall day my father moved out. Not two weekends later my mother was in the yard with a rented Rototiller and a stack of books on gardening, ripping up the ground with all the energy and abandon she’d controlled so well in the weeks since we’d found out about the Weather Pet. She bought seeds and raided nurseries and mulched and composted and spent full days with her hands full of earth, coaxing life out of the dry, dull grass my father had spent years pushing a mower over. All through the house there were seed packets and Xeroxed pictures of perennials and biennials and alpines and annuals and roses in every color you could imagine. I loved the names of them, like secret codes or magical places: coreopsis, chrysanthemum, stachys. The next summer my mother had the most beautiful garden on the block, far better than the evenly planned and scaled plots of our neighbors. Hers stretched itself across the entire yard, climbing over walls and across the grass, blazing out in colors that were soft and bright and shocking and muted all at once. There was always a huge bouquet on our kitchen table, overflowing, and the smell of fresh flowers filled the house the way a heaviness had since that October. I loved to see her out there, hair tied back and the world blooming all around her, the colors so alive and constant and all by her own hand.

“So how was it?” She smiled at me as I came walking up, my bridesmaid’s bouquet dangling in my hand. I held it up as I got close and she examined it. “That’s beautiful. You know what that’s called?
Polemonium caer uleum.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a bouquet before. Maybe I should try some of that next year.” She bent over and tugged at a weed until it gave way, coming up with a poof of dirt around it.

“It was fine,” I said, wondering what words I should use to describe such an event, the details I should go into. “The food was good.”

“It always is at weddings.” She reached down and picked a few shiny leaves, rubbing them together in her hand. “What do you think of this?”

I took them from her and held them to my nose when she motioned for me to do so. They smelled sweet and lemony, like the cough drops my grandmother always gave me instead of candy. “What is it?”

“Lemon balm.” She picked some for herself, pressing it to her nose. “I just love the way it smells.”

I could hear Ashley laughing from the front porch, where she was sitting on the steps, leaning against Lewis. “Ashley’s drunk,” I told my mother, who only smiled that sad smile again and yanked up another weed. “She had about a million glasses of wine.”

“Oh well.” She tossed the weed aside and wiped her hands against each other. “We all have our ways of getting through.”

I could have said it all right there, all the Hallmark kinds of things that I felt I should say to my mother, words of support and solidarity and comfort. But with this opportunity so neatly presented I could do nothing but follow her down the stone walk past her rosebushes and flower beds and bird feeders to the back steps and into the kitchen. She went to the sink and washed her hands, and in the suddenly bright light I looked at her in her faded jeans and flowered shirt and thought how much she looked like Ashley: her long, dark hair done up behind her head, her tiny feet that tracked garden mud across the floor. They were both so small and precise. I wondered what she’d done that afternoon and watched my mother at her sink and said no right things, only pressed those shiny leaves to my face and breathed in their strong, sweet smell.

Chapter Three

I woke up
the next morning to a wedding crisis. By July I could sense one from miles off, but I didn’t have to go that far thanks to the vent in my bathroom and the fact that all major family confrontations seem to take place in our kitchen below. I was lying in bed at eight A.M., already awake but staring at the ceiling, when I heard our neighbor Lydia Catrell knock at the back door and come in with a flurry of high-pitched chatter, matched by my mother’s lower, softer voice as they sat at the table drinking coffee and tinkling spoons. I listened as they talked about the invitations and the guest list; Lydia Catrell had married off four daughters and was our senior advisor on Ashley’s wedding. It was Lydia who arranged for the hall and the church and Lydia who recommended the flowers and Lydia who bustled around our kitchen acting important and dispensing advice, most of it welcome. And so that morning I knew even before Ashley did that she was about to have more problems from the troublesome bridesmaid.

The bridesmaid’s name was Carol Cliffordson and she was twenty-one, a distant cousin who had spent one summer with us when her parents were splitting up; she and Ashley had bunked together and giggled and driven the rest of us crazy being twelve-year-old best friends. They were inseparable. At the end of the summer Carol returned to Akron, Ohio, and we never heard much from her again except for Christmas cards and graduation announcements. When Ashley picked her bridesmaids she was firm that Carol be included even though we hadn’t seen her since she was twelve and even then only for that one summer. Carol accepted and then proceeded to cause more problems than you could ever imagine one little bridesmaid being capable of. It started with the dresses, which Carol objected to because they are low cut in front. Being that she is rather flat chested (although she would never admit it), she called Ashley to say they were too revealing and could she please wear something else. Lydia Catrell and my mother and Ashley all sat around for hours talking about that one five-minute phone conversation, dissecting it and discussing its issues etiquettewise, before Carol called again to say she didn’t think she’d be able to attend the wedding at all because her fiance’s family would be in town that weekend and they expected her to partake in the annual family cookout and square dance. With this, it looked like we might have gotten rid of her altogether, except that the dresses (still low cut but a different style) had already been ordered and it was too late to find anyone else. This set off another round of arguing and consoling between my mother and Ashley, not to mention Lydia Catrell, who wondered out loud several times if this girl was raised in a barn. Finally it was decided that Carol would still attend the wedding with her fiancé, then leave immediately afterwards to make the square dance.

Now there was another problem. Apparently Carol had called early in the morning, hysterical, and cried and cried on the phone, saying her fiancé had decided he would not attend and neglect his own family for the wedding of someone he had never even met. They’d had a big fight and Carol had called to cry to my mother, who clucked sympathetically and said she’d have Ashley call back right away. Then Lydia came over, was filled in, and I lay in bed listening to them go on and on about it, fretting about what Ashley would do when she was clued in to the situation. I heard Ashley going down the stairs and then their voices suddenly jerked to a stop.

“What?” I heard Ashley say after a few solid silent minutes. “What’s going on?”

“Honey,” my mother said smoothly, “maybe you should eat your toast first.”

“Yes,” Lydia echoed, “have something to eat first.”

Of course Ashley was suspicious. The toaster-oven timer rang but I didn’t hear her open it, only the scrape of a chair being pulled away from the table. “Tell me.”

“Well,” said my mother, “I got a call from Carol this morning.”

“Carol,” Ashley repeated.

“Yes,” Lydia said.

“And she was very upset, because she and her fiancé are fighting and she said”—a pause here, as my mother prepared to drop the bomb—“that she will not be able to be in the wedding.”

There was another silence. All I could hear was the sound of someone stirring with a spoon and hitting the sides of a mug. Clink, clink, clink. Finally Ashley said, “Well. Fine. I probably should have expected this.”

“Now, honey,” my mother said, and I could tell by the way her voice was moving around that she had probably gone to put her arms around Ashley, pinch hitting for Lewis. “I’m sure she didn’t realize what a problem this would be for you. I said you’d call her back....”

“Like hell I will,” Ashley said in a loud voice. “This is just the most selfish, bitchy thing she could do. I swear if she wasn’t in Ohio I’d go right to her and punch her face in.”

“My goodness!” Lydia said with a nervous laugh.

“I would,” Ashley said. “Goddamn it, I have had it, I can’t take this anymore. No one can just do one simple thing that I ask them to do and this whole wedding is going to be a total disaster and it will all be her goddamn fault with her goddamn flat chest and her goddamn fiancé and who the hell does she think she is anyway calling me crying when she’s ruining my wedding and she’s such a damn idiot!”

Lydia Catrell added, “You’d think she was raised in a barn. You honestly would.”

“I hate her. I hate all of this.” There was a crash as something fell to the floor. “I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone but Lewis and we’re going to elope, I swear to God we are.”

“Honey,” my mother said, trying to be calm, but there was that crazy edge creeping into her voice, the family hysteria swelling to full force. “Ashley, please, we can figure this out.”

“Call the wedding off,” Ashley was saying. “Just cancel it all. I’m not going through with it. I’m calling Lewis right now and we’re eloping. Today. I swear to God.”

“Oh, don’t be silly.” Lydia Catrell had obviously not seen my sister in a fit before and so did not know to keep her mouth shut. “You can’t elope. The invitations are already out. It would be a social disaster.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Ashley snapped, and I sat up in bed. Lewis disapproved of cursing and it had been a good long while since I’d heard any four-letter word snap from my sister’s lips. For a moment, she sounded like the Ashley I remembered.

“Ashley,” said my mother quickly, “please.”

“I can’t take it anymore.” Ashley’s voice was tight and wavering now. “I’m so sick of everyone bothering me with their stupid details and I just want to be left alone. Can’t anyone understand that? This is my own wedding and I hate everyone and everything involved in it. I can’t stand this anymore.” She burst into tears, still babbling on, but now I couldn’t make out anything she was saying.

“Honey,” my mother said, “Ashley, honey.”

“Just leave me alone.” A chair scraped across the floor and it was suddenly dead quiet, like no one was even there anymore. A few seconds later the front door slammed and I walked to my window to see Ashley standing on the front walk in her nightgown with her arms crossed against her chest, staring at the Llewellyns’ house across the street. She looked small and alone and I thought about knocking on the glass to get her attention. I thought better of it, though, and instead went to brush my teeth and listen to my mother and Lydia Catrell cluck their tongues softly, voices low, as they stirred their coffee.

 

I waited until this latest storm of details had died down before I approached the kitchen and grabbed a Pop-Tart on my way out the door to work. Sunday one to six is the most boring of all the shifts at Little Feet, the children’s shoe store where I worked at the Lakeview Mall. It’s probably the worst job in the world, because you spend all day taking shoes off grubby little kids, not to mention touching their feet; but it’s money and when you have no working experience it’s not like you can be choosy. I got my job at Little Feet when I turned fifteen back in November, and since then I’ve been promoted to assistant salesperson, which is just a fancy title they give you so you feel like you’re moving up even when you aren’t. The first week I worked there I had to pass a series of lessons on selling children’s shoes. They sat me in the back by the bathroom with a boxful of audiotapes and a workbook with all the answers already scribbled in by someone else until I worked my way through the whole series: “What’s in a Size?,” “The Little Feet Method,” “Lacing and Soles,” “Hello, Baby Shoes!,” and finally “Socks and Accessories—A Little Something Extra.” My manager was a man named Burt Isker who was older than my grandfather and wore old moldy suits and kept a calendar of Bible quotes next to the time clock. He was rickety and had bad breath and all the children were afraid of him, but he was nice enough to me. He spent most of the time rearranging everyone else’s hours so he never had to work and talking about his grandchildren. I felt sorry for him: he’d worked for the Little Feet chain his entire life and he’d ended up at the Lakeview Mall shuffling saddle shoes around and getting kicked in the crotch by squirmy kids.