The Chocolate Bridal Bash (6 page)

The clerk at the circulation desk directed me to the high school yearbooks. “Reference,” she said. “Upstairs.” I trotted up to what had once been the church balcony and was now the library’s reference room. Shelves on one side of the room were packed with bound newspapers and copies of the
Watchman
yearbook of Warner Pier High School. Back near the door to the minuscule elevator was a microfilm reader. A couple of standard oak study tables, cabinets holding microfilm, and racks of encyclopedias and other reference works took up the rest of the space. The only people there were two high school girls who were sitting at one of the tables, giggling. At the sight of an adult they tried to act serious, but it was a losing battle.

I smiled at them and went straight to the yearbook shelf. It took only a moment for me to locate the right years, and I took the four yearbooks that covered my mother’s high school career to the seat farthest from the two students. I started with the year my mother graduated, and within seconds I was looking at my mom’s senior picture—dated hairstyle and all.

She had been blond—all the TenHuises are blond—her face round and pretty. Of course, the black-and-white picture didn’t show how blue her eyes were, and the sophisticated travel agent that my mom had become would have been horrified by the pose, which featured hands clasped beside her left ear.

I stared at the picture, and I realized something surprising. I had never seen it before in my life.

In fact, the only pictures I had ever seen of my mom as a child or a teenager were displayed on Aunt Nettie’s dresser. There was a family shot taken by a professional photographer and showing my grandparents seated side by side, with a teenaged Uncle Phil standing behind them and my mom sitting on her father’s lap. She was missing her front teeth. There was an obviously posed snapshot of my mom at thirteen or fourteen roasting hot dogs on the beach with Uncle Phil, by then a young man. And that was it. Aunt Nettie might well have a box of photos tucked away in some closet, but she’d never dug them out to show me. And I’d never asked her to do that.

I’d already concluded that my mom had deliberately turned her back on Warner Pier when she ran away. Now I realized that if she had taken any pictures or mementos when she began a new life in Texas, she’d never shared them with me. Until I came to Warner Pier I had never seen a picture of her made before she and my dad were married.

I’d never seen her high school graduation picture. The thought really amazed me.

I turned to the yearbook index and tracked down all the other mentions of my mother for her senior year. She’d been a member of mixed chorus and girls’ sextet and was pictured with the choir—one of twenty-five girls wearing the same unbelievably unbecoming dress. I couldn’t believe Mom had ever been that plump. She’d been secretary of the Future Homemakers of America. To my surprise, I discovered she’d been a member of the honor society. Mom had always told me she wasn’t much of a student. I wondered why she’d refused to admit she had good grades.

By then I was to the final entry in the index. It turned out to be the page with pictures from the senior prom.

And there was Mom, wearing a short but dressy dress, with her hair twisted up onto the top of her head. And with her was a tall, raw-boned guy with dark hair, worn as long as the other boys’. I didn’t need to read the caption. It had to be Bill Dykstra.

“Tall and dark,” Lovie had said. “That’s the way those TenHuis girls like ’em. Tall and dark.”

I studied the picture and decided she must be right. Tall and dark Bill was the same general physical type as my tall and dark dad. Bill was also the same general type as Joe. But Rich, my first husband, had been shorter and fairer. Maybe that’s why our marriage was such a flop, I thought wryly.

I put that idea aside and looked at the yearbooks from other years my mom would have been a student at WPHS. The books were more of the same, of course. Two years earlier I found Bill’s senior picture. It showed a long-haired kid; he’d matured physically in the two years between his senior year and my mom’s senior prom. He’d been on the basketball team, I noted, and on the stage crew for the senior play. He’d been vicepresident of the Ecology Club; had his mother influenced him? He had also made the honor society. I wondered why he had gone to trade school, rather than college.

He and my mom were also pictured together at the senior prom the year Bill had graduated. But that year, instead of the formal portraits of couples used in my mom’s senior year, the prom page had been a collage of snapshots.

In the one of Mom and Bill, both were laughing. I stared at Bill’s face. He had his arm around Mom. She was looking up at him admiringly. He was grinning from ear to ear. He looked completely happy.

He certainly didn’t look as if he would turn suicidal just two years later.

Someone cleared his throat behind me, and I jumped all over. I looked up to see one of the city councilmen, Raleigh “Rollie” Taylor.

“Sorry,” said Rollie. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Lee. Are you researching wedding etiquette?”

I slammed the yearbook shut. “Not tonight, Rollie.”

“I wanted to make sure you knew that if Oprah Winfrey married Deepak Chopra, she’d be Oprah Chopra.”

I chuckled. “I can always count on you to keep me up on these things.”

Rollie is the classic jolly fat man. I’d been horrified when I first heard his cruel nickname. But when a boy whose name is Raleigh grows up to weigh a hundred pounds more than he should and to be the town’s most enthusiastic teller of jokes, I guess it’s inevitable that his nickname will be Rollie. At least his friends hadn’t added “Poly” after it.

And Rollie did have friends. This had been demonstrated at the latest city election, when he ran for Warner Pier City Council in a hotly contested race and handily beat a more svelte candidate.

Rollie had taught social studies at Warner Pier High School for thirty years. Joe had been one of his students. Now, as city attorney, Joe worked with Rollie. They frequently sparred during the meetings, mostly about money. Rollie had a reputation for being tightfisted with his own money—with the occasional splurge on travel abroad—and he definitely was tight with the city’s money. That’s a good thing in general, I guess, but a few months earlier Joe had thought Rollie was urging the council to cut a few legal and financial corners on a case involving an injured city employee, and they’d disagreed publicly.

Joe had won the council’s support, and Rollie’s proposal had been voted down. Rollie smiled his usual smile, even though he’d lost the vote and might have been expected to be unhappy. Then he said, “It’s okay. Joe and I have been buddies since Lansing.”

Lansing? Lansing was the capital of Michigan and home of Michigan State University. But Joe had gone to the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. I didn’t understand the reference. But since that time Rollie had repeatedly twitted Joe with references to Lansing. I didn’t get the joke, and Joe hadn’t reacted to it. I hadn’t asked Joe to explain.

But Joe didn’t seem to dislike Rollie. Nobody did. He belonged to every committee and club in town. If we’d held a popularity contest, Rollie would have come in near the top, even if he never did buy a round at the postcouncil bull sessions in the bar of the Sidewalk Café.

Rollie reached over and picked up the yearbook I had just slammed shut. “That was the first year I taught at WP High,” he said. He thumbed through the faculty section and pointed to his picture. “I can’t believe I ever had that much hair.”

“Everybody had a lot of hair then. You were right in style.” Rollie’s hair had been thick and dark then, and it had probably been pushing the rules about length for teachers. Now his hair was gray and cut much shorter. It was also thinner on top, though I wouldn’t have called Rollie bald. The main difference between Rollie of thirty-plus years earlier and today was about fifty pounds. He’d been plump then, but he was obese now.

Rollie closed the book and asked the question I’d grown used to. “Is your mother coming for your wedding?”

I tried to answer casually. “That’s the plan.”

“Great!” Rollie leaned toward me and dropped his voice almost to a whisper.

“Lee, your mom was such a sweet girl. Why has she never come back to Warner Pier?”

“She came back for Uncle Phil’s funeral.”

“That was a mighty quick trip.” He frowned. “She’s not still worried about Bill Dykstra, is she?”

“I really don’t know, Rollie. She’s never expelled—I mean, explained! She’s never explained why she doesn’t want to come back.”

He stood up and leaned closer to me. “When she comes, be sure she talks to me.”

“Why?” My voice was sharp, even to my own ears.

“Bill was a troubled young man,” Rollie said. “I might know some things about him that would come as a surprise—even to Sally.”

I
stared at him for a moment. And suddenly I was mad. Just where did he get off wanting to tell my mom things “even she might not know” about Bill Dykstra? What she knew or didn’t know wasn’t any of Rollie’s business.

And it wasn’t any of my business, either. My mom hadn’t asked me to snoop around in her past. She would probably resent my doing so. And she’d be sure to resent a former high school teacher—a person she had never even mentioned knowing—snooping around in her life.

“Listen, Rollie,” I said. “I think you would be wise to drop this.”

“Why?”

“Because my mom has never talked about why she left Warner Pier. She has put the whole town behind her.”

“That may be significant in itself, Lee.”

“Yes, it may. Or it may not. I don’t know about that. But I do know one thing. I know Mom hasn’t spent the past thirty-three years mooning around over her high school sweetheart and his tragic death. She moved on. She married my dad—he’s a nice guy, and for at least fifteen years they were happy. When their marriage broke up, she moved on again. She found a job she liked and developed it into a successful career. She raised a daughter—and she was a highly supportive mother. She has friends, she has a good job, she owns a nice home, she travels all over the world, and she seems to enjoy herself thoroughly.”

I stood up and gathered the old yearbooks into a pile. “I suggest that you and I follow her lead and forget the past.”

Rollie smiled his jolly smile. The one that turned his eyes into little slits. “Of course, you’re right, Lee. Time wounds all heels.”

He didn’t explain what he meant by that. What heels? I decided not to ask.

Rollie turned away, humming softly, and went to the shelf of encyclopedias. He pulled out the first volume and took it to a table. By the time I had the yearbooks back on the shelf he was immersed in the book, but he looked up and smiled at me as I left.

I’d just bawled Rollie out. Why was he smiling?

I left the library feeling righteous. I was nearly home before I began to regret one thing.

I hadn’t looked Sheriff Carl Van Hoosier up in the library’s newspaper files before Rollie confronted me. Now I couldn’t. My outburst had ruined any excuse I had for looking into what had happened.

That thought made me feel guilty and caused me to give myself another lecture on staying out of my mother’s business. At the same time, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t exactly sure that everything I’d told Rollie about her was true.

Those facts were one way to look at my mother’s life. She
had
moved on after Bill Dykstra’s suicide. She
had
married a nice guy, she
had
built a successful career, she
did
own a nice home and travel the world.

But there was another way of looking at it. She had married my dad without realizing that her husband was not ambitious and that he would be happy to stay in his hometown forever; she had always felt that she was stuck in Prairie Creek. And neither of my parents had any financial sense. I used to lie in bed at night and listen to them argue about money. My stepmother had finally straightened my dad’s finances out, but my mom was still up to her eyebrows in credit card debt, mainly because of her travel habit—even travel agents don’t get everything free. Her “nice” home was a dinky condo she had never decorated because she didn’t have the money. And, yes, she did have friends, but she’d never dated anyone seriously since she divorced my dad. In fact, I knew of a couple of nice guys she’d deliberately dropped when they seemed to be getting serious.

I’d told Rollie that she had been a “supportive” mother. That was true. Of course, she hadn’t always supported me in the direction I wanted to go. When I was in my late teens, I’d felt pushed and prodded to do things—such as beauty pageants—that Mom had wanted me to do. I’d been enrolled in classes she couldn’t afford—speech lessons, musical training, exercise classes, even “charm school”—not because those things represented what I wanted to do, but because mom felt they’d help me “get ahead.” Getting ahead by developing my brains and professional skills hadn’t seemed to be an option. Let’s face it; she hadn’t believed I was smart enough to develop professional skills. She thought I’d have to rely on my looks, so I’d better make the most of them.

Despite their other differences, my dad had supported her plans for me. My dad is a Texan. Texans like their daughters to be admired for their beauty and pretty ways. He had bragged about his daughter the beauty queen, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him to brag about his daughter the A student. I made the honor roll, but I wasn’t encouraged to admit it. My mother thought it was just luck, and it simply wasn’t important to my dad.

For five years I’d tried to please them, entering pageant after pageant. Then I made the disastrous decision to marry Rich Gottrocks—I mean, Godfrey—only to find out that he was disappointed, maybe even angry, when he learned there were a few brains under my natural blond hair. It doesn’t do your ego much good when your husband is disappointed because you earned a four-point grade average.