When You Come to Me (52 page)

The Chandler women were in complete shock when, after all of the presents had been opened, Brandon pulled out a box from a hidden corner by the fireplace in the living room, with “To Ms. Chandler” written on a Santa-printed label on the front.

Helen Chandler took the present hesitantly, and said, “You really didn’t have to get me anything…”

“I know,” was Brandon’s response, as he rejoined Natalie on the space on the floor beside the sofa.

“Open it, Mama,” Sidney suggested with eagerness and curiosity filling her eyes.

“I wonder what it could be,” Maya said.

So did Natalie. She hoped it weren’t some obscene gesture, telling her mother off. Nevertheless, she would understand. Her mother hadn’t necessarily been the nicest person the past couple of nights.

Her mother slowly unwrapped the present, pursing her lips as if she were above it all, and when she saw the contents, she gasped.

“It’s rather simple,” Brandon said. “But I thought that you would enjoy it…”

By the look on her mother’s face, she was certain that she did.

Helen held up a black and white picture, framed in black, of her in her early thirties, at the beach with Sidney tugging at her dress, with Natalie sitting in the sand with a bucket hat on her head, and with baby Maya in her arms.

The mother held a hand to her mouth. “I’d forgotten about this day…”

“I stole the picture from Natalie’s apartment,” Brandon explained. “And…and I thought it was great, so I had it blown up and framed…I…I hope you like it, Ms. Chandler…”

Helen didn’t respond quickly, and looked as though she wanted to cry, but she calmed herself and regained her composure. She then cleared her throat, looked at Brandon, placed a hand to her chest and managed the first smile that Natalie had seen in days.

“Thank you,” Helen said quietly. “Um, Brandon…thank you, Brandon…”

Ms. Helen Chandler

Invites you to join her

In the celebration of love

As her daughter,
Natalie Savannah

Is united in marriage to
Brandon David Greene

Son of Jackson and Martha Greene

On Saturday, the fifteenth of August

Two thousand and six

At three o’ clock in the afternoon

Bingham Park

Augusta, Georgia

SHE STOOD in the mirror and ran her hands up and down the fabric, sucking in her breath each time that she pictured being at that wedding, dancing around, hugging her relatives and meeting her new ones. It was visual confection: pure snow-white, several yards of lace and tulle, draping through the midriff of the strapless, A-line gown. It was beaded with diamantes and bugles and shimmered and twinkled in all the right places, and she couldn’t believe that the price had been so reasonable, that she could still afford the food from the catering company and the roses from the flower company and the lacy veil that her mother insisted that she wear.

It was the dress, as soon as she’d laid her eyes upon it, in Alice’s Boutique in Madison, and as soon as she’d tried it on, letting the soft fabric caress her skin, she couldn’t think of another one that she wanted more, and all of her wants and worries and needs that were so closely aligned with that darn wedding, immediately subsided.

It was late May when she shelled out the five hundred dollars for the dress and the one hundred and fifty for the veil, and Natalie became antsy, believing that she hadn’t completed all of the things that she needed to, believing that she wouldn’t be able to get the invitations out in time, believed that any second, with all the nonsense she fed to Brandon on a regular basis about buying the right tuxedo and making sure he kept up with his ring and telling him what his best man’s duties were, that he would walk away from it all and from her and say to hell with it! But, she’d take a deep breath each time he called her and told her that he’d completed another task, restoring her confidence and encouraging her to keep planning.

And as each day drew nearer, she almost believed that she’d walk away from it all as well.

On occasion she’d sit back and tell herself that it was only a wedding, and the thing that she should really be celebrating is a life with Brandon instead of turning into this over analytical, organizationally-crazed maniac, who wanted every aspect of the event to be perfect, and go just as she’d imagined in her head, when she was a little girl, and Jamal Lennox from next door was her groom, and Maya and Sidney were her bridesmaids, and weeds from her grandmother’s backyard were her bouquet, and she was flying to Tahiti for her honeymoon the next day. Her only wish was that someone would smack some sense into her and the entire situation before she lost it completely, before she annoyed Brandon to the point that he no longer wanted her or that wedding.

Brandon finally moved out of the house on Trent Road at the beginning of June, after spending nearly six years of his young life there, his second year living there being the same year (and the same semester) that he met Natalie for the first time. Scotty, who’d secured a job as a rush hour radio personality at one of the stations in Athens, would stay there until he could find a better place, one where he could live by himself. The house lost its luster the moment that all Brandon’s stuff was out of it.

Brandon put the majority of his things in storage in a place just outside of Atlanta, near Natalie’s family’s home in Decatur, where he would later pick them up and they would make the move to North Carolina.

Yes, North Carolina, where Natalie would start her med classes at Duke, and where Brandon had secured a job, despite his grad school dropout guise, at a small marketing firm just outside of Research Triangle Park in Raleigh as an Associate Market Researcher, which he deemed a big step up from being a very low paid internship at a firm in Athens.

And a couple of weeks following Brandon’s big move out, Natalie moved out of her apartment, which, to her, seemed less significant, despite the fact that it was the holding place of all of her and Asha’s inside jokes, and laughs, and small, trivial fights that they forgot about five minutes later. It was the holding place of talks of boys, of television-watching marathons, of Asha consoling her after she’d shed gallons of tears over Brandon’s insolence. So, maybe it was more significant than she originally thought, and in a few months she would be living with a man instead of Asha, who was the biggest neat freak she’d ever met.

She, too, placed her things in the same storage place as Brandon, and while Brandon returned to his home up north, Natalie quit her job at the hospital (which she should have done the moment that she left Anthony!) and moved into her comfortable home in the south with her mother, who was more at peace with life than she’d ever seen her.

Yes, in mid-June, Natalie took her mother by the hand, and walked around the neighborhood with her mother at dusk, the breeze, cooling the sweat at her skin.

They’d walked in silence for several minutes, taking in the sight of the old neighborhood, of the lone drone of the airplane above their heads, the shadows of long branches invading the color of the fading asphalt of Green Hill, of bouncing magnolia blossoms…

Then, her mother said, “I…I…I like Brandon…”

Natalie couldn’t help but smile then, recalling the last time Brandon came home and spent time with her family. It was Easter, and he’d helped lay out the plastic eggs in the yard beside the church for the kids after the service, and at Granny Marie’s, he’d offered to help assemble the deviled eggs, put the vanilla wafers in the banana pudding, wipe off Alicia Chandler’s scrape after she fell on the sidewalk, and wipe the tears from her eyes. Natalie herself had a hard time believing how interactive he’d been, how funny he’d been, how comfortable he’d looked, sitting in the shade in a rusty lawn chair with her uncles, drinking from Milwaukee beer cans.

It was almost as if God wanted everyone to know how perfect he was, how much she loved and deserved him, and especially, how wrong Helen Chandler had been.

“I’m so glad that you do,” Natalie said quietly, her voice floating with the draft.

Helen looked at her. “And you’re different too, young lady?”

“Am I?”

“Lord, yes! You’re so grown up…so…so…”

“Happy?”

“Yes, baby,” Helen sighed, squeezing her hand tighter. “You seem so happy…”

“That’s because I am,” Natalie said. “I’m happy because I’m getting married…I’m happy because you like him…you finally like him…”

“Well, don’t get too excited,” Helen said. “My good feelings for him may go any second…”

“Mama…” Natalie rolled her eyes.

“I’m just telling you, Nattie,” Helen said. “One little slip up and…”

“Mama, just admit that he’s a good guy and leave it at that…”

After the walk, they returned to the house, and the sat on the porch swing, as they’d done a year prior. Helen Chandler wrapped an arm around her daughter and sighed. Natalie’s head found a home in her mother’s bosom.

“I only want the best for you,” her mother said quietly.

“I know, Ma,” Natalie replied, watching the branches of the magnolias in her front yard sway. “I know you do…”

“And if marriage is the right thing…well…”

The more Natalie thought about it, it was. After Brandon moved out of his house at the beginning of the month, he’d gone back to his parents’ house in Saratoga until the wedding in August, and as much as she hated admitting it to herself, she didn’t like the fact that he was outside of Georgia, and she wasn’t with him. This was how she knew that she was ready to live with Brandon, ready to be with him all of the time; the phone conversations were simply not enough. She wanted him there, with her, all of the time, the way they used to be together before things got so complicated. Part of her wanted to get back to seeing him rummage through her refrigerator and cabinets, scratching his belly and making a weird groaning noise while he looked for food. She’d missed fetching him in the middle of the night during one of his bouts of sleepwalking, missed attempting to push him off of her. She missed complaining about the messiness of his room or when his bit his nails, or when she got so mad at him that she simply wanted to scream. Yes, marriage was appropriate…marriage was what she wanted…marriage was the best thing for her…

But, how to explain that to her mother? A mother, who, despite saying that she now appreciated the Caucasian fiancé, still had her reservations about the whole thing. How could she convince her mother that a life with Brandon was all she ever needed at this point in time?

Waiting it out seemed the best medicine for this occasion. By doing that, she could avoid the stress and avoid another endless conversation about why Brandon was so important. After all the wedding was a little over a month away, and for once she would allow herself to steer clear of her mother’s opposition, and focus on her feelings for once…focus on the fact that in a matter of days, she was about to give up her life for another.

Knowing that she wouldn’t see Brandon till the wedding was hard for some reasons, and easy for others. She didn’t have the luxury of falling asleep on his chest while they watched television, or the luxury of going out to dinner with him, and sharing laugh after laugh, or someone to share a Sunday afternoon with beneath swaying trees, watching the clouds move. Moreover, he was out of reach when she wanted to hit him for not following through on a plan she’d designated for him to take care of. Contrarily, she could focus less on their relationship and more on the wedding, which, by the beginning of July, was coming full-circle. Maya decided to put her Savannah College of Art and Design education to good use and elected herself to be the photographer for the wedding. Natalie hoped that she wouldn’t crack under the pressure of being both the photographer and the maid of honor.

“Don’t worry, Nat,” Maya assured her. “How hard can the job be?”

Brandon elected Scotty to be the disc jockey at the wedding reception. With a little persuasion, Scotty finally agreed, saying, “I must love really love you guys…because I never work for free…”

Granny Marie let Natalie scour her rose garden for the floral arrangement that would not only line each row of chairs at the ceremony, but would also be a part of the bouquet (that Maya had also elected to assemble) and the centerpieces at each of the fifteen tables at the reception. According to Granny, the yellow roses with the pink tips meant friendship and falling in love, and the soft pink roses symbolized grace. Natalie smiled at her selection; a little representation on her wedding day never hurt anyone.

Joanna had designed the cake by the start of summer: a three-tiered white cake with butter cream frosting and raspberry filling, embedded with the same grandiflora roses and streams of thin champagne-colored ribbons, cascading down on each side. Natalie worried slightly. How could the cake be transferred from New York to Georgia, in the dead of one of the hottest summers in some time, without crumbling into pieces?

“Don’t worry,” Jo assured her, chuckling with air. “I’ve got it all under control.”

Don’t worry, seemed to be the operative phrase that everyone used with her. Especially on the weekend after the fourth of July, when Scotty and Asha drove from Athens to help her assemble two hundred or so tea-length, three-fold wedding programs that Maya had designed and had printed a few weeks earlier.

When Natalie inquired about the tuxedo order that Scotty was supposed to check on a couple of weeks prior, Scotty proudly said, “Don’t worry, Nat…”

When she asked him about the music he’d selected for the reception, he cleared his throat and said, “Nattie, don’t worry…Maya and I have been in cahoots with each other…we’ve got it all under control, my darlin’…”

“And it’ll be tasteful?” Natalie asked, raising an eyebrow in both his and her sister’s direction.

“Yes,” they both said collectively.

“You might want to give that music play-list a once-over,” Asha advised, placing her hand on Natalie’s wrist. “You know how Scotty is…”

“Exactly how am I, Asha?”

“Oh,” Asha began, with a sigh. “Don’t get me started…”