April & Oliver (35 page)

“I’ll give the diary back to you,” he says, pulling onto the road. “You can decide for yourself.”

“No, I don’t want to read it. I already know more than she would have wanted me to.”

He glances at her. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” She looks out the window.

“You don’t know?”

“I changed her bedpan, I washed the puke from her hair. I don’t think she’d want her privacy invaded any more than that.”

“Do you know something about the affair?”

“Enough to know it wasn’t my father.”

“Who then?”

She doesn’t answer. He shakes his head. They drive the rest of the way home in uneasy quiet.

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep again, but before she knows it she feels his fingers on her arm.

“Hey,” he says softly.

She opens her eyes, sees her apartment building, and groans. Commuters stream up the stairs to the train platform, their faces
stoic and worn. April glances at her watch. Eight twenty already. “I have to hurry,” she says. “Doobie needs to go out.”

He bites his lip, looking at a man clutching his briefcase as he darts across the street. “We never did get that cup of coffee,”
he says.

“Maybe next time,” she says ironically; she knows there won’t be any.

He doesn’t smile. Instead he leans over and kisses her chastely on the mouth. April feels Oliver’s warmth flow into her. The
kiss consumes all of five or ten seconds, but within that interval she feels an entire lifetime come and go. In the instant
it takes the cursing man on the platform to miss his train, a hundred years float in and out of the car.

They lean back then, consciously distancing themselves. Oliver smiles dolefully.

She touches her mouth self-consciously. “Oliver,” she says. “You’ll be fine. You’ll see. Married life will suit you.”

“Right,” he says, tapping the steering wheel.

“See you around then.”

“Sure,” he says. “See you around.”

She opens her door.

“Hey,” he says. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“Notice what?”

“You asked me two questions and I only asked one.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m going to bank it.”

“Really,” she says.

“I don’t know what the question is yet, but I’m holding on to the chit.”

She smiles uncertainly and closes the door behind her.

O
LIVER IS EARLY, THE FLORIST STILL CLOSED
. He walks half a block to the dress shop. Bernadette’s car is parked on the street.

Inside the door of the shop, he pauses. On the far wall, a three-way mirror faces a low pedestal. One of Bernadette’s friends
is being fitted for her bridesmaid’s gown. He can’t remember her name, though of course he should know it. On the floor, a
gray-haired seamstress puts straight pins into the hem of the gown.

“Hey, Oliver,” the girl says, spotting him in the mirror.

He waves sheepishly.

“Bernadette’s changing. She’ll be right out.”

He nods and slumps into a seat.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” The girl gives a twirl on the pedestal, snapping her gum between her teeth. “Organza silk, imported from
Italy.”

The seamstress, with a straight pin between her teeth, gives the girl an annoyed look.

“Lovely,” Oliver says. He’s so tired he could fall asleep in the chair.

“Oliver,” Bernadette says, emerging from the dressing room. “What are you doing here?”

The pitch of her voice sends a shiver through him. “I was early for the florist.”

“A minute sooner and you would have seen me in my gown!” She kisses him lightly on the cheek and tugs his earlobe. She looks
rested and impeccably dressed. “Can you help me carry it out to the car?” She points to a large vinyl garment bag.

Oliver puts his sunglasses back on and lifts the bag off the rack. It is enormous, thirty pounds at least. Bernadette holds
the door open for Oliver and calls so long to her friend. He carries the gown in his arms like a body.

“It’ll fit better in your trunk than mine,” Bernadette says. “Do you mind?”

“No. I’m parked up the street.”

She opens the trunk and he lowers the garment bag inside.

“Oh.” She moves her sunglasses down her nose. Her mouth opens as she recognizes the same clothes Oliver wore the night before.

He feels a softening in his chest, not remorse exactly, but sorrow; she deserves better. “Can the florist wait?” he asks gently.
“I’d like to talk with you.”

She closes her mouth and moves the glasses back up her nose. Her face reddens from the base of her neck to her hairline. “It
was a tough appointment to get.”

In the shop, Bernadette goes over the details of the flower arrangements matter-of-factly: gerbera and baby’s breath on the
tables, white roses for the ushers, orchid corsages for the grandmothers. She is composed, business-like, but Oliver knows
her well enough to detect the thickness in her voice. He braces himself for tears in the car.

But she doesn’t cry. He follows her to her apartment and carries the garment bag up three flights to her door, across the
threshold. “We only have forty-five minutes until my parents get here for lunch,” she says, adjusting the silverware she has
already set out on the table. “Your navy blazer is in the bedroom. I can’t remember if you left any ties. And don’t forget
to shave.”

Oliver opens the coat closet and sees the futility; even empty it would not be big enough for the dress.

“Put it in the bathtub,” she says. “And close the shower curtain.”

He carries the cumbersome bag into the bathroom and carefully places it in the tub. When he comes back to the dining room,
Bernadette is checking each crystal wineglass for fingerprint marks.

He touches her shoulders from behind. “Bernadette.”

“There’s a clean shirt in the closet.”

“Don’t you want to know why I need one?”

She covers her face with her hands.

“I did what you asked,” he says. “I told her I won’t be going to the dog park anymore.”

“I see, and apparently it took you all night to do so.”

“We went to a diner,” he says. For an instant he is stunned by the swiftness and clarity of the lie. Yet it feels honest.
The heart of what he’s saying is true. “You were right that we had some things to work out, old stuff from childhood, but
it’s done now. I feel relieved, so I hope you do, too.”

“I’d feel better, Oliver, if you weren’t wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

“I’m sorry, Bernadette. Sometimes I go about things stupidly, but my intentions were sincere. I wanted to put things behind
me, and I did.”

“So simply,” she says.

“Yes, Bernadette. I promise you.”

She shakes her head dismally.

“Look, I know this has been uncomfortable for you. If you need some time . . .”

“There’s no time,” she says sharply. “The invitations are out. We’re as good as married.”

He takes a step back, stunned. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I made my choice the day you proposed. I thought you did, too.”

“I did, Bernadette. Nothing has changed.”

She stares at him for a dazed moment, a wet sheen on her cheeks. “Swear you’ll never talk to her again.”

He hesitates, hand on his heart. “That would be difficult, Bernadette. We may see her on holidays, my grandmother’s birthday,
that sort of thing.”

“I mean private conversations, phone calls, the diner, the fucking dog park.”

He tries not to show his shock. Never has he seen her face so knotted, a bright vein bulging on her forehead. “Fine,” he says.
“I agree.”

She moves into his arms and starts to cry. “What an idiot you are,” she says. “If only you’d changed your stupid clothes.”

He puts his arms around her. “Bernadette,” he says softly. “I would have confided in you anyway.”

“You don’t know anything about being married. Sometimes you just have to spare a person’s feelings.”

“I’m sorry, then. I have a lot to learn.”

He holds her for a long time. She sniffles into his shirt. On the walls around them hang her children’s drawings, uniformly
cheerful, all rainbows and bluebirds.
What does she do,
Oliver wonders,
with the erupting volcanoes and headless monsters?

“Oliver,” she says. “I can forget everything if you just tell me you don’t have feelings for her.”

He caresses her back, touching the familiar curve of her spine, her small shoulders.

She steps back, looking at him for an answer.

“There’s feeling,” he says. “But it’s grief, nostalgia, a whole tangle of things, including guilt, I suppose. But not love,
not like what I have with you.”

She narrows her eyes.

“Bernadette.” He takes her shoulders. “I’m planning to be married to you my whole life. We’ll have wonderful years and probably
some hard ones, too. We will make a life with children, and it will be good. We’ll be happy. I feel it more than I’ve ever
felt anything.” He means it now. He’s completely sure.

She smiles, finally, with tender, puffy eyes. “I think of the children, too, sometimes,” she says, blowing her nose. “I wonder
who they’ll look like.”

A picture surfaces in Oliver’s mind, a giggly girl with onyx hair and sapphire eyes running along a beach. In the same breath
he lets the image slide away like words written in sand. “Freckly towheads,” he says. “Like you.”

A
PRIL PATS NANA’S HAIR DRY
with a towel and carefully combs out the silken strands. Tired from their earlier walk around the block, Nana begins to
nod off.

“Try to keep your head still for just another minute or two,” April says, setting out the rollers. “We’re almost done.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Nana says. The radio is playing Frank Sinatra, Nana’s favorite. It’s a song about spring. April
ought to know these titles by now.

“Nana,” she ventures. “I have a question for you.”

“Hm?” Nana rouses.

“After that soldier kissed you in the diner,” she says tentatively. “How did you go on?”

“I told you. I didn’t eat for a month. Lost twenty pounds.”

“Did it feel like a rewiring of your body, every cell switched places?”

Nana turns and looks up into April’s face. “Who is he?”

“No one,” she says, reddening. “I’m speaking hypothetically.”

“It’s like this,” Nana says. “All your life you’re yellow. Then one day you brush up against something blue, the barest touch,
and voilà, the rest of your life you’re green.”

April smiles curiously.

“Except that’s a bad example,” Nana says. “Because we’re all rainbow-colored inside, each of us a different arrangement, of
course. The kiss just makes all the colors more concentrated, so intense they can be hard to look at. Or feel, rather. Like
a Mediterranean sunset.”

April ponders this.

“But you have to feel it anyway,” Nana says. “Or you shrivel up inside.”

“I’m done now, Nana,” she says, putting away the extra rollers. “Do you want to take a nap?”

“Remember him, April. Even when you can’t picture his face anymore, you owe each other prayers. And I’m not talking about
sappy, sentimental stuff. Or fantasy, either. You pray for the hardest moments in his life, years down the line, when he’s
in a foxhole, or his child is sick, or he finds he has cancer. No one escapes calamity, but a kiss like that can last you
your whole life.” She looks up at April. “I’m not saying that you think about it all the time. It just leaves you different
than it found you.”

April pats her shoulder and leads her toward the bedroom. “Nana,” she says, tucking her in. “I know my mom and dad did their
best, and I’m not saying they weren’t great parents. I just want you to know that any ounce of good sense I may have picked
up along the way has come from you.”

She glances down for Nana’s response and hears a gurgling snore. April smiles, adjusting the covers.
Naturally,
she thinks.
The last word is Nana’s.

A
T FIRST, OLIVER
found the place disconcerting: a restored seventeenth-century mansion-turned-restaurant, with low ceilings and uneven floors.
The hearth is so large, you can stand up inside. Bernadette was in love with it, though, and helped Oliver to see its charm.
The rehearsal dinner consists of four tables of eight with a small space cleared in the center for dancing. They have the
room to themselves.

The only ones dancing are Al and Nana. From the looks of it, he has been a bit too generous keeping her glass filled. Al shuffles
her around like a girl, dipping and twirling. Nana protests, laughing, hitting him occasionally. Her smile could light up
a city. Oliver imagines her radiance as a young woman. She hasn’t lost it. The liquor makes her movements more fluid and agile
than he has seen her in years. But also loose and unsteady. Just as she begins to lose her balance, Al grabs her.

Sitting by herself, April watches them with a faint smile on her face. No doubt she is the one who set Nana’s hair, dressed
her in the classy gabardine outfit, orthopedic shoes, and seamed stockings. April leans on the table, fiddling with the castanets
Nana was playing earlier. They are good therapy for the hand affected by the stroke. Nana played them clumsily, but with enough
occasional precision that it was obvious she was once a master.

The dessert dishes are cleared and people begin to leave, one by one kissing Oliver and Bernadette good night, wishing them
luck for the morning. “My face hurts from smiling,” Bernadette whispers, rubbing her cheekbones. She is wearing a high-necked
lace dress, hand-tailored and soaked in tea to give it an antique tinge. Her hair is in a French braid, her earrings classic
pearls.

April helps Al escort Nana to a seat. Nana appears dizzy, a little breathless; she asks for water. April kneels down, tears
open the Velcro on her shoes, and massages her feet. Nana touches her hair to see if the curls are still in place, feels her
earrings to make sure she hasn’t lost them. Al rubs her shoulders, his hands big on her tiny frame.