Bygones (11 page)
She closed her menu and looked up. “What?” she said.
“You look good.”
“Oh, Michael, cut it out.” She felt a blush start, and said, “You’ve been staring at me ever since we came in here.”
“Sorry,” he said, but went on staring. “At least you didn’t get mad this time when I told you.”
“I will if you don’t stop it.”
A waitress came. They both asked for seafood chowder. When it arrived, they dipped in; then Michael said, “I’ve been doing some thinking since the last time we talked-about fault.”
Bess was afraid to ask. This was too intimate already.
“I suppose you were right about me helping around the house. After you started college, I should have done mare to help you. I can see now that it wasn’t fair to expect you to do it all.”
She waited for him to add “b” and offer excuses.
When he didn’t, she was pleasantly surprised.
“May I ask you something, Michael?”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever help Darla with the housework?”
“No.
” .
She studied him awhile,
then
said, “Statistics show that mast second marriages don’t last as long as the first ones, primarily because people go into them making the same mistakes.”
Michael’s cheeks turned ruddy. He made no remark, but they both thought about the conversation as they finished dinner.
Afterward they divided the check.
When they reached the door of the restaurant, Michael pushed it open and held it, while Bess passed before him into the cold. To her back he said, “I’ve decided to give you the job decorating my.
condo
. What do
I
do, sign a contract or something like that?”
“Yes, something
like
that.”
“And you’ve got one all made up back at the shop, right?”
“Actually, I do.”
“Then let’s go.” He took her arm commandingly, and they headed into the wind, which whistled in their ears.
“Why are you doing this?” Bess shouted.
“Maybe I like having you poke around my house.”
She balked. “Michael, if that’s the only reason. . .” He forced her to keep walking.
“Just a joke, Bess.”
As she unlocked the door of the Blue Iris, she hoped it was.
Chapter nine
FEBRUARY-SPED along.
The wedding was fast approaching. The telephone calls from Lisa to Bess came daily.
“Mom, do you think I have to get plain white cake, or can I have marzipan?” “Mom, have you bought your dress yet?”
Since she hadn’t, Bess set aside an afternoon, and she and her mother drove into downtown
Minneapolis
, where they browsed from shop to shop. At Lillie Rubin, Stella, turning up her nose at the grandma image, found a hot little silvery number with a
threetiered
skirt, while Bess chose a more sedate sarong suit in palest peach. When they stepped out of their dressing rooms, Bess gave Stella the once-over. “Wait a minute. Who’s the grandma here?”
“You,” Stella replied. “I’m the great-grandma.” Perusing her reflection in the mirror, she went on. “Now this is how I feel!”
“It’s very jaunty.”
“You darned right it is. I’m bringing Gil Harwood along.”
“Who’s Gil Harwood?”
“The man I’ve been dating. I met him at my exercise class, and I’m thinking of having an affair with him.
”.
Bess released a gust of laughter. “Mother, you’re outrageous.”
“Better outrageous than senile.
So how are things between you and Michael?”
Bess was saved from answering, by a clerk who was approaching. But she felt a flurry of reaction at the mention of his name, and Stella’s sly glance said very clearly she knew it.
They bought the dresses and went on to search out matching shoes. When they were in Bess’s car, heading home, Stella resumed their interrupted conversation.
“You never answered me. How are things between you and Michael?”
“Very businesslike.”
“Oh, what a disappointment.”
“I told you, Mother, I’m not interested in getting tangled up with him again, but we did straighten out some leftover feelings that have been lingering since before we got the divorce.”
“Such as?”
“We both admitted we could have worked a little harder at holding things together.”
“He’s a good man, Bess.”
“Yes, I know.”
BESS had little occasion to run into the good man between then and the wedding: The paper was hung in Michael’s condo, but when she went over to check it, Michael wasn’t there. She called him the neat day to ask if he was satisfied.
“More than satisfied.
It looks perfect.”
“Ah, good.”
Bess paused before changing the subject. “Michael, some of the bills for Lisa’s wedding have come in. So would you be willing to give her two thousand dollars, and I’ll add the same, and Lisa can put it into her savings account and draw on it as she needs it? Then what’s left over we can split.”
“Fine.
You really think we’ll see any leftover money?”
Bess chuckled. “No. But I don’t mind spending it, do you?”
“Not at all.
She’s our only daughter.”
The chance remark left the phone line silent while they reached back to their beginnings, wishing they could undo the negative part of their past and recapture what they’d once had.
Bess felt an undeniable stirring. She quelled it and said, “I guess I’ll see you at the rehearsal, then.”
Michael cleared his throat, and said in a curiously flat voice, “Yeah . . . sure.”
RANDY kept his car like the bottom of a birdcage. Whatever
fell,
stayed. The day of the groom’s dinner and rehearsal he took the battered ‘84 Chevy Nova to the car wash and mucked it out.
Fastfood
containers, dirty sweat socks, unpaid parking tickets-all got relegated to the bottom of a fifty-gallon garbage drum. He vacuumed the floor, emptied the ashtrays, polished the vinyl, and washed and dried the outside.
Then he drove to a mall, bought a new pair of trousers and a sweater, and went home to daydream about Maryann Padgett. The rehearsal was scheduled for
. He planned to ask if he could drive her home after the dinner. When he walked into St. Mary’s and saw Maryann, the oxygen supply in the vestibule seemed to disappear. She was wearing a prim little navy-blue coat, and probably a prim little Sunday dress, and talking to Lisa in prim, proper terms. She probably went to Bible camp in the summer and edited the school newspaper in the winter.
He’d never wanted to impress anyone so badly in his life.
“Hi, Lisa,” he said. He nodded to Maryann, hoping his eyes wouldn’t pop out of their sockets.
“You and Maryann are going to be first up the aisle.”
“Yeah?
Oh, hey-how about that.”
Bravo, Curran, you glob rascal, you.
Really knocked her prim little socks off with that one.
Maryann said, “I was just telling Lisa that I’ve never been in a wedding before.”
“Me, either.”
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
Inside his new sweater he was warm and quivering, She had this little pixie face with blue eyes about the size of Lake Superior; and pretty lips, with the tiniest mole above the upper one, close enough that if you kissed her properly, you’d kiss it, too.
The vestibule was crowded, and Lisa left to talk to someone else. In the lull, Randy searched for something to talk about. “Have you always lived in
White Bear Lake
?”
“Born and raised there.”
“I used to go to the street dances there in the summer during Manitou Days. They’d get some good bands.”
“You like music?”
“Music is what drives me: I want to play drums in a band.”
“Oh.” She thought awhile and said, “It’s kind of a tough lifestyle, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I never had the chance to find out.”
Father Moore, the same priest who’d married Bess and Michael twenty-two years before, came in, and they all laid their coats in the rear pews. Sure enough, Maryann Padgett was wearing her
Marion
the-librarian dress, with a dinky white lace collar. She was a throwback, and Randy was captivated.
He was standing in the aisle, continuing to be dumbstruck by her, when someone rested a hand on his shoulder blade.
“Hi, Randy.
How’s it going?”
Randy turned to encounter his father. He removed all expression from his face and said, “Okay.”
Michael nodded to the girl. “Hello, Maryann.”
She smiled. “Hi. I was just saying, this is the first wedding I’ve ever been in, and Randy said it is for him, too.”
“I guess it is for me, too, other than my own.” Michael waited, letting his eyes shift to Randy, but when no response
came,
he drifted away, saying, “Well . . . I’ll be seeing you.”
As Randy’s expressionless gaze followed Michael he repeated sarcastically, “Except for his own . . . both of them.”
Maryann whispered, “
Randy, that
was your father! How could you treat him that way?”
“The old man and I don’t talk.”
“Don’t talk! How can you not talk to your father?”
She stared at Randy as if he’d just tripped an old lady.
Father Moore asked for silence, and the rehearsal began.
Randy remained put out with Michael for intruding on what had begun as a conversation with some possibilities.
After the whole day of thinking about Maryann Padgett, wanting to impress her, the whole thing had been shot by the old man’s appearance. Why can’t he just lay off me?
During the rehearsal Randy was forced to observe his mother and father together, side by side, acting as if everything was just peachy. How could she sit there beside him as if they’d never split up, as if it wasn’t his fault the family broke up?
When the business at the church ended, they all went to a restaurant called Finnegan’s, where the
Padgetts
had reserved a private room for the groom’s dinner. Randy drove alone, and waited in the lobby for Maryann. The door opened, and she stepped inside, speaking with her father and mother, a smile on her face.
She saw him, and the smile thinned, her speech faltered.
“Hello again,” he said, feeling self-conscious.
“Hello.”
“Do you mind if I sit with you?”
“You’d do better to sit with your father, but I don’t mind.”
He felt himself blushing, and as she began removing her coat he said, “Here, I’ll help you with that.”
He hung it up along with his own, and they followed her parents into the room where a long table waited to accommodate the entire wedding party. Walking behind her, he studied her hair, which fell to her shoulders.
He thought about writing a song about her
hairsornething
slow and evocative. While they ate, Maryann talked and laughed with her parents, on her right. She said nothing to Randy. Finally he asked, “Would you please pass the salt?”
She did, with a polite smile that was worse than none at all.
“Good food, huh?” he said.
“Um-hum.
My folks wanted something fancier for the groom’s dinner, but this was all they could afford, and Mark said it was fine as long as Mom didn’t have to do all the cooking herself.”
“You all get along really well, I guess-your family, I mean.”
“Yes, we do.”
He tried to think of something more to say, but nothing came to mind. Finally he said, his stomach in knots, “Listen, I was wondering if I could drive you home.”
“I’ll have to ask my dad.”
He hadn’t heard that answer since he was in the tenth grade.
“You mean you want to?” he asked, amazed.
“I kind of suspected you’d ask me.” She turned to her father. “Daddy, Randy wants to drive me home, okay?”
Jake leaned forward, peered around Maryann to study Randy a moment, and said, “I guess that would be all right, but you have things to do early tomorrow, don’t you?”
“Yes, Daddy.
I’ll get in early.” She turned to Randy. “Okay?”
“ He
raised his right hand like a Boy Scout.
“Straight home.”
When the meal was over, there was a jumble of good-byes at the door. He and Maryann walked across the parking lot to his Nova. He walked around to open the passenger door for her, eager to extend every courtesy ever invented by men for women.