Cancel the Wedding (20 page)

Elliott put his arm around me. “Olivia, I am so proud of you. You just went a little bit crazy.”

I couldn't take my eyes off the water. What good did that do? Now I didn't have a phone. That was just . . . stupid! My brain was reeling.

Elliott was laughing with his arm around my shoulder. “Was that your office?” I nodded, lying. He said, “I honestly didn't think you had it in you.”

This is why you don't go off half-cocked and do spontaneous stupid things! This is why you plan things! This is why you do not put yourself in situations that make you lose your mind!

Elliott tightened his grip. He stopped laughing, probably sensing that I wasn't finding any of this funny. “It's okay. We'll get you another phone. We'll fix it.” We watched the ripples cast out from my drowned phone. His voice was quiet. “But I do think you need to seriously consider more than just a leave of absence from work.”

Elliott realized that I hadn't spoken. I was just standing there dumb struck with my mouth hanging open staring at the lake. He moved in front of my face and bent down a little to be in line with my eyes. He said, “Hey, really. It's okay. You just got to the point where you snapped. It's not the end of the world. It's just a phone.”

It wasn't just a phone.

“Elliott, I think I'm kind of confused right now.” My voice sounded strange and shallow. I couldn't quite get enough air.

He smiled and brushed the hair out of my face, trying to calm me down. “I can tell. Is it because of everything with your mom? Is it just work? Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head.

He laughed at what must have been a very strange and pained expression on my face. “Okay. But remember, I've been where you are with work. I know what it's like to be all tied up with your job and your life and feel like there's no way out. It makes you crazy. It makes you do insane stuff”—he pointed at the water—“like throw your phone in the lake.”

My heart was racing. He didn't realize that I had just thrown much more in the lake than my cell phone. We were standing there facing each other at the edge of the water.

He tucked my hair behind my ear. “Why don't you just leave your job and go off the grid. You can hide out down here with me.”

He was joking, being silly, but I was about to break into a full panic attack. I could feel tears sting my eyes. “I . . . what?”

Elliott laughed then. He grabbed one of my hands and looked down at me, smiling. “I'm serious. Clearly technology is a problem for you.” He was making jokes to ease the tension either because I had just freaked out and lost my mind a little bit or because he had said, out loud, that I should stay here with him. What did that even mean? Was he just kidding or was he telling me something else? At the moment he simply kept teasing me. “You may need to go full Amish. Live out your days in a cabin on the lake.”

His grip tightened around my hand and I could feel myself calming down, letting go of the panic I felt moments ago. He smiled and I couldn't help but smile back. I asked, “And what will I do for sustenance in this Amish lake cabin?”

Elliott filled his cheeks with air and blew out slowly, thinking. “That's a really good question. It could be tricky, especially since you are such a terrible fisherman.”

Logan was right. He did make me laugh. I took a step closer to him. “How hard can it be to hold a stick until a fish is fooled into biting it?”

He was shaking his head, disappointed in my portrayal of fishing. “You will definitely starve.”

“I can always order pizza.”

“No, you can't. You don't have a phone.” Elliott stopped talking and something in his eyes changed, became more serious. He reached up and took my face in his hands and everything felt different. I could feel myself being drawn in to him. He bent down to kiss me and everything else seemed to vanish.

Our moment down by the lake was suddenly and abruptly cut short when Logan came home, bursting through the screen porch door and screaming down toward the water, “Aunt Livie? Are you down there?”

She was proud of herself for getting home before her curfew; I was lamenting the fact that I didn't let her stay out until eleven.

I walked Elliott out and watched as he walked down the sidewalk toward his house. I started to consider all that had just happened, all that it would mean, and then shut it off. I couldn't let my mind go there.

I went inside to the little kitchen and got a glass of water. I walked over to the mantel where the urn containing the remains of my mother had been placed and clinked the glass on it.
Why didn't you ever tell us about him, Mom?

I took Logan's phone and called Georgia back. I had forgotten to tell her that we didn't find any evidence of a shotgun wedding. No evidence of a little bastardly bundle of joy in the mix. For the first time she sounded like she was in a near panic about not being down here with me. She started to say something about Elliott, but I stopped her. “Look, it's complicated and I don't want to talk about it right now.” She was saying something else but I just kept talking over her, not letting her get a word in. “Gigi, will you do me a favor? Call Leo and tell him that my phone . . . my phone fell in the lake and I will call him first thing in the morning after I buy a new one. Don't embellish.”

“Fine. But I have to say something.” I just waited. Georgia's voice didn't sound angry anymore, just concerned. “You may be messing up your life in a way that you won't be able to fix.”

I knew she was right. “Maybe.” I hung up the phone. What had Elliott said about going to Atlanta? He had burned it down again. Throwing my phone in the lake felt like me striking my own match.

When I woke up the next morning Logan had already left for work. She was going to be catching a ride to the marina by boat with Laura, the girl I had met. Apparently Laura lived across the cove. Not a bad way to commute.

I walked into the kitchen and was assaulted with a barrage of fluttery white paper hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a very overzealous child had hung paper snowflakes all over the place. There were dozens and dozens of them.

I stepped under the falling snowflakes suspended in mid-flight and twirled my hands around. They moved on the breeze I created. Then I noticed that some of them had writing on them.

I pulled one down. I realized the white papers were actually coffee filters and the note on the one I pulled down read: “Four o'clock.” I pulled down all of the other filters with writing on them and laid them out on the counter.

I arranged them into some sort of logical message:

I couldn't help but wonder how Elliott had managed to do all of this without waking me up. I made my coffee and stood under the shower of white papers as they danced on the current from the air conditioning vent.

I had never before had the sensation that standing under those silly white coffee filters hanging from strings taped to the kitchen ceiling gave me. It was one of calm mixed with surprise and comfort mixed with excitement. All at the same time. They should really think of a word for that feeling.

I took my time getting ready and then headed to the store to replace my phone. And then, after all the procrastinating I could think of, I called Leo to talk to him about the wedding reception venue. He was very upset with me. For all the obvious reasons. He should have been even more upset with me, but he was unaware of those other reasons.

“Leo, I know you're going to think I'm postponing—”

“Oh my God, Olivia. Really?”

“Just listen to me. I'm down here, in Georgia. I just can't go booking reception venues when I'm hundreds of miles away!”

He spoke through his teeth. “You know what the place looks like. We've looked at it three times! You either want it or you don't.”

I stood my ground. “Okay then, I don't.”

He said, “I think maybe you should come home.”

“What? No! I'm not finished yet.”

“Finished with what? You're on a wild-goose chase. If your mother had wanted you to know all of this from her past she would have told you. It's none of your business.”

I had the urge to throw my new phone into a lake too, but I resisted. “Leo, if we want to find out what happened to her then we have a right to.”

“There is no ‘we.' Georgia's not even down there with you.”

I said, “That's because she had to stay at home with the boys.”

“That's my point. She's at home, where she should be. With her family.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“Me?” I could hear all the anger in Leo's voice. “You're the one who ran off for the summer. And why don't you want to book the gallery? It's the only place you liked.”

I wasn't mad anymore, just tired. “I don't want to argue about it, okay? I just don't want to book that place.”

“Why?”

Such a small word for such a loaded question. “I'm just not . . . I don't want . . .” I kept hearing Georgia's voice in my head telling me I was messing this up to the point where I couldn't fix it. I closed my eyes as I said, “The gallery is too cold. Austere. And I don't like the echo. They can't seem to control that echo.”

I could hear him plop down in his ergonomically correct desk chair in his office. “Is that really why you don't like it?”

“Yes. That's why.”

Leo sighed. “Okay. I understand. We'll find something else.”

“Listen, do you have time to talk right now? A lot has happened since I got here and I feel like we haven't been able to talk.”

“You know I'm inundated this whole week.” I could hear him already shuffling through papers as he spoke to me. That was the cue that this conversation was almost over.

“I know, Leo, but this is important. I'm having a really hard time . . . with some things.”

“You'll be home soon. We can talk then.” That was Leo's polite way of saying he didn't have time to talk to me. Or he didn't want to make the time.

Resigned. “Right, I'll be home after Mom's birthday.”

I wandered through the square and found myself near the library. I decided to duck in and get my mind back on my quest and off of Leo. I walked in and stood for a minute in the cold foyer, taking a few deep breaths and fanning myself with my shirt, which was now damp with sweat from the heat outside. When I found Bitsy I told her that I had a new development in my little research project in the form of an undisclosed first husband.

Bitsy had some things that she had pulled and wanted me to see. She led me to the long library table and produced a large book. It turned out to be the book of plat maps from the area spanning three decades: the 1950s through the 1970s. That would mean it would show the area of Rutledge Ridge before, during, and after the lake had been created.

She tapped her finger on the oversized volume. “Someone pulled this from the shelf this week and I kept it out thinking you might want to take a look through it.”

“Someone else was looking through old maps of Huntley? That's weird. Do you know who it was?”

She shook her head. “No, these are reference books and can't be checked out, so there's no way to know. It is strange though. That book hasn't been pulled for almost thirty years and now it's getting read twice in one week.”

Bitsy went off to find something else while I opened the map book. The book was huge, at least two feet by three feet and when I turned to the first page I was staring at the now-familiar plan of the town of Huntley in the 1950s before the deluge.

This map was at such a tiny scale that I couldn't make out any of the names or plat numbers in the individual parcels of land. But from this vantage point I could see the whole town situated in the valley with the mountains rising on both sides. Huntley was sitting at the bottom of the pool, hemmed in by the river on one side and a railway line on the other. I traced my finger along the topography lines as they crept up and away from the river's edge. You could see very easily how the water would fill it all in. Off to the northeast, safely perched on a plateau in the hillside, was the town of Tillman. It was about to become lakefront property.

It was hard to get my bearings when the geography had changed so much with the formation of the lake. But after orienting myself with the town of Tillman, and knowing where the golf course and marina were currently located, I knew where to look for my mother's house. I had to go steal a magnifying glass from Bitsy's desk to be able to decipher the tiny names on the map. The remains of my mother's house abutted where the golf course was now, so I followed that line in the hilltop until I was able to locate the parcel with “Rutledge Ridge” written faintly across it.

The property contained nearly fifty acres and encompassed both sides of the ridge and all of the land that rolled down toward the valley below. The piece of property to the west of Rutledge Ridge was owned by Nathan Bedford Forrest. That was the family that had the border dispute with my mother's family about the location of the property line. The Rutledges and the Forrests seemed to have had a good old-fashioned neighbor's feud. Cue the dueling banjos.