Cancel the Wedding (6 page)

Logan whined about having to go to the lobby unpolished but finally gave in and left the room. The disembodied voice of Georgia barked at me. “Take me off speaker, Livie.”

“Okay, you're off. What's up?”

“Is Lo okay down there? Are you keeping an eye on her? Does she want to come home?”

“Georgia, we've been here for like five minutes. She's fine; she hasn't said a word about home.” I knew when total silence followed that remark that it had been a mistake. I quickly added, “I mean she seemed a little blue last night. I think she may be a little homesick, but she's putting on a brave face.” I wouldn't call that last bit a lie, more like an exaggeration.

Georgia sounded very small. “Oh, well good. I hope she's having fun.” Those two could barely get through a conversation without screaming and yet Georgia was heartbroken by her absence. Why are relationships between mothers and daughters always so complicated?

The door opened. It was Logan. “I've got to hang up, Gigi. Lo just got back and I have to shower before she decides she wants to straighten her hair for six hours in the bathroom.”

Logan stuck her tongue out at me as I hung up the phone. Apparently the only place to get Internet service was the lobby.

I suggested, “How about we just eat dinner downstairs tonight and then set up our mobile HQ in the lobby?”

“Our what?” Logan's raised eyebrows should have told me not to elaborate for fear of sounding foolish.

I hardly ever take heed of the raised eyebrows. “Our HQ! Our headquarters. We can bring our laptops and notebooks and good pens to take notes and do research about the town and the lake.”

Logan was laughing at me. “You are such a dork, Aunt Liv. Good pens?”

She could act like I was a loser for wanting to dig in right away and find out more about Huntley but she was a fourteen-year-old girl who just found out she was staying on the banks of an underwater town. That had a cool factor that she couldn't ignore. It was, in her words, pretty trippy.

The lobby of the James Oglethorpe Inn was not exactly what one would expect to find in an early-nineteenth-century building. Especially one with such an interesting provenance. The building was originally built as a tavern and inn in the mid-1800s and then had served as a hospital and morgue for several years during the Civil War. There was even supposed to be the ghost of a Confederate soldier wandering around the third floor somewhere looking for his boots. I was making a point of avoiding the third floor.

Over the years the building had also served as a post office, an office building, and then finally had gone back to the inn it was originally intended to be.

I had been expecting overstuffed chintz furniture and lace curtains with the obligatory curio cabinet filled with Civil War memorabilia. And maybe for the floor to be covered in needlepoint rugs and the walls filled with mounted deer heads and trout.

Instead it was stylish, elegant, and modern. Not in a cold way, but in a very comfortable yet lush way. The Belgian linen couches and well-worn saddle leather armchairs cuddled up to the fireplace. The floors were a beautiful distressed wide-plank pine with seating areas corralled by thick cream squares of carpet. The walls were a mottled Venetian plaster in a deep rich caramel color.

Logan and I made our way to the dining room and were seated at a table near the window. The triple-hung window had the old pulley and weight system in the wall and the glass was warped and wavy.

I pointed it out to Logan. “Do you see how the glass has slowly, over time, melted down slightly and become thicker at the bottom of each pane?”

She was not impressed. “Yeah, 'cause that old glass is more like a liquid. You told me that before.” She was perusing the menu.

I ran my finger over the glass. It's strange to think of something that appeared to be solid like this as actually being a liquid, but that's what it was. A very thick, very slow-moving liquid. I was starting to think of my mother like that. She seemed solid. She seemed to be exactly what you saw. But now as I looked back at her I realized that she was morphing before my eyes. Why did she want to come home again after she died? She wasn't what I thought she was. Then what was she? Who was she? Maybe she was the same, but it was my perception of her that was changing.

The waiter was standing there staring at me. I hadn't heard him pop up. We ordered our food and then chatted about the strange reality of mom's hometown being underwater.

I was getting anxious about digging into the history of the place. “I wish the library was open late. We could go there to research.” I loved—I mean
loved
—starting a new research project. At first the wedding planning had started that way. I had a new notebook and a new three-ring binder. I had torn pictures of dresses and cakes and flowers out of magazines and filed them all appropriately. I had taken notes from caterers and event facilities and florists. I was having a ball planning a big party, picking out favors, deciding on color schemes. In all that time doing party planning I hadn't given much thought to the fact that an actual marriage was the inevitable conclusion of the festivities.

It was all so frantic and rushed. Leo had a very small and nonnegotiable window in his work schedule where we could fit in time off for a honeymoon. Between his schedule and mine, finding the perfect wedding day was a little bit like negotiating the moon landing. Then my mother got sick and it all fell apart. We put the planning and the wedding on hold.

My mother's illness was quick, not the drawn-out heart failure that my father endured, but a swift painful cancer. Stomach cancer.

I would never forget the look on her face when we went to the doctor to hear the results of the biopsy. Georgia was in the chair on my mom's left and I was on her right. The three of us sat silently staring ahead, afraid to make too much noise or touch anything in the doctor's office, as if our behavior while we waited could somehow impact her diagnosis.

Georgia was reading through the doctor's pedigree on the wall as I browsed the obligatory family photos on his desk. His children were painfully ugly. Pug-nosed, fish lipped, and mousy haired. They looked alarmingly like our family's old French bulldog, Chloe. I pointed at the line of photos and nudged Georgia. She gave me her “shut up this is serious” face.

My mother turned to where I was pointing and said, “Oh dear, that poor man. Those children have been absolutely beaten to death with the ugly stick.”

We couldn't stop laughing. Especially because we knew we shouldn't be laughing. Once you try to contain it, it just bursts out of you. When the doctor came in he thought we were crying and handed us a box of tissues.

Once we got ourselves under control he told us the results of the biopsy. Georgia started crying for real and I started asking him about the next course of action. My mother was utterly calm. Almost like she was looking death in the eye and saying,
Thank God. What the hell took you so long?

She smiled and stood up, thanking him for his time, and then announced that she wanted us to go out for a nice lunch. She refused to talk to the surgeon or the radiologist about treatment options, saying she wouldn't waste her time with that nonsense. Her husband was already gone and she didn't intend to make her daughters go through several more years watching a parent get weaker. She only did pain management with her general physician, and even that she kept to a minimum. As if suffering through the pain was part of her necessary final journey.

Maybe, if we could find out enough about her childhood, I would finally understand why she acted the way she did at the end. So ready to die and end this life. To me she was an amazing, complex, loving mother. I just couldn't understand why it was so easy for her to accept her fate and leave us. I needed to be careful that I didn't forget who she was to me while I tried to figure out who she was before me.

Logan was thinking back to my comment earlier. “Why do you need a library?”

I took all of the abandoned beets off her salad plate and added them to mine. “So we can look things up like maps and old newspaper accounts of the town being flooded.”

“Jeez, you can find all of that online.”

“You don't even remember a world before Google.”

“There was a world before Google?” She teased.

“Be nice to me or I won't tell you anything else that I learned about Graham.”

She gave me a snide look that reminded me so much of her mother that I had to smile. Why do we always turn into our mother?

After dinner we settled into a very cozy corner of the lobby and each started our laptops to begin searching. I ordered a cocktail, which Logan made a point to comment on.

I could see Mrs. Chatham, the innkeeper, sitting at the bar talking to an older gentleman. He seemed to be holding court at his perch on the bar. People were obviously eager to have an audience with him, so Mrs. Chatham didn't stay with him long.

While I was glancing up to see whom he would receive next, Mrs. Chatham materialized right next to me. “I have been meaning to come meet you. My name's Mrs. Chatham. We are so pleased to have you here at the inn.”

Mrs. Chatham made me believe that she was genuinely thrilled to have us here. I wondered if she meant it or if it was just her job as a hostess to be polite.

I shook her hand. “It's nice to meet you. I'm Olivia and this is my niece, Logan.” Mrs. Chatham sat down with us. I said quite sincerely, “Your inn is lovely.”

She crossed her legs and leaned in like we were old friends. “Thank you so much! We just did the renovation last year, and I really thought it'd be the end of me.” She looked at Logan and said, “I have never met a girl named Logan before.” Then Mrs. Chatham addressed the next comment to me. “You know, because Logan is a family name. But I guess people just don't hold to that like they used to.”

“My sister always liked the name so . . .” I wondered what it meant for something to be a family name. Whose family? I was about to ask her when she turned her charms on Logan.

“Well, you're such a beautiful girl you can have any name your mother wants you to have.” Mrs. Chatham was smiling and shaking her head at Logan. “I mean look at that skin. Like silk. My daughter had such a hard time at your age with her skin.” She sighed, “Bless her heart.”

Logan and I looked at each other and smiled.
Bless her heart.
It was the exact same tone and inflection my mother used to use.

There was no stopping Mrs. Chatham. “So what are you two doing in town? Are you shopping or just visiting?” Where exactly did all these people think we were shopping around here?

“We're just visiting. My mother is from”—I paused for a second not wanting to say “the town under the lake” then continued—“around here. So Logan and I just wanted to come see it for ourselves.”

“Well, isn't that nice. Is she anyone I would know?”

It had never occurred to me that there could still be people living here that had known my mother. But Mrs. Chatham looked to be about the same age as my mom. I held my breath for just a second as I said, “Her maiden name was Jane Rutledge.”

“Was? Has she passed?” When I nodded, she sighed a little and put her hand on her heart. We accepted her sincere condolences. She seemed legitimately distressed that my mother had died. She was twisting her pearls and tugging at the sleeves of her twinset while knitting her brows together and resting her hand on my knee. She really felt our pain. That woman had a gift.

She gave one last consolatory pat on my leg and then composed herself. “I didn't know her, but you must be one of the Huntley Rutledges.”

“I'm not sure exactly. I guess that's what we're here to find out.” It occurred to me in an instant how much easier it would be to find out about my mom's past if we could meet the people who had known her. And then, just as quickly, that there may not be anyone left from Huntley to ask.

Mrs. Chatham was thrilled at the prospect of some old family bloodline returning to its roots. “Isn't that exciting? You'll have to let me know everything you discover. I'm not sure if there's anyone around here who remembers having Rutledges among us.”

Logan finally chimed in. “Excuse me, what did you mean when you said that Logan is a family name?”

Well, that sent Mrs. Rutherford Chatham into a sort of fascinating lecture about how one should name their children. Apparently there were a lot of rules that I had never heard before regarding naming a child.

Logan and I sat patiently as she explained lineage and firstborns and monograms. “One should never ever use the husband's name for a monogram. Good Lord, I don't know who decided to start mixing up the names. That just undoes me. Traditions are traditions and are there for a reason.” As she said that I noticed the monograms on the pillows and napkins in the lobby and bar area and asked her about them.

“Those are the initials of Lady Elizabeth Wright, James Oglethorpe's wife. Like I said, always use the woman's initials. Everything in the house belongs to the woman.” She pointed at Logan. “You remember that.”

That sounded like a lot of baggage. I was starting to get that prickly feeling again about not wanting to get married. It occurred to me that if I had been home on Saturday instead of the office I could have intercepted that call from the chapel and politely declined the time slot. I had a fresh wave of loathing for my job.

One didn't have to be very present while Mrs. Chatham was speaking; she didn't require much in the way of response. At the moment she was retelling the family tree of nearly everyone in town. It seemed as if everyone was knotted together in one way or another as she went through the names. Coming from the transient world of DC, I couldn't help but wonder if it was hard for people in this small town to always be surrounded by the same families.

I was having a hard time keeping up with Mrs. Chatham as she explained the pedigree of someone named “the fourth.”