Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?

by Melissa Senate

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  She touched her belly. “I think I’m going to have a baby. Make that I know I’m going to have a baby. I might be exhausted and I might have to find help where I can, but I know I can do it. That’s really three-quarters of success—knowing you can do it.”

  I was impressed by her attitude. “Then a success you will be.” I put my arm around her shoulder. “And besides, you’ve got me now—and I take my auntly duties very seriously.”

  She stopped and looked at me and hugged me for a long time right in the middle of Broadway.

  chapter 9

  The next morning, another father was causing a commotion of his own in the hallway at Wow Weddings.

  “Who’s the boss around here?” Philippa’s dad bellowed, his gold watch gleaming in the early-morning sunlight shining through the window. “I want to speak to the boss right away!”

  “Daddy!” Philippa squealed, trying to pull him into her cubicle. “Stop—you’re embarrassing me in front of all my colleagues!”

  Astrid’s assistant, Carol, came running to Philippa’s cubicle. “Is something wrong, Mr. Wills?”

  “You bet there is, little lady,” he said. “I want to know why my precious baby girl is stuck working in a cubicle when she should have a corner office!”

  Carol’s eyes widened.

  “Daddy!” Philippa yelled again, but she was fighting a smile.

  “I’m just joshing around!” Mr. Wills said, slapping his thigh and throwing back his head.

  Philippa swatted her father’s shoulder. “Daddy, you’re embarrassing me!”

  But it wasn’t embarrassing. It was…nice. There was nothing not nice about a father loving his daughter. For the past fifteen minutes, Philippa’s father had been hanging on her every word, looking at every article she’d ever proofread and calling her his precious baby girl at least ten times per minute.

  Mr. Wills wagged a finger at me. “Before I left my office, my secretary chased after me with her huge appointment book and a worried expression and said, ‘Mr. Wills, you can’t leave right now—you have a shareholders’ meeting in half an hour!’ Do you want to know what I said?”

  We were all waiting on pins and needles!

  He pointed a finger at me. “I looked her right in the eye and said, ‘Mary, my baby girl comes first.’”

  “Oh, Daddy!” Philippa said, flying into his arms.

  Okay, now it was getting embarrassing.

  “Eleanor, is it?” he said, glancing at me.

  “Eloise,” I corrected.

  “Eloise. Like that little cartoon girl in Paris.”

  I smiled. “Actually, the Plaza.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Well, I’ll tell you, Eleanor, I’m not surprised Philippa is working for a big-deal national magazine. Words were always her thing. She won the statewide spelling bee two years in a row.”

  When, in preschool? Philippa couldn’t even spell officiant. She asked me how to spell it this morning when we were filling out forms for who would be performing our ceremonies. Apparently, clergy persons and judges didn’t offer free services in exchange for ads in Wow Weddings.

  “And look at her now, all grown up and getting married,” her father went on. He started to break down, honest to goodness, then said, “Ignore me. I’m just all choked up.”

  I could hear Astrid’s heels clicking toward us. Her perfume preceded her as she rounded the corner, Devlin a step behind her.

  “Devlin, let’s get some candids of Daddy crying tears of joy that his baby is all grown up,” Astrid said.

  Devlin did his usual snapping at his assistant, who set up the lighting, and then he directed Daddy and Philippa to produce a few fake tears.

  “That’s perfect, Dad,” Devlin said.

  Click. Click. Click-click.

  “I am so proud of you, baby girl,” Mr. Wills told Philippa as he pinched her cheek. “I cannot wait to walk you down the aisle.”

  “I love you, Daddy,” Philippa said.

  Hug. Kiss.

  “Philippa,” Astrid said. “I couldn’t be more pleased with how well your shoots are going. This one in particular—candids in your office environment, the classic girl at work, helping her country, helping the economy until her wedding day when she can concentrate on philanthropic pursuits, both grand scale and grassroots, and babies, of course, at least three—is really going to strike a chord with the American reader.”

  I wondered if Astrid was normal at home. In her relationships with her husband and family and friends. Could you be a completely different person at work than you were outside of work? Probably not. Her husband had to be a trip himself.

  “Um, Astrid,” Philippa said. “I’m not expected to quit when I return from my honeymoon, am I?”

  “Of course not, Philippa,” Astrid replied. “You’ll resign beforehand, so that we can deduct those two weeks from your vacation pay.”

  Dead silence, except for the sound of Philippa swallowing.

  Astrid rolled her eyes. “It was a joke, people. Honestly, does anyone have a sense of humor around here?”

  “She must have had sex last night,” I whispered to Philippa.

  “Eloise, I do hope you were paying attention to the spirit of these shots,” Astrid said. “Especially with the deceased-mother angle, your Father of the Modern Bride shots are going to be more touching than they even need to be. After all, the Modern Bride is also Daddy’s Little Girl.”

  “That is so true, Astrid,” Philippa agreed, hugging her father.

  “By the way, Eloise,” Astrid said. “I moved up your Father of the Modern Bride shoot to next Monday. Please memo me if that’s a problem.”

  Hey, Astrid, here’s a memo: It’s a problem.

  Delayed reactions were interesting. One minute you could be peeling potatoes in your kitchen for homemade French fries as a surprise for your fiancé, who was an addict, and the next, you could be crying your eyes out.

  “Eloise? What’s wrong?” Noah asked from the kitchen doorway.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just the onions.”

  “But you’re not chopping onions.”

  “Oh.”

  He peered at me. “Eloise?”

  “What if you’re not back in time for ring shopping on Monday afternoon?” I asked, tears rolling down my cheeks. “Fiancés are supposed to be there.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “Two o’clock. Round Rings, West Broadway.”

  “But what if you can’t?” I said.

  “Eloise, there is no can’t. I’ll be there no matter what.”

  “This potato peeler is no good!” I shrieked. “It doesn’t peel right.”

  “Eloise, honey, what is wrong? Talk to me.”

  I closed my eyes. “I have a father.”

  He took the peeler out of my hand and set it down. My hands fell to my sides.

  “I have a father,” I said again, tears falling down my cheeks.

  Noah took me by the hand and led me into the living room. I sat on the sofa and stared at my shoes.

  “I’ve been pretending I don’t have a father since I was five, but I have one,” I said. “The reason he’s not walking me down the aisle at my wedding isn’t because he’s dead or in Switzerland on business.”

  Noah held me for a few minutes. He didn’t say anything and neither did I.

  “I really wanted to make you those fries to eat in the cab on the way to the airport,” I told him between sniffles. “But you’re already gonna be late as it is.”

  “I’m not going, El,” he said. “I’m staying right here.”

  “But…”

  But don’t make me expect this. Don’t do things like this that I really need, because I might start needing them.

  I burst into tears.

  “Tell me about your father, Eloise. You never talk about him. The times I’ve asked, you’ve made a joke and changed the subject and I haven’t pressed you. Tell me.”

  I shook my he
ad. “I can’t.”

  “Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

  “But it’s not okay!” I yelled. “It’s not okay to just leave your children! It’s not okay for them to grow up thinking their own father doesn’t love them. It’s not okay! He’s not dead, like my mother. He chose to leave. It’s not okay!”

  I sobbed in Noah’s arms for another five minutes. Huge wracking sobs that hadn’t come out of me since my mother died.

  “No, Eloise, it’s not okay. What is okay is for you to open up to me, to tell me things. Things that are important, like this.”

  “But—”

  He lifted my chin. “No buts, Eloise. We’re getting married. Husband and wife. Team.”

  “But it doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “Husband and wife, father and daughter—they’re just words. They don’t mean anything.”

  “The words themselves might not mean anything, Eloise, but the people do. It’s about the people. It’s about you and me.”

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

  “Tell me about your father, Eloise. Tell me what happened.”

  I leaned back against the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. What was there to tell Noah? That my father left because he couldn’t stand the smell of French toast?

  For a long time, that was what I thought. A few months after he was gone, when my mother and Emmett and I were in a diner, someone at the next table ordered French toast and I flipped out. I screamed and shook my fists and cried, according to my mother, for a half hour. I’d been inconsolable. Poor Emmett, having no idea why his sister was having the kind of tantrum he threw on a daily two-year-old basis, eyed me and stole fries off my plate.

  “When you’re ready, Eloise,” Noah said, holding my hand. “We’ve got all night.”

  I took a deep breath and began telling Noah what I knew, which wasn’t much. That my father left the day before my fifth birthday. My mother had been making French toast, my favorite food, which I wanted for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks (hey, I was five), but she ran out of bread. My father hated the smell of margarine sizzling in a pan and of eggy bread, so he told my mother he needed some fresh air and that he’d pick up more bread in the supermarket on the corner.

  There’d been three slices of bread left. My mother gave two slices of French toast to me and one to Emmett. I kept asking for more, whining, “When’s Daddy coming back?” and after a few hours, my mother gave us each a chocolate bar and disappeared into her bedroom for a little while.

  Maybe a half hour later, she came back out and said that we were going to go get the bread ourselves. I told her I wasn’t hungry anymore anyway, but she said we’d need bread for tomorrow, so we might as well go get it now. And so we did. I looked for my father up and down Lexington Avenue and in the supermarket, in the frozen-food aisle (he liked ice cream), in the cookie aisle, but I didn’t see him. My mother, brother and I went back home, and the next morning, my mother made me as much French toast as I wanted. She put a birthday candle in the stack for me to blow out, and she formed Emmett’s portion into a smiley face (he wouldn’t eat anything unless she did).

  I couldn’t remember wondering where my father was on my birthday. I must have asked and the answer must have seemed normal to me. Probably: Your father’s working. He told me to wish you a happy birthday.

  The day after that, my mother sat me on the chair by the window where she always read me a bedtime story and explained that this time, my father wasn’t coming home. He’d left a short note for her where his duffel bag—always packed and at the ready for him to leave at a moment’s notice—usually sat on the shelf in his closet.

  The note said: I won’t be coming back. Tell Eloise and Emmett I’m sorry when they’re ready to hear it.

  We were never ready to hear it.

  According to my mother, my father had always said he wasn’t the marrying kind (he never did marry my mother). He always said he wasn’t the family kind, the sticking-around-kind. “Your father loves you and always will, but you may never see him again,” she’d told me.

  And I never did. The phrase You may never see your father again, when your father wasn’t dying, was a strange concept to grasp. Because I was five, I accepted it the way you accept it when your best friend moves away. You may never see Suzy Rothberg again was a perfectly reasonable thing to say when she moved to California.

  I was also used to him being gone. For months at a time. But he always came home, bearing nothing but himself, but he came home. There were hugs and hair ruffles, and life was fine. He’d go, he’d come back, he’d go, he’d come back. That was just the way it was. But that year, the year I turned five, the way it was changed.

  We never did see Theo Manfred again—or hear from him again, not a phone call, not a birthday card. Nothing. It wasn’t the kind of thing you understood when you were five or fifteen or even thirty-two.

  I didn’t remember much. I didn’t remember waiting for him to come home or not waiting. And Emmett remembered absolutely nothing of Theo Manfred. He only knew, as a fact, that his father left when he was two and never came back. As we were growing up, when fathers were either called for or mentioned or appeared on television, my mother would ask us if we would like to talk about our father. “No!” we would both snap in unison.

  “Did you or Emmett ever try to find your father?” Noah asked.

  Emmett tried once when he was sixteen. Our mother had very recently died, and Emmett and I moved into our grandmother’s apartment just a few blocks away from our own. Emmett was a junior in high school and I was a freshman at NYU. He tried to find our father through Internet searches.

  “I want to tell that son of a bitch that our mother is dead and now we have no parents because of him,” Emmett had screamed more than once.

  There were two cold addresses in upstate New York, then the trail ended, and Emmett, one angry teenager, vowed never to think about that “bastard loser” again. He never mentioned our father after that, and I didn’t either.

  Noah let out a deep breath. “Oh, Eloise, I’m so sorry,” he said, pulling me into a hug. “That’s a lot for two kids to go through. One loss, let alone two.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m glad I told you.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m glad you’re here, Noah,” I said.

  He smiled. “Me too.”

  “What am I going to do? I’m a mess.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to ask my father why he never came back. I want to ask him why—no, how—he abandoned his own children.”

  “Then do that.”

  I shook my head. “Even if I could work up the guts, I wouldn’t know where to start looking.”

  He squeezed my hand. “You’re not marrying an investigative journalist for nothing.”

  Theodore Manfred wasn’t the most common name, but there were twenty-six Theodore Manfreds in the United States of America. That hadn’t taken an investigative journalist; it had taken a simple search on the Internet. I was glad there were so many. If there had been just one, one Theodore Manfred in, say, Queens or Westchester, I might have spontaneously combusted.

  I knew his middle name was Leo. There were four Theodore L. Manfreds. They were scattered. Ohio. Nevada. West Virginia. Pennsylvania.

  Noah handed me the phone.

  “Who am I calling?” I asked him. “Information in each state?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “My grandmother?” I repeated.

  “She has to know something about your father,” Noah said. “Where he’s from, anything that might help narrow the search.”

  “But I can’t ask her,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Try me,” Noah said.

  I shrugged.

  “You think she’ll be angry at you?”

  I nodded.

  “You think she’ll feel it’s a betrayal of your mother?” he asked.

  I
nodded again.

  “Eloise, I understand that, I really do,” Noah said. “But you might be wrong about how your grandmother feels.”

  “But she never talks about my father. She never has.”

  “Probably because he doesn’t come up in everyday conversation,” he said. “He’s not here. There’s nothing to reference.”

  “You don’t think she’ll be upset that I want to find him?” I asked.

  “Sweetheart, there’s only one way to find out. And if she is upset, you’ll get through it together.”

  Hi, Grams. You’re my only relative in the world aside from Emmett. You won’t be mad if I go searching for the man who abandoned your daughter and grandchildren without a backward glance or a penny of child support.

  Will you?

  My grandmother wrapped me in a tight hug. “Sweetheart, of course I’m not mad. I always knew this day would come.”

  “You did?”

  “Come, sit,” she said, stuffing a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie into my mouth and patting a chair at her kitchen table. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, Eloise. But I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell.”

  I picked up my coffee cup. My fingers were trembling.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, looking closely at me. “Are you sure you want to go down this road? If it’s going to upset you this much, maybe it’s not worth it. You’re getting married—you should be celebrating with that handsome fiancé of yours, not getting all upset over something you had and have no control over.”

  “I’m sort of sure,” I said.

  “Then you’re right to be asking questions.”

  I showed her the printout of Manfreds. “He could be any of these or none,” I said. “I suppose I could call each number.”

  Uh, hello, are you the Theodore Manfred who once had two children named Eloise and Emmett?

  Theodore Manfred Possibility #1: “No, sorry.”

  Theodore Manfred Possibility #2: “No, sorry.”