I shook Philippa’s hand. “Good job, kid.”
She smiled. “Let’s just hope Parker thinks so, too.”
“This is where we’re getting married?” Philippa asked as we arrived at a nondescript—ugly, really—office building in midtown. The building was sandwiched between a cell-phone store and a deli with a blinking neon OPEN 24 HOURS sign.
“If you’re even getting married, Philippa,” Astrid said, whirling around to glare at her. “In any event, I’d appreciate it if you could hold your comments until you’ve seen the space.”
Yes, ma’am, Philippa mouthed at her back.
The Wow Weddings staff and our bridal parties squeezed into a wood-paneled elevator. Astrid pressed the button marked Penthouse.
“Be optimistic,” Jane whispered to me. “You never know.”
I knew, all right. My expectations were very low.
A woman wearing crazy eyeglasses like Astrid’s was waiting for us as we exited the elevator. “Good afternoon! I’m Vanessa Gumm, founder of Fifth Avenue Fantasy. I’m so excited to show you the fantasy-wedding rooms we’ve created for the Classic Bride and the Modern Bride! Let’s begin with the Modern Bride.”
She led us down the hall to an ordinary-looking door. An index card reading MB was taped onto it.
“Modern Bride, close your eyes,” Vanessa said. “You’re about to step into your wedding-fantasy space!”
I closed my eyes and prayed.
The door opened.
My eyes opened.
My mouth opened.
The large room was four walls and a ceiling made entirely of metal panels. It looked like the inside of a paddy wagon. Dotted around the room were triangle-shaped tables and square metal seats without backs.
There wasn’t a flower to be seen.
Instead, there were feathers. Feathers galore. In giant colored-glass vases on the tables. On the walls.
Mini-Astrid beamed.
Devlin snorted.
Philippa seemed enchanted.
Jane, Amanda, Natasha and Beth stared.
“I’ll bet its termite free,” Amanda joked.
“Too bad,” I whispered, “because only termites would eat the food we’re serving at the wedding.”
“I love how the feather theme connects to the Modern Bride’s gown,” Mini-Astrid gushed.
As the Wow Weddings staff chitchatted and discussed minutiae changes with Vanessa (no one asked for my opinion, of course), and my friends glanced around with raised eyebrows, all I could think was that there were no windows.
What if I needed to make a sudden escape, say, a minute into the reading of the vows, when Noah promised to do anything till death did us part?
Could he really promise anything?
I suddenly felt claustrophobic.
“On to the Classic Bride’s space,” Astrid said, snapping her fingers.
Philippa glanced at me. “Heavy on the chintz, no doubt.”
Vanessa led us down the hall to a door marked CB. “Classic Bride, close your eyes!”
Philippa and I both closed our eyes.
When I opened mine, Philippa’s were still closed.
I nudged her in the ribs. “Philippa, it’s okay. It’s beautiful!”
It was. White gauze draped down from the ceiling, entwined with thousands of pastel roses. Round tables, covered with lacy tablecloths. Exquisite short vases with blooming roses. Candelabra.
Philippa’s eyes popped open. She glanced around, grimacing. “It looks like my mother-in-law-to-be’s living room,” she whispered. “Nice, but bor-ing. Tell you what. I’ll trade you. This grandma stuff is yours for fifty cents.”
I laughed. That I could afford.
Ah, if only.
chapter 19
While china-pattern shopping in a tiny SoHo housewares store with the Wow crowd and Grams, who smiled despite her reservations about formal dinnerware that was both gunmetal-colored and stamped with a silver, nonsensical Make Food Not War, I learned that Emmett had moved into Grams’s spare bedroom.
“Charla’s pregnant, isn’t she?” Grams whispered as Devlin’s assistant wiped off her coral lipstick and replaced it with dark red. Her quilted navy vest was exchanged for an orange leather jacket, borrowed from one of the saleswomen.
“Grandmère,” Devlin said, “please turn slightly to the left and hold the dish up just a fraction higher. Yes, that’s it. No, look at the dish, not Eloise. Yes, hold that approving gaze….”
“How do you know?” I asked her.
Grams tried her best to freeze her smile onto her face. “Charla stopped by yesterday to ask if he was there. And before I even said yes, she went racing for the bathroom. I heard her trying to throw up as quietly as possible.”
“She’s been suffering from morning sickness a lot lately,” I confirmed.
“She and Emmett talked for a bit in his room,” Grams said. “And then she left, crying.”
Oh no.
“Then Emmett left for a while, and I heard him come home very late,” Grams said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it, but I’m afraid I’ll scare him into running away again.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight,” I assured her. “Any tips?”
“This is your mother’s grandbaby,” Grams said. “That’s all he needs to know.”
My mouth dropped open. “Emmett and I have been so focused on our father and his legacy that neither of us has even thought about this baby being just as much Mom’s as Theo Manfred’s.”
Grams nodded. “This baby will be more your mother’s than your father’s. You and Emmett are your mother’s children. Not your father’s. And this baby will be hers, too.”
I grabbed Grams into a fierce hug.
“Now, that’s perfect!” Devlin said, clicking away. “That’s the money shot.”
Over beer and buffalo wings at a bar near Grams’s apartment, Emmett insisted he didn’t break up with Charla.
“I’m just figuring things out,” he said.
“Again.”
“Yes, again,” he snapped.
“And from here.”
“Yeah, from here,” he muttered.
“From a distance.”
He shook his head and dipped a wing into hot sauce. “I don’t need a lecture.”
What do you need? I wondered. “Are you going to run forever, Emmett? If a baby with the woman you love won’t keep you around, what will?”
“Who says I love Charla?” he snapped.
“I know you do.”
But I didn’t know. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. If he loved her, would he act like this?
Things aren’t black and white, Eloise….
“Even if I do,” he said. “Oh, forget it. You don’t understand me, anyway.”
“Emmett, can I tell you something?”
“You’re asking? Someone call the Daily News! No, someone call Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!”
“Hysterical,” I said. “Emmett, I was talking to Grams this afternoon. She knows Charla’s pregnant.”
“You told her?” he bellowed. “I told you that I would tell when I was ready!”
“I didn’t tell her. She figured it out yesterday.”
“Oh,” he said, taking a sip of beer.
“And she reminded me of something, Emmett. Something really important.”
“What?” he asked.
“Are your ears open? Really open?”
“Jesus, Eloise, just tell me.”
Please let this work… “I know you’re scared out of your mind about this baby. I know you’re worried that you don’t know how to do this, how to be committed to someone, how to be a husband or a father or how to risk what staying put means.”
“Oh, God, here we go again. My sister, the shrink.”
“Emmett, just listen, okay?”
He bit into a wing and stared straight ahead.
“I think you should remember that you’re Mom’s son. You’re her child. First and foremost. And this baby,
your baby, is Mom’s grandchild. Hers.”
He glanced at me. “And?”
“And I think you’re focusing too much on who your father is instead of who your mother was.”
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I realized how guilty I was of that very thing.
He was silent for a moment.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he said. “I think I have sympathy morning sickness.”
I was surprised. “You know about sympathy morning sickness?”
“Charla gave me a book for first-time fathers.”
I smiled and squeezed his hand. “If you feel sick, Emmett, it’s because this is life-changing stuff you’re dealing with. It’s understandable.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to deal with it,” he said. “Maybe I just want something else.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like my freedom. I’m only twenty-nine years old. Maybe I want to travel or write a screenplay or join the army. Maybe I want to see Tibet.”
“Tibet’s your best bet,” I said. “I doubt monks have cell phones or Internet access. You’d be really unreachable in a monastery, Emmett. Is that what you want to be for this baby—unreachable?”
You can’t do to this kid what our father did to us. What Charla’s did to her. You can’t.
“I don’t need this crap,” he said and walked out.
In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it was déjà vu all over again.
On Saturday morning, I left a message for Emmett with my grandmother that Charla and I were leaving for Pennsylvania at 9:00 a.m. sharp.
He pounded on my door at a minute to nine. “Why is Charla coming? What does she have to do with this?”
“Theo Manfred is her baby’s biological grandfather,” I said. “That’s what she has to do with it.”
“And Eloise is my baby’s aunt,” Charla added. “I’m supporting her. I’ve been down the road she’s going.”
“Shit,” he muttered.
I cupped my hand around my ear. “What was that, Emmett? I don’t think the baby heard you.”
“I really don’t need this crap,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” Charla said as we walked around the corner to the car-rental agency.
Glummer than ever, Emmett got in the car, another Chevy. “I’m only going with you so that when we find him, I can punch him out.”
I put the key in the ignition. “So you’ve said.”
“Wendy,” Charla said, putting on her seat belt.
“What?” I asked her.
“Wendy. Girls’ names that start with W.”
“Winona,” I said.
“Wanda,” Emmett muttered, and we were on our way.
A hundred wrong turns and two nonexistent addresses later, including the Scranton newspaper that had gone out of business six years ago, we arrived at a gas station where Theo Manfred had pumped gas and painted landscapes—as of five months ago.
It was the closest we’d come to him.
“That’s his easel,” the manager said. “He just up and quit one day. Never came back, but he left the easel. Guess he felt guilty for not giving me notice. I’m not much of a painter, though.”
“Do you happen to have his last known address?” Charla asked.
“I should,” the man replied. “Let me check my Rolodex.”
“That’s okay,” Emmett said. “We don’t need it.”
Charla touched his arm. “Emmett, we’ve come all this way….”
He released his seat belt. “Fine, you guys go. I’ll hitch a ride home.”
“Emmett,” Charla said. “What are you so afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I just don’t see the point of finding him. What are we going to do when we meet him—make small talk? Ask him how he’s been for the last twenty-seven years?”
“The point is to make some kind of peace with something that happened to you,” Charla said.
Emmett rolled his eyes. “I just want to get the hell away from here. I want to go home.” But he didn’t get out of the car. He burst into tears and covered his face with his hands. And then he put his hands around Charla’s face. “I love you. I really do.”
“I know, Emmett,” she said, pulling him to her. “I’ve always known that.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a loser,” he said. He put his hand on her belly. “I won’t let you down again.”
Now it was Charla’s and my turn to start bawling.
The gas station manager rapped on my window. I rolled it down. “Do you want the address or not?”
I glanced at Emmett.
He nodded.
Four minutes later, we were there. 452 Lummox Road was the last house on the right of a dead-end street with no sidewalks. The house, like the ones beside it, was ramshackle, in need of paint and a handyman. There was a mailbox out front with two names spelled with black stickers. Green and Manfred.
I put the car in park and turned off the ignition, but neither I nor Emmett moved a muscle. For a half hour.
A woman came out of the front door wearing a puffy down coat like Charla’s. She was fiftyish and pretty, with sandy-blond hair. She stood on the step for a moment eyeing the car, then came over.
She rapped on Emmett’s window, and he looked at me, then lowered it. “If you’re casing the place, I’ll tell you right now, the most valuable thing I own is a nineteen-inch TV set and a bottle of red wine that I won at a Christmas-party raffle. So if you’re gonna come take it, come. But stop freaking me out by sitting out here.”
“We’re not burglars,” Charla assured her.
“Does a Theo Manfred live here?” I asked her, gesturing at the mailbox.
“Past tense, hon,” the woman said. “He lived here with me for seven months, then split a little over a month ago for Florida to go into some stupid shrimp business with a buddy.”
I glanced past her at the house where my father had lived, slept, eaten, breathed, drunk beer or done whatever he did, as of a month ago. I tried to connect him to me and couldn’t. The man who’d lived here, whose name was still on the mailbox, whose name my brother and I—and his and Charla’s baby—had, wasn’t my father; he was just a man who’d had a relationship with my mother, biologically helped produce two children, and then decided that particular life with those particular people weren’t making him happy. And so he left.
That wasn’t a father.
His leaving had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with Emmett and, I was sure, nothing to do with my mother. It had everything to do with Theo Manfred and whoever he was. And whoever he was, he’d missed out on a lot. He’d gotten exactly what he deserved.
“How do you all know him?” the woman asked. “Work?”
I shook my head. “We met him when he was traveling.”
She nodded. “Yup, he’s sure good at that.”
“Well, if you’re headed South, you’ll find him in—” She stopped, tapping her finger against her forehead. “Huh. I can never remember the name of the town. It’s on the tip of my tongue,” she said. “If you give me a minute, I’ll think of it.”
Emmett and I looked at each other.
“That’s okay,” I said. “We don’t need to know.”
“You’re sure?” Emmett asked me.
I nodded. “Dead sure.”
“Suit yourselves,” the woman said, and headed back inside the house.
I turned the car around and drove about a quarter mile or so, then pulled over near the highway. My legs were shaking.
I glanced in the rearview mirror at Emmett. “We don’t need to actually find him,” I said. “I never realized that.”
Emmett nodded. “I think the answers were in the looking, if that makes any sense.”
I turned around and reached out my hand to him. After a few seconds, he took my hand and held it.
New York City, 14 miles. I peered at Emmett and Charla in the rearview mirror. She was asleep. Emmett was looking out the wind
ow, his hand on her belly.
I came home to an empty apartment, but evidence of Noah was everywhere. Not just tangible evidence, either. He was with me. He was home.
If you need me, just call.
I picked up the phone and dialed his cell phone. Noah picked up immediately. “Is everything okay? Is something wrong? Did you find him?”
“Everything’s okay,” I said. “We didn’t find him. We decided we found what we needed along the way.”
“I’m coming home tonight,” he said. “I’ll make you my best lasagna.”
“Can’t wait.”
chapter 20
On Monday morning at 8:59, Philippa burst into Astrid’s office and announced that the wedding was on.
The entire office clapped.
Philippa’s fake family was pretending to be skipping along a path in Central Park. The models stood in front of the summer-day backdrop, kicking up their feet and throwing back their heads in delight.
“Can you try to cry a few tears of joy, Mom?” Devlin said to the fake Mrs. Wills. “And, Dad, a little more pride in your expression.” Fake Mr. Wills puffed out his chest and gazed at Philippa as though she’d just won the Miss America pageant.
Philippa held up her hands. Devlin put down his camera. “Classic Bride, can you get your hands out of the frame?”
“I can’t do it,” Philippa said.
“You can’t do what, Philippa?” Astrid asked, examining her nails.
“I can’t do this, any of it! I won’t have a fake family!”
“What is she talking about?” Astrid said, throwing up her own hands. “Will someone tell me what she’s talking about?”
“I hired fakes,” Philippa shouted. “They’re not my family. They’re just stand-ins!”
Astrid waved Devlin back over. “Philippa, I don’t care who’s in the photos as long as they look remotely like you and have a Classic appeal.”
“Well, I do care who’s in the photos!” Philippa yelped.
The studio door opened and three people came inside, a fiftyish couple and a twenty-something guy who also looked a lot like Philippa.
Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Page 19
