Love, Greater Than Infinity (Book 1: New Adult Romance)

by Avondale, Cora

  Chapter Six

  A keeper may not hinder his assignment’s Free Will

  The wedding was held in Scotts Manor, a mansion half the size of a football field, formerly owned by one of Chicago’s original stockyards founders, Preston Thurston Scotts. It was an enormous Victorian estate in the heart of Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast with the finest rococo furnishings of the era: elaborate oak stairways and newel posts, mirrored walnut hallstands, Tiffany chandeliers, stained glass windows, and hand carved sideboards the size of altars. But it was the lavish Scotts Ballroom that was the most impressive. It was an oval of gleaming cherry floor space—two hundred feet in diameter—canopied by an opulent dome, its vaulted ceiling adorned with mosaic tile and Venetian glass and constructed with perfect acoustics, allowing its guests to stand at the ballroom entrance, whisper up its arched walls, and be heard on the opposite side near the grand fireplace. Preston Thurston Scotts was the only nineteenth-century Midwestern baron to build a ballroom in the center of his home that could entertain four-hundred guests, plus a full concert orchestra.

  Three years after that fateful first date, Gracie Harris could hardly believe she was there, in the Preston Thurston Scotts mansion, preparing for her wedding day, especially considering Gracie wasn’t a spoiled, Lincoln Park trixie whose daddy was vice-president of Marshall Fields and whose mother accompanied her to a chic salon for their weekly manicure and Swiss vanilla spa massage. This wedding was compliments of Gracie’s soon-to-be father-in-law, “Puffy” Pete Ellington, owner and founder of Puffy Pete’s Pastries, the national chain of oversized croissants and donuts. Puffy made the rounds to his business colleagues in the ballroom, just before the wedding ceremony; it was obvious he was the kind of guy who could make millions off the mass-production of Boston-cream donuts the size of a basketball, and not think twice about the meaning of life beyond jumbo jellies or foot-long éclairs. Puff insisted the wedding reception should be held in Thurston’s banquet hall to ensure that his three hundred guests would have their Beluga caviar served properly on mother-of-pearl china, complemented by two hundred dollar bottles of wine, hand-picked by the Master Sommelier, and followed by savory entrees of beef Wellington and roasted rabbit, served on first edition custom-designed wedding china and accompanied with fourteen-carat gold knives and forks.

  If Gracie could have her way, her ideal wedding would be a sloppy drunken affair with finger-licking good food and a live swing band. While most women fantasized about having a fairytale princess wedding, Gracie fantasized about getting married on Halloween, and requiring her guests to dress up in costume—a sea of Cleopatras, and cowboys, and Martians standing before Gracie, all dolled up as the Bride of Frankenstein, and watched her walk herself down the aisle.

  “Don’t take yourself so seriously,” her dad used to say, observing Gracie as she spent hours in the bathroom adjusting her pre-teen hair, and fretting over which outfit to wear to school. His death made those words echo in her head every day, and she remembered them now. Gracie wanted her wedding to simply be a good party rather than a bridal beauty pageant for the entertaining pleasure of three hundred of Puffy’s guests. Gracie knew that her future father-in-law would probably prefer if she tripped down the aisle and broke her leg, if it meant indefinitely postponing the marriage to his son. It was no secret that Puffy Ellington was embarrassed that Luke’s bride came from a penniless, fatherless family. In Puffy’s mind, his only son and heir to the Puffy Pete’s Pastries Dynasty was too good for the likes of Gracie Harris.

  “So what does that little orphan girl of yours expect to accomplish with an English major?” he would ask Luke over Sunday dinner. Mr. Ellington loved to refer to Gracie as “the little orphan girl” even though he had met Gracie’s mother several times during the wedding preparations. Gracie’s father was dead, which according to Puffy, was enough to make Gracie an orphan. It was also a way to justify Luke’s intentions to marry her, as if his son’s selection of a bride was charity work—a way of contributing to a “good cause.”

  “Why does he have to marry the girl, Mags?” Puffy complained to his wife. “Why can’t he just write out a blank check to her favorite not-for-profit?” Puffy’s wife, Mags Ellington, always agreed with her husband with a passive nod of the head. She was a tired, dispassionate woman, aged beyond her fifty-five years, who sucked down blood orange mimosas in the morning, played tennis in the afternoon, and indulged in lazy naps in-between. Her imperfect make-up and reluctant smile betrayed a disengaged housewife who had long since accepted her husband’s infidelity. If you looked at Mrs. Ellington long enough, you could discern a bleeding, faded watercolor version of a younger, happier woman—an attractive socialite with gracious manners and reserved vibrancy buried deep below the alcoholism and depression.

  Puffy threw his eyes to the ceiling and calculated the cost of every item related to the wedding: the banquet hall, the orchids, the hors d'oeuvres, the six-foot-tall Puffy Pete’s wedding cake, antique lace tablecloths and napkins, the professional photographers, the Beluga caviar, the Austrian crystal goblets, the bride and groom ice sculpture. The only thing that Puffy wasn’t paying for was the bride.

  “She should have to pay for something, Mags,” he belabored the point to his wife. “After all, if we pick up the tab on everything, she’ll think we’re doing it out of pity.”

  “Aren’t we doing it out of pity?” Mags questioned her husband.

  “Of course, we are. But when poor people start realizing you pity them—it’s all over. They know they’ve got you by the balls. Next thing you know, we’ll be paying to have her teeth fixed.

  “Really?” Mags responded as if she was just entering the room. “I thought her smile was fine.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. For heavens sakes, Mags, it’s just one example. Next week, she’ll want straighter teeth, next month she’ll want a new car, and after that, we’ll be buying them a house in Highland Park,” he said as exasperated spittle soared from his lips. “Why couldn’t Luke just have married Isabella Davenport from down the street?”

  “Because she’s a royal little bitch,” Mags slurred into her martini.

  “Even so, her father is the president of Wilmette Bank. We’d have a financial partner for the new business launch of Puffy Pete’s Doggie Treats.”

  Mags didn’t bother to respond. It wasn’t that she liked Gracie. She didn’t. But she didn’t despise her either, and even though most of her days were filled with inebriated indifference to everything and everyone around her, Mags Ellington knew when she despised someone.

  Gracie knew that Luke’s parents were less than impressed with his choice in a wife.

  “Your parents don’t really like me,” Gracie said to Luke, one night over dinner.

  “My parents don’t like anyone, including each other.”

  Gracie was looking for assurance, not confirmation that her future in-laws were horrible people. Luke saw the disappointment in Gracie’s face.

  “C’mon, now. Don’t get upset. I’m their only son, and they barely like me.”

  “That’s not true. I’ve seen you with your Dad. He’s very proud of you.”

  “Yeah, that was only after I graduated from business school.”

  Gracie considered the fact that Luke’s parents were the kind of people who would never accept her. “I don’t want to marry into a family that doesn’t want me around.”

  “Since when do you care about what anyone thinks of you?”

  “I don’t. I’m just saying that I don’t want them to think less of me either.”

  “Gracie, my father made his fortune by selling Godzilla-sized donuts. You’re giving the man more credit than he deserves.”

  “But it matters to them that I don’t come from money.”

  “And it matters to me that they get over it.”

  Luke’s brash rub-it-in-their-face rebellion against his parents made Gracie uncomfortable, but it was Luke’s contempt for his own wealth that fueled Gracie’s mixed feelings abou
t her decision to say “yes” to marry him. Luke Ellington had lived his life as if there were no consequences that money couldn’t solve, blowing cash and charging credit cards like a scorned wife on a shopping rampage to get even with her cheating husband. He was spiteful of his father’s fortune, even though it afforded him unlimited freedom. And when it came to average living expenses, Luke Ellington didn’t have the first clue about money.

  “You should quit your waitressing job,” Luke said to Gracie, a month before his graduation from business school. “We’ll be married by the end of the summer. Why do you still need to work weekends?”

  “Because being an administrative assistant doesn’t pay enough to pay my bills.”

  “I’ll pay them for you if it means you’ll spend more time with me.”

  “I don’t want you to pay my bills. I’m not marrying you for your money.”

  “But you’re not going to work as a secretary forever. You’ll find a new job after the wedding, anyway.”

  “Administrative assistant,” Gracie corrected him. “And maybe, maybe not. The only thing I care about right now is finishing my novel.”

  “Well, you can’t work at O’Connell’s your whole life. O’Connell’s is the kind of job you have while you’re in college, not years after college.”

  “But I like working there.” Gracie had worked at O’Connell’s almost her entire adult life. They had become family to her: Pete, Bebe, Stella, even Mitch, the bartender.

  “You hate working there. You complain all the time about all the drunken assholes who harass you.”

  “You were one of those drunken assholes, and look where it got me.”

  “Okay, okay, Sassy. Forget it. Work at O’Connell’s the rest of your life. I’m just saying you don’t have to. You’re marrying into money.”

  It was the kind of comment that made Gracie uneasy. Although Luke acted like he didn’t need his father’s approval or his money, he certainly was comfortable spending it. After three years of business school, Luke still had no idea what kind of career he wanted to pursue, and in the meantime, he covered every personal expense—clothes, shoes, computers, stereos, CDs, furniture, fancy dinners, Gracie’s jewelry—with a trust fund account that his father automatically funded once a month with the profits from Puffy Pete’s Pastries. Luke had never worked a day in his life, and he was already a millionaire. Maybe Puffy’s incomprehension that his son really wanted to marry a penniless, fatherless girl wasn’t so hard to believe after all. Maybe marrying Gracie was Luke Ellington’s a revolt against Daddy’s Donut Dynasty without actually having to give up the luxury sports car or Gold Coast graduation penthouse. Meanwhile, Luke charmed Gracie with his carefree attitude and spontaneous freedom, and although she worried about marrying someone as wealthy as Luke Ellington, deep down, she loved his insistence that she deserved a better life—a life without incessant hardship and heartache, a happier life than the one that Destiny had assigned her for the past decade.

  * * * *

  “I deserve to be happy, too.” Gracie said to herself in the full-length mirror.

  She was in the master bedroom of the mansion, admiring her wedding gown. The Ellington’s querulous wedding planner, Gustave Delacroix, who pretended to be from Paris rather than Quebec, had set up all the bridal boutique appointments and tagged along with Gracie and Mrs. Harris while they shopped for her wedding gown. But Gracie refused to wear anything that whipped around her body and puffed outwards like a coconut cream pie. Gustave folded his hand over his neck scarf and cooed with delight every time Gracie was fitted with a frilly snowflake winter-wonderland Barbie doll ball gown. Avalanches of chiffon cascaded down their umbrella skirts or bunched up in the back like snow moguls. Gracie looked like she was being eaten alive by a frosty white blob.

  The next time Gracie went shopping for a wedding dress, she uninvited Gustave, the garish Quebecois, from accompanying her and her mother. It was Gracie’s only act of dissidence during the whole wedding. With stealth and sedition, Gracie and her mother evaded Gustave’s nuptial radar, and went shopping to consignment shops. There, she discovered an eye-catching eggshell bridal dress at a vintage store in Lincoln Square. The simple A-line skirt poured down into creamy silk, and its underside was lined with a shimmering sheen of camisole pink. Lustrous satiny folds gathered in the back, and formed a seashell sash with swirls of bone and blush fabric undulating into a modest train. Its floor-length hem was trimmed with gossamer lace, and the bodice was a sparkling hand-beaded corset. Gracie charged the three-thousand dollar dress to her credit card—the most expensive thing she’d ever bought for herself in her entire life—and agreed to let her mother pay for the matching four-hundred dollar veil, an ivory triangle of gauze that secured into her hair with a sterling silver antique comb and draped along her neck and bare shoulders. When Gustave found out Gracie had bought the dress without his approval, he turned up his nose and simply said, “Zit will never go with zeh orchids.”

  Now, standing before the full-length mirror, just moments before her wedding, Gracie felt certain that it was the best three-thousand dollars she had ever spent. Her china doll skin glistened iridescent with body glitter that she had applied across her exposed neck, shoulders, and arms. Her strawberry brown hair, feathered back into a French braid, augmented the sherry highlights in her champagne dress. Teddy did nothing except admire her image in the mirror. She was a gorgeous, scintillating moonbeam of perfection. She glowed with the purity of an angel and her veil draped down her head like the rays of a halo. Teddy couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  There was a knock at the door. Her mother opened it, and entered Gracie’s room. “Are you ready, honey?”

  Mrs. Harris approached Gracie and gazed at their complementary reflections. Gracie got her henna hair, fair skin, and slender frame from her mother, and her green eyes, sharp tongue, and endearing goofiness from her dad.

  “You look gorgeous. Your father would be so—” but Mrs. Harris stopped herself. They had made a pack long ago not to bring up ghosts on happy occasions. They both were thinking about him in their own separate ways. Gracie looked down at the antique sapphire ring her dad had bought for her sixteenth birthday, a month before the accident. On her left hand, she wore her engagement ring, a gaudy over-sized five-carat solitaire diamond with an ornate band of mustard gold that Luke unveiled while they were spending spring break at his father’s ski lodge in Aspen. It was a modern monstrosity that sat perched on her hand like an awkward hunk of prismatic ice—the kind of ring that could double as a weapon. Gracie preferred the simplicity of her dad’s sapphire ring to the extravagance of her engagement ring, but she didn’t have the heart not to wear it, nor did she know which was worse: flashing a thirty thousand dollar diamond ring on her finger or keeping it shut up in her dresser drawer.

  “I’m so happy for you, honey.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “The guests are all seated in the ballroom, and the bridesmaids are all ready and waiting in the foyer. Are you ready to go down?”

  Gracie nodded, but there was hesitation in her eyes and heaviness in her heart. Teddy sensed it, too. Gracie wanted to tell her mom that she was having doubts about marrying Luke, but she didn’t know what kind of doubts they were or why she was having them.

  Gracie and her mother descended the mansion’s grand staircase and into the mahogany foyer where a flurry of bridesmaids swarmed about them. They all fluttered like fairies in their cotton candy pink princess gowns, compliments of garish Gustave. One night, over dinner, Gracie had told Luke she wanted her bridesmaids to simply wear black dresses.

  “Every girl’s got a black dress,” Gracie told him. “That way, no one has to waste money buying some stupid dress that they’ll never wear again in their lives.”

  Luke laughed so loud he almost spit his soup through his nose. It was so funny, Luke thought, when Gracie’s frugality made her have such ridiculous suggestions.

  “My cousins have never worn the same dress twice
in their lives.”

  Gracie’s forehead furrowed with humiliation. Teddy considered dumping Luke’s soup right into his lap. The soup was hot and his crotch was a deserving target.

  “Oh, don’t pout like that,” Luke consoled her. “Come on, Sassy. I’m only kidding. You know how much I love it when you worry about money. You always have the craziest ideas, like taking leftovers home from a restaurant, or buying other people’s junk after they’ve strewn it around on their lawns.”

  “They’re called garage sales. And I like scouting out garage sales. It’s fun never knowing what you might find. The hope of rescuing something wonderful that someone else wants to throw away.”

  “I say, let them throw it away. That’s what Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdales are for. You do know what Bloomingdales is, right?”

  Gracie glared at Luke, and threw her napkin in his face. Teddy eyed his soup.

  “I shop at malls like everyone else,” protested Gracie. “I bought this blouse from the mall last week.”

  “Outlet malls aren’t real malls,” interjected Luke, but Gracie turned away in her seat and crossed her arms.

  “Please, don’t put on that face. It kills me. You know it does.” Luke snaked his arms around her waist and snuggled his nose into the crook of her neck, forcing a reluctant giggle from her. “All I’m saying is that you’ll be an Ellington in a few months. One of the luxuries is not having to worry so much about money all the time.”

  “I don’t worry about money all of the time,” Gracie grumbled. “Just some of the time.”

  Luke laughed. “Come here. You’re too cute. It hurts.”

  They kissed, long and hard. Then Luke pulled her away from the dinner table and into their bedroom. That’s when Teddy left the house, went down to the old Esquire Theatre and watched a double header of Dirty Harry.