Cancel the Wedding

by Carolyn T. Dingman

  “Fine.”

  I rested my chin on my hands. “Where. Is. The waiter?”

  Logan looked around and then motioned with her thumb over her shoulder toward a man who had just appeared from the back of the shop. He had stopped to chat with the man behind the counter. The newcomer had a dish towel slung over his shoulder. His hair was a bit wavy and he kept raking his hand through it, trying to make it behave and stay out of his eyes.

  He was wiping the towel over the counter as the two men laughed about some shared story, then his eyes swept the room. When they landed on me, they stopped. Because I had been caught in the act of staring at him, rather blatantly. I did a tiny wave and smiled, implying that we were ready to order.

  He seemed a little confused. He glanced behind him to see if there was someone else there that I could have been waving to. When he didn’t see anyone he looked back at me and smiled as he approached the table. “Can I help you with something?”

  “We were just, um, ready to order. I mean if you’re ready.” I glanced at Logan, hoping she’d jump in quickly.

  Logan smiled up at the waiter. “Sorry, my aunt needs coffee, like now. She’s hung way over.”

  “Logan!”

  She shrugged.

  I pretended to laugh. “Ha, kids. So funny.” The waiter still seemed a bit confused as I told him what we wanted. At one point he grabbed a pen from another table and wrote our order down on the palm of his hand. I guess we were all having a rough morning.

  The waiter looked at me and said, “It’s weird. I almost always have a notepad on me.”

  Well sure, I thought. You’re a waiter.

  He held his hand up, confirming our order that was written on it. “I’m Elliott by the way.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Elliott.”

  In no time he was back with our food and a whole carafe of coffee. I couldn’t quite soak my entire body in it fast enough.

  He said, “You can pay Jimmy at the counter when you’re finished.”

  Elliott waved to Jimmy behind the counter, who was laughing at our exchange for some reason. I watched as Elliott walked out the front door and made his way across the square.

  While my head was turned Logan stole the bacon off my plate. As she stuffed it in her mouth I said, “Really?”

  “What?”

  “I thought you weren’t eating meat.”

  She looked at me like I was a crazy person. “Well, yeah, but I didn’t mean bacon.”

  The food was helping to wake me up and so was the coffee. When I went to pay the check I asked if I should leave the tip on the table for the waiter or leave it with Jimmy-behind-the-counter. Jimmy seemed like the kind of guy who would never snake your tips.

  He shook his head. “No, we don’t have a waiter. You’re supposed to just order at the counter.”

  I was confused. I looked back at our table as if it would explain the phantom waiter to Jimmy.

  “But I thought—” I held my hands up in obvious confusion.

  “Nah, Eli was just here for breakfast. He was probably trying to be helpful since you didn’t seem to know any better.” Jimmy shrugged. “Didn’t want to embarrass you.”

  Oh great, so I had accosted some poor customer and demanded that he take our order and wait on us. Mission not accomplished. I was embarrassed.

  Logan and I made it safely outside before she started laughing at me. “You’re such a dork, Livie.”

  “You’re the one who made me think he was the waiter.” I made a conscious decision to change the subject. “What should we do today?” The slightly cooler temperatures of the morning were long gone and the day was heating up. I asked, “Research? Go by the cemetery? Visit the lake?”

  Logan looked around. “I don’t get it. How come Grandma never talked about her childhood? This town is totally cute.” We were walking along the sidewalk looking out over the green lawn of the town square. There were booths for a farmers’ market set up on one side and some kids playing soccer on the other. It was, in fact, very cute.

  “I don’t know. Hopefully we can find out. I was thinking we could go to the library and the local paper. See what they have in their archives.”

  “It’s too nice today to be stuck inside.”

  “Good point.” We weren’t planning to scatter her ashes until Georgia could fly down, but we had a lot of information gathering to do before then.

  And this was the crux of our adventure. Research. Long hours at a library table reading through years and years of old newspaper articles until your eyes were seeing double. Leafing through countless legal documents until you stumbled on something that actually told you more of the story. Digging up old maps and plats and deeds to track the location of homes and property. I loved the idea of trudging through all of that. But I was absolutely not up for any of it today.

  We began walking back toward the inn. “So that leaves us with the cemetery or the lake.”

  “Do you think it’s her parents’ grave that she wants to be left on?” She asked me without looking up from the screen of her cell phone as she typed.

  “Probably.” I didn’t really know. But who else would it be? “Who are you texting?”

  “My mom. I’m telling her how you’re ordering random townsfolk around to do your bidding.”

  I snatched the phone away from her and threw it in my purse. I was putting her in cell phone time-out. She was not allowed to make fun of me via electronic media.

  That same boy from the night before was standing at the valet stand in front of the inn in his oversized maroon jacket with the James Oglethorpe Inn logo embroidered on the pocket. He was waiting for a car to park or a person in need of an open door. He seemed pleased to see us. That’s when I realized why Logan had spent so much time on her hair.

  “Morning, ma’am.” I wished they’d all stop calling me ma’am. It made me feel very old.

  “Good morning.”

  He asked if we were planning to spend the day shopping. I glanced around at the few stores in the square. They were admittedly adorable but it didn’t really feel like a shopping Mecca.

  I said that we might shop later but asked him if he could tell me where the cemetery was. Apparently it was a quick drive and just outside of town. And the lake was even closer as the town actually sat on it. But to reach the marina, you had to drive through thirty minutes of winding back roads to get to the other side of the lake.

  I wasn’t thrilled about the winding roads to the marina, but I decided on the lake instead of a visit to the cemetery. It sounded like a good way for us to spend the day.

  I asked, “Would you mind drawing me a map to the marina then? We just want to spend some time on the lake today.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to rent a boat or anything you don’t need to go all the way to the marina. You’re welcome to just use our dock. We have a path straight down to the water and a floating dock on the lake. It’s only three blocks away. It’s on a nice quiet cove for swimming.”

  The inn should have mentioned in their materials that they have a waterfront dock. I had no idea the lake was within walking distance. The valet boy’s name was Graham, and he gave us directions to the path down to the lake. He seemed to be a sweet kid who was clearly trying to get Logan’s attention. In the few minutes we stood there talking to him he had managed to share with us that he was going to be a junior in the fall, he dropped hints about his football and baseball prowess, and then mentioned that he was hoping to go to Johns Hopkins for college.

  Logan and I went to our room to gather our bathing suits and some gear for a nice day on the lake. And then I waited while Logan reapplied her makeup.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Why are you putting on eyeliner to go swimming?”

  She was ignoring me. “Graham seems really nice. He’s totally cute. Didn’t you think he was cute?”

  Well played, Graham, your plan is working. I sort of missed the days when it was just tha
t easy.

  THREE

  Logan and I walked down the ancient broken sidewalk in the direction of the lake. There were a few old oak trees whose roots had jumped the man-made confines and were spilling out over the edges of the concrete. The little bungalows on both sides of the street were well kept. There were a lot of additions, new roofs, and new second stories. There were flowers in bloom everywhere making the entire block look like an ad out of a real estate brochure. In the distance to the west you could see the blue tinge of the mountain range. The Appalachians were old and gentle mountains. Worn down through time in a way that was emphasized by their blue mist.

  The directions Graham had given us led down a pathway between two houses and across a wide back lawn. I felt like a kid cutting across the neighbor’s yard. They probably got a lot of traffic through there from guests of the inn but you’d never know it to look at the grass. It was lush and thick and meticulously edged. A gravel path, lined on both sides with rough-cut granite stones, took us through the stand of trees. Then after climbing down a small flight of wooden steps we were on the banks of Lake Huntley.

  It was a calm, clear lake. The ragged edges I had seen on the map made more sense down here on the water. The landscape was hilly and rugged with the water filling in the low spots. It looked as if the rains had come one day filling up the basin in the valley and allowing the water to slowly climb up the mountains. The endless fingers snaking off the main body of the lake made up these coves. There was a shadow on this side of the lake, cast from the rise on the opposite bank.

  Looking across the lake there were several islands jutting up out of the water here and there. Each one had blue-green water lapping up to a thin strip of red Georgia clay, which was then topped by a mass of green trees, mostly pine and bald cypress.

  We walked out onto the floating dock and sat in some of the old Adirondack chairs facing the water. The surface was alive with skimming water bugs and swooping dragonflies. The sound of birds singing was everywhere.

  This particular narrow cove in the lake had houses backing up to the water on both sides. All of them had some form of stairway down to the water. Some were wooden, some were made of very elaborate stonework, and some were just crude steps cut into the hillside. At the base of each stair was a dock. There were simple floating platforms like this one and then there were gargantuan two-story boat garages, floating deck mansions on the water to pull your boat into and tuck it in for the night. Those deck mansions were topped with covered decks and outfitted with teak seating groups and custom bars. One of them had a hot tub on one side of the top deck and a diving board off the other.

  I said, “This is beautiful.” Well, the hot tub was a little tacky, but the lake and trees and rocky outcroppings were lovely. A slight breeze was coming off the water, cooling us considerably, and with it came the faintest sound of a song from a distant radio. I couldn’t quite make it out.

  The sun had risen high enough in the sky to peek over the opposite ridge and bathe us in light. We both sat with our eyes closed and our heads back, soaking it in.

  I said, “You know those houses we walked past are probably from the nineteen thirties or forties originally. They would’ve been here when my mom was here.” I was trying to picture my mother as a young girl walking around the town.

  “Where do you think her house was?” Logan asked without opening her eyes.

  I shrugged. “Maybe we can find out when we hit the library.”

  There had been a fire in my mother’s childhood home when she was in her twenties. The house and all of its contents burned to the ground one night. This event explained the lack of physical mementos from her childhood, but the lack of stories from her was something we had just had to get used to. Mom never talked about her childhood and after a while we stopped asking.

  Logan was putting sunscreen on her face. “In a town this small there must have been a bunch of stories about the fire.”

  “You’re right.” She looked pleased. “We’ll try that,” I said. “And old property deeds. I’m not really sure. Hopefully the librarian will be good at research and willing to help us out.”

  “It’s weird being here, you know?” Logan shielded her eyes and stared out at the lake. “Grandma hated the water.”

  “What? I never thought she hated it. She just never, I don’t know, had an interest in it.”

  “She told me she hated it.”

  Sometimes I forgot how close Logan and Mom were. “Really? What did she say?”

  Logan remembered a story of the two of them having lunch discussing her summer plans. Logan was trying to choose between a landlocked summer camp and one on a lake in Upstate New York. My mother gave Logan a glimpse, as she did on occasion, of someone we never knew, of the person she had been before she became our mother. She said that there was nothing quite like being on the water. The way it made the dirt smell in the evenings, the way the fog drifted over it on fall mornings, the way the dragonflies hovered over it at sunset in the summer. There was a time, she said, when she didn’t feel alive if she didn’t dip her toes in every day. “But then Grandma said I should always stay landlocked because nothing can break your heart the way water can.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? That doesn’t even make sense. How can water break your heart? And then why would she want to be buried in the lake?”

  Logan threw her hands up, exasperated with my ignorance. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s totally weird.”

  We sat there for a long time with our eyes closed, telling each other stories about my mom. Awful things she used to cook. Funny things she used to say. I felt like I needed to tell Logan everything I knew about Mom so that the spirit of Jane Rutledge Hughes could go on living. And there were a lot of stories to tell.

  When someone did or said something particularly stupid, instead of arguing back my mom would shake her head very slowly and say, “Bless her heart.” As if it wasn’t worth getting upset over, clearly God had made that person stupid and all you could do for the ignorant was feel pity and pray for a jump in their IQ. I think that phrase might have meant something else to other people, but my mother had adopted it to mean “dumbass.”

  The horrific meals she used to cook that always had cream of something soup as a major component. That woman had not grown up learning the finer art of cooking. Maybe that was a byproduct of losing her mother at such an early age; she was no more than ten when her mother had died. But then who cooked for her and her father? So many questions.

  “Hey Lo, who’ll be the manners gestapo now?”

  Logan laughed. “You know my thank-you note after Christmas was late one year so she wrote out the whole thing for me and left it taped to my door. She was all, ‘Dear Grandmother, I am absolutely appalled by my lack of courtesy in writing to thank you for my lovely monogrammed stationery.’”

  I had always thought of her quirky mannerisms as old-fashioned. Now I was starting to wonder if they weren’t just a product of this small town. I had been getting “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” since we drove in. She was at the heart, after all, a small-town girl. I just had to figure out why she decided to hide it from us.

  The sound of very loud footfalls on the wooden staircase behind us startled me. I turned around to see Elliott, the nonwaiter from breakfast, making his way toward us. He was carrying a fishing pole. A surprised sort of smile edged across his face as he spotted us on the dock. I could tell he hadn’t expected to see us here.

  Well, this was embarrassing. I leaned into Logan. “We’re being stalked by Opie Taylor.”

  Logan looked at me. “Who’s Opie Taylor?” Then she turned in the direction I was facing and saw Elliott. She waved. Ugh! Don’t wave at him. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to see that guy again after the stunt I pulled at breakfast. Logan lowered her sunglasses. “He’s super cute, Livie.”

  “I think he’s a little old for you, Lo.”

  Logan was whispering now so that Elliott couldn’t hear her as he reac
hed the bottom of the stairs. “Gross! Not for me. He’s so old. He’s like your age.”

  “Nice, thanks.” I stood up to greet our random visitor.

  “Well, hey ladies. What are you doing here?” Elliott said.

  “Us? We’re just—what are you doing here?” I blurted out. “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t a waiter?”

  He winced or laughed I wasn’t sure. “Sorry. I was just trying to help out. Jimmy’s shop can be so confusing.” He said it with a fair amount of sarcasm. “And you looked a little bit like you might drop dead without a quick injection of coffee.” He winked at Logan and she laughed at me.

  Great, now they were in cahoots with the whole “Olivia’s an idiot” thing. As if Logan didn’t already think everyone over the age of twenty-five was a moron. I said, “It wasn’t . . . You should have said something. I felt awful. I didn’t mean to make you serve us.”

  He stepped out on the floating dock, making it wobble a bit. “It was no problem.”

  Elliott came over and sat in the chair right next to me. It felt a tad too familiar, him sitting so close.

  I asked again, “So what are you doing here?”

  He held up the fishing rod like it was pretty obvious what he was doing there. “But please stay. You won’t bother me.”

  I was confused. Who was this guy? “Are you staying at the inn?”

  “What? No, why?”

  Hang on. I had a bad feeling about this. “Isn’t this the inn’s dock? Is it open to the town or . . . ?”

  “No. This is my family’s dock. That’s our house. Well, my parents’ house.” He was pointing up at the house whose yard we had cut through to get here.

  I felt like the universe was handing me new and different ways to embarrass myself today. “I am so sorry.” I jumped out of my seat. “The boy, Graham, up at the inn sent us down here.” I was throwing things into my bag and scrambling to find my sunglasses. Logan was still just sitting there smiling at Elliott. I kept tripping over myself apologizing. I could not get out of there fast enough. “I didn’t realize it was a private dock.” I felt like this guy Elliott had just walked into his house and found me eating food out of his refrigerator.