The Wedding Machine

by Beth Webb Hart

  NINETEEN

  Ray

  “I’m going out,” Ray calls to Willy on her way down the street. “I’ve left some cinnamon rolls on top of the oven for everyone, and there’s a fresh pot of coffee on.”

  “All right,” he says. “I’ll let folks know.”

  It’s been eight weeks since Hilda closed her door to the world, and Ray thinks it’s time the woman showed her face. She’s been spying on the delivery boy from Barbour’s Grocery who drops a package off at the back of Hilda’s house every Wednesday morning, and today she’s got about an hour where she can duck down in the pittosporum bushes and wait for Hilda to open the back door. She’s just got to lay eyes on her and see what kind of condition she’s in, and if she can get a word in, she knows she can convince her to open her door for Little Hilda, who’s in town for Thanksgiving weekend and Angus’s wedding.

  Just like clockwork, the young man walks through the wrought iron gates and around the back of the house with two bags full of groceries. She can see a half carton of milk peeking out of the top of one of those bags, and she knows Hilda won’t let that sit outside for long. When the boy leaves, Ray shimmies through a doorway in the brick wall that runs alongside the house and she crouches behind one of the larger bushes. She waits for fifteen whole minutes without blinking an eye, but she doesn’t see any movement on the back porch.

  It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and the children have descended for the holiday and the wedding. Except for Priscilla. She’s on the way to Ridgefield, Connecticut, to meet Donovan’s parents. If Ray weren’t so worried about Hilda, she’d be on top of the world, thanks to the hormone replacement therapy and her daughter’s imminent engagement.

  She skipped yesterday’s vestry meeting to pick up Priscilla’s ring from Croghan’s. Then she took it to the Charleston airport where a special courier will deliver it to Donovan in Baltimore tomorrow.

  Vangie’s voice was on her answering machine when she got home last night. “Ray,” she said. “We need to talk. The revival healing day is only six weeks away, and I need you to help me with the sign-up sheets.”

  Ray rolled her eyes. Too busy for that nonsense. Then she pushed the delete button on the machine and started polishing the silver for her Thanksgiving feast.

  She’s offered Priscilla’s room to Little Hilda and Giuseppe, and they arrived last night looking so grown-up. It was awfully strange for Ray to show them to Priscilla’s peach and white eyelet room where Little Hilda spent many a night during her childhood. It gave Ray a funny feeling—the realization that her daughter’s best friend is officially allowed to spend the night in the same bed with a grown man. But the way Giuseppe picked up Little Hilda’s bag and carried it up the stairs made Ray well up with a kind of hope and excitement about their union. And Priscilla’s future one. Hilda would be so proud. It’s time for her to come out of her shell and see her daughter, and Ray is not afraid to wait her out.

  The bushes poke at Ray’s ribs as she pushes back into them. Maybe she should have worn some of Willy’s camouflage. She rubs her neck and stares at Hilda’s back door. It’s awfully hot for November, and she should have brought some of that bottled water Justin brought home the other day from that Costco in Charleston.

  Suddenly, she feels something creeping up her neck. It’s some kind of bug or spider, she is sure, and now it’s crawling down her back.

  “Ahh,” she shrieks as she feels it bite her skin.

  Before she knows it she has to strip off her sweater and her blouse and swat at her back until it’s gone.

  By the time she gets her blouse back on, she looks over at the back piazza, and the groceries are gone. Well, doggone it.

  “Hilda!” she screams.

  She comes running out from behind the bushes with her sweater buttoned wrong and her hair sticking out in all directions and bangs on the glass door of the back piazza.

  “Hilda Prescott, open this door! I need to talk to you!”

  She peers through the window, but all she can make out is the sofa in the den and the corner of a grocery bag on the kitchen counter.

  “Your child is in town, and she’s staying at my house!” Ray hollers. “Don’t you want to come out to see her?”

  The house seems more still than ever. Like it’s holding its breath. Ray can’t detect the slightest sound or movement, and she wonders where in the world Hilda is hiding—in the linen closet or the kitchen cupboard or maybe behind the sofa.

  “Come on out now,” Ray says. “I just want to lay eyes on you.”

  Her forehead is up against the glass. “I really might call the fire department this time. Or maybe I’ll get Willy and Justin to climb up to the top piazza and open the door. I know that one has never had a working lock.”

  She paces the moss covered bricks, but the house doesn’t even creak. There is no sign of Hilda. That stubborn old mule. How long does she expect to pull this off? Ray will find a way to get her out of there. But how?

  “Fine,” Ray hollers at the door and takes a step back. “You’re going to miss your daughter and your son-in-law and a whole lot of other things unless you get your nerve up and step out here. Do you hear me, Hilda?”

  Now Ray sees her reflection in the glass, and she quickly rebut-tons her sweater. Then she licks her palms and tries to flatten her hair. She’s got to call Sylvia Crenshaw for an emergency appointment. She can’t have Thanksgiving dinner or attend Angus’s wedding with this bedraggled do.

  Of course, Sylvia won’t be available the day before her sister’s wedding, but Ray’s going to drive over there right now and beg her to do it. Sylvia’s got a soft spot, and she won’t be able to turn Ray away.

  TWENTY

  Kitty B.

  Kitty B. spends Thanksgiving morning in the kitchen basting the turkey and making the dressing and gravy. Marshall and his parents are coming over for dinner, and Katie Rae went into Charleston to take part in their Thanksgiving service. Tommy and Cricket are coming over, too, but the funeral home is short staffed for the holiday weekend, and they have to attend to the family of a teenage boy who crashed his car into a live oak tree in the wee hours of Tuesday morning on his way home from a party in a cornfield on the outskirts of town.

  Kitty B.’s felt a lump in her throat ever since she heard about that accident. When someone young dies, it hits her hard, and it takes her back to the time when she lost Baby Roberta. Next week will be the twenty-seventh anniversary of that awful night, and she’s trying not to think about it too much. If she lets her mind go there, she’ll be screaming at God by the end of it all, and that only seems to make it worse.

  She tries to shake off the thought of it for the sake of the holiday. Her family hasn’t had a full-blown Thanksgiving dinner since LeMar fell ill a few years ago, so she’s making all of the old favorites: rice and gravy, oyster pie, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and pickled artichokes. And of course, her mama’s homemade biscuits that just melt in your mouth.

  She’s even dusted off the old cornucopia basket she used to put out when the girls were little, and she’s created a table centerpiece that Ray would be proud of with dried corn, pumpkin gourds, plums, apples, and tangerines. Kitty B. wants things to be nice for Marshall and Katie Rae and the Benningtons. This should be a joyful time, and if she can pull this dinner off, she hopes it will be the beginning of many holidays spent around the table together.

  As Kitty B. pulls out the silver butter tray Hilda gave her for a wedding gift over thirty-five years ago, she prays, “Lord, carry her in your arms today.” Tonight Angus will tie the knot with Trudi, and she knows Hilda’s heart is just shattered. She’s on duty at Hilda’s this evening since Ray and Sis have been called on to help with the wedding. After dinner breaks up here, she’ll make a nice basket of leftovers and take them into town. She figures she’ll sit in Hilda’s garden all evening just to let her know she’s not alone.

  “LeMar,” she calls up the stairs. “It’s ten o’clock, and I could sure use a h
and. Time to get up now.”

  “Can’t,” he shouts from behind the door in his room. “Come up here, Kitty B. I need to talk to you.”

  Oh, Lord, she prays. Give me patience.

  When she rounds the stairwell and knocks on his door, she can hear Wagner’s Parsifal playing on the CD player by his bed.

  “C’mon in,” he says as he turns down the music.

  “What’s wrong?” She pushes at the old, swollen door until it opens. LeMar’s propped himself up on four pillows and he’s still in his nightshirt and boxers. Both of his hands grasp his throat.

  “My neck aches,” he says. “I think it’s swollen.”

  He turns over and points to the base of his head. “Take a look at it for me.”

  Kitty B. peers over and takes a gander at his neck. Aside from a little pinkness, it doesn’t look any different than it looked yesterday or the day before that.

  “Looks all right to me,” she says. “Now you told me you were going to help me with this dinner. The guests are going to be here in a few hours, and there is no way I can get everything together without you.”

  “Doggone it, Kitty B.!” LeMar shouts. He hurls the glass of water by his bed down on the ground and it shatters. “I don’t feel good, and all you can do is shout orders at me.”

  Kitty B. shakes her head. She walks stiffly over, stoops down, and picks up the shards of glass. The thought half-crosses her mind to leave a sharp piece down there for the next time he gets out of bed, but that would only provoke more whining and maybe even another exasperating trip to the Medical University.

  “I’m sure you just slept on it the wrong way,” she says. “You’ve been feeling so much better, remember? Now you’ve got to help me welcome the Benningtons into our home.”

  “Not today, I can’t,” he says. “Call them and tell them I’m under the weather.”

  Kitty B. carefully holds the pieces of glass in her wide hands. “No,” she says. “You were too ill to meet them a few weeks ago, and I’m not going to tell them that again.”

  “What are you saying?” he asks. “Are you saying I’m making this up?”

  Then he reaches for the back of his neck and rubs it. “I need some ibuprofen or I’m going to pass out from the pain.”

  Kitty B. walks toward the doorway. She’s not going to wait on him hand and foot today. “I’m sure there’s some in your medicine cabinet. Now I’m going down to check on the turkey.”

  As she sets the fine china and silver on the table, she hears him grumbling.

  “We’re all out,” he finally hollers and she wants to say, I’m not leaving to go get some now. You can go.

  But she knows he won’t go on his own. LeMar rarely drives. He was never very good at it, and since he’s been home the last few years, he asks her to chauffeur him everywhere.

  So she calls their neighbor, Mr. Tidemann, the ones who raises the goats, and he meets her on the dirt road between their homes with an unlabeled bottle of aspirin that looks like it could be twenty years old.

  Before long the Benningtons arrive in their minivan with Katie Rae and Marshall in tow. Shawna has made some kind of greenish marshmallow concoction that she calls Watergate salad, and she’s also made some macaroni and cheese with crushed potato chips sprinkled on top.

  “Where’s Daddy?” Katie Rae says as Kitty B. greets them on the porch. She’s set up a little drink station against the porch railing with a little iced tea and her father’s famous Bloody Marys that he made every year for Thanksgiving dinner.

  “He’s under the weather,” Kitty B. says. “Again.” She hopes they can’t detect the sarcasm. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s too bad,” Roscoe says. “We were really looking forward to finally meeting him.”

  “Yeah,” Shawna says as she squints her eyelids. They’re painted a shade of bright green, and they sparkle in the midday sunlight.

  Marshall leans into Katie Rae. “Should you go up and see him?” Katie Rae looks to Kitty B. “Yeah,” she says. “Mama, I’m going to see if I can talk him into coming out.”

  “Go ahead, honey.” Kitty B. snags a strip of peeling paint that dangles from the porch railing. “You might have better luck than me.”

  The Benningtons all prefer iced tea over Bloody Marys, and Kitty B. wonders if their denomination is somehow connected to the Baptists. They sit on the porch and nibble on her pickled shrimp appetizer and these wonderful new spinach and pine nut tarts that she pulled from last month’s Southern Living.

  Lowcountry autumns are glorious and today is no exception. The sky is a clear blue and the water reflects the sun as the ripples of the incoming tide pour in, filling the surrounding marsh banks. Thankfully, the dogs are too lazy to play chase, and they nap together beneath the rosebush after sniffing thoroughly around the Benningtons’ minivan. Mr. Whiskers, the cat, is nowhere to be seen, and Kitty B. hopes to heaven that he’s not in the kitchen nipping at the turkey.

  On the porch, they can all hear the dull roar of Parsifal as it pounds against the window panes in LeMar’s room above them. Kitty B. recalls bits of the production LeMar took her to see at the Newberry Opera House several years ago. There was this tall spear—the one that was used to pierce Christ—that Parsifal had to recover in order to heal the king of an order of knights who guard the Holy Grail. Kitty B. kept worrying that the lead was going to trip and stab himself with it. Opera, she thinks. What melodrama.

  Within minutes Katie Rae returns. She holds her hands palms up and says. “He says he needs to stay in bed and rest his neck.”

  “Oh, dear,” Roscoe says. “Think I could go up and pray for him?”

  Marshall clears his throat dramatically in an attempt to put the brakes on his dad. Kitty B. guesses that Marshall knows enough about their family to know when to let LeMar be.

  Roscoe sits back and nods. “Well, y’all just tell me if you’d like me to.”

  Kitty B. nods and helps herself to a tart. “He’ll live,” she says, trying to strike a cordial tone. In truth, she is not convinced that all of LeMar’s ailments aren’t in his head, but she’s not about to voice her suspicions to the Benningtons. Who knows what they would think of her—a wife who doesn’t believe her husband. Surely that’s a big-time sin.

  “What a nice place,” Shawna says as they watch a row of pelicans cross low over the river. “Marshall tells us it belonged to your family.”

  “Yes,” Kitty B. says. “I grew up spending every summer here, tubing down the river or curled up in the tire swing reading a book.”

  “Nice,” Shawna says.

  Kitty B. pictures herself barefoot in a smocked dress, climbing up the oak tree just in front of the river. “’Course my parents had live-in help back then,” she says to the Benningtons, “and there was always somebody to chase after my brothers and me and make sure we didn’t get into too much trouble. There was a lovely lady, Lucy, who was our housekeeper, and she would bring me in the kitchen every afternoon and let me help her cook dinner. She’s the one who really taught me how.”

  “What a gift she gave you,” Roscoe says.

  Kitty B. can see Lucy coming out on the front porch and hollering up at her. “Get down from there, child. It’s time to pickle the watermelon.”

  “Yes,” Shawna says. “Katie Rae gave me the Lowcountry Manna cookbook for my birthday last week, and I’m going to make something from it for our next covered dish supper.”

  Just as Kitty B. is about to set the turkey on the table, Tommy and Cricket arrive, dressed for business. Tommy in a navy suit and tie and Cricket in a straight, black and white houndstooth dress from Talbots that hits her at the knee. They are as polite as can be to the Benningtons, but Kitty B. can tell they’re out of sorts.

  Tommy makes himself a giant Bloody Mary, and just as he is about to sit down on the sofa, Cricket nudges him and says, “Daddy’s not around. You better go carve the turkey.”

  “Girls,” Kitty B. says to her daughters as she walks toward the kitc
hen. “Why don’t y’all give me a hand?”

  When Cricket walks through the kitchen door, a roach the size of a stick of Juicy Fruit gum scurries across the kitchen counter toward the green bean casserole, his antenna waving wildly in the air.

  “Disgusting,” she says. “Mama, why don’t you get somebody out here to spray. Those palmetto bugs don’t exactly give me a good feeling about eating this meal.”

  Kitty B. turns to Cricket. “Honey,” she says. “We live on the edge of the river with bugs and water rats and raccoons galore, and there’s not enough spray in the world that could keep them out.”

  “Hush,” Cricket says. “Don’t let the guests hear that, Mama. It’s disgusting. Normal people don’t live this way.”

  Then Katie Rae walks in and closes the door behind her. “Did you say there was a rat in here? I can hear y’all in the living room, you know?”

  “No,” Kitty B. says as she takes off her shoe and prepares to smash the roach as it inches its way over to the coffeemaker. “Just a palmetto bug.” She takes one good swipe at him, but he swiftly makes his way behind the oven.

  “I bet you have droppings in your cabinets, Mama.” Cricket opens up the silverware drawer and starts inspecting.

  “Katie Rae.” Kitty B. dusts off a tray and hands it to her. “Make your daddy a plate and take it up to him for me, okay?”

  Katie Rae nods and dips her finger in the gravy bowl. “Mmm.” She says.

  Kitty B. dips her own finger in for a sample. “Think it has enough salt?”

  Cricket shakes her head as she rubs a paper napkin around the inside corners of the drawers. “Mama, please wash your hands before you touch any more of the food. It’s uncouth.”

  “Do you see anything?” Katie Rae says as she peers over Cricket’s shoulder.

  “Yes, I do.” Cricket takes a napkin and presses it down into the drawer.

  “See,” she says as she opens the napkin to reveal the tiniest black speck.

  Kitty B.’s face reddens. She called her daughter in to help, not for a kitchen inspection. Who in the world could keep palmetto bugs out of a house on the river?