The Wedding Machine

by Beth Webb Hart

  After tea, they send Kitty B. on home and Sis helps Ray clear the plates and wash the dishes. Just as they are drying the last silver spoon, Ray grabs Sis’s hand, spins the ring around, and says, “What’s this?”

  Sis blushes and steps back.

  “You’re engaged!” Ray squeals. “Oh, my word, Sis!”

  Ray pulls Sis over to the kitchen table with her wet hands. “Sit down right now and tell me everything! Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out until now.” Sis watches Ray wipe her hands on her apron. “I want every detail. Every single one.”

  “Oh, Ray, he’s so wonderful.”

  “Yes, yes, of course he is,” Ray says. “Well, when did he ask you? And how?”

  “We were sitting on a park bench sharing a chocolate gelato beside the Romanesque Cathedral in his hometown, Lucca. It’s in Tuscany just to the northeast of Pisa. It’s a quiet little place with ancient roads and churches and a Puccini museum that LeMar would just flip over. Oh, poor LeMar.”

  “LeMar is in good hands, Sis.” Ray narrows her eyes. “Now tell me more. Were you surprised?”

  “Honestly, no,” Sis says. “From that first night at Katie Rae’s wedding, Salvatore dropped hints about getting married. At first I thought he wanted something from me, my little bit of inheritance or an American citizenship. I didn’t know what. But over these last few months I’ve come to realize that he simply felt something for me that he hadn’t felt in a long, long time, and the feeling is mutual!”

  “Has he ever been married before?” Ray asks. “Does he have any children?”

  “Oh, it’s the saddest story,” Sis says. “He lost his wife decades ago just before she was to give birth to their first child. He woke up one morning and she was stone still in the bed next to him. She’d had one of those awful embolisms that just gets you out of nowhere, and Salvatore had to lay her and his baby daughter to rest. It took him twenty years to come to grips with it. Don’t you know, I could certainly understand that?”

  “Yes, you could,” Ray says, tears filling her eyes. She pulls one of Cousin Willy’s handkerchiefs out of the seersucker jacket hanging on the chair next to her and pats her eyes. “Of course you can. And you love him? You think you are compatible?”

  “I know it’s only been three months, but it just feels right,” Sis says, her eyes wide. “As different and foreign as he is, we have a lot in common. We love music, we love our friends, we love the church, and we love our families.” She stands up as if she can’t contain herself. “And let me tell you, Ray, this man smells good. He smells like tangerines and aftershave and cigarettes and something I can’t even put my finger on. Something warm and manly that is just Salvatore, and I just love it. I love him!”

  And she knows it’s true. She does love him. She couldn’t deny it any more than she could the good Lord Himself.

  “Well, where are you going to live?” Ray asks.

  “We think we can manage to split our time between Jasper and Lucca. Mama wants to give us the old home on Third Street, and Salvatore has a charming little villa by the Cathedral. We will go back and forth every six months, depending on how Mama is feeling and what Salvatore’s concert schedule looks like.”

  “Can you believe it, Sis?” Ray asks. “I’m just so happy for you.”

  “I really can’t believe it,” Sis says. “But I’m going to.” She sits back down and squeezes Ray’s hands. “Now we want the whole wedding to be quiet and quick. We’re both in the sunsets of our lives, and we don’t need any kind of fuss.”

  Ray nods steadily and looks off for a moment. Sis can see her wheels spinning. “Ray, I don’t want a big to-do.”

  “I know, I know,” she says. “But you will let me plan it, won’t you?” “Of course,” Sis says.

  “Great!” Ray stands up and embraces her. “You tell me a date and I’ll get going. I don’t want you to worry about a thing.”

  Sis lets Ray hold her tight for what seems like whole minutes until Willy comes through the back door and says, “All right, gals. What are y’all blubbering about now?”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ray

  Well, a lot has been going on these last few weeks. Ray stands back for a moment and surveys the preparations going on in her back garden. She nods in satisfaction. This is going to be the best wedding yet. Despite all the drama that has followed her for months now.

  After Ray realized there was no way she could talk sense into Priscilla about an annulment, she’d refused to take her calls. Then J.K.’s parents invited her and Willy to Alexandria for a small post-wedding celebration, and Cousin Willy had to pry her into the car and drive her up there by force. She had to admit that J.K.’s parents seemed quite civilized. His father is a banker, and his mother runs an antique shop on King Street in the heart of the historic district. Mrs. Neely had a beautiful dinner for them in their lovely town-home, and J.K. actually behaved as though he had some manners. The gals—except for Hilda, who has remained completely silent for over six months now—are helping Ray plan a wedding celebration for Priscilla and J.K. that will be held in a few weeks.

  Then there was the Saturday of the rescheduled Healing Prayer Revival Day at All Saints. When she thinks about it, Ray cannot believe that was the best day she’s had in months. It was the sec ond week in March, just after Sis had come home from Italy and announced her engagement.

  ~ MARCH 11, 2006 ~

  Vangie gathered the ushers in the narthex bright and early. “Thank you all for serving.” She frantically checked her file folders and pulled out the programs and the prayer cards. “Especially you, Ray.”

  Ray nodded and pointed to the programs. “Want us to hand those out?”

  “Yes,” she said, tugging on the gold bangles on her wrist. “I’m nervous as can be about this, y’all. I hope we’ll have a turnout this time.”

  Vangie held up a small index card with “prayer requests” written at the top and said, “Now tell the participants that this is a day for their own personal healing and revival. If they want prayer for someone else who’s on their mind, they should write the person’s name on a pew card and give it to you all. Then I need y’all to turn it into the prayer ministers we’ve brought in from some of the churches in Charleston. They will pray over them.”

  When Capers opened the door there must have been about thirty folks lined up in the church yard. Some were All Saints parishioners, but most were just interested folks from the community.

  Ray took her place at the back of the church and ushered folks into the old family pews for Capers’s teaching on the healings in the New Testament. Then she went up and down the aisles to collect their prayer requests for loved ones, which she handed to a group of priests in the back of the room who received the cards and prayed for them one by one.

  During Capers’s teaching Ray slipped a prayer card out of the back pew and put the names of the people who she felt needed it: Priscilla and J.K.; William and Carson; Laura, the sister she hadn’t seen in four years; and even her daddy, who might still be alive somewhere out there. She slipped the card to one of the men in the back who nodded and gave her a reassuring smile before he read the names on the card and closed his eyes.

  When Capers finished his talk, Ray opened the pews one by one and ushered the participants up to the altar where Vangie and Capers put their hands on them and prayed for their concerns and ailments as Sis played some worship songs softly on the little keyboard Capers had rented for the occasion.

  No one fainted or fell down into any strange convulsions when Capers and Vangie prayed for them, much to Ray’s relief, but every time a participant walked back down the aisle to their seat after prayer, she noticed they had a different look about them. Ray couldn’t tell if it was in their body language or their facial expressions, but it was a look of peace and a quiet strength, and it was a new look for each of the folks she had ushered out of the pews. It was so pronounced in some that she had to stop herself from making her own walk down the aisle wh
en Capers turned to the congregation, opened his hands, and said, “Anyone else?”

  After Kitty B. served everyone a delicious chicken salad lunch in the churchyard, Ray helped round everyone up and back into the sanctuary for what Capers called the “Generational Healing Eucharist,” which was some kind of unique communion service where, as Capers said, “We will ask God to cut us free from anything negative that has come down our family lines, whether we know about it or not.”

  Then Vangie told Ray to hand out these little family tree charts for everyone to fill out. “You fill one out too,” Vangie said, when Ray took her seat next to her in the back. Well, at first Ray thought about making up things about her family—a little cancer here, a little heart disease there—the way she did in Dr. Arhundati’s office. But then when Capers announced that no one would see the charts, she actually turned away from Vangie and put a big question mark up her daddy’s side and another up her mama’s side.

  As they went forward for communion, Ray and all of the participants took their charts and placed them in an offering basket. Next they followed Capers out to the graveyard and burned the charts as a symbol of this “cutting free.”

  Strange thing was, for Ray’s whole life she’s wanted to know who her family was. To attach herself to them. She’s wanted to know where she came from, and she’s wanted to hitch her wagon to her ancestors, whoever they were, without stopping to think that she could be hitching up to something rather awful. Maybe that’s why her mama never elaborated. Maybe she was trying to protect her.

  She realized this as Capers stoked the ashes and some of the participants wept, and she decided to have her first talk with God since Priscilla’s Las Vegas wedding. She turned away from the group and looked out over all of the weathered, ornate gravestones that stood like a grand record of the history of Jasper. She was always envious of the gang who all had family plots around the chapel and a heritage to point to. “That was Grandmama,” one would point. “That was Great Uncle Rudolph,” said another.

  Well, God, she says. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe I don’t need to know about my roots. I’ve had a blessed life here in Jasper with a loving husband and a place to finally call home, and I might as well let it go at that.

  As Ray watched the smoke of the singeing family trees waft up and into the Spanish moss of the live oaks, she let go of the pain in her heart—the pain she’d carried ever since the night some forty years ago when Nigel Pringle called her a bastard. Then she breathed in the sweet smell of the smoke spreading out in the thick air around her and pictured herself climbing into the back of the pickup truck the night the pack came calling and how when they took off, she looked back to find her mama standing on the front stoop smiling and waving.

  When she turned back around in the graveyard on the healing prayer revival day, most of the participants had filed out of the churchyard, and Vangie was picking up the leftover programs that a few folks had left on the headstones.

  Ray came alongside her and picked some up too. Then she patted Vangie’s back. “It went real well.”

  That night when Ray went home, Cousin Willy met her on the back steps with a white wine spritzer and some summer sausage and Triscuits. “How did it go?” he said.

  She sat right down on the rocking chair beside him, and they looked out over the garden and she said, “Willy, did you know I never had a father?”

  He reached out, put his arm firmly around her shoulders, and took a deep breath. “I figured, sweet.”

  “You did?” Snippets of their life together flash through her mind. “All this time?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Neither you or your mama had much to say about family, and I just assumed—”

  “You mean you figured that all along, and it never bothered you?”

  He turned to face her. “Bothered me? Heck, Ray, the best thing that ever happened to me was you and your move to Jasper. I couldn’t have cared less about your family history.”

  She smiled and rested her head in the nook of his neck.

  “There’s more,” she said. “I wasn’t a relative of Mrs. Pringle’s on South Battery, Willy. My mama was her housekeeper. We took care of her when she was elderly. That’s why she left us some of the inheritance.”

  Cousin Willy pulled her closer. “It doesn’t matter, Ray. That has never mattered to me. The only one it’s mattered to is you.”

  Ray opened her eyes wide and sat up. “Do you think the gals know?”

  Willy shrugged and pulled her back close to him. “I don’t know, and I don’t care.”

  She settled into his thick chest and breathed in his warmth. She guessed she might have sensed all along that the gals had a hunch about her past. Hilda had always probed her about it, but she thought that was just to get a rise out of her.

  “I love you, Ray,” Cousin Willy said. “I love you, your gals love you, and the whole town of Jasper would be a wreck without you.”

  She leaned forward, slapped her knees. “Well, Willy, I think you’re right.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “And I think we ought to have Sis’s wedding right here in our back garden. I’m going to make it glorious. Better than anything the town has ever seen. What do you say? Can I offer it?”

  Willy took a sip of her wine spritzer. He winced and said, “I think it’s a fine idea. Now you call your gals, and I’m going to get a beer and put a venison loin on the grill.”

  “You’ll help me, won’t you?” Ray said to the back of his balding head. “We’re going to have to clean the garden up real good, and we might need to repaint the trim of the house.”

  “’Course.” He turned back to grin at her. “’Course, I’ll help you, First Lady.”

  The next day Ray grabbed Sis’s old wedding dress—the one she’d bought back from Goodwill the day Sis donated it—and drove over to the fabric store in Savannah where she purchased the most beautiful ivory shade of raw silk you ever saw. Then she went over to Hilda’s and rang the doorbell. She had written a letter to Hilda the night before, and she pulled it out of her pocketbook and slipped it through the mail slot.

  “Hilda,” she called. “I’ve got a letter for you that will be worth your trip down the stairs. It’s about my life before Jasper, which I think you knew all along. But once you get down here to read this, I’ve got something else for you. It’s Sis’s old wedding dress and some gorgeous silk from the fabric store. I was hoping you could take the measurements from the old dress to make her a new gown. She’ll be marrying that Italian trumpeter next month, you know?”

  Ray rested the fabric and the dress on the bench by the front door. She peered through the dining room window, but she couldn’t see any sign of Hilda. She cupped her hands and hollered toward the upstairs, where she noticed one window was open just a couple of inches.

  “I’m going to keep back checking with you all week, Hilda. If you feel up to making the dress, write me a note. Otherwise, we’ll go to town and buy something.”

  Now on the night before Sis’s wedding, Ray really is pulling out all of the stops. It’s going to be the most beautiful celebration the town has ever seen. Her gardenias have just started to bloom, and she is using every last one of them for the boutonnieres and the wedding cake and one of the focal points of Sis’s spring bouquet. You will never smell a sweeter fragrance in your life!

  “Don’t you want to save those for Pris’s party?” Kitty B. had asked a few days ago when she and Ray went to Charleston to buy the oasis and floral tape.

  “No,” Ray says. “I don’t. I want to use every last one of them for Sis.”

  Ray even took down her stash of champagne glasses from the shed last week, and she and Richadene washed each of the two hundred glasses by hand for the occasion. When she didn’t hear back from Hilda, she took Sis to Charleston where they searched and searched for the right gown. They settled on a two-piece ensemble they found at Saks—a straight satin skirt with a beaded jacket. Ray thought it looked a little like something
a mother of the bride would wear, but Sis twirled around in it in front of the dressing room mirror and said, “This will work fine. Tasteful and age-appropriate. With three weeks to go, I can’t be too picky, right?”

  Tonight Ray’s putting everyone to work for the final touches. She and Kitty B. are cutting the flowers and preparing the oasis for the arrangements while Justin and Willy set out the mosquito zappers beneath the tent in the backyard. Sis even dropped by, and now she’s polishing the last few silver trays for the champagne toast.

  “Go on home and get some rest.” Ray pats Sis’s back, looks at her watch, and adds, “It’s almost eleven o’clock.”

  “I’m an old woman, Ray,” Sis says. “The last-minute, behind-the-scenes stuff is my favorite part, and I’m not going to miss it.”

  “I’m spending the night,” Kitty B. says. “You can, too, if you want.”

  Ray laughs. “Of course you can.”

  “I think I will,” she says. “It’s thirty-four years later, but I want my prewedding slumber party too.”

  At midnight, Ray puts the last bits of greenery in some water and says, “Y’all go get ready for bed, and I’ll make us a midnight snack.”

  A few minutes later they are out on the piazza with three shrimp salad sandwiches, a tray of lemon squares, and a bottle of chardonnay, watching the reflection of the moon on the ripples of water moving into Round-O Creek. The heat from the late April day has long since faded, and the air is soft and cool.

  “How’s LeMar?” Sis asks Kitty B. as she props her feet up on the coffee table.

  “Angus took him to the Medical University today,” Kitty B. says. “He wanted to hear for himself what the specialist had to stay about the test results, and he’ll give me a full report tomorrow.”

  Kitty B. leans back in the wicker chair, closes her eyes, and breathes in the fresh air. Then she tilts her head to Sis and says, “But to answer your question, he’s hopeful, and that’s been a wonderful surprise. Just the other day on our way home from the hospital he said, ‘I’m not worried, Kitty B. I think we’ll be able to get this under control.’”