Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701)

by McDonough, Yona Zeldis

  “Mom, I do not understand why you are so timid! Someone had to have taken that ring—it was right there.” Angelica gestured to the dresser. “And now it’s not.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Betsy said. “But I want to be…tactful, all right?”

  “I think the time for tact has passed!” Angelica said sharply. “Someone needs to talk to him. And if you won’t do it, I will.” She turned and marched out of the room. Lenore was puzzled. Something was not right here, though she could not say what it was. She did not like this Bobby person, not one bit. But somehow she had a hard time believing he had slipped into this room and stolen that ring. Call it an old woman’s intuition, but she simply did not think he was guilty. Justine, on the other hand, was hiding something. What it was Lenore did not know, but she aimed to find out. Everyone else had started filing out too.

  “Justine,” she called to her great-granddaughter, but the girl had already skipped ahead of everyone else and was flitting down the stairs. She did not turn.

  Lenore watched her go, yet said nothing. What she had just heard did not correlate at all with what she had seen: Justine pawing the grass, looking so frantic. Justine insinuating that Bobby could have been the culprit. Bobby, Lenore decided, did not take that ring. Lenore was as sure of that as she was sure that Monty had loved her or that she would continue to miss him until the day she died. So the story was clearly a bubbemeisser, but the question was why. Why did Justine lie? Did she take the ring? Then why would she be looking for it in the grass? If that was what she had been looking for. There was a meaning to this, an order that had yet to be revealed. And until that order had made itself clear, Lenore did not want to say anything to anyone else in the family about what she had seen.

  These were the thoughts that occupied her as she walked out of Angelica’s room and down the hall to her own. Round and round they circled like a pair of puppies nipping at each other’s tails. She stopped, her attention arrested by a sound. It was a small yip. No, it was more like a whimper. Betsy’s odious little dog clamoring for attention—again. But hadn’t Lenore left it in her room with the door closed? Maybe Betsy found it and brought it back to her own room. Had she seen the stain on the rug yet? Lenore had forgotten to mention it.

  The sound continued, and Lenore realized that it was not coming from the room that was Betsy and Don’s. No, it was much closer than that; it was coming from behind the door where she now stood, the door to Caleb’s room. And it was not canine but human. With a sick feeling Lenore realized she was listening to Caleb, who was crying, crying as if his tender boychick’s heart were breaking right in two.

  Ten

  The motel was every bit as grim and dispiriting as Lincoln had anticipated: the torn window shade, the lumpy mattress, the collar of rust encircling the toilet’s base, the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet were familiar and predictable, all features common to this breed of forlorn roadside establishment.

  But the painkiller had blunted the throbbing, and he was grateful, even buoyant, for the reprieve. He immediately hung up the rented tux, sparing it from further travel-related indignities, and he unpacked the rest of his things, placing them neatly in the drawers, two of which were of course broken. He showered, glad he had thought to pack a pair of flip-flops; the shower floor was no doubt teeming with fungal spores and God knew what else; he didn’t want his bare skin to touch anything in this place. He shaved too and trimmed the damn hairs that poked out from both his ears and nostrils; he neatly combed what remained of the hair on his head.

  Then, still wearing his flip-flops and robe, he stretched out on the unforgiving mattress for a nap. Though jittery and uncomfortable, he nonetheless fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. The sound of his phone—the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth—so startled him that he jumped up in the bed, knocking his head against the reading lamp that was attached to the wall above it.

  “Hello?” he fairly shouted into the thing. “Hello?”

  “Dad, it’s me, Caleb. You don’t have to yell—I’m not on Mars.”

  “Caleb.” Just saying the name slowed and soothed the erratic pounding of his easily jolted heart. “What’s up, big guy?” Big guy had been his nickname for Caleb when he was a boy; considering what a pip-squeak he’d been throughout most of his childhood, it had been a running gag between them.

  “Dad, can I see you?” His voice sounded clotted; had he been crying?

  “Sure—your mother asked me to be at the house around five for pictures.”

  “I can’t wait that long. I need to see you now.”

  “Okay, okay,” Lincoln said, rubbing the sore spot on his head. Now he knew that Caleb had been crying. “But let’s not meet here,” he added, eyes roaming the room with its bald carpet, its cheap and misaligned prints of sailboats and lighthouses.

  “Well, I don’t want to meet here,” Caleb said. “Is there somewhere else?” Lincoln had not a clue. He hadn’t been to this part of Long Island in more than a decade, and even then Great Neck was not a town he knew well. Too rich for his blood back then. And way too rich for it now.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Come pick me up here, and we’ll drive somewhere. I’ll have all my stuff ready, and after we’ve talked for a while, we can head back to your mother’s together.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes,” Caleb said.

  Lincoln looked forward to spending some time alone with him, the boy he loved best. Angelica had and would always come first in his heart, but then came Caleb. Gretchen and Teddy vied for third place, their respective ascendancy shifting and changing as they grew. Gretchen’s dogged and often principled gravity had been engaging when she was a child, but as an adult, it was quite frankly a drag. Whereas Teddy’s childish bellicosity had turned him into a driven, high-octane guy with his own successful Web-marketing firm; Lincoln, never more than a company drone, admired his elder son’s initiative and finely honed sense of attack. Teddy was, as his grandmother Lenore would have said, a macher. But Caleb—well, Caleb had a quiet, self-contained sweetness to him, a sweetness that sometimes split Lincoln’s heart but to which he was also perpetually drawn.

  He got up and dressed with exceptional care. If he was going to be seeing Betsy, he wanted to look good. So he put on a fresh pair of pants and his best polo shirt—black with thin gray stripes, no guy on horseback galloping across his nipple. Then he shined his shoes with the doll-sized sponge provided by the motel, one of the few amenities he’d seen here so far. Okay, he was ready. Caleb would be here any minute. Just a last stop in the motel room’s cramped bathroom, where he lifted the seat and a moment later flushed.

  The foul water in the bowl rose so quickly that Lincoln didn’t even have time to step back. Up and over the rim it rushed, splashing his pants, wetting his shoes. Damn. The water kept coming, gradually turning darker and more malodorous. He had to turn it off; wasn’t there usually a spigot on the floor behind the toilet? But he didn’t want to kneel down to locate it.

  Lincoln grabbed the flimsy towel from its perch atop the tank and used it to staunch the flow. It might as well have been a tissue. As he looked wildly around for another towel, there was a knock on the door. Caleb!

  “Just a minute,” Lincoln called. Spying another towel on a slightly rusted rod, he reached to pull it down. He must have yanked too hard, because the rod—cheaply made and light as a chopstick—pulled right out of the wall and fell to the floor in a grayish flurry of plaster dust. “Jesus Christ!” he said. The knocking at the door continued. Lincoln heard Caleb call, “Dad? You okay in there?”

  “Coming,” said Lincoln. The water continued to pool on the bathroom floor; it had begun to saturate the room’s carpeting, rendering the ugly burnt-orange color even uglier.

  “I was out there for about five minutes,” Caleb said. “Didn’t you hear me?” Before Lincoln could answer, he added, “This place really is a dive. You sure you don’t want to stay at Mom’s?” He sniffed, a critical, what’s-that-smel
l kind of sniff. “And it stinks too.”

  “I heard you,” Lincoln answered. “But I was in the midst of a crisis. Actually I’m still in the midst of it.” He turned and looked toward the bathroom.

  “Jesus, Dad, I know it’s a dump, but did you have to trash the place?”

  “Trash the place!” said Lincoln. “I didn’t trash the place! But I’ve got to get all this cleaned up, or Christ only knows what they’re going to charge me for the mess.”

  “But if it’s not your fault…” Caleb said.

  “In a place like this, you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Dad. We’ll just call the front desk and they’ll send someone to deal with it.”

  “No!” Lincoln said. “Please don’t do that.” How to convey the sense of humiliation he was feeling? The panic? He didn’t want to call the front desk or to face the inevitable arguments about whether he had stuffed something in the toilet that had caused the overflow or should be held accountable for pulling the towel rack out of the wall. No, he just wanted to deal with it himself as expediently as possible. “I don’t want to call anyone, okay? I can handle it.” He looked at Caleb, with his custom-tailored shirt, his blindingly white Keds, and hated the words that were about to come out of his mouth. “If you’ll help me, that is.”

  “All right,” said Caleb, surveying the damage. “We’d better turn this off—now.” And without showing any concern for his pants, he dropped to his knees, located the spigot, and gave it an authoritative twist. The water stopped flowing, though the bathroom and carpet were still a soaked, smelly mess. “Now wait here.”

  “Where are you going?” Lincoln asked.

  “I’ll be back in five,” Caleb said, ignoring the question.

  So Lincoln sat on the bed, his legs pulled up and nowhere near the floor. He was ashamed of needing help from his son but grateful to have it nonetheless. When Caleb returned, he was lugging two bags; one bulged with towels. He was also dragging a vacuum cleaner.

  “Where did you get all that stuff?” Lincoln asked.

  “Some of it was in the trunk of my car,” Caleb said. “I like to be prepared.” He dropped the bag with a thud. “The vacuum and the towels came from the motel maid I ran into on the way to the parking lot. She was happy to make an extra twenty bucks.” Caleb began yanking towels out of the bag. “Let’s get to work.”

  Together Caleb and Lincoln laid towels over the carpet and bathroom floor, and walked back and forth across them a few times. They each washed their hands in the hottest water they could stand, and while waiting for the towels to do their work of absorbing, they opened the window wide and sat across from each other on the bed.

  “Thanks, Caleb,” said Lincoln. “I really appreciate your doing this.”

  “It’s okay,” Caleb said. “I’ve got some baking soda in the bag. As soon as the rug is a little less wet, you can sprinkle that all over; it should help with the smell. Then you can vacuum it up later.”

  “Good idea,” Lincoln said. He was resourceful, this son of his. No doubt about that.

  “And I’ve got some tools in there too,” he said. “I can probably manage to get the towel rack up again.”

  “You’re a boy wonder,” said Lincoln. “A regular boy wonder.”

  “De nada,” Caleb said, and his face twisted, a semaphore of pain.

  Suddenly Lincoln remembered the urgency in Caleb’s earlier request to talk. “You said you needed to see me. What’s going on?”

  Caleb stretched out on the bed and folded his hands very carefully behind his head, as if he didn’t want to muss his hair. “My life is ruined,” he said.

  “Ruined how?” Lincoln asked. Caleb always had been dramatic.

  “Remember you were asking me about work today? And I said everything was fine?” Lincoln nodded. “Well, that wasn’t true. Everything isn’t fine. And it hasn’t been fine for a while. I hate retail. I hate folding and refolding the same goddamned sweater all day long. Straightening the tie racks, buttoning suits, sucking up to customers who treat you like shit.”

  “Sounds pretty mind-numbing,” said Lincoln.

  “Soul numbing would be a better way to describe it. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, I got passed up for a promotion. Twice. Both times I really thought I was going to get it, you know? All pumped up, strutting around the floor, waiting for the word from the man. Only when the word came, it was no. And I was back to stacking dress shirts and swiping gold cards.”

  “You can get out,” Lincoln said. “Get out now while you still can. While you’re young.”

  “That’s what I’m planning to do. I decided to go to cooking school. To become a pastry chef.” He rolled over onto his side. “The school’s in France. Mom said she would pay for it.” Caleb looked at his father as if expecting his disapproval or, worse, his scorn.

  “That’s great. Just great. She’s got the money. Why not use it for a good cause? And you’re one of the best, okay? The very best. And don’t you forget it.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Caleb said wanly.

  “So why is your life ruined? Sounds to me like you’ve got things pretty well figured out.”

  “It’s Bobby.” Caleb dropped the name as if it were a brick.

  “What about Bobby?”

  “I thought he was the one, Dad. The one I’d been waiting for, the one I’d dreamed about. We were so good together. So damn good.”

  “Were?” asked Lincoln, seizing on the past tense.

  “We were having a great time. I introduced him to Mom and everyone; they all loved him, I could tell. He seemed to really fit in; he told me how much he was looking forward to the wedding. I even used my discount at the store to buy him a new suit, new tie, new shoes, new everything. But this morning after we went swimming, I found him making out with some half-naked guy on Mom’s payroll.” He took a deep, melancholy breath. “Gretchen was with me. She saw him too.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Lincoln said, heart constricting like a fist when he thought of what it must have felt like to have seen that. “Son of a bitch.” To his surprise Caleb actually smiled.

  “Yeah,” he echoed. “Son of a goddamned bitch.”

  “Throws a monkey wrench in your plans, huh?”

  “Totally. I wanted him to come to France with me.”

  “Fuck him,” Lincoln snapped. He got off the bed and began padding around the towel-covered floor. “You go to France yourself. You go to France, and you become the best damn pastry chef in the country. Hell, on the planet, okay? You’ve got what it takes. Remember the scones? The tarte tatin?” He mangled the last name, the French one, but so what. Caleb knew what he meant.

  Caleb swung his long legs off the bed and went into the bathroom with his tools. Lincoln followed, waiting for him to say something. But Caleb was silent, immersed in the job of screwing the shoddy thing back into the wall while Lincoln swept up the debris and deposited it in the trash.

  “What am I going to do?” Caleb asked, finally breaking the silence. “I’ve got to face him tonight. We’re seated at the same table.”

  “Let’s talk about that when we’re on our way to your mother’s,” Lincoln said. “I’ve had about enough of this motel from hell for right now.” He changed back into the pants he had worn on the plane, but he didn’t have another pair of shoes; he hoped the ones he was wearing didn’t smell too bad.

  When they got into the car, Lincoln laid the rented tuxedo out across the backseat. When he turned around again, he saw Caleb sitting, not moving, with his hands clasped at the top of the steering wheel. Lincoln waited a beat; Caleb lowered his head until it touched the top of the wheel.

  “I know your heart is breaking,” Lincoln began.

  “Not breaking. Broken.” Caleb’s words, though slightly muffled, were still discernible.

  “Broken, then. Broken.” Lincoln paused, not entirely sure how much of the past he wanted to dredge up. “And I know how you feel, buddy. Believe me, I know.”


  “You mean—Mom?” Caleb turned his head slightly so that he was no longer speaking into his hands.

  “Big-time,” Lincoln said.

  “So how did you get over it?” Caleb asked.

  “I didn’t,” Lincoln said, finding a strange relief in coming clean. He’d never talked to his kids about the residual mess of feelings he had for Betsy; there had never been a reason to before.

  “You didn’t? Even after all these years?” Caleb sat up now; his hands, though still on the wheel, were no longer gripping it so tightly.

  “Even after all these years.”

  “I didn’t know,” Caleb said.

  “Why would you? I never wanted to bring it up with you kids; it didn’t seem right.”

  “You mean you still love her?”

  “Still,” Lincoln said. “Still and always.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” Caleb said. He looked at his hands like he expected to find some answer in them. “Is it going to be tough for you to see her today?”

  “What do you think?” Lincoln countered. “It fairly kills me that she’s happier now. So much happier than when we were together. She really loves this guy. Even if the reason why beats the hell out of me.”

  Caleb didn’t answer, but his fine, sensitive mouth twisted into a smirk.

  “Oh, you think she loves his wallet, right? That it’s all about the money? I told myself that,” Lincoln said as much to himself as to Caleb. “I told myself that for a long time, because it was easier and because it let me off the hook. But you know what? I don’t think that anymore. And you kids shouldn’t either.”

  “So why are you doing it?” Caleb asked. “Why are you here?”

  “Why am I here?” Lincoln felt his agitation spreading like a rash. “Why am I here? Because Angelica is getting married, that’s why. And I wasn’t going to let anything—even my own goddamned broken heart—keep me from seeing it.” Sensing he might sound too rough, Lincoln began again. “It hurts like hell, but you can get through this, big guy,” he said softly. “I know you can.”