Blue Moon

by Luanne Rice

  “Yeah, sure,” Emma said, punching Belinda’s arm. “You’re just hot for her speech teacher. Sock it to me, Zacharoonie.”

  Belinda blushed, because Emma was absolutely, one-hundred-percent, nail-on-the-head right. Zach was totally cute, and he actually wanted Belinda there when he taught Josie. He said they could practice on each other. “I just want to learn to sign so I won’t get caught talking in study hall. I’ll teach you when I learn more.”

  “I want Zach to teach me,” Emma said, kissing the air. “Oh, Zach, baby, teach me how to use my hands.”

  “It’s not like that,” Belinda said, blushing harder.

  Sean rushed in, all out of breath. He stood in the doorway looking worse than Alison and T.J.

  “Look who’s here, straight from the altar of Satan,” Emma said. “The Bridegroom of Cruella. Sacrificed any kittens today?”

  “Shut up, scuzface,” Sean said. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Having an orgy,” Emma said. “She invited about a thousand peanut M&M’s over, and she’s having her way with them. Eating them out.”

  “I was at the arcade, and I just saw Willis, all dressed in a fucking tuxedo. He says he and Aunt Nora are getting married today. He was on his way to pick up their rings.”

  “You’re kidding! Mom!” Emma yelled. She tore out of the room, and Belinda followed her. They found Aunt Bonnie in the kitchen, ironing and watching “Another World.”

  “Mom, did you know Aunt Nora and Willis are getting married today?” Emma asked accusatorily, her hands on her hips.

  “Yes, honey. Aunt Nora wanted a very small wedding, just her and Willis and a justice of the peace at Nora’s apartment.” She shrugged, shaking her head. “Belinda, your mom knows about it, too. We think it rots, but what can we do?”

  “This is outrageous!” Emma yelled. “A family wedding, and we’re not even invited?”

  “Remember, sweetheart—Nora and Willis are in their forties, and it’s Willis’s second marriage. Aunt Nora just felt this would be more … appropriate.”

  “Fuck appropriate,” Emma said, storming from the kitchen. As soon as she was out of Aunt Bonnie’s sight, Belinda clutched Emma’s forearm.

  “We’re crashing the wedding,” Belinda said.

  “Yes!” Emma said.

  They raced upstairs to Emma’s room. Emma pawed through her closet, throwing clothes all over. She emerged with last year’s spring-dance dress and her standard family-party red satin skirt.

  “Pick,” Emma said.

  “This one,” Belinda said, reaching for the strapless lavender dress.

  “Ravishing.”

  They packed the dresses and Emma’s best shoes in a grocery bag and left the house, telling Bonnie that they were going to ride over to Belinda’s on their bikes. Then they took off down the long hill to the harbor. Icy wind stung Belinda’s cheeks, and it wasn’t even winter yet. She could practically feel her nose turning red. She’d look really great in Emma’s sexy dress with a bright Rudolph nose.

  Now that she was halfway to Aunt Nora’s, riding as fast as she could, Belinda had second thoughts. If Aunt Nora had wanted them there, she would have invited them. She wondered if her mother’s feelings were hurt. Everyone in the family had liked Willis right away, and Belinda had heard her parents talking about how good he was for Nora. But what kind of man would want to marry her and not invite the rest of the family?

  Belinda passed Emma on the straightaway. She wanted to see if Emma’s nose was red, but she was moving too fast. She wheeled into the Benson’s Mill parking lot and pedaled into a deserted carport.

  “What a perfect dressing room,” Emma said, looking around approvingly. Naturally, her nose was only a little pink, not flaming. She whipped the clothes out of the bag, and she and Belinda stripped.

  “This is colder than the girls’ locker room,” Belinda said, her teeth chattering.

  “I know! What kind of luxury condo doesn’t heat its garages?” Emma said. “Chintzy.”

  Belinda turned so that Emma could zip her up. She had goose-bumps across her shoulders, and she couldn’t stop shivering. “What time do you think the wedding is?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “I didn’t see Willis’s car when we came in.”

  Belinda pulled on her jacket. She ran to Aunt Nora’s carport and back. “Just one car. That gives us time to get a wedding present.” Her eyes roved the garage area.

  “I didn’t bring any money,” Emma said. “Besides, we don’t know when Willis might get here.”

  “We have to find something. Something right around here should be perfect.” Her eyes down, Belinda covered the pavement. Some pennies, a few flip-tops, a battered hubcap. In the corner of the parking lot, someone had abandoned a lobster pot.

  “Oh, look, a lovely coffee table,” Emma said, doing her New York summer-person imitation. “Such a nice reminder of our New England vacation.”

  “Kindling,” Belinda said. She dragged it into the carport/dressing room and used a rock to break the brittle wood slats into small pieces. Lots of Benson’s Mill residents had firewood piled in their carports, but Aunt Nora never remembered to buy any. Belinda and Emma darted in and out of the neighbors’ carports, swiping a log from each pile.

  “Six logs and a bag of kindling,” Belinda said.

  “They can have their first married fuck in front of a roaring fire. You’re so romantic, Bel.”

  “Thanks, Em.”

  They rang Aunt Nora’s buzzer.

  “What if she doesn’t let us in?” Belinda asked, balancing three big logs under her chin.

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Yes? Who is it?” crackled Aunt Nora’s voice over the intercom.

  “Flowers,” Emma said, disguising her voice like a delivery boy.

  The buzzer sounded, and the cousins pushed open the door. They climbed the five flights, bowing under the weight of the firewood.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Belinda said. She felt lightheaded, as though she might start laughing and not be able to stop. She had the terrible feeling they were making a mistake, that Aunt Nora was going to be furious at them.

  They got to her floor, opened the fire door, and there she was in the hallway, her red hair curled and tumbling onto the shoulders of a gorgeous low-cut white lace gown.

  “Oh, my God,” Aunt Nora said.

  “Aunt Nora, you look so beautiful,” Emma said. “Doesn’t she, Bel?”

  “You do, you look incredible,” Belinda said, afraid she would drop the wood.

  “I’m sorry we faked being florists. Can we put this wood in your apartment before we die?” Emma staggered through the door and laid the logs on the raised brick hearth. Belinda stacked the wood in the fireplace.

  “We wanted to give you a fire for your wedding,” Belinda said. “May your love always burn bright.”

  “And may your heart always burn whenever you think of Willis,” Emma said.

  Aunt Nora laughed, and so did Belinda, but Emma didn’t quite get what she’d said. “Willis told Sean you’re getting married, and Sean told us, and we had to come,” Emma said. “You can kick us out if you want.”

  “God, I’m glad you’re here,” Aunt Nora said, holding her arms open so they’d give her a hug. “I am so nervous, I’m about to start smoking again. Eloping sounds romantic, but it’s been terrible so far. I’m all alone, and I can’t even call your mothers because I’m ashamed of uninviting them. I was bridesmaid at both their weddings, and I didn’t even invite them to mine.”

  “We’re here now,” Emma said, patting Aunt Nora’s hand, beautifully manicured with shell-pink nail extensions. “We’ll be your bridesmaids.”

  The three of them sat on the sofa, leafing through bridal magazines. Belinda saw about fifty dresses she’d like to wear to her wedding. Every picture of a groom wearing glasses made her think of Zach.

  The doorbell rang, and Aunt Nora jumped. “They’re here, Willis and Judge Garrity.”

&nbs
p; “Take a deep breath,” Emma advised. “Pinch your cheeks—you’re a little pale.”

  Nora went to the kitchen. Her satin-toed shoe snagged on the carpet, and she nearly tripped. Belinda caught her elbow.

  “Thank you, Belinda. Thank heavens you’re here.”

  “We’re your family,” Belinda said.

  Aunt Nora opened the refrigerator door. Her hands shook as she removed a pristine white box. She opened the lid, ruffled back the green tissue paper, and took out a bouquet of white roses. Aunt Nora pressed them to her nose, and then, almost as an afterthought, offered them to Belinda to smell. Thinking of Aunt Nora buying her own bouquet all by herself, storing it in her refrigerator, alongside the orange juice and coffee beans, made Belinda’s throat tighten up.

  “I should have flowers for you and Emma,” Aunt Nora said absently, examining her bouquet, as if she were considering splitting it into three.

  “That’s okay, Aunt Nora,” Belinda said quietly, to calm her down. You could see she wasn’t getting nearly enough air.

  Emma answered the door. Willis’s face lit up when he saw Belinda and Emma. He didn’t say, but suddenly Belinda knew it had been Aunt Nora’s idea, not Willis’s, to elope. Belinda stood extra close to Aunt Nora, because Aunt Nora had a long way to go in the love department, and she needed support. Belinda beckoned Emma to stand on Nora’s other side.

  Willis looked tall and elegant in his tux. Aunt Nora walked toward him, taking small steps, the way a bride walks down the aisle. She and Willis stood perfectly still, staring into each other’s eyes. Belinda and Emma moved to one side, watching.

  “My Nora,” Willis said.

  Then, as if she had just remembered, Aunt Nora fumbled her bouquet, freeing up one rose. She took a hat pin out of her sleeve and started to pin the rose on Willis’s lapel, but Emma tapped her back.

  “That’s a job for the best man,” Emma said. Belinda doubted Emma had ever pinned a flower on a man before, but she managed to do it without sticking Willis.

  Judge Garrity, a white-haired friend of her grandparents, cleared his throat. “Where would you like to stand, Nora?” he asked.

  “By the window,” she said.

  Everyone moved across the living room to the big picture window overlooking Mount Hope harbor. It was dark out, and the living-room lamps cast cloudy brown reflections on the glass.

  “We need candlelight,” Belinda whispered in Aunt Nora’s ear, and Aunt Nora nodded.

  “It gets dark so early now,” Emma said, to make conversation.

  Belinda found matches on the mantelpiece, and she lit two tall white candles in crystal candlesticks. She handed one to Emma, and they moved around the room lighting all the candles.

  Through the window, you could see all the harbor lights. There was Lobsterville and the wharf twinkling at the right, and Minturn Ledge Light, its beam piercing the sky, at the left. Except for the chapel where her parents had gotten married, Belinda thought this was the best place anyone could have a wedding.

  Judge Garrity began the ceremony with the old words, “We are gathered here to celebrate …”

  Belinda tried to listen, but she was too busy gathering everyone together in her mind, all the people who should have been there to celebrate Aunt Nora’s wedding: her parents, T.J., Josie, Emma’s parents, Sean, their grandparents, and Great-granny Sheila.

  Belinda had just about finished in time to hear Judge Garrity say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

  Willis took Aunt Nora’s head in his hands, tilted her face so it glowed in the candlelight and from all the love Aunt Nora had inside, and he kissed her. Belinda had never been to a wedding before, and she didn’t understand why such a happy occasion would make her feel so choked up.

  Then Aunt Nora and Willis turned to face Belinda, Emma, and the judge, and from their great smiles and the way they opened their arms, you’d think they were ready to greet a hundred people.

  “Can we call you ‘Uncle Willis’ now?” Emma asked.

  “I’d love that,” he said.

  “Oh, you girls,” Aunt Nora said. “Surprising me like this. You’re exactly like your mothers.”

  “We know,” Belinda and Emma said at the exact same time.

  19

  Don’t you wish we’d thought of it?” Bonnie asked, the day after Nora’s wedding. Reaching into the tank, she grabbed a small lobster. She weighed it on the overhead scale, then threw it into a crate full of seaweed with fourteen other lobsters.

  “Our own sister gets married,” Cass said, “and it takes our daughters to crash the wedding. God, I’m proud of them.”

  “If you start thinking about it, it’s depressing,” Bonnie said, holding her hand over the tank’s circulation jet. Cold salt water bubbled through her fingers. She watched Cass, dressed in yellow oilskin overalls, a red plaid jacket, and her Red Sox cap, throw lobsters into a crate marked “Wickenden Tavern.”

  “What’s depressing? They’re thirteen, and they’re wild. We couldn’t hold them back if we tried. So let’s just be glad they decided to crash their aunt’s wedding instead of hitchhiking to Seattle.”

  “I’m talking about us. Middle-aged suburbanites.”

  Cass squealed. She dropped the lobster she was holding and made an exorcism cross with her index fingers. “Say you’re sorry!” she said. “It’s a well-known fact that once you start thinking you are something, you become it.”

  “Alewives Park, Cass. Forty years old.”

  “State of mind, Bonnie. Once you start thinking of yourself as a middle-aged suburbanite, you wind up spending entire days going to grocery stores in search of the best buy on coffee filters.”

  “It did cross my mind to crash Nora’s wedding,” Bonnie said. “But I didn’t feel like stopping what I was doing.”

  “Oh, dear. Do I want to know what that was?” Cass asked, her voice sinking.

  “Ironing. While watching a soap opera.”

  Cass resumed weighing lobsters. “That’s just considerate,” she said. “We were specifically uninvited to Nora’s wedding. First of all, I wouldn’t have given her the satisfaction of crashing her wedding.”

  “Are you mad at her?”

  “Furious. But still. It not only crossed my mind to crash it, I couldn’t think of anything else all day: the fact that she was getting married and no one from the family would be there. I planned what I was going wear to crash it, what clever reason I was going to give for showing up. Luckily, I had to work, then Zach came over.”

  “That makes me feel a little better,” Bonnie said, but it didn’t. She watched Cass sort the lobsters. Cass in her oversized work clothes managed somehow to look more feminine and vulnerable than she did in a dress. Yet Bonnie was sure that that morning Cass had just thrown on whatever was most practical and comfortable. Bonnie, who spent an hour every morning dressing and making up, saw Cass’s careless style as a metaphor for why Cass didn’t feel like a suburban matron and Bonnie did.

  “No, it doesn’t make me feel better,” Bonnie blurted out.

  Cass looked up, surprised. “What’s wrong?”

  “You don’t see the difference between you not crashing Nora’s wedding because of work and waiting for Josie’s speech teacher, and me not crashing because of ironing and a soap opera?”

  “Look, we weren’t invited. Let it go.”

  “I am in a rut,” Bonnie said.

  “I think you have a nice life.”

  “It’s very nice. But all of a sudden it’s scaring me.”

  “Just because you didn’t crash Nora’s wedding?”

  Josie had been talking to Barbie, walking her up and down the wooden stairs. Now she dropped the doll and started making hand signs in the air. Cass stopped working for a minute to watch.

  “What’s she saying?” Bonnie asked.

  “I have no idea. So far I know about ten words,” Cass said. “All our names, ‘I love you,’ ‘good night,’ ‘tell me what happened,’ ‘stop
that.’ The basics.”

  “I’m impressed,” Bonnie said, watching Josie resume playing, totally involved with her doll.

  “She’s doing better,” Cass said, watching Josie. “I’m terrified, of course, because she’s way ahead of me. Zach says she picks up quickly because the signs fill a void. I don’t need it, so I don’t learn as fast.”

  “But you’ll learn, right?”

  “Zach says it doesn’t work that way. I’ll learn the rudiments, but Josie will be fluent. It’ll be the difference between learning French in high school and being born in Paris.”

  “Does it help with her tantrums?”

  “She has rough spells. It’s a bad combination, a temper and a speech problem.”

  “Temper runs in the family,” Bonnie said. “Have you and Dad made up?”

  Cass shook her head, not taking her eyes off Josie. “I know he’s old-fashioned, set in his ways, all that. But you didn’t hear him call handicapped people freakish right in the middle of a conversation about Josie.”

  “Every time I think I’m having a bad day, I should come see you,” Bonnie said. She pretended to dry her hands, head for the door. “Will you excuse me while I go home to my lovely suburban rut?”

  Cass laughed. She sealed the Wickenden crate and kicked it toward the door. Then she started counting a new batch of lobsters, for the Wellsweep Restaurant.

  “I’ve done some research,” Bonnie said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Oh?”

  “That brownie idea you had.”

  “Good!” Cass said. She opened her mouth to say more, but she must have sensed Bonnie’s hesitancy.

  “Well, lots of places have baskets by their cash registers, full of individually wrapped brownies, cookies, stuff like that.”

  “I know, a dollar twenty-five for a cranberry muffin,” Cass said. “I’m telling you, you’ll rake it in.”

  “Christmas craft shows are coming up,” Bonnie said. “I’m thinking about bringing a basket to one in Peacedale.”

  The telephone rang twice—a signal from upstairs to pick up in the tank room. Cass answered. She whooped once, then stayed on another minute.

  “Billy,” she said when she came back. “He’s been at the boatyard all week, getting the boat ready. He wants to launch her this afternoon.”