Grace Grows (38 page)

How to begin? “I—I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night. And, well, okay. I think it’s a great idea. Let’s do it!”

He stared at me. Perhaps not clear on what I was saying.

“Let’s get . . .” I found I couldn’t quite say the m-word. “. . . hitched.”

He leaned back into the corner of the couch, eyes narrowed at me.

“Ty, do you want to?”

He sat forward slowly, elbows on knees, hands clasped. He looked at the floor for a long time. Scratched his neck. He looked at me and shrugged. “I think it’s worth a try.”

You’d think he was talking about experimenting with a new brand of shaving gel.

“Okay,” he said briskly, standing up. “Listen, I have to go back in now, they’re waiting on me to cut a track.”

“Okay.” I struggled to rise from the low couch. He took my arms and hauled me up. “So, should we, um, should we call City Hall and make an appointment?”

“We have one,” he said. “Next Thursday at three forty-five.”

“Oh . . . all right. Okay. I think that will be fine. I’ll just check with my mom, and Peg.”

“I found out we don’t need blood tests.” He ushered me into the hall. “But we have to go down to the municipal building at least twenty-four hours before to get the license.”

His friends were going back into the recording room.

“Hey, I’m coming,” he called to them. He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and a wave as the elevator doors closed.

The girls outside were gone. I walked down the sidewalk slowly, my mind churning.

WTF
, with the appointment? Had he been that sure of himself? Of me? What did it all mean? Would I ever understand this man?

The cabdriver was waiting, as requested. He was a solicitous Middle Eastern fellow who helped me into the car. Unfortunately, his kindness sent me right over the fine, overwrought emotional edge along which I’d been sidling.

“Are you all right, lady?” he asked, over the front seat.

“I don’t know!” I said between boo-hoos. “I just asked someone to ma-harry me. Or I accepted his proposal. Or something.”

“And he will marry you, yes?” He was looking at my belly, worried. “Yes. But he’s not excited about it. It’s not very romantic!” I wept harder, though I knew I was being ridiculous.

“But he is doing the right thing,” the driver said serenely.
He
was perfectly satisfied. “I take you to your home now, yes?”

We agreed to meet on Monday during my lunch break to get the license. I took a cab down to the municipal building on Centre Street, and to the City Clerk’s office. I was a little early.

A guy at the counter gave me the license application, on a clipboard. I sat in one of the waiting area chairs and started filling out my information. It was pretty quick and straightforward. Name. Birthplace. Social Security. Marital history. I had to swear there were no legal impediments to the marriage.

Then I came to this part that said

You are advised to carefully consider whether to change your surname or not. The various options are listed on the back of the application. Whatever your choice of surname it will be final. Although you may amend other mistakes in your marriage record a surname choice is not considered a mistake and therefore cannot be amended.

I turned the application over and read the various options. We could be Grace Barnum and Tyler Wilkie. We could be Tyler and Grace Barnum-Wilkie. Or Wilkie-Barnum. Grace and Tyler Barnum. Tyler and Grace Wilkie.

I tapped the pen rapidly on the clipboard, until a woman a couple of seats over asked me to please stop.

Wilkie was Ty’s professional name. He wasn’t going to change it, add Barnum and a hyphen, or anything. This decision was about who I was going to be.

Barnum. It was an interesting name. My father’s name. My mother’s name. Which made me wonder, why had she kept his crazy circus name, when she could have returned to being Julia Dalton? Probably because it was my name. Grace Barnum. Which led me to think about The Bump. What would we name him? We hadn’t even talked about it, and he would be out here with us soon.

I stared at the page for minutes, batting it all back and forth in my head. Then I decided: Let’s just simplify and all be Wilkies. In for a penny, in for a pound.

I neatly penned
Susannah Grace Wilkie
on the line.

I signed my name—my
maiden
name—at the bottom of the page and dated it. Susannah Grace Barnum. I would be her for only three more days, but I didn’t feel all that sad about letting her go. She was kind of a mess.

Ty came breezing in and the room brightened.

“Hey, sorry.” He dropped into the chair next to me.

“You’re not late, I was early.” I handed him the clipboard. He took off his baseball cap, shoved his hair back, cracked his knuckles, and set pen on paper. I watched him scrawl his way through the form and just hoped the clerk would be able to read it.

He slowed way down when he came to the surname part. He read the admonishment to choose your name carefully and looked at what I’d written. Turned the page over and read the various options. Turned it back over and looked again at what I’d written. Then he wrote
Tyler Graham Wilkie
on his line, next to mine. He looked at me and winked.

I smiled.

We said good-bye downstairs when I got into a cab. He was going to his parents’ for the next few days, so I wouldn’t see him again until we met back here on Thursday afternoon.

When I got back to work, I told Lavelle I was getting married and asked for Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday off. It wasn’t a problem; with my pregnancy now so advanced, other educators had taken over my teaching schedule. She was excited for me.

“What about the honeymoon?” she asked.

“I think we already had it. About eight months ago. I’ll be here Monday.”

Peg went with me Tuesday to look for something to wear. We found a knee-length, sleeveless dress of the palest blue lace, with a silk band that ran under the breasts and tied in back. I actually looked kind of pretty, in an overripe, about-to-burst way. I found a pair of silver sandals that gave me some height.

That night I called Ty in a panic. “What about wedding rings?”

“I have one for you.”

Yikes. He was way ahead of me on this wedding stuff.

“Okay, well, what about you?” I asked. “Do you want to wear one?”

“Of course I do.”

Of course he did. Good to know. “Okay. What do you want it to look like?”

“Nothing fancy.”

“Gold? White gold? Maybe it should match the one you’re giving me?”

“Yeah. Make it white gold.”

He had a white gold wedding ring for me.

“Okay, Ty.” I felt excited and shy, all of a sudden.

“Okay. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Heck, yeah!” he said, with a lot of his old cheer. God, I loved him.

“I’ll—I’ll be glad to, um, see you on Thursday.”

“Okay, Gracie. Me, too.”

“Well, ’bye.”

“ ’Bye, darlin’.”

Wednesday I slipped out of the office and walked over to the diamond district to look for Ty’s ring. In a store on Forty-seventh I bought a plain, white-gold band. I also got him a wedding present, a watch that cost me the equivalent of a month’s pay. I’d never seen him wear one. Maybe that was the problem all this time. Though I had noticed that since he’d come back from the tour he’d hardly been late for anything.

Julia was at the apartment when I got home. She was spending the night.

Before Peg left for work, I heard her on the phone in her room, telling someone that all was well and we would be there.

“Who was that?” I asked when she came out into the living room.

“Ty.”

I must have looked mulish, because she quickly added, “He said he tried to call you but your phone is off. Don’t worry about calling him, he’s going to dinner with friends. He’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Great,” I muttered. Imagining the bachelor party. Lots of b-words flashed through my mind. Boobs. Beer. BJs? It was, theoretically, his last chance to be nasty with a complete stranger.

Julia was extremely solicitous, obviously afraid I was going to bolt. She massaged my scalp. Patted my hand. Rubbed my feet. She ordered takeout for us, and we sat on the couch and ate pasta e fagioli and watched a story on the health channel about a woman having a ninety-five-pound tumor surgically removed. Then I went to bed.

At almost midnight, my cell rang.

“Hey,” he said. “I guess I woke you. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. How was dinner?”

“All right. It was me and Bogue and Dennis and some other guys.”

“Dennis the mean cousin?”

“Yeah. He’s still an idiot.”

“Why was he invited?”

“Bogue asked my mom what relatives he should invite.”

“So how was the food?”

“Not bad, Hooters has an awesome steak sandwich.”

I knew it. They were probably off to the Hustler Club next for a few lap dances. “Well, that sounds great. Party on!”

He was laughing. Fine.

“I’m home now,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Three fifteen, right?”

“Yes. Right.”

“Hey, Gracie?”

“Hm?”

“What are you wearing?”

“I’m naked, of course. Except for these stiletto heels. They keep getting caught in the sheets.”

“Awesome.”

leap

Early morning I lay in bed a long time, trying not to think.

It was impossible. I was getting married. To this guy I had only known for a few short years. Shouldn’t you know someone for, like, twenty years before you married them?

And my father was going to miss my wedding.

I called Dan in Tokyo. “Hey,” I said when he answered. “Supposedly I’m getting married today.”

“I know. Your mother e-mailed me.”

“I’m sorry, it’s been so rushed . . .”

“I understand.”

“But maybe you’d like to be here. Not to, you know, give me away or anything dumb like that. Just be here.”

“Well, I would, of course. But don’t worry about me. It sounds like you’ve got it all arranged, and I know you want to do it before the baby comes. You and Tyler and I can have a celebration when I get back.”

“Okay.”

“Get someone to take pictures.”

“Okay.”

“Be brave.”

“Okay, Dan,” I squeaked. “I—I love you.”

“Yes. I love you, too.”

After that I tried to sleep some more. It was useless. I sat up in bed and talked quietly to The Bump.

“Hey, in there. How’s it going? I can’t wait to see you. Your dad and I are getting married today. I think you are going to like him, a lot. He’s strong. He has warm hands. And he’s fun! You’ll see. It will be cool to have him for a dad. People will think you’re cool. Oh. Is that a good thing? How do I make sure you have friends who like you for you? I’m going to figure that out. You don’t need to worry about that right now. I’ll talk to your dad. Sometimes he thinks of things I haven’t thought of. We’ll both work on it. You’ll be fine.
We’ll
be fine.”

All beautified, I looked like a very pregnant high school sophomore.

My dress worked as my something new and my something blue. For the something old and borrowed Peg had loaned me a pair of diamond-drop earrings that had belonged to her great-grandmother. They looked like something Mrs. John Jacob Astor might have worn to dinner on the
Titanic
.

I did not like, by the way, that I was thinking about the
Titanic
.

Julia and Edward had curled my hair, leaving me with long corkscrews down the sides of my face, like a Brontë. Not that they’d let me anywhere near the parsonage in this condition.

Julia had protested that my hair was too curly, while Ed just smiled patiently and gave me a look. Their paths hadn’t crossed often, but he and Julia were too much alike in certain ways to get along very well.

“It will settle down,” I told them sadly. I knew my hair.

Ed had brushed the curls into long waves and pulled some of it back with a silver clip. Peg had helped me into my dress, and since reaching or even seeing my feet was problematic, Julia knelt and buckled my sandals.

“You look
gorgeous
,” she said.

“Thank you,” I quavered, adoring not just Julia, but each of them in turn. “I love you.”

Ed went off to meet Boris, while Peg and Julia escorted me downtown. What a crowd greeted us at City Hall!

Ty’s family. All of them were dressed up—Jean in elegant, pink faux-Chanel and Beck in a silky floral sundress. Even Nathan was wearing a suit.

Bogue and Allison—who, now blond and delicately pretty, couldn’t be called emo anymore.