The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (36 page)

Just after Ramsey and Florence were seated, the music changed to Handel’s “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba,” which had been Clarice’s suggestion for use as the bridal march. Veronica appeared.

Clarice was forced to admit that Veronica looked nice. Green wasn’t a good color for anyone else in the wedding party so far, but it looked good on her. Veronica smiled, waved, and occasionally mouthed hello to guests as she proceeded down the aisle with her jerky, fast gait. When she passed Clarice, Veronica made a show of pointing her chin toward the sky to remind her cousin that she had not forgotten the clash they’d had on Veronica’s backyard deck when Clarice passed along the story of catching Clifton in a compromising position with another woman.

Veronica’s grand procession was marred by a sudden outburst when she was nearly at her seat. Florence Abrams began to scream and run back and forth in front of the bridal arch. No one could hear what she was yelling at first. But the cause of the commotion became evident when Florence ran past Reverend Biggs, who was outfitted with a lapel microphone. She yelled, “I’m stung. I’m stung!” and she clutched her left forearm where a bee had just stung her. A few seconds later, Florence was down on the ground, still screaming. It was very frightening because everyone who knew Florence at all well knew that she was severely allergic to bee stings.

Ramsey promptly fetched his wife’s EpiPen injector from her pocketbook and administered a shot of epinephrine so Florence wouldn’t choke on her tongue in front of three hundred wedding guests. After tending to his wife, he walked over to Reverend Biggs and shouted into the pastor’s lapel that they’d been through this many times before and that Florence would be just fine. Florence remained on the ground for a while, though, until the injection took effect. All anyone could see of her was her feet sticking out from a bed of sky-blue phlox.

Odette leaned across Clarice, who had the aisle seat, in order to get a better look. Always immune to hysteria, Odette said, “I sure do like her shoes.”

To a round of applause, Florence was hauled up from the ground and helped back into her seat. Then the reverend, groom, and groomsmen took their places and the speakers came to life again, blasting out a loud drumroll.

The doors opened and suddenly the scent of lavender overwhelmed the fragrance of the flowers. Out came the pink cloud. It wasn’t quite the round, cottony ball it had appeared to be in the brochure advertising the Cloud Nine Wedding Package. Because of the fans blowing on it, the cloud looked more like an undulating blob of fiberglass insulation, tendrils of which flailed threateningly in the hot air and then evaporated.

One at a time, Sharon’s sisters filed out of the fog. Each of them wore the same neon-green crushed-velvet dress with balloon sleeves
and puffy bows ringing the waistline. Only Veronica would conspire to make those homely young women wear such terrifying monstrosities. Watching the bridesmaids lumber down the aisle, Clarice thought,
I know I can’t be the only one here thinking “Gorillas in the Mist.”

The bridesmaids were followed by the flower girl, Veronica’s nine-year-old granddaughter, Latricia. Veronica had chosen Latricia because she was the prettiest of her three granddaughters and consequently her favorite. Clarice had tried, as diplomatically as she could, to talk Veronica out of that decision. Latricia was a cutie, but no one would ever accuse her of being the least bit intelligent. Latricia’s flower girl technique amounted to running several quick steps, then stopping suddenly. Every time she stopped, she dug her hand deep into the green toile-covered wicker basket she carried, took out a fistful of green carnation petals, and flung them as hard as she could directly into the face of whoever sat nearest to her. She kept this up until her mother, the matron of honor, bellowed, “Latricia, cut it out! Now!” Latricia completed her walk at a steady pace. But along the way, she glared at the wedding guests and stuffed flower petals into her mouth.

Odette said, “That is not a bright child.”

A trumpet fanfare began and Reverend Biggs raised his arms to let the guests know that they should stand for the entrance of the bride. Sharon emerged from the pink cloud on the arm of her father, Clement.

Her appearance was greeted with oohs and ahhs from the guests.

“My goodness, she’s so thin I wouldn’t have recognized her. She looks adorable,” Barbara Jean said.

It was true. Sharon looked divine. With the aid of her hypnotist, Sharon had wiped fifty pounds off her figure in just a few months. The gown her mother had purchased several sizes too small for her now fit perfectly. Though Clarice had sworn to herself that, as a part of her new life, she had given up on diets forever, she couldn’t help but think that when she and Veronica started speaking again she would have to ask for that hypnotist’s phone number.

The trumpet music ended and a syrupy, string-heavy tune began to stream from the speakers as the doors closed behind Sharon and her father. A few steps beyond the pink cloud, Sharon slowly raised her bouquet to her veil-covered face and began to sing “We’ve Only Just Begun” into a microphone that was hidden among her flowers.

The song was clearly a Veronica touch, Clarice thought. A girl of Sharon’s age would never have chosen an old Carpenters’ song, popular long before her birth, to sing at her wedding. And Sharon certainly wasn’t singing it as if it were a personal favorite. All around the courtyard, people squirmed in their seats and grimaced in response to the bride’s voice. The newly slimmed Sharon may have looked like an angel in her ivory-colored, form-fitting bridal gown, but she sang like a screeching demon freshly released from the deepest pit of hell. Clarice thought,
Why, oh why, didn’t Veronica spring for a few voice lessons in addition to Sharon’s hypnosis?

Right on cue, a dozen white Bostonian doves fluttered away from a cage hidden behind the spitting fish fountain as Sharon wailed, “A kiss for luck and we’re on our way.” About ten feet up in the air, the doves formed a circle and flew in formation in response to whistled cues from the bird wrangler, who crouched behind one of the taller pseudo-Roman pillars. The effect was impressive enough to draw scattered applause.

Unfortunately, that impressive moment didn’t last long. As Sharon caterwauled her way toward her groom, a dark blur appeared overhead and streaked toward the doves. In a scene reminiscent of
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
, an enormous gray-and-brown falcon snatched one of the doves away from the formation and zipped off with it clasped in its talons. The dove wrangler began frenzied tooting, presumably calling the other eleven birds back to their cage. But the doves kept flying higher. They had already sensed the arrival of the second hawk. It descended upon them an instant later and reduced their number to ten.

The remaining birds, shrieking loudly, returned to their trainer. He secured them inside a large cage and then hustled them away from the courtyard. The location of the two missing doves was made
clear to the assemblage by the twin streams of white feathers that lazily drifted down from a tall maple tree just on the other side of the wall. Occasionally a feather floated onto the courtyard and was struck by the red light of the laser that spelled out “Sharon and Clifton,” imbuing the white feathers with an eerie, bloody-looking tinge.

Shocked, Sharon gave up on her vocalizing and walked the rest of the way down the aisle with her father to the sound of the instrumental accompaniment of the song.

Reverend Biggs tried to get things back on track. He began his homily with a brief reference to the circle of life. Then he artfully segued into his prepared speech.

But, like so many things that day, the reverend’s remarks went unfinished. Not long after Reverend Biggs began speaking, the big oak doors creaked open once again. All of the guests turned their faces toward the back, hoping they might feel the sweet breath of cool air escaping from the indoors for a moment. No one got any relief from the heat, but they did get another look at the pink cloud. Then they saw four uniformed policemen step through the fog and onto the brick path. The policemen appeared to be embarrassed when the doors shut behind them and they realized that hundreds of wedding guests sat staring at them. The policemen moved off to one side, trying to make themselves less conspicuous. But they’d been seen, and their effect was immediate.

One of the groomsmen shouted, “It’s the cops, man!” Then he and the unsavory-looking character next to him took off running. The groomsmen leaped over shrubs and bushes, finally escaping the courtyard through an emergency exit. Opening that door activated an alarm, and the thick air was filled with shrill screeching. Clarice turned toward her friends and said, “I don’t know about you, but I prefer this to the singing.” Odette and Barbara Jean nodded in agreement.

The police didn’t make a move to pursue the groomsmen. They stared directly at the groom. Clifton Abrams responded to their attention by shoving Reverend Biggs out of his way and running through the tea roses and across a perennials bed. He made a dash
for a clematis-covered trellis that stood against an outer wall. Once there, he began to climb. The police chased after him. They grabbed him by his ankles before he could make it over the wall and wrestled him down into a patch of black-eyed Susans.

Florence Abrams let out a loud cry and fainted. She crumpled to the ground so that, once again, all that could be seen of her was her feet sticking out of the phlox bed. Clarice said, “You’re right, Odette, those really are cute shoes.”

The policemen handcuffed Clifton and carried him out. Sharon followed them, howling, “Clifton! Clifton!”

Little Latricia skipped along after Sharon, tossing green petals high into the air.

Odette said, “They really should get that child some help.”

Veronica let loose a stream of obscenities the likes of which none of the Supremes had heard since Odette’s mother passed. Veronica cornered Minnie McIntyre near the bridal arch and made quite a scene shouting about the faulty information her oracle had provided. She yelled, “Where’s my perfect day, dammit?!” Veronica’s husband and daughters had to restrain her while Minnie escaped, running into the pink cloud after the cops, the groom, the bride, and the flower girl.

Rather than stick around Garden Hills for canapés and quiet gossip, Odette, Barbara Jean, and Clarice decided to adjourn to the All-You-Can-Eat for ribs and loud gossip. They stuck around just long enough for James to put on his law enforcement hat and get the lowdown from one of the cops who had arrested Clifton. Then they walked to their cars in silence, each of them trying to digest what they had just witnessed.

They were in the parking lot when Barbara Jean interrupted the quiet that had fallen over the group, saying, “Well, that just goes to show you what happens when you don’t have a church wedding. It was bound to end badly.”

Clarice said, “No, that’s what happens when you’re foolish enough to listen to Minnie McIntyre’s advice.”

James said, “No, that shows you what happens when the groom
is dumb enough to mail a wedding invitation to his pissed-off ex-girlfriend when she knows he has outstanding felony warrants for drug possession and grand larceny in Louisville. The detective said some girl named Cherokee walked into the police station last night waving the invitation in the air and saying, ‘If you’d like to apprehend a fugitive felon, I know where he’ll be tomorrow at three.’ ”

Clarice stopped where she was standing and began to laugh. She said, “I feel sorry for Sharon, I really do. But I’ve been holding in a giggle ever since Florence got stung by that bee.”

The floodgates opened. Barbara Jean joined Clarice, laughing so hard that she cried. Richmond chuckled into one hand and held his stomach with the other.

They all stopped laughing when they noticed that Odette had slumped against James. The two of them slowly sank down onto the hot pavement. Odette appeared to be only half-conscious. And James looked even more stricken than she did as he cried out her name.

Clarice and Barbara Jean rushed to Odette’s side and saw that her eyes were flickering open and shut. Before she completely lost consciousness, Odette mumbled something that they could have sworn was “Back off, Mrs. Roosevelt.”

I was on my feet hooting and howling and preparing to lie about feeling sorry for Veronica when the air around me turned to milky water. Then I was sitting on the asphalt. Everyone except for Mama and Mrs. Roosevelt, who both popped up just as the air went to liquid, began to move in slow motion and fade away. I told Mrs. Roosevelt to back off, but she cast sorrowful puppy eyes at me and moved closer.

Then I was in the ICU. For six days I lay there, not exactly awake and not exactly asleep. I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t frightened. And Lord knows I wasn’t lonely, not with the constant stream of guests who came and went—James, my pastor, the other Supremes and Richmond, my doctor, nurses, to mention a few. And that was just the living. Sometimes the room was packed to bursting with Mama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Big Earl, Miss Thelma, and other friends from the spirit world.

Mostly, I felt tired and blazing hot, hotter than I had ever been when I’d had those bad night sweats at the start of my illness. I had a powerful urge to shake off my tired body like it was a heavy, scratchy wool coat and walk away from it feeling light and cool.

Sometimes the air around me would clear and I’d mumble a few words. Always James was there to respond. He’d grin down at me in my bed and say, “Hey there. I knew you’d come back,” and then we’d exchange a few words. But the flood would come again and he’d suddenly be unable to hear what I was saying to him even though I was shouting at the top of my lungs. Whenever that happened, Eleanor Roosevelt would frown and cover her ears and Mama would say, “Stop all that yellin’. You’ll wake the dead.” Then, each time she made that joke, she’d giggle like it was the first time she’d said it.

On my first day in the hospital, I learned from listening in as Dr. Alex Soo talked to James that, for the first time in months, cancer wasn’t my most serious health problem. I was suffering from an infection. My heart and lungs were distributing sickness throughout my body and the antibiotics weren’t halting it. I was, in Alex’s words, “gravely ill.”