The Wedding Machine (32 page)

As she patted the infant's backside she noticed that her chest was not rising and falling. Then she felt her plump little legs and they were cool to the touch. She quickly turned her over and pulled her to her chest. She patted her baby's back over and over as LeMar stood in the doorway and cocked his head to the side.

“Something's wrong,” Kitty B. screamed. “The baby's cold! I can't tell if she's breathing.”

LeMar grabbed the infant out of her hands. “What? My word, Kitty B.! What did you do?”

She ran downstairs to the telephone and called the hospital and then Angus and when she went back up, LeMar had barricaded the door. She could hear his wails from inside.

“An ambulance is on the way!” she yelled as she pounded on the door. “Let me in, LeMar! Let me in!”

“No!” he wailed from behind the thick door. “I will not!”

Kitty B. fell to her knees, grabbed her aching chest, and prayed, “Lord, help us!” just as a sleepy-eyed, six-year-old Cricket stumbled out of her room.

The weeks and months that followed were a blur. Cricket couldn't understand what had happened to her baby sister, and Kitty B. couldn't bring herself to voice the lies the elderly ladies in the church had told her. “One of God's sweet angels took her in the night.”

No,
she thought.
It was something awful that stole her away.
Something darker than the pitch-black fields on the country road.

LeMar wept silently for weeks on end as Kitty B. tried to comfort Cricket and warmed up the stacks of casseroles that the ladies of Jasper kept bringing over.

He wouldn't look at Baby Roberta's room. He couldn't even walk by it. And when the gals came over to help her pack up the clothes and the baby blankets, he drove away from the house and didn't return for two weeks.

Mr. Bouton from Sally Swine called and his parents called and Cricket asked, “Where's Daddy?”

“On a trip,” Kitty B. said. “He'll be back soon.”

“Has an angel taken him away?” Cricket asked.

It was Cousin Willy and Angus who brought LeMar back. They went to New York and found him sitting out in front of the Metropolitan Opera House in the same clothes he left in.

When he came back, Kitty B. tried everything she could to make him feel better and keep her family intact. She cooked his favorite foods and rubbed his back as he stared into space and listened to
Wozzeck
by Berg over and over.

Her parents gave them the house at Cottage Hill, and they sent them money each month until LeMar could get himself together.

When Katie Rae was born a few years later, he did seem better, and he even went back to work for several years. He wept quite often during Katie Rae's infancy, and he checked on her several times during the night. Then somewhere along the way his tears turned into rants, and they were always directed at Kitty B.

He blamed her. He blamed her for Baby Roberta's death, but she can't for the life of her understand why.

Kitty B. pulls up to Hilda's. She has some index cards so she can write her friend a sweet note. Something like, “Thinking of you on Thanksgiving.”

However, when her pen hits the card, she can't help but write down the thoughts that have been bubbling up inside of her for decades now.

Sometimes I look around and wonder how my life got to be this
way, Hilda. I married a difficult man. I live in my parents' old
summer cottage and eke by on their inheritance. I'm overweight. I
drive a crappy car. I have children who don't pay me a lick of respect.

But that's not even the worst part. The worst part is how life
just seems to happen to me, you know? It's like I have no control
over it. I couldn't stop the tragedy twenty-seven years ago, and I
can't stop the misery today. All I seem to know how to do is just
stand here stunned as life thrusts itself on me.

Take it. That's all I've ever done. And I'm sick of taking it.

Love, Kitty B.

She puts the letter through the mail slot and rings the doorbell. “I've got a nice Thanksgiving dinner for you, Hilda. I'm going to run back home to my Aunt Ruby's for a few minutes so you'll have plenty of time to come out here and pick it up and enjoy it. Be back in an hour. I'm not going to leave you alone tonight.”

Kitty B. drives around town several times to give Hilda a chance to discreetly get the food. Aunt Ruby moved out to the retirement home on Seabrook a few weeks ago, but Hilda doesn't know that. As she passes the Baptist church, she sees all of the wedding guests filing out of their cars and into the sanctuary. Ray and Sylvia are on the church steps manning the guest book, and Cousin Willy stands by Angus, who is pacing in the parking lot. This is the second time Willy will serve as his best man.

Oh, Hilda
, Kitty B. thinks.
You do know what I mean. You have
to take this union, and you don't want to. I don't blame you for putting
up a fight. In fact, I kind of respect you for it. It's more than I ever
would have had the guts to do.

She thinks about the letter she wrote, and she wonders if Hilda is reading it right now. She can't help herself from driving back out of town and toward Cottage Island, thinking of LeMar all the way.

When she pulls up in front of the house, LeMar is sitting on the rocking chair with a heaping plate of leftovers and a Co-Cola.

“Back already?” he says as he stares beyond her at his rosebush.

“No,” she says. “I'm not back, but I have something to say to you.”

He winces and grabs his neck, but he does not look her in the eye. She takes the plate out of his hands and dumps the food over the porch railing and into the azalea bushes where the dogs come running up to sample it. She leans against the rail right in front of him and stares him down until he is forced to look up.

“LeMar,” she says. “Maybe you will never go back to work. And I don't expect you to touch me or hug me or share a bed with me. I don't even expect you to ever feel good again. To ever wake up and say, ‘I'm feeling good today.' That's a decision you've made. To feel awful all the time. And I don't expect that to change.”

She looks down at the wagging tails in the azalea bushes and catches her breath. “But I do expect you to treat me with decency. To treat me like a human being. Not your cook or the face you yell at when you're frustrated or the Grim Reaper who has come to destroy you.

“You
can
treat me decently, and it's not too much to ask. And I'm here to tell you this today: If you can't, then I'm leaving. I'll move in with Sis or Ray, and you can take care of your own self. You can fix your own food and listen to your own whining and change your own bed sheets. You hear me?”

He grabs his Co-Cola and takes a sip. Then he cocks his head and stares back at her.

“I'm not bluffing,” she says. “You try me.” Then she turns back toward the car.

When Kitty B. arrives back at Hilda's, she sees that the food is gone. She walks up to the piazza and rings the doorbell. “I'm just going to sit here on the piazza and study some cake recipes,” she calls.

She sits down on the bench and just as she's arranging her cooking magazines, the light flips on above her.

“Thanks, Hilda,” she says with a smile. “Glad to see you're still moving around up there.”

Kitty B. can't remember when she's felt so at peace. She's not scared and she's not anxious and she's not even hungry like she usually is after a confrontation. She
means
what she said to LeMar, and it's up to him whether or not to heed her words. Now she breathes the soft air in and out again before letting out a satisfied sigh. She stays this way on Hilda's porch until midnight, studying the cake recipes and clipping her favorites to try for Katie Rae's wedding.

TWENTY-ONE

Sis

“Well, your baby girl's wedding is upon us.” Sis holds up a piece of wire and Kitty B. snaps it with the pliers. It's the Saturday after Christmas, and the gals are decorating the flying-purple-people-eater cathedral.

“I know,” Kitty B. says.

Ray paces back and forth, examining the poinsettia arrangements, then goes to her pocketbook and writes something in her notebook. Sis looks at Kitty B. and rolls her eyes. Then she whispers, “Ray can't seem to
focus
.”

“I know,” Kitty B. whispers back. “I wish Hilda were here. She'd keep her on task.”

“It was twelve weeks last Sunday.” Sis shakes her head in disbelief. “I can't believe she hasn't let us in to see her for that long.”

“Or at least called us so we could hear her voice.” Kitty B. holds up the pliers and snips another piece to go around a magnolia leaf Christmas wreath.

Sis can see that Ray's mind is on Priscilla's big day. She keeps writing in that blasted “ideas” notebook as if she's critiquing Katie Rae's wedding before it even happens.

Hilda told Sis that Ray is secretly growing gardenias behind the screen of bamboo in her backyard, and Sis has half a mind to sneak over there and see for herself. Who knows what other special touches she's been concealing?

~ APRIL 5, 2004 ~

Sis and Hilda dropped by Ray's one afternoon to see if they could borrow a few more wine glasses for Little Hilda's engagement party. Ray was at Sylvia's getting her hair done, so Justin led them to the shed next to the garage and said, “Try in here.”

There were boxes and boxes of china plates and wine glasses and fluted champagne glasses stacked to the ceiling that read, “Pris” on them, and they knew she must have purchased them somewhere along the way and was saving them for her daughter's wedding.

“Think you should ask Ray if we could use some of those?” Sis asked. They were low on champagne glasses too. It was going to cost a fortune to rent them from the party store in Charleston, and Ray knew it.

“
No
.” Hilda crossed her thin arms and crinkled her nose. “She would have offered if she'd wanted to. That crafty little hoarder.”

On the walk back, Hilda lit a Virginia Slim and said, “Ever since Ray moved to Jasper, she's been looking for an angle to trump everyone else, and I can't say I'm all that surprised she's been withholding that stuff.”

“Really?” Sis's eyes grew wide. “I am. She's the one who pulls us all together to make these things happen.”

“No doubt.” Hilda exhaled and walked through the cloud of smoke before her. “Ray does roll up her sleeves on behalf of all of us. That's true, Sis. But she's always holding a little something back for herself.”

Sis considered the notion. Ray seemed like a tireless worker to her. Just the day before she was ironing all of the linens for the engagement party. “I don't know if I believe that, Hilda.”

“I'm not saying she doesn't work hard. I've never seen someone polish silver the way she does or iron a linen tablecloth.” Then Hilda leaned in and said quietly as they rounded the corner of Third and Rantowles, “It makes me wonder just what she did growing up. That kind of thing comes from experience, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Sis asked.

“I just mean it's important to Ray to trump everyone else—in the etiquette department, in the happy marriage department and most importantly, in the offspring wedding department. She's got something to prove. Think about it.”