Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (6 page)

Lenore, who had ordered blueberry pancakes, was pouring the syrup into concentric circles on their speckled brown surfaces; she added a pat of butter—softened and fluffy as whipped cream—on top. Unlike Betsy or Angelica, Lenore never included the caloric content of what she—or anyone else—ate in her conversational repertoire.

“Do you want a bite?” Lenore looked up from her plate and held out her fork, on which she had impaled a large and particularly tempting wedge. Gretchen wavered for a moment before leaning forward to accept a mouthful.

“Delicious,” she said and felt her annoyance with her grandmother dissolve along with the warm, maple-laced morsel that slid so easily down her throat.

She suddenly remembered a time nearly thirty years ago when Lenore had taken her to Bloomingdale’s, where she bought Gretchen a cranberry-colored dress trimmed with a black velveteen collar, and a tiny pot of iridescent pink lip gloss, something Gretchen’s mother would not have bought her in a million years. Later there had been grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk shakes in a coffee shop—the shopping bag with its new dress tucked tightly between Gretchen’s knees, and the lip gloss in her coat pocket, where it seemed to give off a subtle electric charge. She loved that lip gloss so much that she barely permitted herself to use it. She was so successful that she still had the nearly spent pot, its lid dinged and crazed from its tumultuous life inside her various book bags, backpacks, and handbags, when she went off to college.

So magnanimous did this memory cause Gretchen to feel that she actually let her grandmother drive home, something that would have made Betsy, had she known, crazy. Gretchen sat beside Lenore, whose eyes never left the road. There was little traffic, and Lenore seemed perfectly competent, if a tad prone to speeding, in the driver’s seat.

“Slow down,” Gretchen told her at one point.

“Slow down?” Faded eyes blazing, Lenore turned to her. “At my age, there’s no time to slow down!”

Gretchen almost reached for the wheel, but then the speedometer slipped back a few crucial numbers, and besides, here they were with the car nosing right up to the house like a horse finding its way home.

Ennis had not yet arrived. Good. She needed more time to ready herself. She had not thought to ask whether he was bringing a date, and when the possibility occurred to her, she felt physically sick. But she did not believe Ennis would be so brazen or so cruel, and Gretchen banned the thought from her mind.

Back in the bathroom of her flowered quarters, she took a long, indulgent shower. There were three kinds of body wash, two shampoos, and two conditioners from which to choose. And then—the dreamy white towels. Afterwards she reached for her dress, which she had bought without trying on; those pesky new pounds made any dressing room mirror a small smack to her self-esteem. Pretty risky, but it was black, and although black was hardly the ideal choice for a June wedding, the dress was also stretchy and had looked very forgiving on the hanger.

Her first full-length view of herself was, then, a surprise, though it turned out to be a welcome one. The dress was more than forgiving: it was downright flattering, making her look curvy, not fat. The low-cut neckline highlighted her cleavage—always a strong component of her physical arsenal—and against the black, her skin looked creamy and lush. In this dress she wasn’t just some overweight, not even properly divorced loser; in this dress she was a babe, a piece, a cougar. She experimented with a small, predatory snarl in the polished glass.

The unexpected success of the dress started her mind thrumming, her synapses snapping. So what if Ennis would be here? He had no claim on her, none at all. Maybe she would meet someone tonight, here at the wedding in Great Neck. Someone whose identity was as yet unknown to her, but who would have a profound effect on her life. She could almost feel the aura. It might be a guy—wouldn’t
that
would be nice? But it might also be a professional contact, someone to whom she might turn for guidance, counsel, advice—or something more concrete, like a new job. A job in which she would be both immersed and engaged, not just spinning her wheels.

Maybe she could parlay her most recent experience with Ginny into something better. An arts organization or some other culturally minded nonprofit? She could see herself in development or PR; she was good at writing grants and at igniting a spark in the hearts and minds of those with money to burn.

Still gazing at her not-at-all-shabby appearance in the mirror, Gretchen coiled her wild mass of hair into a loose topknot. The added height made the line of her neck look longer—a welcome and slenderizing effect. She let her hair go, and it sprung loose from her fingers, as if glad to be free again. Surely that stylist downstairs would have some bobby pins; Gretchen would go downstairs and find out. She’d inquire about having her brows done too. Nothing like a well-waxed pair of eyebrows for facing your future.

And even if she didn’t meet someone tonight, Gretchen resolved to start making calls on Monday, putting out some feelers. She knew a few people, and those few might know a few more. She might even sign up for an online dating service, though she had shunned the idea in the past. But her best friend, Shelby—divorced three years this month—had done so and met a sweetheart of a saxophonist, who had been wooing her with intimate weekends at his beach house and his lush, fruity music.

Gretchen thought about what her grandmother had been trying to say earlier. That her approach to her own life was too vague, too diffuse. According to Lenore, she needed to know what she wanted and go after it, like a panther stalking its prey. Like Teddy. And Angelica.

Well, maybe Lenore was right. Maybe Gretchen had been too vague, too soft, too willing to let things happen instead of making them happen herself. Her eyes went once more to the mirror. Was it ridiculous to think that a becoming new dress could signify a change of mind, a change of heart? Gretchen didn’t know. But she fully intended to find out.

S
tanding in the crowded Continental arrival lounge at JFK, Lincoln Silverstein bit down on the stale, brick-hard granola bar and cracked his back molar. Blame, like debris from an explosion, shot out in all directions. He blamed the stingy airline for not providing any food, thus driving him, in his ravenous state, to foolishly attempt to eat the year-old granola bar that he found lodged deep in the recesses of his carry-on bag. He blamed Jerry, the tightwad owner of the telemarketing company where he was currently employed, for excising the dental coverage from the already meager insurance plan. Without insurance to help defray the cost of the dentist’s visit, Lincoln had studiously ignored an intermittent pulsing in that molar, a pulsing that, it was all too clear now, was a signal of the impending dental calamity that had now befallen him. While he was at it, he blamed the manufacturers of the granola bar—brittle, sugary excuse for food that it was—his ex-wife, Betsy, for divorcing him, and Aaron Schulkind, his best friend throughout grammar and middle school, who had defected to the cool crowd when they reached the ninth grade, leaving Lincoln to eat his dust. Blame, once you got started, was viral: pretty soon it was everywhere.

Gingerly, Lincoln touched his tongue to the cracked tooth; pain shot through his head like a bullet. He pulled his tongue away, and the pain retreated a millimeter or two. Now what? He didn’t want to have to deal with this, not when he was on his way to Angelica’s wedding. It seemed wrong, selfish even, to complicate the day—
her
day—with his damn tooth.

Lincoln glanced at his cheap Timex watch. Caleb should have been here by now, and Lincoln was getting antsy. But he did not want to call his son, not yet. He viewed this visit like an audition or a job interview: he was going to be judged by a lot of people, most significantly by his children. He didn’t want to start out by sounding petulant and whiny, so he’d suck it up and wait for Caleb without complaint.

Lincoln knew that he had screwed up with his kids in so many ways great and small. His son Teddy had told him so more explicitly than the rest of them. But over the past decade Lincoln had put his life back together, piece by excruciating piece: he’d kicked the booze habit, moved out to LA, gotten an apartment, and held a series of jobs, none especially gratifying but still they were jobs. The latest, working for Jerry, had actually offered a glimmer of possibility: it turned out Lincoln was excellent at making the cold calls required for the time-share telemarketing position. With his low-key humor and ability to listen as well as gab, he’d been the top-selling employee four months running, and Jerry was tossing words like “promotion” and “supervisory responsibilities” into their conversations with some frequency.

Lincoln dug through his carry-on bag again, found the bottle of Advil he had hoped was still there, downed two gelcaps dry, and hoped they would kick in soon. If he was careful about what and how he ate, maybe he could get through the wedding without telling anyone about the tooth. It would be his own private triumph, a little gift he could give Angelica without her ever knowing.

Because he was doing this for her, that was the crucial thing. Angelica was getting married and she wanted him to be there. And for his other kids—Teddy and Caleb and Gretchen—he was doing it for them too. He hadn’t seen any of them in more than a year now, and no matter what they might think or like to tell each other, he did miss them. And his granddaughters too—Justine and Portia. A year made a huge difference at their age; they’d be grown-up before he knew it.

The rest of the crew—his former wife, Betsy; her new husband in his hot-pink Ralph Lauren sweater (a six-feet-four, three-hundred-plus-pound guy in hot pink? Who knew they even made the damn sweaters, with their damn little ponies dancing across the nipple, so big? That sweater could keep a hippo warm), his erstwhile mother-in-law, Lenore; the friends he’d had from his marriage who’d dropped him like a clod of horse dung when he’d moved out, lost his job and had to spend those months in rehab—he was not doing this for any of them, so he would put them out of his mind. Zap. Gone.

There would be no other members of Lincoln’s family present at the wedding. His parents were long dead, and his brother, Bruce, had died of cancer five years ago this August. In the years he’d been drinking, he’d lost touch with his remaining aunts, uncles, and cousins, and even after he’d stopped, he somehow never reestablished the ties.

His cell phone buzzed. Caleb, no doubt, to say he’d gotten tied up in traffic. Lincoln was glad he had not broken down and called. But when he answered the call, it was not Caleb. It was Angelica, the dream daughter herself. “Hi, Daddy,” she almost purred into his ear. Nearly thirty years old, about to be married, and she still called him
Daddy
. Lincoln lapped it up.

“What’s up, sweetheart?” he asked, ready as ever to do her bidding.

“I need your help,” said Angelica.

“Just tell me where it hurts.” Lincoln felt puffed with pleasure. Despite everything, Angelica still felt she could turn to him. Not Betsy, not Don with all his money. Him.
Daddy
.

“It’s about Gretchen. You see, Ennis
is
coming after all. And Gretchen is not going to be happy about it.”

“That’s news,” Lincoln said. Which was more neutral than the
uh-oh
that he wanted to say.

“I know. But he called to ask if it would be all right. And Justine and Portia really did want him there. So I thought in terms of the big picture and hoped Gretchen would understand.”

“But you haven’t actually asked her?”

“No,” Angelica said. “I haven’t.”

“You want me to talk to her, then? Smooth it over?” said Lincoln, assembling all the pieces in his mind.

“Could you? I would, but there’s just so much left to do before tonight. And besides, you know how it is with Gretchen, Daddy. She’s jealous; she always has been. I think she begrudges me this wedding. Do you know I asked her to be my matron of honor, and she turned me down?”

“I’m sure she’s happy for you,” Lincoln lied. He was sure of no such thing; he had not talked to Gretchen in quite some time, although he had heard about her refusal to be in the wedding party. Since both the boys and her daughters were, her decision seemed, well, strange. He hadn’t discussed it with her, though. “But you can understand how she feels about Ennis. I mean, he did behave like an asshole.”

“I know. Which is why I thought it would help coming from you. Because you’re a man. So do you think you could?” Her voice was coaxing and soft.

“Of course,” Lincoln said. He was a man, all right. Right now, he was
the
man. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” Angelica said. “I knew you’d come through for me.”

“Always, sweetheart,” Lincoln said. But she had already clicked off. Lincoln stood staring at the cell phone as if he could summon her back by the force of his gaze. Angelica. His cupcake, his muffin, his dolly girl. She’d been dazzling him—and the whole world—with her strategically situated dimples, her thickly fringed dark eyes, her gleaming curtain of black hair since she was a half-pint.