Читать книгу Everything We Ever Wanted - Сара Шепард - Страница 10

The first time Joanna heard about the Bates-McAllister family, she had been a few weeks shy of eleven years old. She and her mother, Catherine, were waiting at the orthodontist’s office for an appointment to see whether or not Joanna would need braces – unfortunately, she would – when Catherine noticed a Main Line newspaper that was wedged between a Highlights for Children and Woman’s Day. It was the kind of paper that announced community activities, openings of new local restaurants, and road construction. In the back, it featured a society page.

Catherine folded back the page and passed it to Joanna. She pointed at a picture of a woman wearing a long velvet gown and sporting a nest of diamonds on her head. Two young boys stood next to the woman, both of them about Joanna’s age, both of them wearing suit jackets and ties. Sylvie Bates-McAllister and family, attending the annual gala for The Swithin School, said the caption.

The waiting room was empty, Joanna remembered, save for the team of receptionists behind the desk, women who were made to wear matching purple jumpers and floral-print turtlenecks. Joanna’s mother had specifically chosen this orthodontist because he was the best, because all the women in the grocery store or at the PTA meetings or at Catherine’s exercise club said that he was the only reputable guy to send one’s children to, and because the hygienists and receptionists were featured in a local newspaper not long ago for their brisk cheerfulness, their annual all-patients-invited Fourth of July parties, and their matching uniforms. In Joanna’s slowly forming consciousness about money and class, she’d begun to realize that Catherine often sought out the best of things, even if they couldn’t always afford them. Catherine chose to plant Japanese maples in their front yard instead of run-of-the-mill sequoias or pines, trying to make their little split-level just on the outskirts of the Main Line stand out from the others in the neighborhood. She insisted on the family going on vacation to Avalon or Cape May, where the people in the bigger, newer, cleaner houses at the top of their development went – and, incidentally, where even the Bates-McAllisters went – instead of Ocean City or Wildwood, where the people in the shabbier ranch houses at the bottom of their neighborhood gravitated. And then, after returning from the only beach house they were able to afford in Avalon or Cape May, which inevitably bordered a house shared by no less than twenty sorority sisters, Catherine made sure to paste an Avalon sticker on their Volvo so everyone would know where they’d gone.

The summers they didn’t go away, Catherine enrolled the family at the local country club, which, though it didn’t have a golf course or a bar, was pretentious and exclusive all the same. Catherine dragged Joanna to the country club every day those summers, sitting on an Adirondack chair near the tanned, pinched-faced women who lived a few train stops closer to the Main Line, glomming on to their every sentence, desperate for any scrap of conversation they threw her. The country club was a sticking point between Joanna’s mother and her father – he wanted to know why they couldn’t just join the Y instead, which had two outdoor pools, many more kids Joanna’s age, and was a quarter of the cost. But Catherine never relinquished the country club membership. She went, she sat in that Adirondack chair, and she belonged.

And so when Catherine saw the photo of Sylvie Bates-McAllister and her boys in the Main Line Times at the orthodontist’s office, her eyes glistened with envy. ‘Would you look at them,’ she gushed. She placed her thumb under Charles and Scott’s faces. Their hair was slicked, their bow ties were neat and straight. She zeroed in on Scott, who even then was strikingly beautiful, with big, round eyes, enviable cheekbones, thick black hair. ‘Lovely.’

‘What’s a gala?’ Joanna had asked, reading the caption.

‘A big party,’ Catherine said knowingly. ‘Probably to raise money.’ As if she’d been to plenty of galas herself.

After that first mention of Sylvie Bates-McAllister, Catherine brought her up again and again, as though they were friends. At a jewelry store at the mall, eyeing the displays: ‘I bet Sylvie Bates-McAllister buys diamonds like that and thinks nothing of it.’ Passing by a stable: ‘Do you think Sylvie Bates-McAllister takes riding lessons there? Goodness, I’d love to learn how to jump. I should inquire about lessons.’ When spotting a stretch limo paused at a traffic light next to them: ‘Perhaps Sylvie’s in there.’ She looked longingly into the tinted windows.

She seemed to spend like Sylvie Bates-McAllister, too – every time Joanna’s father received the monthly credit card bill in the mail, her parents had the same, shopworn argument. ‘This is where the money goes?’ her father would boom to Catherine, who would be sitting at the kitchen table, doing her nails. ‘I just want things to be nice,’ she’d holler back. ‘Is that too much to ask? I deserve this.’ ‘If you want all this shit, get a job,’ he’d say. To which Catherine would say that she absolutely would not get a job – no self-respecting Main Line woman had a job – to which Joanna’s dad would stomp down to the basement, where he kept a weight bench and a few free barbells. Bruce Springsteen would start up, loud, and Joanna would listen to the sound of metal against metal, the grunt of heavy weights being thrust over his head. And Catherine would put down her nail file and little bottle of polish, look at Joanna and say, ‘This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.’

Nothing was ever right for Catherine. Nothing was ever good. When her health problems developed, episodes that made her writhe and faint and spend hours in the ER, begging to be examined, Joanna was certain it was because of her constant and pressing dissatisfaction. It had metastasized through her body, Joanna figured, in precisely the same way her friend Chelsea’s mother’s breast tumor had metastasized to her lungs and liver. If one could die from cancer, then one could certainly die from unfulfilled dreams.

For a long time, Joanna didn’t notice the looks the ER nurses gave one another when Catherine was wheeled in yet again. Nor did she question why her mother was never really given a diagnosis, or why she was never even properly admitted to the hospital, or that her father merely dropped the two of them off at the ER entrance, wanting nothing to do with this. She’d just assumed her father was mean and insensitive, probably burdening Joanna with all the responsibility because he wanted more time to lift weights or tinker with his ham radio. On Joanna’s eleventh birthday, just as Joanna was welcoming the first of her friends to their house – she was having a sleepover party in the finished part of the basement – her mother got that pale, vague look again, and Joanna knew what was coming. Joanna hustled her friends downstairs, watching with trepidation as her mother yet again collected her things to go to the ER. ‘I can’t go with you this time,’ she said.

Catherine’s eyes widened. ‘Why?’

Joanna was suddenly near tears. ‘My friends are here,’ she answered. And then, even more stupidly, ‘It’s my birthday. Maybe Dad could go.’

Catherine looked terrified. ‘No! It has to be you!’

And then Joanna’s father stepped in, forming a barricade between mother and daughter. ‘It’s her fucking birthday, Catherine,’ he repeated. Before Catherine could react, Joanna’s father grabbed her by the arm and announced that he was taking her and her friends out for birthday pizza. If Catherine needed to go to the ER, she would have to drive herself. Instead of going to the ER, Catherine stormed up to the bedroom and slammed the door. Which confused Joanna – didn’t her mother need the ER? Wouldn’t she die if she didn’t go? And then she realized how foolish she’d been. The discovery bit hard into her skin, rippling through her whole body. Though she uncovered her mother’s secret that night, she kept it to herself, never admitting what she knew.

Joanna couldn’t help but daydream about the Bates-McAllister family, too. She brought the magazine home from the dentist and she stashed it in her nightstand drawer, looking every so often at Sylvie’s smiling face, so poised, so serene, so stately. Sylvie wasn’t a striver – she was already there. Could a life like this solve everything? As time passed, she collected other photos of the Bates-McAllister family, following their lives the way other girls followed the goings-on of a much-loved music group. She kept a photo of Charles at Swithin, a photo of James and Sylvie at a ball for the Philadelphia Art Museum, a photo of Charles and Scott standing outside a new running trail on the east side of the county, and a clipping of Sylvie alone, holding a plaque indicating she was being honored at a Swithin charity event. She pulled out a worn map from the junk drawer in the kitchen and found the Swithin grounds, a few towns away, and then Roderick, nestled in the woods of Devon. The more trips her mother took to the hospital, the more complex Joanna’s fantasies about the family grew. She envisioned herself and her mother going over to Roderick for a family dinner, though the interior of the house looked very different in Joanna’s imagination than it did in reality. Whenever her father was kind enough to drive Joanna and her mother to the hospital, Joanna shut her eyes and imagined them in the Bates-McAllisters’ car instead. It would be a very fancy car, she figured – a Rolls-Royce. They would listen to the classical radio station, not the angry, evangelic talk radio her father preferred. And afterwards, when her mom had been treated and discharged and they waited at the curb for Joanna’s dad to pick them up, Sylvie Bates-McAllister would pull up to the curb instead. Maybe Sylvie and Catherine would become friends. Maybe Sylvie Bates-McAllister would die young and leave Catherine money in her will.

Eventually, Joanna earned a scholarship to Temple that allowed her to move out of her family’s house and into the school’s dorms in Philadelphia. After that there was a string of jobs, a string of boyfriends, and her parents finally divorcing. Once out of the suburbs and that house, the cloud over Joanna’s head began to clear. Her mother would call with reports of yet more visits to the ER, and though Joanna would sometimes accompany her, she no longer felt so responsible for pulling Catherine out of her misery. She lived her own life. She’d all but forgotten about the Bates-McAllisters until the day she saw Charles in a bar in Philadelphia, standing across the big, square room, a pint glass in his hand.

She’d nearly dropped her glass of wine. It was startling that Charles was real, standing a mere twenty feet away. His posture wasn’t as upright as she’d imagined, and his pants were a little high-waisted. He had razor burn on his jaw line, and his leather jacket fit like a poncho. And his voice – for she could hear it across the mostly-empty room – was wholly different, mid-tone and gravelly and without any accent at all. For some reason, Joanna had assumed he would sound like John F. Kennedy.

Seeing Charles filled Joanna with bittersweet nostalgia – Oh, there’s that boy whose family I used to be obsessed with! And she could have left it as a sad, funny, odd little moment and gone home, that chapter of her life closed, except Charles walked over to her. He bent over at the bar right next to her, ordering another beer, even though there were other empty spots at the counter closer to his friends.

So Joanna said something to him. Maybe something about his complicated platinum watch, maybe something about what he was drinking, she couldn’t remember now. Charles said something back, looking her over, smiling. It was surreal, Charles Bates-McAllister smiling at her, like a character from a book becoming three-dimensional and asking her to dance. After about a half hour of talking, Joanna dared to take him by the hand, lean over the bar, and kiss him. Charles’s eyes popped in surprise, but then he kissed her back. Charles Bates-McAllister kissed her back. She sat back on the stool, grinning, and he was grinning, too. Later that night, when she left with Faith, her roommate, Faith asked why Joanna had thrown herself at the short guy with the ugly tie and terrible shoes – he wasn’t that cute. ‘He’s an old friend,’ was the only way Joanna could explain.

Charles called later that same week. After they had been dating for three months, Joanna decided to finally break the news to Catherine that she had a new boyfriend – someone whose name she might recognize. It felt like the biggest moment in her life. But there was a long pause after she made her announcement. Catherine stared at her, a nail file in one hand. Finally, she set the file on the table. ‘Why in God’s name would he be interested in you?’ she cried.

Joanna was taken aback. ‘What?’

‘You don’t know how to hang pants on a hanger. You don’t know how to set a table. You always put the knives on the wrong side of the plate.’

Joanna had stood up, walked to the bathroom, and inspected her reflection, looking for – well, she wasn’t sure what. A blemish on her face. Oily hair. Some visible ugliness. She looked the same as she always did, her thick dark hair past her shoulders, her gray, almond-shaped eyes bright and alert, her teeth straight from years of treatments from the right orthodontist. For a moment she thought worriedly about Charles’s old girlfriend, Bronwyn, whom he’d told her about by then. Bronwyn had made Joanna very nervous and cagey until Charles assured her that she didn’t matter and that he wouldn’t bring her up again. But Bronwyn did know how to put knives on the right side of the plate, certainly. She sounded so perfect, the daughter of a brilliant physician and professor, the girl whose parents gave her every unthinkable opportunity in the world. In fact, Joanna could easily imagine Bronwyn standing beside Charles in those old, dusty Main Line Times photographs that were still in a box at her mother’s house. Was her mother on to something? Should Charles be with someone like Bronwyn instead?

And then she’d straightened up. Who the hell cared about knives and plates? She emerged from the bathroom, her composure regained. ‘Charles likes me,’ she insisted.

‘Okay,’ her mother said suspiciously, still not letting down her guard. Why wasn’t she happy? Wasn’t this what Catherine was attempting to groom her for?

‘He does,’ Joanna protested. ‘And I like him, too.’ She hated how hard she was trying.

She did like Charles. He was just what she’d imagined he’d be and much more: he took her to great places in the city for dinner. He had season tickets, courtesy of his parents, to the Philadelphia Orchestra. He enjoyed going to plays and museums. When they went shopping, he didn’t sit sullenly on the couch boutiques put out for bored husbands and boyfriends, but instead helped Joanna pick out things that fit her best. Whatever she liked, he bought for her. Whenever they went out to dinner, he paid. His apartment in Rittenhouse Square was clean but not generic – he read Civil War biographies and Vanity Fair. He had square ceramic plates and a collection of old Star Wars toys. He saved his old baseball and concert ticket stubs in a leather-bound black book. Once, when he was taking a shower, she’d found a lined notebook full of original poetry. In that same book she’d found a creased flyer that said, Redemption Is Near. Repent! A man had shoved it at them on their first date; they’d laughed about it in the restaurant, making a jokey second date to attend the Prepare-For-The-Apocalypse Meeting the flyer had advertised. They’d gone to a bar instead of that meeting. And then back to Joanna’s apartment. But Charles had saved that flyer. It meant something to him.

After Joanna found that flyer, she gave herself over to Charles. He became no longer a conquest but something shiny and true. The first time she cried in front of him – recounting an old argument her parents had that culminated in her dad throwing a plate and her mom sobbing on the kitchen floor – she felt safe and protected. Charles unburdened himself to her, too, telling her about his stilted relationship with his father and his brother, recounting memories of being ostracized at summer camps, sadly wishing he were better with his hands. He had flaws; she liked that. It drew her to him, made him more attractive. When he came over, she would tear off his clothes. She liked the way he kissed her all over, and she liked the way he stared at her as if she was truly beautiful and unique. When Charles asked her to marry him at their favorite Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, the one in the small room with the homemade pastas and the exuberantly touchy-feely proprietor, Joanna had been rendered speechless. All those pictures she’d saved of Charles’s family, all that wishing to be part of it. But what made it even sweeter was that who Charles was didn’t matter anymore. She would’ve chosen him out of anyone. And she’d thought he’d chosen her out of everyone, too.

Now, though, she wasn’t entirely sure how the choosing had happened.

It was ten in the morning on Wednesday, two days after Joanna and Charles went to Sylvie’s for dessert. There had been no more talk about Scott since then, and although Joanna wanted to bring up what she’d heard Charles and his mother talking about in the kitchen, she didn’t know how. What was this fight Charles had referred to? Why hadn’t he ever told her about it, and what did Bronwyn have to do with it? How much did he think about Bronwyn, anyway? Charles had assured her that he hadn’t spoken to Bronwyn in twelve years, but he’d never explained why they’d broken up. Joanna suspected that Charles had not been the one who’d cut it off.

She lay in bed now, staring up at the clean, smoothly plastered ceiling, willing herself to get up. Out the window, she saw the rest of the houses lined up along the streets. Centennial, their development was called; there was a stone sign at its entrance, crowing the name in curly We The People font. The streets’ names had something to do with American ideals – there was the cluster named after great American leaders, Washington, Franklin, Hancock, there was Valor Drive, Integrity Circle, Freedom Court. Joanna and Charles lived on Democracy, just past the dog park and the jogging path and the playground.

It was nothing like Joanna’s old neighborhood in Lionville, with its hodgepodge of houses linked together by a gate at either end, her own house slightly on the bedraggled, lowerclass side. Each house in We The People was big and uniform and beautiful and perfectly maintained. The only blemish was the line of houses on Spirit, two streets down. They were originally models, but the developers had decided to try to sell them off. Charles had put a down-payment on this plot before he and Joanna had seriously begun dating – a fact that he’d announced only after they’d gotten engaged, and a fact that had disappointed Joanna a little, knowing they wouldn’t be choosing a house together, but no matter. By the time the construction on their house had been completed, the market here and in the rest of the country had taken a steep downturn. The developer hadn’t started any new construction since. All the houses on Spirit were still empty. Quite a few of the For Sale signs in the yards – Low Financing! Upgrades! Reduction! – had fallen over. One was missing entirely. A tree in one of the houses had become so overgrown it looked like it was doing damage to the siding. There was even a rumor teenagers had broken into one of the homes and were using the closets to grow pot. Maybe it was naïve, but Joanna had thought life in the suburbs – suburbs like this – would be untouched by economic strife. More than that, Spirit houses seemed so expendable. Without people inside them, they were without identity, mere structures of concrete and siding and faux stone.

She sighed, rolled out of bed, and stumbled for the bathroom, forgetting for the millionth time that it wasn’t in the hall but to the left, part of the master suite. Though they’d lived in this house for two weeks, she still felt lost here. She felt a little aimless, too – she’d quit her job in the city two weeks ago, the position at the non-profit not lucrative enough to justify the commute into the city, and it was the first time in years she’d woken up without somewhere to go, without anything concrete to do. There were rooms to paint, she supposed. There were new fixtures to buy for the kitchen, patio furniture to scope out. And there were all the unpacked boxes to attend to, including the ones stacked in the living room that contained stuff from Joanna’s old apartment in Philly.

She walked downstairs and looked at the boxes. She hadn’t seen any of the old items in almost a year, as she’d put the stuff into storage when she first moved in with Charles. Only one box had been opened, its flaps gaping free. All its contents were still packed inside: a stack of old foreign films on VHS, a pair of seventies-style sunglasses she had bought at a thrift shop and worn incessantly one summer, an industrial-sized backpack she’d used on a trip to Europe, funded all on a ridiculously tiny amount of money. The items smelled a bit moldy and unclean, instantly conjuring up a long-suppressed memory of a house party she and her roommate had had about five years ago that had culminated in a bunch of strangers kissing. The time when she’d used all of it felt like three Joannas ago, and she couldn’t quite remember who that Joanna had been. She wondered, too, what the Joanna who’d used those items would think of the Joanna now. She had no idea where to put any of the things, or even if they belonged in this clean, bright house at all.

She turned away from the box toward the kitchen, examining a Crate & Barrel box by the fridge instead. Inside was the Cuisinart mixer she and Charles had been given as a wedding gift. She hefted it out of the Styrofoam packing material and put it on the counter. Perhaps she’d make cookies.

A sound in the backyard made her turn. The women from the neighboring houses were standing outside in their yards. Two little kids sat in an enormous sandbox that straddled the two lawns, feeding sand into a wheeled and levered contraption and sifting it out in a neat, pyramid-shaped pile.

Joanna sprang into action, running her hands through her hair and putting on a bra, a clean t-shirt, and a pair of jeans. She walked down the stairs, turned right instead of left for the kitchen, stopped, reversed directions, and padded around the island and the table and the pile of broken-down boxes near the laundry room. Sun dappled across the back deck. The one birdhouse they’d installed twisted on its chain. When the women heard Joanna’s sliding glass door opening, they turned their heads for just a moment, gazing at her disinterestedly, as though she were just yet another Canada goose slowly meandering across their lawn. Undeterred, Joanna walked over.

‘Hi,’ she said. Her heart beat quickly, although she wasn’t sure why. She’d made plenty of new friends before. She was usually good at it. ‘I’m Joanna Bates-McAllister. My husband and I just moved in. I’ve been meaning to say hello for a few days, but I’ve been so busy.’

The brunette woman nodded. ‘I thought I saw a van.’ She was the type of woman who wore color-matched velour sweat suits and shimmering athletic sneakers, ready to exercise at a moment’s notice. She lived on the left side of Joanna, and Joanna had watched yesterday as she’d hung a silk flag decorated with an Easter basket outside her front door, in honor of the upcoming holiday.

‘I’m Teresa Cox,’ the woman added, in afterthought. ‘And this is Mariel Batten.’

Joanna turned to Mariel, who had blunt-cut blonde hair, a slender, down-sloped nose, and very white teeth. There was a lipstick imprint on her white coffee cup. She appraised Joanna without much enthusiasm. ‘Is your husband related to Timothy McAllister?’ she asked blandly. ‘From Chadds Ford?’

‘Oh.’ Joanna tugged self-consciously on her earlobe. ‘No, my husband’s last name is Bates-McAllister. His father was from Boston. He didn’t have family from around here. His mother did, though. Sylvie Bates?’

Mariel shrugged noncommittally. There was no recognition of Sylvie’s name. No swift change of expression, no taking of Joanna’s arms and saying it was so nice to meet her. No begging that she’d have to come over for dinner some time, she and her husband. No huge grin and confession that when they’d heard Joanna and Charles were coming to this neighborhood they’d become so excited, for it’s truly an honor to have them.

Joanna rubbed her hands up her bare arms, struck dumb. ‘Anyway,’ she fumbled. ‘Cute kids.’

Teresa Cox smiled. ‘The girl is Forrest. She’s mine. Hollis is Mariel’s. Do you have any?’

Joanna shook her head. And then there was the dead air again. But my mother-in-law is on the board of directors at The Swithin School, Joanna wanted to say. The best school in the county. She’s a socialite. Didn’t that matter? Who cared about kids when there was that?

‘Anyway,’ Joanna said, not able to stand the pointed, exclusionary silence any longer. ‘It’s nice to meet both of you. I have things to do inside. So.’

‘Nice to meet you, too,’ the women said in unison. They tilted their bodies away. Joanna took faster steps than normal back to her house, suddenly painfully aware of how cold it was outside. Goose bumps rose on her arms. Her whole body shook with shivers. There was a peal of laughter behind her, a gasp. One of the children turned a crank of a sandbox toy.

She shut the screen door quietly and placed her palms flat on the cluttered kitchen table. The house was judgmentally quiet. She longed for noise of the city, traffic screeches and subway rumblings and buzzing chaos to drown out what had just happened. She snatched her cell phone from the island and pressed the speed dial for Charles’s office. When he answered, she let out a whimper.

‘What is it?’ he gasped.

‘I just tried to meet the neighbors,’ she blurted in a scratchy whisper. ‘The ones I told you about? With the shared sandbox? The ones that just stand there and talk all day?’

There was a three or four second pause. ‘Okay…’

‘They were so…cold. I felt like I was the new girl at school and I wasn’t wearing the right clothes.’

There were voices in the background, someone else’s phone extension ringing. ‘I’m sure they’re very nice, Joanna.’

‘Oh.’ She sat down on the couch, not anticipating this answer.

‘I don’t remember you being this way about people in the city.’

‘I wasn’t. It didn’t matter.’

‘Why does it matter now?’

She stared up at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered powerlessly. There was something about this wide-open space and these people peering out from their identical houses that made her want to conform and belong. Hideously, it reminded her of her mother sitting on that Adirondack chair at the country club, in the right place but so, so wrong. Joanna had assumed it would be so much easier for her.

‘Is that all?’ Charles asked.

She swallowed, now almost in tears. ‘Are you okay?’ she blurted.

‘Me? Yeah. Why?’

‘You’ve been…quiet.’

‘No I haven’t.’

She squeezed the red throw pillow on the couch. Give me something, she thought. Anything. ‘Are you guys worried about Scott? Is there anything I can do?’

He paused for a long time. Let me in, she willed, staring at her reflection in the dusty television screen. You know I heard you two talking. You have to know.

Charles sighed. ‘Joanna, I’m actually in the middle of something. Can I call you later?’

The receiver was limp in her hands. She tugged on her sweater sleeve so suddenly and with such force that she heard a seam rip. ‘Don’t bother,’ she snapped.

And then he hung up. Joanna sat upright on the couch, her back pressed into the cushions, her calves at right angles to her thighs, waiting for him to call back, but he didn’t. She felt silly for wasting his time. To Charles, she was the one at fault, she was the one who’d broken some kind of social contract and was now being whiny and impatient. And where was the sympathy for her? Again she thought of Bronwyn. Again she tried to imagine what Charles was referring to two nights ago, but it was like trying to bake a cake without any of the ingredients.

She stared blankly at the mantel across the room. The only thing they’d put there so far was a framed photo from their wedding, Joanna in her long and simple strapless gown, Charles holding her waist just as the photographer ordered. They stood in Roderick’s garden, where the wedding had taken place, grinning at one another. Joanna squinted at the photo until their faces blurred.

On the day of their wedding, Catherine had arrived at Roderick in a long red dress that dragged on the floor, almost like a wedding train. Her posture was very poised and upright, Joanna could tell she was trying very, very hard to act as though she’d visited Roderick many times, but whenever Catherine thought no one was looking, she stole long glances at the stained glass on the second floor, or the labyrinth and wading fountain over at the other side of the grounds, or at the opulent yellow diamond Sylvie had recently begun wearing. It was early fall, the air growing crisp, and some of the guests wore furs. Catherine gaped at those, too.

‘A garden wedding,’ Catherine had sighed romantically, listing into Joanna. She spied a man with a camera over her shoulder and gripped Joanna’s arm. ‘Who do you think he is?’ she whispered. Her breath already smelled like gin; she’d been making good use of the open bar, probably due to nerves. ‘Maybe from the Inquirer? Or the Main Line Times? This is just the kind of thing that would make it into that.’

‘He’s just the wedding photographer,’ Joanna said, shrugging.

‘Nonsense,’ Catherine said, craning her neck at other guests. ‘I’m sure he’s from the Main Line Times. I think I recognize him. And oh! I just met Charles’s brother, Scott. So unusual looking. And such a flirt!’

Joanna craned her neck to see where Scott was. Charles had chosen not to include him in his small wedding party – ‘It’s not like he’d do it, anyway,’ he’d said – and Scott had been a ghost at the ceremony. Joanna had definitely taken notice of the thin, beautiful, dark-skinned girl he’d brought as his date – Queenie, or Quinta, something with a Q, anyway. As she walked through the crowd earlier, wanting to get a look at the cocktail hour appetizers, the crowd had quickly parted. It was as if the other guests were slightly afraid of her.

Catherine inspected Joanna carefully. She reached out and brushed a few strands of hair out of Joanna’s eyes. ‘Why do you look so pissed off? You should see yourself. It’s like you’ve swallowed a wasp. Your pictures in the Main Line Times are going to be terrible.’

‘Mom, the Main Line Times isn’t here, okay?’ Joanna snapped. And then her mother’s face fell, and Joanna clenched inside. Okay, so she was pissed off. A sour, irksome feeling had infected her in the last hour, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on the cause. Catherine, most definitely, but that wasn’t all of it. Was she irritated about the band not showing up on time? Was it because the bustier beneath her dress was digging into her ribs? Certainly, but she was also just the tiniest bit rueful about a particular entry in an old journal she’d kept when living alone in Philly she’d come upon a few days ago when cleaning out her things. The entry described Joanna’s ideal wedding: it would be barefoot on a beach on a mid-summer night with only a handful of guests, culminating in a clam-bake on a patio and a lot of dance songs like ‘Come on Eileen’. It was a silly idea, and she never would’ve shared it with Charles, but that was the thing – she hadn’t been able to share any ideas with Charles. The details for the wedding at Roderick had been in place more than likely before they’d gotten engaged – more than likely before Charles was born.

‘You’d better start smiling,’ Catherine whispered through clenched teeth, nudging Joanna’s elbow. ‘Don’t screw this up. You probably don’t even realize what you have here.’

Joanna took stock of Catherine’s words and finally understood. Her mother’s reservations weren’t about Joanna not knowing how to hang pants on a hanger or how to properly set a table. Catherine thought Joanna didn’t deserve this marriage – she did. Catherine was the one who had wanted, who had worked, who had strove, but Joanna had swooped in and taken, taken, taken.

Joanna had pushed her hand over the top of her head, feeling a mess of bobby pins. She walked away from her mother, not dignifying her with a response. As she spun back toward Charles, who was sitting with his groomsman, having danced his one and only dance of the wedding and therefore fulfilled his duties, a sharp pain prodded her side. She suddenly felt dizzy and thirsty and on display. When the photographer grinned at her from behind his camera, she was afraid he was secretly laughing. What if Catherine was right? What if she didn’t deserve Charles? Was that what was niggling at her?

It wasn’t possible. What she’d just felt was wedding jitters, that was all. And underneath that, a fizz of excitement. Excitement that her life was about to change. Excitement for it to be all she’d anticipated it would be. In fact, no – more than that. Excitement that it was going to be better than she’d ever imagined.