Страница 39 из 58
“Like what?” Mom asks with a tiny snort. “Dr. Qui
“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Lizzie,” Rose says. She shoots a look at the kitchen door, through which my dad hasn’t reappeared, apparently still being busy getting his own coffee and cake to go with it. She drops her voice to a whisper as she hisses, “Grandma embarrassed us enough while she was alive. Let’s not have her embarrass us in death too.”
I widen my eyes and swing my head around to look at Chaz, who’s choked a little on the mouthful of coffee he’s just swallowed.
“So, Chaz,” Dad says as he comes into the room, followed by Angelo, Rose’s husband, who is wearing a black suit with no tie and a black shirt unbuttoned almost to midchest. “Are you still in school?”
“Yes, sir,” Chaz says. “I have about three more years of course work left, then I have to start writing my dissertation, and then I’ll have to defend it. I hope after that I’ll be able to find a job and start teaching.”
“Oh?” Mom makes room on the couch for Dad to sit down beside her. “And where are you hoping to find a position? Back here in the Midwest? I know how you feel about the Wolverines. Or out East?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Chaz says with a shrug. “Wherever Lizzie is.”
Mom pauses with her coffee mug halfway to her lips, looking as if she’s not quite sure she’s heard Chaz correctly. Rose narrows her gaze and directs it pointedly to the ring on my left hand, while Angelo looks confused. Sarah coughs. Dad just grins affably and says, “Well, that’s nice,” and shovels the rest of his coffee cake into his mouth.
“I don’t get it,” Angelo says. “I thought Lizzie was engaged to that Luke guy. Chaz, weren’t you goin’ out with that lesbo friend of hers?”
“Who’s Luke?” Dad wants to know.
“Oh, you remember, dear,” Mom says. “We talked to him on the phone. That nice boy Lizzie met in France.”
“I’m still engaged to Luke,” I say quickly. “Things are just… complicated right now.”
“Are they ever,” Rose says, getting up and grabbing Chaz’s and Dad’s empty plates. “Too bad Gran’s gone. She’d have loved this.”
And I realize, a little belatedly, that Rose is right. Not only would Gran have loved what’s going on between me and Chaz, but she’d have been rooting for it. She was the one who’d urged me not to get engaged. She was the one who always thought Chaz was my boyfriend all along.
And a hunk too, if memory serves.
Gran had been right.
About a lot of things, it turns out.
T he first wedding rings were worn only by brides, not grooms. That’s because the first brides were considered possessions by their husbands and once “ringed” (or captured), they were considered their husbands’ property. The ring—though still worn on the fourth finger of the left hand, the finger with the vein thought to lead to the heart—was a symbol of the husband’s ownership. It wasn’t until World War II, in fact, that it became popular for men as well as women to wear wedding rings, and not until the Korean War that it became standard.
Why is this? Why, so women could be sure that their menfolk, when away from home, were reminded that they were not available!
Tip to Avoid a Wedding Day Disaster
When canceling a wedding, it is appropriate, but not mandatory, to send out formal a
LIZZIE NICHOLS DESIGNS™
• Chapter 16 •
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and dramatist
“Honey, where have you been?” Mom demands as Chaz and I enter the church, late. This was a deliberate ploy on Chaz’s part to spare me what he’d declared to be a barbarous practice—the viewing, which had been scheduled for the hour prior to the funeral.
Unfortunately, I discover as Mom grabs my hand, they’ve kept the casket open just for me.
“Hurry,” she says, tugging urgently. “They’re about to close it.”
“Uh, that’s okay,” I say. “I’m good.”
“No, honey,” Mom says. “You, more than anyone, need the closure of seeing Gran at peace.”
“No,” I say. “I really don’t, Mom.”
But Mom evidently doesn’t believe me, because she rips me from the safety of Chaz’s protective embrace and drags me to the side of Gran’s coffin, which is at the back of the church, waiting to be wheeled to its place of honor up front. The lid is open, and Gran, looking incredibly small and frail—and completely unlike her normal self—is inside. I stare in horror.
“See?” Mom says in comforting tones, pulling me toward it. “It’s all right. They did an incredible job. She looks like she’s just sleeping.”
Gran does not look like she’s sleeping. She looks like a wax dummy. For one thing, whoever did her face put way too much rouge on her. And for another, they’ve put her in a blue dress with a collar that’s too high and lacy—something she’d never have worn in life—and clasped her hands across her chest over a rosary.
A can of Bud would have been entirely more appropriate.
“You can kiss her good-bye if you want,” Mom says to me soothingly.
I don’t want to insult anyone, but the truth is, I’d sooner kiss DJ Tippycat.
“No,” I say. “That’s okay.”
“Maggie kissed her,” Mom says, looking a little affronted.
I look around for my niece, expecting to find her huddled in a corner of the church, rocking gently and telling herself everything’s going to be all right. But she’s over by the doors trying to fill a Snapple bottle with holy water and telling her cousins it’s okay, she drinks it all the time.
“Uh,” I say to Mom. “I’m good. Really.”
I don’t care if my six-year-old niece did it before me, and I don’t care if it is Gran: No way am I kissing a dead body.
“Well,” Mom says as the funeral attendant, obviously fuming about having been kept waiting this long, takes this as his cue to lower the lid to the coffin. “I guess it’s too late now.”
But in a way, I realize, it isn’t. Also that Mom’s right. And that the half hour Chaz spent driving crazily around town, insisting we not get to the church until he was certain the casket would be closed, had been for nothing.
Because seeing Gran like this—this empty shell of a body, this statue of her former self—has given me a form of closure. It’s proven to me that the essence of Gran, what made her… well, Gran, is really and truly gone.
And when the funeral attendant snaps the casket closed, I suddenly don’t feel sad anymore. At least, not as sad. Because that isn’t my grandmother he’s shutting up inside that box. I don’t know where my grandmother is.
But she isn’t there.
And that’s a huge relief. Wherever Gran is now, I know she’s finally free.
I wish I could say the same for me.
“Let’s go,” Mom says, taking Dad’s arm and pulling him away from the wall of church bulletins, which he’s been assiduously studying this whole time (Dad’s always been powerless in the face of flyers). “Girls.” She snaps her fingers at Rose and Sarah, who are trying to gather their progeny. “It’s time.”
And like magic, Father Jim appears with a few altar boys holding candles, and then we all fall into our places behind the coffin, which is wheeled to its place of honor before the congregation, almost none of whom I recognize… except Shari, whose gaze locks with mine as Chaz leads me down the aisle. She’s standing with her parents, and at the sight of her I realize, guiltily, that I really ought to have checked my cell phone, which has been vibrating angrily all day, no doubt with messages from Shari, telling me she’s arrived.