Buch lesen: «The Rest of the Story»

ONE

The wedding was over. But the party had just begun.

“It’s just so romantic,” my best friend Bridget said, picking up the little glass jar of candy from her place setting and staring at it dreamily. “Like a fairy tale.”

“You think everything is like a fairy tale,” my other best friend Ryan told her, wincing as she reached down yet again to rub her sore feet. None of us were used to dressing up very much, especially in heels. “All those days of playing Princess when we were kids ruined you.”

“I seem to remember someone who had a Belle fixation,” Bridget said, putting the candy down with a clank. She tucked her short, choppy dark bob behind her ears. “Back before you decided that being cynical and depressed was much cooler.”

“I was the one who liked Belle,” I reminded her. We all had our roles: they were always bickering about our shared history, while I was the one who remembered all the details. It had been like this since we’d met on the playground in second grade. “Ryan was all about Jasmine.”

“She’s right,” Ryan said. “And I’ll remind you again that I’m not cynical or depressed, I’m realistic. We can’t all see the world as rainbows and unicorns.”

“I don’t even like rainbows and unicorns,” Bridget muttered. “They’re so overdone.”

“The truth is,” Ryan continued, “even with cute candy favors, the divorce rate in this country is over fifty percent.”

“Oh, my God. Ryan!” Bridget looked horrified. Ryan was right about one thing: she was the biggest optimist I knew. “That is a horrible thing to say at Emma’s dad’s wedding.”

“Seriously,” I added. “Way to jinx my future. Was my past not bleak enough for you?”

Ryan looked at me, worried. “Oh, crap. Sorry.”

“I’m kidding,” I told her.

“And I hate your humor,” she replied. “Have I mentioned that lately?”

She had not. But she didn’t need to. Everyone seemed to have a problem with what I found funny. “Despite the statistics,” I said, “I really do feel Dad and Tracy will make it.”

“She’ll always be Dr. Feldman to me,” she said, glancing over to the cake table, where the couple in question were now posing for the photographer, their hands arranged together over a knife. “I still can’t talk to her without feeling like I need to open wide.”

“Ha,” I said, although as the kid of a dentist, I’d heard all those jokes, multiple times. What’s your dad’s favorite day of the week? TOOTHDAY! What do you call your dad’s advice? His FLOSSOPHY! Add in the fact that my dad’s name was Dr. Payne, and hilarity was always ensuing.

“No, I’m serious,” Ryan said. “Even just now, when they came by to say hello, I was worried she’d notice I hadn’t been flossing.”

“I think she’s got bigger things on her mind today,” I said, watching as my new stepmother laughed, brushing some frosting off my dad’s face with one hand. She looked relaxed, which was a relief after over a year of watching her juggle the details of flowers and her dress and the reception along with her own bustling practice. Even at her most stressed, though, she’d maintained the cheerful demeanor that was her signature. If my mom had been dark and tragic, Tracy was sweetness and light. And, yes, maybe flossing. But she made my dad happy, which was all that really counted to me.

“Nana incoming,” Ryan said under her breath. Immediately, we all sat up straighter. Such was the power of my grandmother, who carried herself with such grace that you couldn’t help but try to do the same. Also, she’d tell you if you were slouching. Nicely, but she would tell you.

“Girls, you all look so beautiful,” she said as she came sweeping up in the simple rose-colored chiffon gown that she’d custom-ordered from New York. “I just can’t get over it. Like little princesses!”

At this, Bridget beamed. While Ryan and I had moved on, she’d never really gotten over her own years of wanting to be Cinderella. “Thank you, Mrs. Payne. The wedding is lovely.”

“Isn’t it?” Nana looked over to the cake table, where my dad was now feeding Tracy a bite from his fork. “It all came together perfectly. I couldn’t be more thrilled for them.”

“Me too,” I said, and at this she smiled, reaching down to touch my shoulder. When I looked up at her and our eyes met, she gave it a squeeze.

“Are you getting excited about your cruise?” Bridget asked Nana now as the waiters began to move through the room with champagne for the toasts. “I heard you’re going to see pyramids!”

“That’s what I’m told,” Nana replied, taking a flute from a passing tray and holding it up to the light. “And while I’m excited, I’d honestly rather be here overseeing the renovations. Travel is always good for the soul, though, isn’t it?”

Bridget nodded, even though I knew for a fact she’d only been on one real trip, to Disney World a few years back. “Renovations are boring, though,” she said. “We did our family room last summer. It was all sawdust and noise for months.”

“You underestimate how ready she is to turn my room into something fabulous, like a Zen garden or formal sitting room,” I said. “She’s been counting the days.”

“Not true,” Nana said, looking at me. “You have no idea how much I will miss you.”

Just like that, I felt a lump in my throat. I made a point of smiling at her, though, as a man in a suit passing by greeted her and she turned away to talk to him.

There were good changes and bad ones, and I knew that the ones ahead were firmly in the former category for both Nana and myself. After the wedding, my dad, Tracy, and I would live together in a new house they’d purchased in a neighborhood walking distance to my high school. Nana would finally get her apartment back, something she said she didn’t care about one bit, but in truth I knew she wouldn’t miss the clutter and noise that came along with her son and teenage granddaughter as roommates. After my parents split and my mom first went to treatment, we needed somewhere to land, and she’d offered without a second thought. Never mind that I’d probably racked up enough of a bill in broken china and scuffed floors to cover my college tuition: Nana said she wouldn’t have it any other way. Her home was a work of art filled with works of art, each detail from the carpets to the wall hangings curated and considered. Now it featured a banged-up bike in the entryway, as well as a huge widescreen TV (Nana didn’t watch television). After a renovation that would happen while she was floating down the Nile, she would get it back all to herself to do with as she chose. And I was glad.

I was happy for my dad as well. After the roller coaster of dealing with my mom, Tracy was the most welcome of changes. She didn’t take more than she gave, or give nothing at all. She could be trusted to go to a work dinner and not embarrass him by drinking too much or telling a joke that had profanity or sex as part of the punch line. And if she said she’d be somewhere at a certain time, she was always there. It was this last thing that I think he appreciated most about her. I knew I did. After loving someone you couldn’t depend on, you realize how important it is to trust someone will do what they say. It’s such a simple thing, not to promise what you can’t or won’t deliver. But my mom had done that all the time.

In our new home in Lakeview, in the Arbors neighborhood, I would have my own suite with a big airy bedroom, as well as a bathroom and a small balcony that looked out over the rest of our street. It would be a change from our apartment, where I could look out at night and see city lights, and the noise from the street was muted but still always there: garbage trucks rumbling in the morning; drunk students walking home from the bars after midnight; sirens and car horns. I knew I would miss it, the way I’d miss my breakfasts with Nana, us splitting the newspaper—she took the cultural section, while I preferred the obituaries—and being able to step out of my house right into the world going on around me. But change was good, as Nana also said, especially the kind you were prepared for. And I was.

Before all that, though, my dad and Tracy would leave for their honeymoon to Greece. There, they were chartering a boat, just the two of them, indulging their shared love of sailing to tour the islands. It was a perfect culmination of their courtship, which, despite their shared profession, had not begun in a tooth-based setting. Instead, they’d met at a general interest meeting of the Lakeview Sailing Club, which gathered every other Sunday at Topper Lake to race dingys and knockabouts. I knew this because before Tracy, I’d had the unfortunate luck of being my dad’s first mate.

I hated sailing. I know, I know. It was my name, for God’s sake—Emma Saylor—chosen because my dad’s passion for mainsheets and rudder boards had been what had brought my parents together at another lake all those years ago. My mom, however, had felt the same way about sailing as I did, which was why she’d insisted on spelling my name the way she had. And anyway, I was Emma for all intents and purposes. Emma, who hated sailing.

My dad tried. He’d signed me up for sailing camp one summer when I was ten. There, I was usually adrift, my centerboard usually having plunged into the lake below, as instructors tried to yell encouragement from a nearby motorboat. But sailing with other people was worse. More likely than not, they’d yell at you for not sitting in the right place or grabbing the wrong line under pressure. Even when my dad swore he was taking me out for a “nice, easy sail,” there would be at least one moment when he got super stressed and was racing around trying to make the boat do something it wasn’t wanting to do while, yes, yelling.

Tracy, however, didn’t mind this. In fact, from the day they were assigned to a knockabout together at the sailing club, she yelled right back, which I believed was one of the things that made my dad fall in love with her.

So they would go to Greece, and holler at each other over the gorgeous Aegean Sea, and I would stay with Bridget and her family. We’d spend the days babysitting her brothers, ages twelve, ten, and five, and going to her neighborhood pool, where we planned to work on our tans and the crushes we had on Sam and Steve Schroeder, the twins in our grade who lived at the end of her cul-de-sac.

But first, there was tonight and the wedding, here at the Lakeview Country Club, where the ballroom had been lined with twinkling lights and fluttering tulle and we, along with two hundred other guests, had just finished a sit-down dinner. Despite the lavishness of the celebration, the ceremony itself had been simple, with me as Tracy’s maid of honor and Nana standing up with my dad as his “Best Gran.” (One of the wedding planners, a dapper man named William, had come up with this moniker, and he was clearly very proud of it.) I’d been allowed to choose my own dress, which I was pretty sure was Tracy’s way of trying to make it not a big deal but instead did the opposite, as who wants to make the wrong decision when you are one of only four people in the wedding party? Never mind that I was an anxious girl, always had been, and choices of any kind were my kryptonite. I’d ended up in such a panic I bought two dresses, then decided at the last minute. But even now, as I sat in my baby-blue sheath with the spaghetti straps, I was thinking of the pink gown with the full skirt at home, and wondering if I should have gone with it instead. I sighed, then reorganized my place setting, putting the silverware that remained squarely on my folded napkin and adjusting the angle of my water glass.

“You okay?” Ryan asked me. We’d been friends for so long, she knew my coping mechanisms almost better than I did. Perpetually messy herself, she’d often told me she wished she, too, had the urge to keep the world neat and tidy. But everything is welcome until you can’t stop, and I’d been like this for longer than I cared to remember.

“Fine,” I said, dropping my hand instead of lining up the flowers, glass jar of candy, and candle as I’d been about to do. “It’s just a big night.”

“Of course it is!” Bridget said. There was that optimism again. “Which is why I think we need to celebrate.”

I raised my eyebrows at Ryan, who just shrugged, clearly not in on whatever Bridget was planning. Which, as it turned out, was turning to the table beside us, which had been full of young hygienists from my dad’s office until they all hit the dance floor, and switching out the bottle of sparkling cider from our ice bucket for the champagne in theirs.

“Bridget,” Ryan hissed. “You’re going to get us so busted!”

“By who? They’re already all tipsy, they won’t even notice.” She quickly filled our flutes before burying the bottle back in ice. Then she picked up her glass, gesturing for us to do the same. “To Dr. Payne and Dr. Feldman.”

“To Dad and Tracy,” I said.

“Bottoms up,” added Ryan.

We clinked glasses, Bridget with a bit too much enthusiasm, champagne sloshing onto the table in front of her. I watched them both suck down big gulps—Ryan wincing—as I looked at my glass.

“It’s good!” Bridget told me. “Even if you don’t drink.”

“My mom says it’s bad luck to toast and not imbibe,” Ryan added. “Just take a tiny sip.”

I just looked at them. They knew I wasn’t a drinker, just as they knew exactly why. Sighing, I picked up my flute and took a gulp. Immediately, my nose was tingling, prickles filling my brain. “Ugh,” I said, chasing it with water right away. “How can you really enjoy that?”

“It’s like drinking sparkles,” Bridget replied, holding the glass up to the light just as Nana had, the bubbles drifting upward.

“Spoken like a true princess.” Ryan tipped her glass back, finishing it, then gave herself a refill. “And my mom also says nobody really likes champagne. Only how it makes you feel.”

“All I feel is that everything is changing,” I said. Saying it aloud, it suddenly felt more true than ever.

“But in good ways!” Bridget said. “Right? New stepmom, new house, and before that, new summer full of potential …”

“For you two,” Ryan grumbled. “I’ll be stuck in the mountains with no internet, with only my dad and some drama nerds for company.”

“You get to spend the entire summer at Windmill! That’s one of the best theater camps in the country—” Bridget replied.

“Where I’ll be the camp director’s kid, so everyone will automatically hate me,” Ryan finished for her. “Except my dad.”

“You guys.” Bridget lifted out the bottle again, topping off our glasses. “It’s going to be an amazing summer, for all of us. Just trust me, will you?”

Ryan shrugged, then took another sip. I looked at my own glass, then across the room at my dad, who was now leading Tracy back to their table. He looked flushed and happy, and watching him, I felt a rush of affection. He’d been through so much, with my mom and then the divorce, raising me basically as a single parent even before he really was one, all the while working nonstop. I was really happy for him, and excited. But the time that he’d be in Greece would be the longest we’d been apart in my memory, and I already knew I would miss him so much. Parents are always precious. But when you only have one, they become crucial.

I reached down, moving my dessert fork and coffee spoon a bit to the right. When Ryan looked over at me, I expected to be called out again, but instead, this time, she just gave me a smile. Then she turned her head away so I could arrange the vase, candy jar, and candle as well.