“Huh. Wow.” I stood up. “I’d better call Jere. Wait, it’s the middle of the day. He’s still at work.”
I sat back down.
I probably should have felt relieved that someone else was taking over, but instead I just felt overwhelmed. This wedding was getting a lot bigger than I had imagined it. Now we were renting tables? It was all too much, too sudden.
Across from me, Conrad was buttering another ear of corn. I looked down at my plate. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I felt sick to my stomach.
“Eat,” Conrad said.
I took a small bite of chicken.
I wouldn’t get to talk to Jeremiah until later that evening. But the person I really wanted to talk to was my mother. She would have known how to configure the tables and where to seat everyone. Denise wasn’t the one I wanted to swoop in and tell me what to do, and not Mr. Fisher either, or even Susannah. I only wanted my mother.
chapter thirty-seven
CONRAD
It didn’t really hit me how hard of a time Belly was having until I heard her on the phone with Taylor later that week. She had her door open, and I was brushing my teeth in the hall bathroom.
I heard her say, “Taylor, I really appreciate what your mom is trying to do, but I promise you, it’s okay. … I know, but it would just feel too weird with all the adults from the neighborhood at my wedding shower and then my mom not being there. …” I heard her sigh and say, “Yeah, I know. Okay. Tell your mom thanks.”
She closed her door then, and I was pretty sure I heard her start to cry.
I went to my room, lay down on my bed, and stared up at the ceiling.
Belly hadn’t let on to me how sad she was about her mom. She was an upbeat kind of person, naturally cheerful, like Jere. If there was a bright side, Belly would find it. Hearing her cry, it shook me up. I knew I should stay out of it. That was the smart thing to do. She didn’t need me looking out for her. She was a big girl. Besides, what could I do for her?
I was definitely staying out of it.
The next morning, I got up early to see Laurel. It was still dark out when I left. I called her on the way and asked if she could meet for breakfast. Laurel was surprised, but she didn’t ask questions; she said she’d meet me at a diner off the highway.
I guess Laurel had always been special to me. Ever since I was a kid, I just liked being near her. I liked the way you could be quiet around her, and with her. She didn’t talk down to kids. She treated us like equals. After my mom died and I transferred to Stanford, I started calling Laurel every once in a while. I still liked talking to her, and I liked that she reminded me of my mom without it hurting too much. It was like a link to home.
She got to the diner first—she was sitting in a booth waiting for me. “Connie,” she said, standing up and opening her arms. She looked like she’d lost weight.
“Hey, Laur,” I said, hugging her back. She felt gaunt in my arms, but she smelled the same. Laurel always had a clean, cinnamony smell.
I sat down across from her. After we ordered, pancakes and bacon for both of us, she said, “So how have you been?”
“I’ve been all right,” I said, chugging down some juice.
How was I even supposed to broach this subject? This wasn’t my style. It didn’t come naturally to me, the way it would for Jere. I was butting in on something that wasn’t my business. But I had to do it. For her.
I cleared my throat and said, “I called you because I wanted to talk about the wedding.”
Her face got tight, but she didn’t interrupt.
“Laur, I think you should go. I think you should be part of it. You’re her mom.”
Laurel stirred her coffee, and then she looked at me and said, “You think they should get married?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then, what do you think?”
“I think they love each other and they’re going to do it regardless of what anyone else thinks. And … I think that Belly really needs her mom right now.”
Drily, she said, “Isabel seems to be doing just fine without me. She never even called to let me know where she was. I had to hear it from Adam—who, by the way, is apparently paying for this wedding now. Classic Adam. And now Steven’s a best man, and Belly’s dad is going to give in the way he always does. It seems I’m the only holdout.”
“Belly isn’t fine. She’s barely eating. And … I heard her crying last night. She was saying how Taylor’s mom is throwing her a wedding shower but it won’t feel right without you there.”
Laurel’s face softened, just a little. “Lucinda’s throwing her a shower?” Then, stirring her coffee again, she said, “Jere hasn’t thought this through. He isn’t taking it seriously enough.”
“You’re right, he’s not a serious guy. But believe me, he’s serious about her.” I took a deep breath before I said, “Laurel, if you don’t go, you’ll regret it.”
She looked at me directly. “Are we speaking honestly with each other here?”
“Don’t we always?”
Laurel nodded, taking a sip of coffee. “Yes, that we do. So tell me. What’s your interest in all of this?”
I knew this was coming. This was Laurel, after all. She didn’t mess around. “I want her to be happy.”
“Ah,” she said. “Just her?”
“Jeremiah, too.”
“And that’s it?” She looked at me steadily.
I just looked back at her.
I tried to pay for breakfast since I was the one who invited her out, but Laurel wouldn’t let me. “Not gonna happen,” she said.
On the drive back, I played back our conversation. The knowing look on Laur’s face when she asked me what my interest in this was. What was I doing? Picking out vases with Belly, trying to play peacemaker with the parents. Suddenly I was their wedding planner, and I didn’t even agree with them. I needed to disengage from the situation. I was washing my hands of the whole mess.
chapter thirty-eight
“Where have you been?” I asked Conrad when he came back in the door. He’d been gone all morning.
He didn’t answer me right away. In fact he was barely looking at me. And then he said, shortly, “Just running errands.”
I gave him a weird look, but he didn’t offer up any more information. So I just asked, “Wanna keep me company while I go to the florist in Dyerstown? I have to pick out flowers for the wedding.”
“Isn’t Jere coming today? Can’t you go with him?” He sounded annoyed.
I was surprised and a little hurt. I thought we’d been getting along really well these past few weeks. “He’s not going to be here until tonight,” I said. Playfully, I added, “Anyway, you’re the one who’s the flower-arranging expert, not Jere, remember?”
Conrad stood at the sink with his back to me. He turned on the water, filling a glass. “I don’t want to piss him off.”
I thought I heard a trace of hurt in his voice. Hurt—and something else. Fear.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen this morning?” I felt worried all of a sudden. When Conrad didn’t answer me, I went up behind him and started to put my hand on his shoulder, but then he turned around and my hand fell back to my side. “Nothing happened,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ll drive.”
He was pretty quiet at the florist’s. Taylor and I had decided on calla lilies, but when I looked through the book of flower arrangements, I ended up picking peonies instead. When I showed them to Conrad, he said, “Those were my mom’s favorite.”
“I remember,” I said. I ordered five arrangements, one for each table, just like Denise Coletti told me to.
“What about bouquets?” the florist asked me.
“Can those be peonies too?” I asked.
“Sure, we can do that. I’ll put together something nice for you.” To Conrad, she said, “Are you and your groomsmen doing boutonnieres?”
He turned red. “I’m not the groom,” he said.
“He’s the brother of the groom
,” I said, handing her Mr. Fisher’s credit card.
We left pretty soon after.
On the way back home, we passed a fruit stand on the side of the road. I wanted to stop, but I didn’t say so. I guessed Conrad could tell, because he asked, “Want to go back?”
“Nah, that’s okay, we already passed it,” I said.
He made a U-turn on the one-way street.
The fruit stand was a couple of wooden crates of peaches and a sign that said to leave the money in the container. I put in a dollar because I didn’t have change.
“Aren’t you going to have one?” I asked him, wiping off my peach on my shirt.
“Nah, I’m allergic to peaches.”
“Since when?” I demanded. “I’ve definitely seen you eat a peach before. Or peach pie, at least.”
He shrugged. “Since always. I’ve eaten them before, but they make the inside of my mouth itch.”
Before I bit into my peach, I closed my eyes and inhaled the fragrance. “Your loss.”
I had never had a peach like that before. So perfectly ripe. Your fingers sank into the fruit a little just touching it. I gobbled it up, peach juice running down my chin, pulp dripping all over my hands. It was sweet and tart. A full-body experience, smell and taste and sight.
“This is a perfect peach,” I said. “I almost don’t want to have another one, because there’s no way it can be as good.”
“Let’s test it out,” Conrad said, and he went and bought me another peach. I ate that one in four bites.
“Was it as good?” he asked me.
“Yeah. It was.”
Conrad reached out and wiped my chin with his shirt. It was maybe the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to me.
I felt light-headed, unsteady on my feet.
It was all in the way he looked at me, just those few seconds. Then he dropped his eyes, like the sun was too bright behind me.
I sidestepped away from him and said, “I’m gonna buy some more, for Jere.”
“Good idea,” he said, backing away. “I’ll go wait for you in the car.”
I was shaking as I piled peaches into a plastic bag. Just one look, one touch from him, and I was shaking. It was madness. I was marrying his brother.
Back in the car, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t have even if I wanted to. I didn’t have the words. In the quiet of the air-conditioned car, the silence between us felt blaringly loud. So I rolled down my window and fixed my eyes on all the moving objects on my side.
At home, Jeremiah’s car was parked in the driveway. Conrad disappeared as soon as we got into the house. I found Jere napping on the couch, his sunglasses still on his head. I kissed him awake.
His eyes fluttered open. “Hey.”
“Hey. Want a peach?” I asked, swinging my plastic bag like a pendulum. I felt jittery all of a sudden.
Jere hugged me and said, “You’re a peach.”
“Did you know Conrad’s allergic to peaches?”
“Of course. Remember that time he had peach ice cream and his mouth swelled up?”
I broke away and went to wash the peaches. I told myself, there’s nothing to feel guilty about, nothing happened. You didn’t do anything.
I was rinsing peaches in the red plastic colander, shaking excess water off the way I’d seen Susannah do so many times. While the water was running over the peaches, Jeremiah came up behind me and grabbed one, saying, “I think they’re clean now.”
He lifted himself onto the kitchen counter and bit into the peach.
“Good, right?” I asked him. I held one up to my face and inhaled deeply, trying to clear my mind of all the crazy thoughts.
Jeremiah nodded. He’d already finished it and was lobbing the pit into the sink. “Really good. Did you get any strawberries? I could eat a whole box of strawberries right now.”
“No, just the peaches.”
I put the peaches in the silver fruit bowl, arranging them as nicely as I could. My hands were still shaking.
chapter thirty-nine
The apartment had wall-to-wall navy blue carpeting, and even though I had flip-flops on, I could just tell that it was moist. The kitchen was the size of an airplane bathroom, practically, and the bedroom had no windows. The place had high ceilings—that was the only nice thing about it, in my opinion.
Jeremiah and I had spent the whole day looking at apartments near our school. So far we’d seen three. This place was the worst by far.
“I like the carpet,” Jeremiah said appreciatively. “It’s nice to wake up in the morning and put your feet down on carpet.”
I glanced toward the open door, where the landlord was waiting for us. He looked around my dad’s age. He had a long white ponytail, a mustache, and a tattoo of a topless mermaid on his forearm. He caught me looking at the tattoo and grinned at me. I gave him a weak smile in return.
Then I walked back into the bedroom and motioned for Jeremiah to follow me. “It smells like cigarette smoke in here,” I whispered. “It’s, like, absorbed in the carpet.”
“Febreeze it, baby.”
“You Febreeze it. By yourself. I’m not living here.”
“What’s the problem? This place is practically on campus, it’s so close. And there’s outdoor space—we can grill. Think of all the parties we’ll have. Come on, Belly.”
“Come on nothing. Let’s go back to the first place we looked at. That place had central air-conditioning.” Above us, I could feel rather than hear the bass from someone’s stereo pumping.
Jeremiah jammed his hands into his pockets. “That place was all old people and families. This place is for people our age. College kids like us.”
I looked back at the landlord. He was looking at his cell phone, pretending not to listen to our conversation.
Lowering my voice, I said, “This place is basically a frat house. If I wanted to live in a frat house, I would bunk with you back at fraternity row.”
He rolled his eyes. Loudly, he said, “I guess we’re not taking the apartment.” To the landlord, he shrugged, like whaddyagonnado. Like they were in on it together, just a couple of guys, partners.
“Thank you for showing us the apartment,” I said.
“No problemo,” the guy said, lighting a cigarette.
As we stepped out of the apartment, I shot Jeremiah a dirty look. He mouthed, What, in a bewildered way. I just shook my head.
“It’s getting late,” Jeremiah said in the car. “Let’s just pick a place. I want to get this over with already.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, turning up the AC. “Then I pick the first place.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Fine,” I said back.
We went back to the first apartment complex to fill out paperwork. We went straight to the management office. The building manager’s name was Carolyn. She was tall and red haired and she wore a printed wrap dress. Her perfume smelled like Susannah’s. I took this as a definite good omen.
“So your parents aren’t renting the apartment for you?” Carolyn asked. “Most students have their parents sign the lease.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but Jeremiah beat me to it.
“No, we’re doing this on our own,” he said. “We’re engaged.”
Surprise registered on her face, and I saw her glance ever so briefly at my stomach. “Oh!” she said. “Well, congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Jeremiah said.
I said nothing. Inside, I was thinking how sick I was of everybody thinking I was pregnant just because we were getting married.
“We’ll need to do a credit check, and then I can process your application,” Carolyn said. “If everything checks out, the apartment is yours.”
“If you’ve been late on a few credit-card bills, will that, um, negatively impact a person’s credit?” Jeremiah asked, leaning forward.
I could feel my eyes widen. “What are you talking about?” I whispered. “Your dad pays your credit card.”
“Yeah, I know, but
I started one freshman year too. To build my credit,” he added, giving Carolyn a winning smile.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said, but her smile had faded. “Isabel, how’s your credit?”
“Um, good, I think. My dad put me down on his credit card, but I never use it,” I said.
“Hmm. Okay, how about any department-store cards?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“We definitely have first and last month’s rent,” Jeremiah put in. “And we have the security deposit, too. So it’s all good.”
“Great,” Carolyn said, and she stood up from her chair. “I’m going to process this today, and I’ll let you guys know within the next couple of days.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.
Jeremiah and I walked out of the building and to the parking lot. When we were standing outside the car, I said, “I really hope we get that apartment.”
“If we don’t, I’m sure we can get one of the other ones. I doubt Gary would even do a credit check on us.”
“Who’s Gary?”
Jeremiah went around to the driver’s side and unlocked the door. “That guy from the last apartment we saw.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure Gary would still do a credit check.”
“Doubt it,” Jere said. “Gary was cool.”
“Gary probably has a meth lab in the basement,” I said, and this time Jeremiah rolled his eyes.
I continued. “If we lived in that apartment, we would probably wake up in the middle of the night in an ice bath without our kidneys.”
“Belly, he rents apartments to lots of students. A guy from my soccer team lived there all last year, and he’s fine. Still has both kidneys and everything.”
We looked at each other from across the car, on opposite sides. Jere said, “Why are we still talking about this? You got your way, remember?”
He didn’t finish the sentence the way I knew he wanted to—You got your way, like you always do.
“We don’t know if I got my way or not.”