Instead of answering, I looked down at Josh, who wouldn’t meet my eyes. I wanted to say that I wasn’t only working at a tackle shop, but who knew what my brother had told him? If Josh had mentioned that I was working on a documentary, which I seriously doubted, I was certain he didn’t explain anything real about it, anything positive, like what I was hoping to learn about the wives, like what I was trying to accomplish. I wasn’t about to get into that all now, especially considering that I hadn’t yet. Learned anything. Accomplished anything.
I turned back to Berringer. “You know,” I said, “this is not an ideal moment to make fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you,” he said seriously. “I’m curious to hear what you’re up to.”
I stayed fast in my position in the front doorway anyway. “Well, could you be curious a little later, please? I need to go inside and check on my mom.”
“You might want to wait on that,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Josh said.
“The Moynihan-Richardses are in the basement,” he said.
Josh sat up taller, his face turning worried—wrong—before my eyes. The Moynihan-Richardses were Meryl’s birth parents. The Ozark professors. The weirdos. From the back, they each looked more like how you might imagine the other looking: Dr. Moynihan-Richards with a long ponytail, wiry legs, Mrs. M-R with short, cropped hair and a black leather jacket that she never seemed to take off.
Under the best of circumstances, which these certainly weren’t, the two of them staying here was a weird thing.
Berringer shrugged. “There was some sort of issue with them parking their RV near Meryl’s parents’ place in the city. It was like three hundred bucks to put it in the garage for the weekend or something crazy. So they showed up here about twenty minutes before you guys did. Your mom’s in a bit of a tizzy.”
He sounded so apologetic when he said the last part that I wondered if he knew that something else was going on with Josh. I bet he did. I bet he knew a lot more than I did. Like Elizabeth’s last name. And where she lived. And what might happen next.
I looked over at Josh, who was starting to stand up. I quickly waved him back down. “I’ll find out what’s going on,” I said, meeting his troubled glance, trying to calm him. “Just stay out here.”
“You sure?” he said.
“Positive,” I said, opening the door. I looked at Berringer, who was looking at Josh with so much concern that I immediately forgave him for his age joke. I’d immediately forgive him everything, if he could somehow just make this okay again. “You want a beer, Berringer?” I asked him.
He turned back toward me, giving me a smile. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I know I don’t have to.”
He smiled. “I’d love one then.”
I smiled back at him, tapping on the doorframe, before walking into the front hall. Maybe this would be okay. Maybe Josh would talk to Berringer and they’d work it all out, the confusion or hesitation or whatever you wanted to call it that Josh seemed to be feeling. Maybe Berringer would know, better than me, the right thing to say to calm him down.
Only I didn’t close the door completely, and unfortunately, I was able to hear Josh’s next question.
“Meryl didn’t come with them, did she?” he said.
Berringer said, “Not that I saw.”
This was when my brother, sounding not at all like himself for the second time that night, said: “Well, thank God for that, at least.”
The thing I was starting to learn about wedding weekends was that they encourage people to revisit the past. Isn’t that what wedding toasts are all about, really? This bringing to the surface of all the old stories, the private anecdotes, that we want to relive in order to feel like we all really know somebody—feel reinforced as to who they are—so we can let them go? Even before the actual wedding, even over the course of a wedding weekend, you can start to see this freshly minted need to disclose—everyone talking to each other a little differently, more honestly.
One of my mother’s favorite stories, which I knew would come up before any future wedding of mine—and probably in some capacity over the course of Josh and Meryl’s wedding also—was of the time that I asked her to marry me. I was maybe seven. Halfway through first grade. And when I asked her, she told me no. She gently explained that she couldn’t marry me because she was my mother, to which I apparently responded, “Then I’ll marry Daddy.” Getting the same answer on that end—You can’t marry your father because he’s your father—I said with great reluctance that I would marry Josh. And when she told me there would be no dice on that end either, I had the first of several complete breakdowns. ‘You mean to tell me that I’m going to grow up one day, and have to marry a complete stranger?’
As many times as I’d heard it, I actually always looked forward to this story because it reminded me about what I’ve always loved most about my mom. (Aka Sadie Meredith Everett. Born 1949, Reading, CT. Steadfast Virgo. Former schoolteacher.)
Sadie’s favorite part of the story wasn’t—nor had it ever been—the arguably cute moment at the end when I said that I didn’t want to marry the stranger. It was the beginning.
When I picked her first.
I found my mother now in the kitchen, standing at the kitchen counter in her silk robe, fixing a ridiculously large platter of fruits and cheeses and crackers. She didn’t look up at first when I walked in, which gave me a chance to watch her: her hair pulled back, sharp cheekbones, little elbows. I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. She was so little, my mother, much smaller than me, finer, with bones as tiny as pearls. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I did it. It still scared me when I touched her.
“They’re sleeping in sleeping bags down there,” she said. “They won’t even take my blankets. I can’t even talk about it.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said into her shoulder.