A Fireproof Home for the Bride (44 page)

“Are you kidding?” He laughed and smacked his forehead with the flat of his palm. “My folks are nuts about you.” He drew her into a hug and rubbed his nose against hers. She tried not to sneeze.

“Yes, but this all seems beyond generous.”

“Not for my girl.” He kissed at her lips. “Besides, it’s you or the priesthood.”

Emmy pressed him slightly away. “What’s that mean?”

“It’s a joke, honey,” Bobby said, but his face twitched with a hint of truth. “In an Irish family, the first son is expected to become a priest. I’m afraid that you’ve ruined me.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Emmy said, sensing something more painful behind his teasing. “If that’s what you want?”

His face sobered as he took her hand, gazing down at the ring. “This is right, Emmy,” he said. “It has to be.”

A tremor in the bedrock of Bobby’s love rattled Emmy’s perception. If it was constant, it allowed her to pluck at the seam of her own doubts. If it wasn’t, she would be overpowered by them. “Why?”

“So much depends—” he began, but another knock came at the door. Bobby told Michael to get upstairs and then lowered his voice. “Please just tell me that you love me?” he asked Emmy. His eyes filled again with the same kind of tears she’d seen earlier that day—though this time she thought there was a caul of deception that she’d been blind to before.

“I do,” she said, painful tears of her own beginning to gather like spring rain on a frozen windshield. “I love you.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and held her hand to his lips, a return of confidence sparkling through his dewy lashes. Emmy stilled the chaos inside of her long enough to realize that she hadn’t looked into his eyes in a very long time, and by withholding her gaze she had been denying him the intimacy she had once so freely shared. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking back down at the desk. “But I can’t seem to make sense of all of this.”

“Growing up happens fast,” he agreed, and turned to the door. “It can make your head spin, I know.”

“Yes, but…”

“Sheesh,” he interrupted. “You sure do think a lot, don’t you? There’s plenty of time to work out any details you don’t like, okay?”

Emmy nodded, even though she couldn’t shake the feeling that there would never be time enough. He led her through the empty basement and up the stairs. The noise from the crowd had reached an excited pitch, and Emmy tried to catch the loose thread that would tie her to the moment and fasten her jangling nerves. She was beginning to understand the meaning of what she and Bobby were entering together by presenting themselves before the chattering well-wishers. The paper shamrocks hanging from the ceiling that she’d found so charming on the way in the door now felt gaudy, alien. And yet they were all so willing to accept Emmy, invite her to become one of them, that she couldn’t help wanting to be drawn into their enveloping embrace.

As she cleared the top of the stairs, Bobby put his arm around her waist. The group that was packed around the dining room table and lined along the living room fell silent and then burst into applause. As the couple walked slowly into the space made for them, it seemed to Emmy that everyone moved an inch away, or that the walls were receding and absorbing all the giddy faces, the teary-eyed aunties, the squirming children, the red-faced men. There was a full assortment of neighbors, siblings, relatives, and friends, including a very elderly and frail woman snoozing in an armchair by the fire, as well as Sister Clare, Father Munsch, and in the middle of them all, Peggy and Bob Doyle. As Bobby’s father quieted the cheers and began to talk about how much this day meant to him—to all of them—Emmy caught sight of a familiar face at the back of the crowd, but she couldn’t quite place how she knew this slightly older woman. Her hair was a brilliant blond, her features smooth and fine. She was tall and well dressed, with profound color on her high cheekbones. For a small sad moment, as she saw smiling faces filled with tears and joy, Emmy thought maybe it was her own mother in the back of the room. When Mr. Doyle finished his speech, everyone cheered, and Emmy was jostled by congratulants to her place at the table. The woman moved toward her and it wasn’t until Emmy sat down and the apparition vanished that Emmy realized she had only been looking at herself in the breakfront mirror all along. Growing up happens fast, indeed.

*   *   *

“Emmy, this is Father Finney,” Peggy Doyle said, seating an elderly priest to the right of Emmy. “He’s going to help with your studies for conversion, and Sister Clare has offered to sponsor you.”

“Conversion?” Emmy asked. She had barely begun to think about becoming a Doyle, and here she was, pressed into the chute out of which she would emerge a Catholic.

“Yes, my child,” Father Finney said. “We know from Peggy about the beauty of your spirit, and are happy to invite you to join our faith. Jesus takes all comers.” He laughed and tapped her knee with his frail hand. “First we’ll get you into the current Rite of Initiation class, and by Easter, you’ll be confirmed in the faith.”

Emmy forced her lips into a smile. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t really—”

“It’s okay, Emmy,” Bobby said from across the table. “Father Finney doesn’t bite.”

“I barely have the teeth in me anymore,” the priest exclaimed, showing his missing teeth in a grin.

“That’s a relief,” Emmy said, realizing that it would be disrespectful to voice her concerns at the table of her hosts. She respectfully turned toward the priest. “I would love to hear all about the process, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind in the least,” Father Finney said, buttering a slice of white bread and using it to soak up the glaze from the ham on his plate. “Of course you’ve been baptized.” There was butter on his chin. “And never married.”

“Of course,” she replied, and silently fell to eating as the priest talked endlessly about the mysteries of faith.

Emmy found her voice less and less accessible as dinner wore on into the early afternoon, and her itch to be at work intensified. The switching of chairs next to her became dizzying, with every guest paying court—commenting on the ring, giving bits of marital advice, or showing her some sort of boyhood treasure that included a Roger Maris baseball card. At least when a Doyle sibling engaged her she was able to find something to say, but eventually the amount of food and the calamity of the noise, and the clattering of the coffee cups and the cakes plates, and the “little bit of sherry,” and the endless questions took their toll as the clock struck three and Emmy’s newly fitted bit strained against the grinding of her molars. It struck her that even with all of the obvious improvements, this dinner wasn’t all that much different from a typical Sunday at the Branns’ for how it made her feel invisible even as she was the one being celebrated. None of these people were interested in
her.
They were curious, sure, but apart from how her pieces fit into the Doyle architecture, no one attempted to discover any details of her life.

She noted the time and excused herself from the table. Once she reached the muffled peace of the upstairs bathroom, she opened the window and contemplated leaving to meet Jim early. Never in her life had she been the center of any kind of attention, and she had already had more than enough. The thought of venturing back into the fray for another round of dream dress or embarrassing ribbing about child-making was too unbearable. She lit a cigarette and tried to calm down, blowing the smoke out of the house like a detention-seeking schoolgirl.

A car door slammed somewhere down the block and Emmy glanced in its direction. In the middle of steadily falling snow stood Pete, wildly gesturing at the house as he talked; whatever he was saying was frequently punctuated with finger poking at Bobby’s snow-dusted chest. When had he left? Emmy backed away from the view and held her breath for a second, nearly catching the delicate lace curtain on fire with the end of her forgotten smoke.

“Oh, dear,” she whispered, dropping the cigarette into the toilet.

The men’s argument drifted toward the window, but she could not hear them clearly. From the tone of Pete’s voice, though, she could tell it was some sort of disappointment—even though Bobby didn’t seem to be doing any apologizing. He stood there with his arms across his chest, stoically taking whatever anger Pete was throwing at him.

“Hello in there,” a woman called against the closed door, rattling the doorknob.

“Just a minute,” Emmy said, quickly collecting her things.

“Oh, Emmy,” the unknown woman said. “Take your time, dear. I’ll use the one downstairs.”

“Thank you,” Emmy said, and then turned back to the window in time to see Bobby getting into Pete’s car. She checked her watch. It was three fifteen. Disappointment bubbled in her as she watched the car pull away from the curb. Here she was, worried about leaving early, and yet Bobby was gone without notice. Her dismay turned to anger, and Emmy eased out of the bathroom, grabbed her coat off the bed across the hall, scurried down the stairs, and slipped out the front door. She sprinted across the thickly blanketed front yard to where Bobby had parked her car. Hearing an engine rev down the block, Emmy immediately ducked into the Crestliner just as Pete sped off down North Terrace. She grabbed her windshield brush and quickly dusted the front and back windows clean of the powdery snow.

“Please just start,” she whispered to the cold car, coaxing the engine once, and then it turned over and began to purr. As she threw it into first gear and let up on the clutch, she glanced at the Doyle house in the rearview mirror and felt a pang of guilt over how relieved she was to be driving away.

The streetlamps came on as she turned north on Elm, following Pete’s car at a distance. The fading of the light and onslaught of thicker snow slowed her pace to a conflicted crawl. She switched on the wipers as the heavy flakes began to clump and blur her view. It was then she realized that she was shaking uncontrollably in the freezing cold car, her teeth chattering over the noise of the full-blowing heater. The red dots of Pete’s taillights brightened as he turned onto a treeless road on the edge of town, just beyond Hector Airport. Emmy downshifted into second to maintain her cautious pace behind as she watched the white-and-red lights of his car trace slowly down the horizontal expanse, her many memories of parking with Bobby along that same road raising an alarm in her that she couldn’t quite hear or understand. She took the turn and just as soon saw Pete’s car roll into a spot a ways down. As she carefully bumped along the dirt road, following the double brown tracks Pete’s tires had made in the whitened gravel, her vision blurred with the rising feeling of having been left behind.

Emmy stopped the Crestliner and backed into a spot between two other cars, their windows opaque with the fog of necking, and she waited there for Pete’s car to pass on its way back out of the area. Nobody came here to talk, she knew all too well. Clearly Pete was interfering again, telling Bobby that Emmy wasn’t good enough, and whittling away at Bobby the same way he’d done with her. Fighting against the desire to weep, Emmy opened her eyes as wide as she could, and tried to imagine going to Pete’s car, knocking on the window, and demanding of Bobby that he make a choice between Pete’s friendship and hers. But what if he chose Pete? Then again, what if he didn’t? Was Emmy really so in love with Bobby that she could say for certain the wound she was nursing had been cut by anything other than her own pride?

Resting the back of her head against the top of the seat, she stared at the car’s ceiling in the dark, letting the tears streak down her temples and pool in her ears until she finally wrenched from her heart the bittersweet truth she no longer had any reason to deny: She didn’t want to go to the other car; she didn’t care what they were doing. Pete had been right that hot summer night: She was the kind of girl who broke hearts. It just so happened that the heart she was breaking this time was her own. There was no point in denying that she had to end things before her love for Bobby strangled her ambition to grow and learn. Being his wife would mean kids and cleaning, cooking, and smiling. A vision of her wearing one of Mrs. Doyle’s housedresses and a head scarf appeared in Emmy’s mind, a child glued to each hip, a glint of whom she’d once been dying away in the light of her eyes. It wasn’t what she wanted.

More than anything else, Emmy wanted to go to the office and sit at a table with Jim, digging into her dead grandfather’s possessions. Being Bobby’s girl had become a part of a routine that filled the hours between leaving work and going back again. The hum of the printing presses called to her from miles away; the way the paper was rolled around and cut and stacked and folded by the many well-oiled machines created a rhythm in her heart that nothing else could match. It was where she belonged—a cog in those clockworks—neatly turning in the service of a greater hour. I don’t have to do this, she thought, and the ringing of reason quieted her panic. I don’t have to do this, I can do what I want.

Emmy slowed her breathing and wiped her face with a handkerchief from her purse, rolling the damp cloth into a rope before taking off the ill-fitting ring and tying the two objects together. She dropped the entire mess into the small bag and threw it into the backseat, knowing that she would eventually have to return the diamond, and all it promised, to Bobby. The car eased back onto the dirt road as Emmy drove away from the sparkling disappointments of the day and off into the alluring gloom of the falling night.

Twenty

A Collection of Order

When Emmy arrived in the newsroom, she expected to see more people still at work. Instead, she was surprised to find only Jim and a handful of others, most of whom had already donned their coats and were headed for the door.

“You’re late,” Jim said without looking up as Emmy approached his desk. She checked the large clock on the far wall.

“By only thirty minutes,” she said, brushing the snow from her hair with the tips of her fingers.

“Gordon’s sending everyone home ahead of the storm.” Jim picked up a pencil and stuck the blunt end between his teeth. “Though I doubt we’ll get more than another inch.”