A Wedding Invitation (36 page)

“Dear, come here a moment.” Dovie stops me before I can reach the front door.

I stand between her and Thuy at their table where they are eating from a bowl of mixed nuts. “Yes?”

Patting my arm, Dovie says, “Tell Thuy what a wonderful house I have.”

Uncertain as to why I need to do this now, I say, “Dovie’s house is really nice. I love being there.”

Dovie nods. “Thank you,” she says. Turning to Lien’s mother, she beams, and with a heap of affection in her voice, adds, “And there is room for you at my home.”

Thuy raises a limp arm for more nuts. Her hand misses the bowl and knocks over a glass of punch. “Oh. Sorry,” she mutters, clearly annoyed at herself.

“No worries,” says Dovie, taking a few stray napkins to mop the spill from the tablecloth. “These kinds of things happen to me all the time.”

I help by finding more napkins on the next table and then, pulling Lien away from Jonathan, say, “Lien, Dovie wants your mother to move in. Would you like that?”

Shock covers Lien’s face as she looks at my aunt. “With you? Live with you?”

Dovie says, “Yes. Thuy can live with me. My house is wheelchair accessible.”

Beanie says, “If Thuy moves in, it will be like
Summer of Bloomsville
.”

Once again, she has named a movie I haven’t seen, but Dovie has.

“That’s right,” my aunt says. “Only the woman’s wheelchair was wooden in that one, wasn’t it? And she had a nice man to push her. Perhaps you will find a nice man in Winston.” Dovie gently pats Thuy’s arm.

When Lien and her mother start a dialogue in Vietnamese, I make my move outside. I am not sure whether Lien and Thuy should live in the same town, and yet Dovie would be a great caregiver for Thuy. From my observations today, I can see that the frail woman needs a full-time care provider. Right now, Angie, the frosted-hair woman, comes to do her laundry, drives her on errands, and shops for her groceries.

The sun is setting, making its last imprints on the cars parked in the lot. The earlier heat from the day is gone, and a breeze rustles clusters of leaves on the ground. I consider going back inside to get my shawl, a lacy one that Mom let me choose from the rack for the wedding. Not seeing Carson by the storefronts, I stride to the back, my arms crossed against my chest for warmth.

There he sits on a stoop by the service entrance of Have a Fit. His eyes are focused on his folded hands.

“Carson.” He glances at me as I sit beside him. When he doesn’t say anything, I pick up where we left off before the bouquet toss. “What I meant was that I wanted to be asked by this man I met years ago.”

“Old boyfriend?”

“No, he was never my boyfriend.”

“Who was he, then?”

I’m amazed at my next words. “I loved him.” Unable to meet his gaze, I look down. “But I never knew how he felt about me.”

“Oh?”

“He had a girlfriend back home.”

“He did?”

“Yes, but I cared so much for him. I even asked God to make him like me, to make him love me.”

“And?” He lifts my chin and looks me in the eye. “Did this man marry the girlfriend?”

“No.” I look down.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know his heart. He claimed he didn’t love her.”

Carson lifts my face to his. “Do you believe him?”

“I want to.”

“And will you believe that God answered your prayer? That this man does love you, Sam?” His hands find their way around my shoulders, pulling me close.

This is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve dreamed of. I place my head lightly near his heart. Like Lien, like Beanie, I want to belong.

“Trust me, Sam,” he says. “Please.”

When my tears dampen his suit, he pulls away and from inside his jacket pocket produces a handkerchief. He hands it to me.

“What’s this?” I ask, and as the words leave my mouth, my heart feels an odd soothing sensation, like it’s been coated with Beanie’s lotion. With the handkerchief in my hands, I go back in time. Laughter, a party, dancing, a walk, rain, and tears. I’d forgotten how intricate the embroidered yellow flowers were. I wasn’t sure which kind they were, but today it’s clear; these flowers are tulips.

With a smile he says, “This woman gave it to me. We shared a special common bond.”

“Do you remember what it was?” I search his eyes.

“I do. Her father died when she was young. And mine had recently died.”

I turn my focus back to the handkerchief. I loosely recall opening the box that held this gift. There had been so many more presents from students since that party. However, the memory of the night I used this cloth against Carson’s face is one I’ve relived many times.

“ ‘You just keep pushing my love over the borderline,’ ” Carson says with a smile.

Playfully, I smack his arm. “You wrote that I wasn’t intelligent.”

“I wasn’t intelligent enough to notice just how smart you were. I was fighting my feelings for you, Sam. You and I were—and are—so much alike. More than Mindy and I would ever be.”

As a breeze cools the evening air, I shiver. Carson holds me closer. “I had promised Mindy that I’d be faithful to just her. In college, we’d made a pact.”

“A pact? Really?”

“I guess it sounds sort of silly to admit it now.”

“No,” I say, clearly understanding now why the past played out the way it did. I recall the days of wanting so much to be with him, to have him all to myself without the tug he felt to go back to his dorm room and write letters to Mindy. But he had made a promise, and he’d kept it to Mindy until he realized their future was not to be. I run fingers along the edge of the handkerchief as I feel tears surface. I never thought Carson was the silly sentimental type. In a whisper I say, “You’ve kept it ever since.”

“I only keep the things that matter to me, Sam.”

I lean against him, burying my face in his shoulder, letting the weight from the past leave me. “All these years.” The fabric feels light and even softer than it did when I first received it as a gift in my rustic classroom.

His lips feel soft, too.

“So are we going to make a pact?” I ask teasingly.

“Yes,” he says as he kisses my eyelids. “For always.”

forty-seven

C
arson wants to get married tomorrow. I tell him that a girl has to have some time to plan. He says not if we elope. I stare at him, then run that option over in my head. If we ran off and got married at some county clerk’s office, we wouldn’t have to fool with a guest list, invitations, a reception, or flowers.

He grabs my hand and shakes me out of my deep thoughts. “I was only kidding. Seriously, we need to have a wedding.”

“So can we ask Lien and Jonathan to do everything for us like we did for them?”

“Now you’re thinking.”

As Carson and I sit at Mom’s dining room table on a Sunday afternoon in December, we look at a 1994 calendar and set a date: Saturday, May 28, a spring wedding.

“That’s not far away,” I say.

Mom says she’ll start looking for the perfect dress for me.

“How about a veil?” I ask.

“Veils are overrated.”

I’m about to ask her how she knows these things when there’s a knock at her front door.

Mom stands up to answer it. As she swings the door open, all we hear is, “Oh! Oh!” A long gasp and then, “Oh, my.”

I have never heard sounds like that come from her, so I jump up, rushing to the door. Carson follows.

There on the steps stands a robust woman wearing a tan jacket. I think I might know her. Cradled against her chest is a yellow cat, the color of butter. As the woman lifts the cat toward Mom, my mother takes the animal from her. “Baby!” my mother exclaims. “Oh, my sweetness.” Looking up from the cat, she asks, “Where was he?”

The woman says, “There was a cry at my back door, and there he was.”

This I cannot believe; Butterchurn is back.

“Where do you live?” I ask the woman. And how did she know that this tabby cat with green eyes and one white paw belongs to my mother?

“This is Mrs. Low, my neighbor,” Mom says, and now I realize where I have met this woman before.

I watch my mother crooning and kissing her long-lost pet’s head. “I’m Cecelia’s daughter, Samantha,” I remind Mrs. Low. Placing my arm around Carson, I say, “And this is my fiancé.”

She notes the ring on my finger. “Lovely. Sparkly.”

I smile, recalling the night Carson presented the ring to me in a tiny gold box with a black velvet bow.

“Where was he all this time?” I wonder aloud after we have all thanked Mrs. Low, closed the door, and Mom has poked and prodded to make sure her cat is without any medical needs.

“He looks good,” says Mom, a smile filling her face. She lowers Butterchurn onto the hardwood floor. “Someone’s been feeding him. His collar is gone, though.”

Butterchurn rubs against Mom’s legs. Then, with a light purr, he gazes at the lit Christmas tree in Mom’s living room and settles beside it in a cozy ball.

“It’s been since February. That’s ten months,” says Mom, her mental calculator adding up the time that has passed. “What was he doing all that time in between?”

Gently, Carson places his arm around her shoulders and says, “Missing you. Trying to find a way back to you.” Although his words serve as an explanation for my mother, I know there is more to his meaning. What he is trying to say is that the months in between were not lost. They were only a detour in his attempt to come back—to return for a second chance.

Mom assumes I will leave Falls Church and move down to Winston-Salem. Carson tells her he’ll come up here and look for a job. “Why?” she asks him.

“Because Sam works here.”

“Sam likes it in your Moravian town.”

Carson looks at me as I think about where I’d rather live. I’d hate to be far from Mom and her shop.

As though reading my mind, Mom insists that she is fine and can manage the store without me. “You can get a job in North Carolina, be a teacher like you studied for in college.”

“I like working at the boutique.”

“I can get someone else to help me at the store, Sam. Pursue your teaching career.”

“But what about you?”

She places a finger along the side of her nose and looks me up and down. “You will need a size five, I think.”

I sigh. Already she thinks she’s won the discussion and is now moving on to think about my wedding gown.

I let her change the subject, but on a cold day in February, when she’s helping me pack some of my summer clothes into boxes for my move to Winston, I feel the need to bring up the topic again.

With boldness, I dive in. “I get a little tired,” I say to her as I fold a shirt into a cardboard box.

She’s been humming an Elvis song, “Love Me Tender,” for the past half hour. She’s unaware that she does this. Once I told her that she hummed often and she looked at me and said, “I don’t know how to hum.” Then, as if to tease me, she started humming once more. Today she asks, “What makes you tired?”

“Your independence.”

“My what?”

“You’re always acting capable, like you don’t need me.”

Her lips pucker like she’s trying to hold back something. I watch her eyes to see if they’ll turn wet. We can cry together, I think. Mother and daughter, a good cry in my living room. This is what movies are made of.

But my mother simply takes a backless sundress off its hanger and folds it into a large box in front of where she’s seated. I wonder if she’s thinking that she ordered that dress for me two years ago and she’s never seen me in it. I’ve never let her know that the material—some man-made stiff stuff—irritates my skin when I wear it for longer than a few hours.

I keep watching her and waiting. As she continues to pick clothes off hangers and fold them into the box, I can’t keep quiet any longer. “Dovie says that you are—”

Mom cuts me off, closing the lid to the box. “Dovie does not know everything about me.”

“She wants to. We all want to know you.” I edge closer to her. Perhaps I can be the daughter who breaks her mom from her stoic mold.

“You are like your father.”

I hate it when she says that because I never quite know what it means and how I’m like a man who was born in Scotland and spoke with a heavy brogue, often mimicked by my classmates. Does she mean that I’m like him because of my love of travel? If so, she has a point. Ever since that family summer trip to his home in Edinburgh, I’ve wanted to hop on a plane and let it take me to lands I’ve only read about. Yet, as my mind snaps back to the conversation Mom and I are having now, I doubt she is weighing any of my thoughts as her own.