HE THOUGHT HE’D BE NERVOUS by now. But after thinking about it for a few days, Oliver had convinced himself that Mattie’s use of the word “date” had been innocuous. She’d simply used flirty language precisely to emphasize the fact that she was not flirting with him. Besides, how much pressure could there be in a big church with loads of strangers? If nothing else, it should be a goldmine of potential material. He imagined an overly benevolent priest, chatty bridesmaids, jokey groomsmen, a rival pair of weepy mothers, a horde of bratty kids, tipsy uncles, and nostalgic wives on the arms of bored husbands.
The first needling twinge of apprehension struck when he saw the steeple rising up in the distance. But Mattie’s directions led him past the church and through a quaint neighborhood that eventually opened up into a collection of small, sprawling estates.
Oliver eventually matched the number on the mailbox to the number on Mattie’s Hello Kitty envelope. The driveway was long and circular and swarming with valet parkers. It felt odd surrendering the keys of his dilapidated Integra to the valet that had just leapt from an idling Hummer—odder still that he recognized him from the hotel. In fact, Oliver was fairly certain he’d run over this guy’s foot before on his way out of the garage.
If the valet recognized Oliver, he didn’t act like it. Instead he pointed to an open gate on the east side of the house. As Oliver approached the sound of happy voices, he felt an overwhelming urge to adjust something—his shirttail, his hair, his wallet. But he was already as put-together as he was going to get at this point. And adjusting his wallet wasn’t going to make it any fatter.
Mattie spotted him at once, almost as if she’d been looking for him. Oliver was only a little disappointed when she didn’t jog to his side and take his arm. Instead she waved him over and introduced him to a group of four couples that Oliver could only describe as geeky chic. He assumed that at least a few of them played in her band, but no one mentioned music. And so far there was no sight of Max, the smarmy non-fiancé. Oliver answered a few obligatory icebreaking questions—he was fine, thank you; he worked with Mattie; he was “between” colleges at the moment; and that, no, he was not the new drummer. Mostly, he just listened to their banter and inside jokes until the wedding planner yelled at everyone to take their places.
Mattie directed him toward neat rows of white foldout chairs facing a gazebo the size of Oliver’s garage. It too was white, strung with some kind of evergreen garland and dotted with what appeared to be real magnolias. Mattie deposited him on the outer end of the last row and told him to have fun. He couldn’t tell if she winked or if the sun was in her eyes. Then she took her place among a group of what he assumed were bridesmaids.
Despite the ridiculously opulent surroundings, the festivities were surprisingly informal. The preacher was youthful, but not all that young. The string quartet was stellar. And the vows were plain, unaffected, and obviously written by the bride and groom. During the solemn exchange, tissues sprouted, then bloomed—mostly on the bride’s side of the aisle.
When the preacher started speaking again, Oliver’s mind began to drift back in time to the first wedding he could remember attending.
• • •
He couldn’t have been more than six or seven. And he couldn’t remember ever seeing his mother so happy, or beautiful. She had never not been pretty, even after she lost all the weight and her eyes fell out of sync. Even now, she wasn’t pretty for her age. She was pretty in spite of it.
But the morning of the wedding she’d been stunning, radiant, like a TV starlet from one of her soap operas. And she’d dressed him up in a secondhand sport coat and clip-on tie too. The most vivid image from this batch of memories was the way her face seemed on the verge of laughing and crying at the same time.
She kept calling him her little man and promising that things were going to be different from then on. And not just different, but better. But Oliver couldn’t imagine anything much better than a happy mom and Krispy Kremes and chocolate milk.
When they finally piled into the strange black car, she answered all his questions about the wedding they were going to. When he finally got around to asking who they were going to watch get married, she’d bitten her bottom lip and told him that they were finally going to get his wish. Which seemed more than a little peculiar that she would use such a formal occasion to inform Oliver that he was finally going to get the trampoline he’d been begging for and that she was going to finally get her farmhouse with the wraparound porch and baby goats. But he wasn’t going to argue. It made sense why she seemed so giddy. Weddings, it seemed, were like Christmas.
Just before they climbed out of the biggest, blackest car ever, Delores Miles took her only son’s face in her hands and said, “You are going to be surprised, Oliver. And we are going to be so happy.”
Only the first part came true.
As Oliver sat, swinging his feet in the first pew of the tiny chapel, he finally learned what a wedding was. Even better, his mommy was the bride. But the groom never showed up.
Neither did the trampoline, the big porch, or the goats.
Later that night, Oliver used all his newfound knowledge to make things better again. He sat down cross-legged on his bed with construction paper and a few freshly sharpened pencils. After several false starts and piles of balled-up paper, he finally finished his note.
His mother was sitting in the dark, still in her pretty cream-colored dress, staring at nothing on television, and nursing a bottle of something that smelled like bathroom cleaner.
He offered her the note. She unfolded it and read his proposal. He volunteered to be her groom and get a good job as a mailman and buy her the farmhouse and goats. He promised to always clean up his toys and dress nice and be a really good and nice groom. His favorite paragraph was the one that took the longest to write, the one where he told her what a beautiful bride she was.
But when she finished the note, she didn’t smile or laugh or cry. She just folded it up and let it fall from her hand to the sofa, then from the sofa to the floor.
She said simply, “Go to bed, Oliver.”
He’d seen his mother drink her “medicine” before. He’d experienced the blanked-out expressions, dreamy speech, the long stretches of apathy. But he’d never seen her be so mean. Unfortunately, he would see a lot more of it in the future, all of it.
He’d poured out his milky little heart, hoping to nourish his mother. But all he really managed to do was stain the carpet.
Oliver finally snapped out of his own memory when the preacher told Reese he could now kiss the bride.
• • •
The first marital smooch was chaste, sweet even, the way their foreheads touched and all the pent-up wedding day tension seemed to blissfully drain away. But then a pair of groomsmen destroyed the moment by whooping and whistling, which prompted Reese to attempt an impromptu make-out session. Two boys in the row in front of Oliver made retching sounds. Mattie seemed to be caught in a perpetual eye-roll. Oliver followed her gaze upward, half expecting to see a sky-written message up there.
The cellist cued the rest of the quartet, who then pounded out a strident recessional. Before the newly minted married couple had disappeared through the portable archway, staff members materialized in droves—caterers, waiters with hors d’oeuvres and wine bottles, and serious young men assembling some tables, disassembling others, and moving chairs to encircle an enormous makeshift dance floor. Oliver surrendered his folding chair and went in search of some inconspicuous place to blend in as the wedding party posed for pictures. Mattie found him leaning against the trunk of a willow tree. She handed him a flute of champagne, then sipped her own as they watched people congregate around the newly assembled dance floor.
Oliver said, “We don’t really have to dance, do we?”
“Just once. It’s basically a photo op for the wedding party. But it’ll be a slow number. We just zombie waltz for three-and-a-half minutes, then our duties here will be done.”
The wedding planner seemed to be pulling imaginary strings and levers from the edge of the dance floor. During the traditional bride-and-groom dance, she coordinated more and more couples in what appeared to Oliver as the on-deck circle—the bride with the groom’s father, the groom with the bride’s mother, then increasingly complex pairings of the bride’s stepparents and best men and maids of honor and grandmothers. Eventually the entire wedding party was invited to join in and Oliver found himself embracing the Harrington Hotel’s new night auditor. He held one hand aloft and perched the other self-consciously on the small of her back. Mattie rested her head on his chest and hummed along with whatever sappy song the DJ was spinning.
A minute into the song, Mattie angled her face up toward his, and for one delightfully alarming moment he thought she was going to kiss him. He tried not to think about the taste of champagne on her lips. The longer she looked at him the harder he tried to think about anything else. But nothing worked.
Finally, she said, “You okay up there?”
“Sure, yeah. Why do you ask?”
“Your heart’s playing a drum solo.” She tapped his ribcage with her finger. “And your hand’s all clammy.”
“Sorry. I’m a little out of practice. I think the last time I danced was with my mother, about a hundred years ago.”
“Maybe you should do it more. If you could relax a little, you’d be quite good at it.”
“Thanks. I’ll just be happy if I don’t break any of your toes.”
Actually, that had been his mission when the song started. Now it was to keep breathing in the smell of her hair and pray the song never ended. But the song did eventually fade and the DJ began yammering instructions for the bridesmaids to stay put and do the Chicken Dance.
Mattie finally pulled away, shrugged, and rolled her eyes yet again. Oliver backed to the edge of the dance floor, savoring the warm spot on his chest, watching the girl who’d made it. She looked bored, just going through the motions until the grinning bride grabbed her hands and exaggerated the wacky dance moves. The more she lost herself in the madcap choreography, the harder it was for Oliver to take his eyes off of her. He was conniving various ways to ask her to slow dance again when he felt someone bump his elbow.
“You’re Oliver, right?” It was Reese, the groom, Mattie’s brother.
“That’s me.” Oliver offered his hand, but Reese did a poor job pretending not to see it. “Anyhow, congratulations. The ceremony was beautiful.”
“You do realize that, technically speaking, you weren’t invited?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said gamely, still holding out hope that Mattie’s brother was just messing around. “I have a pretty vivid memory of Mattie asking.”
“Well it’s not exactly her wedding, is it?”
“Are you asking me to leave?”
“Just making friendly conversation,” he said. “So tell me, what are your plans with Mattie?”
“As far as I know we don’t have any. But she did say something about dinner later.”
“She mentioned your sense of humor,” Reese said. “I have to say though, that so far I’m not impressed.”
“Look, I didn’t come here to start trouble. Mattie asked me to come and I came. I promise I’m not trying to ruin your big day or break up your band or whatever it is you think I’m doing here.”
“So did she feed you that load of crap about staying in the band to save her kid brother?”
“Not exactly,” Oliver said.
“Despite what my sister tells you, my alleged addiction was basically a two-year stint of relatively normal fraternity life. Excessive partying, failing a few too many classes, and maybe a drug test or two. But it was a weird time for all of us, and we all found our own unhealthy ways of dealing with it. All of us.”
“Okay,” Oliver said, unsure how he’d been so easily sucked into such a one-sided argument. Evidently, Mattie wasn’t the only Holmgren who said everything that came to mind. He’d already decided his best line of defense was to just stop talking when the elder version of Reese appeared, grinning too wide, speaking louder than necessary, and pumping Oliver’s hand much too hard.
“I’m Walter, Mattie’s father.”
“The difference,” Reese said with way more drama than the situation called for, “is that I admitted I had a problem. Unlike everyone else in this family.” Then he ambled off without even acknowledging the man still gripping Oliver’s hand. He appeared to be talking to a guy that looked suspiciously like Max.
“I’m Oliver Miles. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“Mattie’s told me quite a lot about you.”
“She has?”
Walter Holmgren stared at his drink as if seeing it for the first time. “Actually, no. But I’m sure she meant to.”
That’s when Mattie finally broke away and hurried over to Oliver’s side. Her face was flushed from dancing, her forehead damp as she rose up on tiptoes to kiss her father’s cheek. “Love you, Pop,” she said.
Walter smiled into his drink. Mattie gripped Oliver’s arm and escorted him toward the gate by the side of the house.
“Does this mean you’re coming to my rescue?”
“Actually, I’m coming to kick you out.”
“Funny, your brother just tried that.”
“Well, I’ll be much nicer about it. And you’ll just have to believe me when I say it’s for your own good.”
Mattie shot her brother and Max a dirty look as she ushered Oliver past piles of amplifiers and guitar cases. Once outside the gate she nodded toward the nearest valet and told Oliver, “Give me your ticket.”
“Why the rush?” he said. “Looks to me like a band’s about to set up.”
“Which is exactly why I’m rushing you out of here.” She took the claim ticket out of Oliver’s hand and placed it into the valet’s.
“Hey, don’t I know you guys from the Harrington?” he said.
All at once Oliver nodded and Mattie said no, that he must be confusing them with someone else, and to please hurry. When the valet ran off to fetch Oliver’s car, Mattie turned and said, “By the way, thank you.”
“For what exactly?”
“For being here to help me endure these people.”
“Who? Your family? Or the Family?”
“See why I hate that name?”
“No,” Oliver said. “I really don’t.”
“Don’t get me wrong. We love each other. But did you get the sense from anyone you met here today that we’d ever actually choose to spend time together if we weren’t related?”
“Now that you mention it,” he said. He wondered if she had any idea how sad that sounded, if she had any clue how lucky she was to actually have an intact family. But he decided to play along, to be a good sport, to keep his envy to himself. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re going to stand here in the driveway until I leave.”
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Mind if I ask why?”
“You already know. Yes, that’s my brother’s band setting up in the backyard. No, I had no idea they were going to do this. But I’m not surprised either. And if it weren’t his wedding day I’d jump in your car with you and treat you to that dinner I promised. As it stands now, I hope you’ll take another rain check.”
The valet pulled Oliver’s wheezy Integra alongside them. He fished his wallet out of his pocket, more than a little dismayed to see only one bill tucked inside—a twenty. He stared at it, willing it to break into a pile of singles. It didn’t move, and neither did the toes of the valet’s Nikes. Oliver surrendered the obscene tip with his eyes clenched. The valet practically shouted his thanks, then stood at attention, holding the door as if Oliver were the prince of Nashville.
Finally, Oliver turned to Mattie and said, “Why don’t we just go after you guys play?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You really need to go.”
“But why?”
“Because …” She gripped his arm with one hand and placed her other hand on the top of his head, just like a cop on TV. Then she playfully yet forcefully shoved him inside his car. “You can’t see me this way, Oliver.”
“You know, I could just drive around for twenty minutes and come back while you’re already playing.”
“But you won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re going to promise me you won’t.”
“I am?”
That’s when Mattie punched him in the shoulder. Her expression was playful, but the pain was rich and intense.
“Ouch!”
“Promise me,” she said, her lopsided grin now in full bloom, her fist still clenched. “Or I’ll have to do it again.”
“Okay, I promise, Mattie.”
He watched her shrink in the rearview mirror, arms folded and unmoving until they were out of each other’s sight. Oliver turned the radio down so he could replay Mattie’s last three syllables in his head. Then he spent the rest of the trip trying to devise more ways to get Mattie to hit him again.
Oliver got lost on the way home. Or maybe his subconscious had commandeered the wheel. Either way, he found himself taking the Second Avenue exit away from the city, through a few of Nashville’s seedier neighborhoods, and eventually idling outside a nondescript three-story brick building. Although he’d never actually been here, he’d made the trek dozens of times in his mind’s eye.
Oliver killed the ignition and sat, staring and doubting and wondering what he thought he was doing here. Maybe it was meeting Mattie’s father, or just an inconvenient rash of curiosity.
Roscoe had warned him numerous times that it was probably a bad idea to track his father down. Now he was about to find out.