“What in the world?” LeMar says from his rocking chair the next afternoon as Katie Rae and her fiancé stand on the front porch of the Cottage Hill house and show him the solitaire on her left hand. Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette plays in the background. Kitty B. went to see the opera with LeMar a few months ago at the Spoleto Festival. It was set in a contemporary New Jersey community where the Capulet family ran a funeral home. LeMar listens to Act Five, in which the lovers die praying for divine forgiveness, at least once a week. He’s so melodramatic, Kitty B. thinks.
“You two hardly know each other, Katie Rae,” he says, a knowing look in his eye.
Then he turns to Dr. Marshall Bennington. “Son, when you came to ask for her hand last week, I thought I made it clear that this needs to happen at least six months down the road.”
Marshall clears his throat over the tragic music. He pulls at his starched oxford collar before smoothing out the pleats in his khaki shorts. “Sir, I’m thirty-five years old. I’ve been asking God for a wife for nine years now, and I know that Katie Rae is the answer to that prayer.”
An out-and-out smile, teeth and all, spreads across Katie Rae’s face. She looks frumpy compared to Marshall in her untucked T-shirt and cutoff jeans, but at least she bothered to put on some small silver hoop earrings and a little lipstick too.
“Might be,” LeMar says as he pinches his nostrils. “But I don’t think you’ve been with her long enough to know.”
“Marshall’s a good man, Daddy,” Katie Rae says, furrowing her wide brow. Her chubby cheeks begin to flush as she adds, “A better man than I ever dreamed of meeting.”
“You’re only twenty-two, child.” LeMar tries to meet her eyes. “You haven’t finished college and you’ve never held down a legitimate job or a long-term relationship, and you think you can make a decision like this after knowing someone for two months?”
Katie Rae’s cheeks fill with air and her eyes narrow. She grabs her head with both hands, and her solitaire catches the crisp light of the September afternoon. Then she dashes out toward the dock with Marshall fast on her heels. The dogs think this is a game of chase, and they follow raucously behind, nipping and barking at Marshall’s ankles.
LeMar holds the palm of his hand up to Kitty B. as Romeo drinks a vial of poison in the Capulet crypt before seeing Juliet rouse.
“Don’t utter a word, Kitty B.,” he says. “I know what’s going on.”
“Oh, you do?” She grinds her teeth. “Please tell me what you know, LeMar. Tell me why you’ve gone and mortally insulted our daughter in front of what might be the only man that is ever going to love her.”
LeMar shakes his head back and forth, then he grabs at the back of his neck.
“Y’all are speeding this up on account of my headaches,” he says, sitting down in the rocking chair. “You want me to be there before whatever shows up on that MRI eats me up. You’ve all but bought my headstone, haven’t you?”
He bites his lip and conducts the orchestra for a moment with his thick hands. His fingers remind Kitty B. of the link sausages she buys at Marvin’s Meats.
Of course. She gets it now. Somehow this has got to be about you and your make-believe illness!
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Marshall and Katie Rae climb into the johnboat. Katie Rae cranks the motor and steers them out into the river.
The two labs stand like statues on the edge of the dock and Rhetta, the poodle, barks and yips for them to take her too.
“You know, LeMar,” Kitty B. says. “This has nothing to do with you.”
He leans back in the rocking chair and closes his eyes. She stands there staring at him for a whole minute, and she knows he just hopes she’ll disappear.
“Stop tuning me out.” Somehow Kitty B. gets the nerve to stand right in front of him and lean down on the arms of his rocking chair so that he is forced to sit upright.
When he opens his eyes she says, “First, you are not going to die and you know it. Angus says it’s probably just another CFS symptom. No one here has written you off, except maybe you. And as for Katie Rae, did you ever stop to think that she is one year older than I was when we got married?”
He closes his eyes again and shakes his large head gently back and forth. “Oh, and we’ve had a marriage made in heaven,” he says.
Kitty B. stands up straight, her knees trembling, and wonders what to say next. How in the world did they come to this? How did they go from adoring one another the way Marshall and Katie Rae do to hardly having a relationship at all? They live two separate lives under their crumbling roof, and as far as Kitty B. can tell, the only feeling LeMar has toward her is contempt.
She goes and cuts the CD player off and walks back out to the porch with her back to him, watching the black ripples from Katie Rae’s wake slap the edge of the mud banks. The salt marsh is starting to turn from green to brown, and by December they’ll be such a pale, ashen gray that she will have a hard time believing they will ever regain their color.
“Well, I don’t know what we can do about the mess we’re in, LeMar,” she says. “But I do know that we shouldn’t drag Katie Rae down with us.”
He closes his eyes again, and she turns to face him.
“This nice man loves her,” she says. “He respects her and sees what very few people have seen in her, and if we forbid her from taking hold of that, then we may very well ruin her chance at happiness.”
LeMar plays dead.
“Now I’m going to wait down at the dock for them,” she says. “And I’m going to tell them that they have my blessing to get married and they should proceed with or without you. You hear me?”
He pinches his face, and short dark marks run across his lips like a crudely drawn time line. She turns and walks toward the dock as Honey and Otis run up to greet her. Rhetta remains at the water’s edge, barking into the air.
As Kitty B. takes her seat on the dock, she pats the dogs who are vying for her attention. Their muddy paws leave streaks across her apron. It’s the hot pink apron that the gals bought her when she finished the church cookbook, and it has “Editor-in-Chief, Lowcountry Manna” embroidered on the front with the publication date.
The gals seem excited about Katie Rae’s engagement. Kitty B. doesn’t know why LeMar can’t be. It’s been a fast courtship, but goodness knows they never thought Katie Rae was ever going to move out of their house, much less meet a man and marry him. It’s a practical miracle as far as Kitty B. can tell, and as happy as Marshall is, it seems they should be thanking the good Lord for His grace.
Now the goats bleat across the fence as the sun makes its way down toward the water’s edge. When it rises again Kitty B. will drive LeMar down to the Medical University in Charleston for his third MRI of the year. The old paranoid curmudgeon.
He’s been sick and aching more often than not since she’s known him, and some days it seems like he takes great satisfaction in his sufferings the way a tongue can’t help but work its way over a sore tooth.
The doctors will look at him. Look at the inner workings of his body and wonder why he is such a head case. Why he wants to believe that he has some fatal disease. Then they’ll look at me. She shakes her head. They’ll look at me and wonder, “Why does this fellow want to die so badly? He must have an astoundingly horrible home life.”
Some days she’d like to leave him at the hospital for the nurses and doctors to deal with for a few weeks. Isn’t it terrible to think like that? She knows it’s not right, but good grief, she can’t help herself.
Tomorrow she’d like to hand him over to the nurse and then make like she’s going to the waiting room to snip recipes from her cooking magazines, and the next thing you know she’d be halfway down I-26 to her cousin’s house in Roanoke, Virginia. Or maybe she could go to one of those weight loss spas in Arizona or drive to the airport and catch a plane to New York City, where she’d make her way to Rockefeller Center and stand outside the Today show studio, holding up a sign that reads, “Get well soon, LeMar!” before stepping back into the folds of the crowd.
Just as she pictures the look on LeMar’s face while he reads the Today show sign on the screen in front of his hospital bed, Katie Rae and Marshall come around the mouth of the Ashepoo River and toward the dock. The wind pulls back her daughter’s thin dark hair so that it dances behind her like the streamers in a wind sock. Her intended’s arm rests on her back as she turns the boat around and eases up to the marsh bank.
When Marshall scurries to the bow of the boat to grab the line, Kitty B. reaches out her hand, and he throws it to her. She tugs them toward the edge of the dock and ties the line tight as the dogs bark in delight.
“Where’s Daddy?” Katie Rae says, looking toward the porch.
Kitty B. looks back to see the rocking chair empty in the shadows of the autumn dusk.
“Who knows?” she says, reaching out to help them out of the bobbing boat. “Maybe he’s run away.” Maybe he beat me to it.
“No ma’am,” says Marshall pointing up toward the house, where LeMar teeters on the threshold with four of her mama’s old crystal flutes and a bottle of champagne.
He nods his head in an invitation, and they walk across the yard toward him as Honey and Otis sniff each other and Rhetta bolts past them toward the porch, yipping at a high pitch as if she understands that the time has come to celebrate.
Katie Rae follows suit and Marshall even breaks into a little jog on the way toward the sloping porch.
Looks like we’re going to have a wedding. Kitty B. hopes to high heaven that Katie Rae doesn’t have her heart set on having it out here. This is a beautiful spot, but it would cost them a fortune to get the place in shape. The house needs a paint job something awful, and their yard is nothing more than holes of black dirt where the dogs dig and sniff and do their business.
Now Otis and Honey chase each other around Kitty B.’s legs as if to round her up as LeMar embraces his baby girl and his future son-in-law in the center of the sloping porch. Kitty B. hears the cork pop, and she watches as it ricochets off the porch roof and lands in the browning azalea bushes by the steps.
“Hurry up, Mama!” Katie Rae calls. “It’s time for a toast.”