Anne, Queen of Disaster Relief
Outdoor weddings were lovely…as long as it didn’t rain. Anne looked at the cloudy sky covering Lake Washington like a dome of doom and sighed. It had been sunny all day and Anne had begun to hope that the weatherman was wrong. Why couldn’t the rain have held off a little longer? She’d reminded the bride and her mother that end of April was not a good choice for cooperative weather. In Seattle anything before the Fourth of July was a risk.
But Felicity had her heart set on an outdoor wedding, and her mother, Trina, had her heart set on giving Felicity anything she wanted. “She’s my only baby,” Trina had said. “I want her to be happy.”
Anne could understand that. Although she did encourage the bride to have a plan B.
“It won’t rain,” Felicity had said blithely.
“If it does, I guess we’ll have to squeeze into the basement,” her mother had said with a helpless shrug. Later she’d confided to Anne. “I don’t know how we’ll fit everyone in the house.”
“That’s something to consider,” Anne had responded diplomatically.
Mother and daughter did consider it, and the bride-to-be stuck to her plan for an outdoor wedding. They cut the guest list, but not enough, since even after that her mother worried about where they’d put everyone.
Planning the event had been easy. Both mother and daughter had been delighted with all of Anne’s ideas, making it a snap to take care of ordering the cake and flowers and finding the DJ and caterer, renting the chairs and the tent and the dishes and linens. Now all sat in readiness waiting for the bridal party to finish with photos in the garden and on the dock.
Anne blinked as something wet hit her in the eye. This was followed by another something wet splashing her cheek. Oh, no. Here came the rain.
The photographer was finishing up, and Felicity and her groom and their posse began horsing around on the dock, the guys pretending to push the girls off and the girls squealing in mock horror. Ah, the energy of youth. They seemed oblivious of the darkening gray clouds and the spatter.
The mother of the bride wasn’t, though. She hurried over to Anne, her face a study in motherly concern. “Oh, Anne, you were right. This was a bad idea. I wish I’d never let Felicity talk me into this.”
Anne was never one for I-told-you-so. “What would you like to do?”
“Felicity will want to wait and see if this blows over.”
Maybe it would, but not in time for the wedding to take place outdoors. They’d have to move the ceremony inside. Anne looked over to where Felicity stood on the dock, laughing. A speedboat decorated with flowers bobbed next to it, ready for the father of the bride to motor the couple to an undisclosed wedding-night location. She felt sorry for Felicity and her mom. They’d taken a gamble and lost.
Trina shook her head. “She wanted an outdoor wedding so badly, and she wanted it this weekend.”
Anne knew why. Trina had told her. Felicity had wanted to honor her older sister, who had died in April twelve years earlier from childhood leukemia. Later in the evening the wedding party planned to toss their flowers on the lake in honor of her.
When Anne had brought up concerns about the weather, Felicity had insisted that the day she’d picked would be sunny. It had to be. The universe couldn’t be that cruel.
It had been all Anne could do not to say, “Oh, yes, it can. In fact, the universe doesn’t care two figs about you or any of us.”
1997
Anne burrowed under her blankets on the couch and turned up the TV, ignoring the ringing phone. She knew it would be her mom calling to check up on her, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even Mom. All she wanted to do was stay here forever watching soaps on TV and feeling sorry for herself. She’d been doing a pretty good job of it, too. So far, forever had lasted three months. She barely cleaned; she served sandwiches and canned chili for dinner, and let her business slide, leaving Kendra, who’d only recently come on board, scrambling.
“We can try again,” Cam had said after her first miscarriage, holding her in his arms and kissing the top of her head.
But now she was convinced it didn’t matter how many times they tried. They were never going to have another baby.
“It’s a blessing in disguise,” her grandmother had said after each miscarriage. “Something must’ve been wrong with the baby. This is nature’s way of telling you to start again.”
No, it was nature’s way of taunting her. She’d always thought they’d have at least two children, maybe three, or even four. She’d longed to hear the thunder of feet as her children raced up and down the stairs, longed to hear giggles and see sisters and brothers playing together in the backyard. She felt cheated and angry, and she felt especially angry at God. This was her third miscarriage. How could He let this happen?
“How is it that any bad thing happens?” her mother had responded earlier in the week when Anne was venting her anger. “There are no guarantees in this world. You know that. All we can do is enjoy the good things that come our way and accept the bad.”
Well, Anne didn’t want to accept the bad. Her arms ached to hold the little one who’d tried so hard to hang on inside her. She felt the loss as surely as if she’d carried the baby to term. Now she was in deep mourning, her husband and daughter mere figures, blurred and moving at the dark edges of her grief.
The phone rang again. She turned the volume on the TV even higher.
Later in the day she was still on the couch when her mom let herself in with the spare key Anne and Cam kept under the flowerpot out front. “I don’t want to see anyone,” Anne greeted her and burrowed deeper under her blankets.
“I know.” Her mother sat down on the opposite end of the couch, settling Anne’s feet in her lap and starting a foot massage.
“It’s not fair,” Anne said bitterly.
“I know. But you still have a living daughter.”
Anne pulled her foot away. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Her mother calmly took back her foot and resumed rubbing. “I’m only agreeing with you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re trying to teach me a lesson.”
Julia smiled. “Things always had to be fair when you were growing up. I had to make sure you and your sister both got the exact same number of cookies for your after-school snack, the exact same number of gifts at Christmas. And, oh, the complaints when she was allowed to stay up as late as you on special occasions.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this.”
“Going? I’m simply agreeing with you. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that you still have a healthy, happy child when so many women all over the world wind up with none. Come to think of it, it’s not fair that you have such a kind, loving husband who’s always there for you. Or such a nice house. And plenty of food on the table.”
“Now you’re going to lay a guilt trip on me for feeling the way I do?” Anne demanded, incredulous.
Julia stopped the foot rub. “No, sweetie. Remember, I had a miscarriage between you and Kendra and it broke my heart. But I couldn’t stay brokenhearted forever. I still had a child who needed me. And after losing the baby, well, you became even more precious.”
Anne had been too wrapped up in her grief to remember what she still had.
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t mourn this loss,” her mom continued. “All those hopes and dreams, gone, the little one finished before even getting a chance at life. It’s horrible. But at some point you have to go on. You can’t lie on this couch forever. And you can’t let yourself become bitter. It’s not fair to your husband and the child you have.”
Anne chewed her lip, taking that in and yet wishing she didn’t have to.
“You still have so much to be thankful for,” Julia said gently.
“I don’t want to be thankful, damn it!” This was followed by a storm of tears and a maternal shoulder to cry on. And hugs. And a quiet prayer together.
An hour later, Anne got up and made a real dinner for her family for the first time in three months.
Dinner wasn’t all she made. She made an attitude adjustment, too. She reentered life with a vengeance. She and Cam took tango lessons and started scheduling a monthly date night.
On their first night out, as they sat in a little Italian restaurant in lower Queen Anne, enjoying pizza and Chianti, she thanked him for being so patient and understanding. “I know you always wanted to have more kids.”
“But I’ve got you and Laney, and I’m okay with that, Annie. In fact, I’m more than okay. I think I’m a pretty lucky guy.”
“And I’m a lucky woman,” she said.
He raised his glass to her. “We’ve got a lot to be thankful for, babe.”
Yes, they did, she thought as they clinked glasses. Cam and her mother were right. In spite of what she’d lost, she could still be thankful for what she had.
* * *
Now the wind had arrived, whipping the water on Lake Washington into whitecaps and tearing at the pretty white tent. While the groom and his groomsmen carried chairs into the basement, Anne, the bride and her mother and aunt all went into a wedding huddle.
The bride began to cry, her eyeliner running. “I can’t believe this! Where are we going to put everyone?”
“We’ll make it work,” Anne promised her. The basement was roomy and finished and had a fireplace, perfect for a floral arrangement. The bride and groom could take their vows in front of it. They’d have to forgo the tables and squeeze chairs along the walls. A number of guests would have to stand, and in the interests of squeezing everyone in, the bride would have to don a raincoat and make her entrance via the patio door.
“Good idea,” said the aunt after Anne had shared her ideas. “We can do this.”
“Go fix your makeup,” Trina said. “We’ll take care of everything.”
And they did. With Anne supervising, everyone got busy preparing for plan B. The bride patched up her makeup and found her smile again, even as the rain beat on the windows.
The guests came and the basement got hot with all the bodies in it. So hot, in fact, that the bride fainted just before saying, “I do.” Father fretted while the groom carried her to the nearest chair, and a friend of the family who happened to be a doctor helped revive her. A door was opened and a gust of wind blew in, along with a neighbor’s dog, who insisted on greeting one of the guests with his muddy paws. In spite of all that, the bride and groom finished their vows and the guests enjoyed their salmon, getting their food from the upstairs kitchen and spreading throughout the house to eat with their plates on their laps.
As the evening continued, the wind blew away the clouds and the night cleared up enough for dancing on the soppy lawn and, most important, for the bride and her bridesmaids and the groom and his groomsmen to cast their flowers on the water in memory of the bride’s sister.
“For a while there I wasn’t sure I’d be able to say this,” Trina said to Anne, “but it was a wonderful wedding.”
“Your daughter’s a wonderful girl.”
They turned to watch as, in the middle of the lawn, the groom spun his new bride in a circle, both of them laughing.
Bride and groom happy, mother of the bride happy—mission accomplished.