One day before the wedding, the weather finally breaks, sunshine creeping between clouds that thin in the heat, dissolving.
“This weather better hold,” Kristin has repeated to everybody at least twice, with a grim edge that indicates she will hold us each personally responsible if it doesn’t. “Do you think the ground will be dry by tomorrow? Is there anything we can do to speed that up?”
“Yes, Mom,” Alex tells her evenly. “We’ll blowtorch it.”
“Do you really think—?” Kristin smacks his arm. “Don’t tease me! I’m getting married tomorrow! How would you like getting married in wet grass?”
Alex meets my eye for a split second, then continues his task of tying ribbons to wreaths. The two of them have returned to the shop to watch me sort out wedding flowers. I’m so busy already with May Day preparations that a Very Big, extra, short-notice task is frazzling, to say the least. I think that’s partially why Alex has volunteered to be my assistant. (The other part is that we’ve got a crew making quick work of the sewer line right now, and Alex enjoys offering them unsolicited advice on how to do their job.)
“Sorry, Mom.”
“You can make it up to me by hunting down some place cards for the reception. They were supposed to be here by now! Romina, I know you’ve got a lot going on already, but . . .”
Alex says to his mother, “Mom, I think she’s busy.”
I should leave it at that, because he’s correct, but some part of me will always want to impress Kristin, make her pleased with me. “What is it? Do you need something?”
“My maid of honor was supposed to fly in yesterday, but her daughter just had a baby. A C-section, she was stalled at two centimeters for forty-eight hours, poor thing. The baby was eleven pounds! I can’t imagine delivering an eleven-pound baby. Alex was seven pounds and came out in two pushes.”
I’m not sure where she’s going with this. “Oh . . . ?”
“Patricia will be here tomorrow, but I’d like a stand-in for the rehearsal, so that I can see exactly how it’ll go, where everybody stands, all that. Would you mind? I know you’re Trevor’s plus-one, you’re already helping me out so much with these flowers . . . I don’t want to put you through any trouble . . .”
“I’ll help out however I can.”
She beams. “Oh, thank you! You won’t have to do much. Just walk a few steps, stand next to me, so that we can make sure everything looks right. Short and breezy, then we’re off to dinner.”
“I’d be happy to.”
“Wonderful! I’m so glad you’re a part of this, Romina.” She hugs me, tears fountaining. She’s been crying nonstop today—over the flower girl’s dress, because it’s tiny and cute, and over the sunshine, and the new earrings Daniel surprised her with for the bride’s something new.
A couple of hours later, Kristin has returned to check on our progress, making a sad sound over the place cards Alex has been working on. “What are these?”
“Place cards. I bought a downloadable template.”
“They didn’t have any with a salmon, white, and green design?”
He scratches his head. “You didn’t say you wanted that.”
“Those are my colors!” More tears. “Nobody cares about the colors except for me. Everything’s such a mess.”
“Sorry,” Alex says wearily, half dead from running around all day. I’ve put him to work snipping things from the garden whenever I need it, as well as packing wedding flowers into biodegradable cartons that are speedily filling up not only my work fridge and my home fridge, but the one in Luna’s apartment upstairs as well. “Do you want me to find different ones?”
“They’re fine, they’re fine. I’m sorry. Am I doing the bride-o-saurus thing? I didn’t think I’d become one of those people.”
“Bridezilla,” Trevor supplies, struggling with a heap of string lights that Kristin’s tasked him with untangling. She also bought the kind that blink on and off, but wants the lights to remain steady.
Kristin has a minor breakdown over the lights, which is only resolved when Daniel calls with his hourly update on tomorrow’s weather forecast: “Seventy-two and sunny! They’re saying less than forty percent chance of rain.” Her mood does a one-eighty.
“All right!” Kristin claps. “The pastor’s going to be at Half Moon Mill in twenty minutes, so it’s time to jet. Romina, are you ready?” She smiles beatifically at her son. “I’m sure Alex will give you a ride.”
He cuts her an evaluating look.
“Uh, sure.” I’m at loose ends already, and the prospect of sitting in a car alone with Alex has me even more flustered. “Just let me change real quick?”
I flee the sunroom, across the courtyard. I go tearing through my wardrobe, under my bed, in my closet. “Black shoes, black shoes, where are my black shoes?” I can’t ever find anything when I need it! And I swear Trevor has been stealing my perfume. This bottle was full a few days ago.
I track down my shoes, then forage for a nice pair of socks. I can tell that Aisling’s been rummaging through my stuff, because older clothes I don’t normally wear have turned up at the surface, like an archaeological digging site. Frog-patterned stockings. Fishnets. Socks with holes in the heels, but that I can’t throw away because I might teach myself how to darn them eventually. I sit down on the bed and begin yanking on a fancy white pair with silk polka dots in dove gray. The left sock has a weird lump in the toe.
I turn it inside out, revealing a much smaller sock, white with tiny pink hearts on the ankle. Small enough to fit in my palm. It’s stiff and crinkled from being scrunched into a ball throughout the drying process, my sock one of the Bermuda triangles where her miniature garments perpetually disappeared to. I stare at it, light-headed.
Adalyn.
Sometimes, I trick myself into thinking I’m all the way okay. I don’t know if such a thing exists.
After I moved out of Spencer’s house and he told me I’d never see her again, I turned avoidant, mapping my world around triggers: certain aisles in the store, songs Adalyn and I listened to during car rides, television shows. I was caught in a riptide of references to parenthood that crashed from every direction—until I lost the girl who’d practically been my daughter, had there been this many Pampers commercials? Every car at every stoplight showcased a sticker family on the rear windshield with a passel of scribbled children.
I put in a great deal of work to recover, at least as much as anyone could recover from something like that. At the urging of my therapist, I coaxed myself to walk by purple bottles of Johnson & Johnson nighttime baby wash at the store, Garanimals onesies with colorful animals. I can’t avoid “The Wheels on the Bus” and tiny house slippers with bunny ears and washcloths (“Washclosh!”) and bubbles and I Can Learn to Read books forever. Reminders will always appear, because Adalyn was not a splinter that could be easily excised, leaving no mark. She is all over my heart; I could probably take any object in the world and find a way to connect it to her, I loved her so completely.
One day, a few months after I moved back home, Trevor brought strawberries into the shop. When I saw the plastic carton, I immediately stumbled back in time—Adalyn loved strawberries, had a permanent red juice stain around her mouth. Trevor tossed them up in the air to catch between his teeth, and the most wonderful, ordinary thing occurred: I threw another strawberry at Trevor’s while it was tumbling upward—a collision—resulting in both of them hitting Luna. I’d laughed, a shock of a noise I hadn’t heard from myself in a long while. From that point on, whenever I’ve seen a strawberry, the dominant link is laughter. One memory’s power superseding another. I’m not sure how long I’ll continue to remember Adalyn’s strawberry grin, but it’s been pushed further back, my brain rewriting over scar tissue with a scene that makes me smile.
This sock smells like Dreft detergent. I bought this, I washed it, I dressed her in it. Peeled it off a sweaty foot at the end of the day after I carried her in from the car, tromping over dandelions in a grassy yard, dead autumn leaves, snow, my boots crunching through the top layer of ice, Adalyn and I joined at the hip from before she could crawl until she was five years old. Sliding with her on the icy walkway, balancing my purse, a shopping bag, those legs kicking, mittens a lost cause. Into the laundry basket went the sock, into the washer, dryer, back onto her foot, then onto the floor of the living room, into the washer and dryer again, her dresser drawer, under the couch, at the bottom of her toy basket. I was eternally cursing how easily they’d vanish.
I can hear Peppa Pig blaring in the background while I’m on my hands and knees digging under the couch, Where’d it go? She crammed stuff under there on purpose. Half of a rice cracker, the whole set of Blue’s Clues & You toys she couldn’t sleep without only last month. And there it is, in an alphabet bus toy. A thin pink line at the seam, the row of delicate hearts.
You are not going to fall apart right now, I tell myself harshly. Not over a wrinkled lump of cotton. But in my mind’s eye, I see my hands rolling that sock over a little foot. I hear a voice proudly saying, “Toes,” as a chubby hand reaches toward them.
“Toes,” I repeat encouragingly. “Nose. Where’s your nose?”
She points.
“Good job!”
She claps, grinning.
“Where’re your eyes?”
She pokes her eyelids, making me laugh. “You’re so smart!” I fasten the Velcro buckle of her shoes, sit her up, finger-comb her fine blond hair. “So pretty, my sweet girl. Are you ready to go bye-bye?”
“Bye-bye!”
“Yes, bye-bye! We’re going to spend the day with Aunt Luna so that Daddy can get some work done.”
My eyes burn. I can’t discern anything in front of me. “Romina?” someone asks, and I turn, my eyes hot and wet. Alex stands in the doorway.
“Oh, no.” Another scent sweeps in to overpower the Dreft: eucalyptus, which he’s been weaving around wire crowns. Calming eucalyptus is all over his hands. I feel the strangest blast of gratitude, that with this new smell, I have snapped back to the present and my chest has loosened, able to breathe again. “Romina,” he repeats softly, taking me in his arms. “What’s wrong?”
I sniffle into his shoulder. When I lay my cheek against it, I see his gaze shutter for a moment. “Thank you” is all I can say.
I feel him trying to puzzle out what’s going on, why I’m crying. He takes the sock. “What’s this?”
“It was Adalyn’s.”
“Who?”
I shake my head.
“Will you tell me why you’re crying?”
“Because you smell like eucalyptus.”
He nudges me. “You smell like a garden. Naturally.”
“It’s my soap. Brassavola nodosa, Lady of the Night.” I stretch my socks on, finally, too dazed to be embarrassed that he wandered in here and caught me crying with a baby sock in my hands. I’m going to make him late. I’m going to ruin the rehearsal, and all I’d wanted to do was help.
“I like it.” He watches me, concern deepening. “Romina. Talk to me.”
The silence stretches.
“I met someone,” I say slowly. He hands me a tissue, waits while I blow my nose. “When I was twenty-one. He was thirty-eight, he had a baby. His wife had left them, and . . . he needed a lot of help.”
He lowers to the floor, wordlessly sliding a black ankle boot over one of my feet. Then the other. My fingers fist the blanket as I watch.
“He kept asking me out. I’d say no, because it didn’t seem like a good idea to get involved with the parent of one of the kids—did I mention that? This was at the daycare. When I worked at Over the Moon Daycare. I had Adalyn every weekday from morning till evening.”
Alex listens, not interrupting.
“He was so sweet, at first. I still don’t exactly know how it happened, the shift from me taking care of Adalyn to me moving into his house, taking care of both of them. I . . .” There isn’t enough time to sift through all of that mess right now, and he’s only being polite. He can’t sincerely want to hear about this. “Anyway, the relationship ran its course, obviously, but I didn’t realize that in leaving Spencer, I would be forced to lose Adalyn. I taught her how to walk and talk. Losing my role as her mom killed me.”
He rests a warm hand to the side of my face. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m doing better now, but sometimes a reminder will hit me out of nowhere, and it’s as if not a single day has passed since I was with her, and I start to miss her so much, it’s the worst pain imaginable.”
“I can tell my mom that you aren’t feeling well, if you want. It’s not that important to have a stand-in maid of honor at the rehearsal.” He draws me upright, then close, clasping me into a hug.
I relax into him, but only for a heartbeat. Then I wipe my eyes. Remind myself how far I’ve come, how much progress I’ve made, how I can wheel my shopping cart past the pacifiers without being sucked back into a nursery in my memories, fumbling in Adalyn’s dark crib for a glow-in-the-dark handle. Adalyn is eight years old. By now, her memories of me must be blurred past the point where she’d recognize me on the street. She probably associates the vanilla fragrance I used to wear with birthday cakes celebrated with her dad and biological mom, her family singing to her. Loving and cherishing her, I hope. With every passing year, the little girl who once called me “Mama” and loved me more than anyone else in this world will write over all of our memories together until someday she won’t remember me at all. If I made a difference in her life, she won’t be aware of it. I don’t get to be a part of what happens next, who she becomes. But I can take heart in knowing I did my very best in the short time we had together.
In time, a strawberry can just be a strawberry. Life goes on.
I draw a deep breath, squeezing his hand. “Let’s go.”
East Falls scents the air like puffs of woodsy perfume, mist pearling in the treetops, and walking beneath is like wafting through a gentle, continuous rain. Alex’s left arm is an anchor as we march to the spot of grass where, tomorrow, an arbor will be crowded with bird-of-paradise and Magical Moonlight buttonbush. The pastor, who works an aggressively firm handshake, is leading Mr. Yoon and Kristin through the And then this happens, and then that, and afterward . . . When it’s time for me to join Daniel’s brother (the best man) as we glide down the invisible aisle, Alex removes his arm as anchor but gives me his eye contact, steady and centered. He accompanies his mother, as he’ll be giving her away, but his gaze is trained on me. I’m situated on one side of the arbor; he joins the other, next to Trevor, third in line among groomsmen.
If anyone notices my face is blotchy, at least I don’t stand out—Kristin’s weepy, too. Mr. Yoon keeps fondly teasing her about it. She responds by burying her face in his shoulder.
After Kristin and Mr. Yoon exchange their practice “I do’s,” Alex snaps back to my side like a rubber band, arm sliding behind my waist. Trevor skips away, Alex’s eyes following him with an unmistakable shine of outrage.
“I’m going to talk to him,” he mutters darkly.
“About what?”
“I found you crying, and where was he? He should be here with you, not me.”
“It’s fine.” I wave dismissively.
Alex slides in front of me to block my view of everything else, watching me carefully. “Why doesn’t that bother you?”
“I’m all right, Alex. Seriously.”
He looks up at the sky and sighs. “You’re about to be annoyed with me.”
What else is new. “Can’t wait to hear where you’re going with this.”
“I have circled back to my belief that you and Trevor are not a couple.”
“Oh, boy. This again.”
“You’re not in love with each other, that’s for sure.”
“Why would we pretend to be in love if we aren’t? That’s absurd. Also, our relationship is a very relaxed sort, which is exactly what I want. You’re in denial.”
“First of all, you’re in denial, and you’re bad at it. And yes, it is absurd to pretend to be in love when you’re not, but call it a gut feeling—I know something’s up. Secondly, there’s no way that if your relationship is real, you’re satisfied. You barely even look at him, you never walk over to stand next to him whenever he comes around. You look at me way more often than you look at him, I’ve noticed.”
“Notice less, please. Your mom’s getting married tomorrow, so you should try focusing on that instead.”
“I’m a solid multitasker.” His head tilts, tone curious. “You’re blushing.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why are you blushing?”
He isn’t going to let this go. “I’m sunburnt, probably. Be useful and go get me some aloe vera.”
“Is it because of this?” His hand flexes on my waist.
My breath catches.
“Interesting.” He trails a finger up my arm, chucking me beneath the chin. “Shall we experiment?” Mischief dances in his eyes.
“Hands to yourself,” I hiss.
“You first.”
I frown, then look down. To my horror, my hands have found their way to his sides, tips of my fingers curled into his waistband. I leap back with a start.
Heat rushes to my face, my ears, between my thighs. Alex laughs a quiet, knowing laugh. Strolls off without a care, offering an elbow to his mom, kissing her cheek, and when he glances back at me, he winks.
