Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,21
hoping you might be my maid of honor?” She put her thumbnail near her mouth like she was about to bite it and then stopped herself. She was nervous. I didn’t know how someone so pretty and neat could be nervous.
“Um . . . suuuuuurrre,” I heard myself say.
“I’m so happy!” Polly hugged me, again, and clapped, again. “I have my wish book, so you won’t need to do any of the usual maid of honor duties.”
I had no idea what maids of honor usually did, besides stand there, so I said, “Okay, thanks.”
She squeezed my shoulders and held me at arm’s length, taking in me and my Sunkist shirt. “And if you look that good in orange, wait until you try on the bridesmaid’s gown. It will be dusty peach!”
“What’s a dusty peach?”
She pointed to the flowers. “Our colors. We’re doing this quickly, so imagine this. Fall nuptials with a harvest theme.” She grinned as if the word “harvest” would mean something to me, but all I could imagine were those cornucopias we had to make every year in grammar school. “Pale peach is too summer. But dusty makes it autumn . . . al. I can never say that word! Autumn-al. Al. Autumn. Never mind. You’ll see when I show you the fabric swatches.”
As she continued, I made polite noises and thought about the gown I’d wear, imagining something off the shoulder, even though I wasn’t sure that was autumnal. My hair would be curled like Jaclyn Smith’s, and to go along with the impossibility of achieving that hair, my eyes were also bigger and darker and, for some reason, looking into Bobby’s, as he held out a hand and asked me to dance. He’d hold my waist tight and say, “You’re cold, come closer.”
“Wow,” I said, out loud by accident, and the dining room became even smaller.
“I know, I think it’s gorgeous, too,” she said, gazing at the flowers, which she’d been rearranging while I daydreamed. “I’ve always had a knack with flowers. I’m going to take a Polaroid and show the florist.”
“Mmm,” I said, willing the stirred sensation between my legs to leave, which was easier than at school because I noticed a baby picture of me on the sideboard. You couldn’t be weaving impure scenarios in your imagination while looking into your own baby eyes.
“Thank you so much for being so great! I’m absolutely thrilled,” Polly said, and squeezed my shoulder as she left the room. “I need to check on the roast!”
I sat there for a minute, unsure what to do. If I went to my room now—it was the condo’s guest room, with a bed shoved against the wall and no other furniture—I’d seem like a sullen, angry teen who didn’t want her dad to remarry. That wasn’t really true. I could have happily gone without ever knowing what dusty peach was, but whereas the divorce had shed light on my mom and who she was, I hadn’t learned anything new about my dad. He’d gone from Albert, guy left by his first wife, to Albert, guy about to get a second wife. I loved him, of course, but he could have been anybody. If my mom was one of the detailed pages in my old Barbie coloring books that made me excited to color in the intricate accessories, my dad was the page with Ken standing against a stark background that I skipped over.
I felt sorry for thinking that, so I wandered into the living room and took a seat next to him on the couch. A commercial for Budweiser was on TV. “Polly told you about the harvest thing?” he said, without looking at me.
“Yup,” I said, as the commercial ended and Soldier Field came back onscreen.
“I appreciate you not, you know, giving Polly a hard time,” Dad said. “I told her you don’t much go in for all the flowers and romance.”
He said it like he was almost proud of me for it, but before I could decide whether it was actually a compliment, he added, “Your ma mentioned something about a soccer team?”
He packaged his comment as a question, like he was interested in talking about it. So Mom had told him about it. I couldn’t remember the last time they’d both seemed tuned in to something I was doing.
“Yeah, I made the team,” I said. “We have practice tomorrow.”
Dad mulled this over with his eyes on the TV. “Huh. I always thought soccer was kind of a girly