Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,64

property,” I said.

“I need to talk to your mother,” he said.

“Get off her property.”

“I’ll go to see her at the hospital,” he said. “I guess your father’s not really in a position to make decisions anyhow, is he?”

“Just stay away from my family,” I said, turning my back on him. It was the rudest I’d ever been to anyone, and I didn’t care one bit, not after what he’d said about my father. It made me feel good, to talk like that, better than I’d felt in weeks.

My least favorite part of the fall was listening to people tell me how much their kids liked it at the state university. Mrs. Venti said that LaRhonda had the prettiest roommate, a girl from outside Pittsburgh whose father worked at Alcoa, and that the two of them were both figuring on being Kappas. The only thing worse than hearing that was listening to the woman who worked in the steak house kitchen and went on and on about how homesick her daughter was. I wanted to tell her that if her daughter really wanted to know homesick, she should stay home in my house. I felt like my head was always full of things like that, that I felt like shouting but could never get away with even saying out loud.

LaRhonda came home at Thanksgiving, and the next thing I knew she was asking me to be her maid of honor, telling me that she was getting married over Christmas break, showing me a good-size diamond ring. “I’m telling you right now, there’s no way Fred bought that unless it’s a cubic zirconium,” Steven said. It always amazed me, the things he knew. A cubic zirconium. He was right about one thing. Fred hadn’t paid for the ring himself but with a loan from his future father-in-law, who took one look at the chip Fred had gotten at the new mall and said, “You’d need a microscope to see that thing.”

“I guess there are some girls at school who are married, right?” I said, but LaRhonda frowned and her mother said, “Oh, Mimi, she’s not going back to the university. She’s staying right here with Fred. Mr. Venti’s got plans for him. He always wanted a son.”

“I don’t know why you keep saying that,” said LaRhonda.

“When I get the money together I’ll buy you a ring bigger than that one,” said Steven in the back bedroom of a house he’d just bought at auction. He loved telling stories about the future. He moved from place to place now, couldn’t see the point in renting an apartment or even a room when he owned a couple of houses and didn’t care about living in a place with the kitchen cabinets in a pile in the backyard waiting to be carried off and replaced by ones he’d found at a job lot. He was really good about doing more with less. At some building site he’d found a small stall shower that had been the wrong size for the bathroom it was intended for, and bought it for ten bucks from the foreman. It was in the second bathroom of the house he was working on, and living in. We’d had sex standing up in it. It sounded a lot better than it turned out to be, but Steven seemed to like the idea. It was one of those things he could talk about after.

The other bridesmaids were two of the Holy Rollers from high school, and two girls LaRhonda had met at college and who I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be seeing again. They stayed at the Ventis’ house the week of the wedding, and the rooms in the children’s wing were finally full. But I was the one who stayed in LaRhonda’s room, and who heard her after the rehearsal dinner throwing up in her bathroom, with its metallic wallpaper and ruffled shower curtain. Her hair was in rollers for the next day, and one fell out and landed in the toilet with a plop, and I think that’s what set her off. She sat back on her heels, her pink furry slippers poking out from under her nightgown, and wailed, “It was only three times and it hurt and I didn’t even like it. Not one little bit.”

I knelt down next to her, feeling stupid because I was probably the only bridesmaid who hadn’t immediately understood the reason for getting engaged at Thanksgiving, getting married at Christmas, and quitting college.