The Wedding - By Nicholas Sparks Page 0,88
piano sounded, while MacDonald wanted to take a look at the kitchen and the rest of the layout to ensure dinner went smoothly. Both men promised to keep the visit short, but I assured them it wasn’t a problem. I had to drop something off at the house—something Leslie had left in her trunk—and was heading over anyway.
Just as I was leaving, I heard Joseph enter the living room behind me.
“Hey, Pop. Mind if I come along?”
“Not at all,” I said.
Joseph stared out the window and said little on our drive to Noah’s. He hadn’t been there in years and seemed to be simply soaking up the view as we wound along the tree-lined roads. While New York City was exciting—and Joseph now regarded it as home—I could sense that he’d forgotten how lovely the low country could be.
Slowing the car, I turned up the drive, then parked in my usual spot. When we got out of the car, Joseph stood for a moment, gazing at the house. It was radiant in the high summer light. Within hours, Anna, Leslie, and Jane would be upstairs, dressing for the wedding. The procession, we’d decided, would begin from the house; staring up at the second-floor windows, I tried and failed to imagine those final moments before the wedding, when all the guests would be seated and waiting.
When I shook myself from my reverie, I saw that Joseph had moved from the car and was heading in the direction of the tent. He walked with hands in his pockets, his gaze roaming over the property. At the entrance to the tent, he stopped and looked back at me, waiting for me to join him.
We wandered silently through the tent and rose garden, then into the house. While Joseph wasn’t visibly excited, I could sense that he was as impressed as Leslie and Anna had been. When he completed the tour, he asked a few questions about the mechanics of what had been done—the whos, whats, and hows—but by the time the caterer pulled up the drive, he’d grown silent again.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away, but a faint smile tugged at his lips as he surveyed the property. “To be honest,” he admitted at last, “I can’t believe you pulled it off.”
Following his gaze, I flashed on how it had looked only a few days earlier. “It is something, isn’t it?” I said absently.
At my answer, Joseph shook his head. “I’m not just talking about all this,” he said, gesturing at the surrounding landscape. “I’m talking about Mom.” He paused, making sure he had my attention. “Last year, when she came up,” he went on, “she was more upset than I’d ever seen her. She was crying when she got off the plane. Did you know that?”
My expression answered for me.
He pushed his hands into his pockets and looked down at the ground, refusing to meet my eyes. “She said she didn’t want you to see her that way, so she’d tried to hold herself together. But on the flight . . . I guess it finally got the best of her.” He hesitated. “I mean, here I was, standing in the airport waiting to pick up my mom, and she walks off the plane looking like someone who’d just come from a funeral. I know I deal with grief every day at my job, but when it’s your own mom . . .”
He trailed off, and I knew enough to say nothing.
“She kept me awake until after midnight the first night she was there. Just kept rambling and crying about what was going on between you two. And I’ll admit that I was angry with you. Not just for forgetting the anniversary, but for everything. It’s like you always viewed our family as a convenience that other people expected you to maintain, but you never wanted to do the work required. Finally, I told her that if she was still unhappy after so many years, she might be better off alone.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“She’s a great lady, Pop,” he said, “and I was tired of seeing her hurt. And over the next few days, she recovered—a bit, anyway. But she was still dreading the thought of going back home. She’d get this real sad expression whenever it came up, so finally I asked her to stay in New York with me. For a while there, I thought she was going to take me up on