Writers & Lovers - Lily King Page 0,26

when their affair began—until he was diagnosed with cancer, the same leukemia that had already taken two pilots he’d dropped chemicals with over South Vietnam. When treatment in Boston failed, my mother drove him to his family in Phoenix and stayed until they buried him a year and a half later.

My mother came back in the late spring of my sophomore year of high school. She rented a small house on the outskirts of town. My father and I had moved in with a woman named Ann by then, and they didn’t object when I went to live at my mother’s. She wasn’t familiar at first. She wore blue jeans and beaded belts and cried a lot.

But she made efforts with me. I’d put up a photo of Lady Di on my wall and when Prince Charles married her that June, she woke me up at six in the morning with raspberry scones and a pot of English breakfast tea. We watched the carriage make its way through London, and she seemed excited, but once they reached the cathedral and the cameras zoomed in on their faces, my mother’s mood changed. She’s terrified, she said. And look at him, so cold. That poor girl. That poor girl, she said over and over. My mother was the same age as Diana when she married my father. Nineteen. Never put yourself in that situation, she said to me. Never ever, she said as Diana walked slowly up the stairs with the long train behind her. Marriage is the polar opposite of a fairy tale, my mother said.

I went back to bed before they’d said their vows.

At Iris, leaning over to refill a glass or relight a candle, I eavesdrop on the wedding guests.

‘She was always in love with the roommate.’

‘He got her to add two zeros to the prenup.’

‘Is it so hard to find a goddamn Catholic in this town?’

‘She said he was like a Cossack in bed.’

‘A what?’

‘You know, like super rigid. Like a doll that doesn’t bend.’

And the toasts reveal everything: the rancor between the two families, the promiscuity, the unrequited loves, the bad behavior, the last-minute confessions—all delivered in drunken tangents that end with saccharine platitudes. The rites of marriage are an expensive and dreary business. The only thing that can cut through my skepticism is if the mother of the bride stands up. No matter what she says, no matter how poorly expressed, no matter how icy or bland or clichéd, I cry. Harry holds my hand.

August is endless.

My old friends are getting married, too. The invitations catch up with me eventually, forwarded from Oregon or Spain or Albuquerque.

Unfortunately, sometimes these invitations arrive before the wedding has taken place.

I check the regret box on the small return card and write an apology without an excuse. I do not mention my debt or my work commitments to the weddings of strangers or my bewilderment at why they would participate in a hollow, misogynistic ritual that will only end in misery.

It’s easy when it’s just a box to check. It’s harder when they track you down by phone. Tara from middle school calls and puts me on the spot. She wants me to be her maid of honor. In November. In Italy. She knows my situation. I’m not sure why she’s going through the motions of asking.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she says. ‘But it’s going to be easy for you. I got a huge discount on the dresses so they’re only three hundred. And they’re classic—a soft lilac—you can cut it off and wear it all the time. And we got a super deal on a villa outside of Rome. It’s magnificent. Meals included. Only four hundred a night when it’s normally like eight. And we bundled the plane tickets—business class. If you get them by the end of the week, it’ll only be seven fifty.’ She’s acting like she’s not talking about dollars but something much easier to come by like hairs on my head, like I can just pluck them off and hand them to her.

‘You have no idea how out of the realm that is for me.’

‘I need you there. You have to be there. This isn’t a choice, Casey.’ The squeak in her voice reminds me of how she used to wheedle her mother until she got what she wanted. ‘You go to your best friend’s wedding.’

Best friend? She’s a good friend. She’s an old friend. Just the smell of her parents’ living