Page 114

“Let's see how you make deviled eggs, Grace,” he says.

I make them, my eyes on their landline the entire time.

The following Thursday, my mother, Faith, and Hope arrive. Though they will stay with Miriam, Mrs. Wells and I have them over for coffee and cake—all the work done by me, naturally—so we can discuss the wedding.

I pour coffee and set out cream and sugar while my mother and Mrs. Wells discuss where I should go to find a dress. Normally, a dress would be sewn for me by the women in town, but we are now only two weeks out from the wedding and there just isn't time.

If I cared about marrying Tommy, I'd want to participate in the conversation. I'd resent the fact that they're discussing this while I carry out the cakes I made—vanilla buttercream and chocolate with a ganache filling lusciously displayed on Mrs. Wells' crystal.

I bring Mrs. Wells a cake knife and spatula to do the honors, but just as I'm about to sit, at last, Mrs. Wells stops me. “Grace,” she says imperiously, “please rewash these plates. They're smudged.”

The plates aren't smudged. Mrs. Wells just wants to demonstrate how thoroughly trained I am, perhaps making a point that she's doing what my mother couldn't.

My mother's polite smile holds, but her hand grips the teacup. “Hope, go help her,” says my mom.

“It's just six plates,” Mrs. Wells objects. “She can do it by herself.”

My mother’s smile tightens. “They like to wash and dry as a team.”

Hope follows me silently into the kitchen. She’s nearly my height now, but this newfound maturity has nothing to do with surging into adolescence. My guess is it happened when she saw how suddenly and dramatically your world can fall apart if you take a wrong turn.

“Is she always like this?” Hope mutters, tipping her chin toward the living room.

“Pretty much,” I reply.

“Mom said you aren't getting marital housing,” she says. “That you have to stay with them until they die.”

I could ask Hope to help me. I trust her, and yet...what if I'm wrong? What if she worries that helping me will make my life worse? That I’m misguided? I can't tell her everything.

I nod. “It's okay. I just wish they'd let me call Kappy. I want her to be at the wedding. And when I choose a dress.”

Hope dries silently, her eyes focused on some distant point beyond the sink.

“I could invite her,” she finally says.

“Huh?”

“Give me her number,” Hope says. “Once they've made a dress appointment, I'll call her—Mom keeps her phone charging in her room and spends half the day in the garden with Miriam. She'll never know.”

I memorized it after I got Kappy’s letter, out of fear they’d take it away from me. So, I could…

“How do we explain the fact that Kappy knew about the appointment?”

Hope shrugs. “Mom will think Mrs. Wells let you call, and Mrs. Wells will think Mom called her. They don't seem to like each other...They're already inclined to think the worst.”

Perhaps. Or is Hope testing me? Did they tell Hope to offer to help me in some way, just to see what I’d ask for?

Even if they did, though...what exactly is proven by the fact that I want Kappy at my dress fitting? It's not as if I'm asking for Ford.

I reach for a pen and scrawl the number, just as Mrs. Wells calls back to us. “I certainly hope you'll wash dishes a bit faster once you're a member of this household,” she says.

When hell freezes over.

That’s when I’ll be a member of this household.

We arrive at the bridal boutique the following Monday. When I look toward Hope, she gives me a nearly invisible nod, but I don't know if that means she reached Kappy or simply tried to reach Kappy.

I'm in the middle of trying on the first gown my mother and Mrs. Wells have chosen for me—a white taffeta monstrosity that looks like it's straight out of Gone with the Wind—when Faith shouts Kappy's name.