The Christmas Wedding Read online

  “Remain seated. No one sees it till it gets my approval,” Stacey Lee said, and she left the room by herself.

  “I think I’ll go for a little walk too,” said Gus, who was becoming, if not downright friendly, at least cordial.

  “It’s cold and it’s snowing. Don’t go out, honey,” Claire said. I was glad to hear her use the word “honey.”

  “I could use some fresh air,” Gus said, getting to his feet. “Too much food.”

  “You could use a few puffs of weed is what you mean,” I said.

  “Gaby!” Gus said, acting all shocked and offended. Sometimes he seemed to forget I taught high school.

  “Arms out. Legs apart,” Marty said as he stood alongside Gus.

  “No way!” Gus yelled. “C’mon, Uncle Marty!”

  “Then you don’t go out,” Claire said. “Your choice, dude.”

  “Give him a break,” Bart said. Talk about your good moods. Bart and Emily were like different people. The intense, Type A, New York duo had been replaced by an easygoing, lovey-dovey twosome.

  “Nope. This will be quick,” Marty said. He began moving his hands over Gus. “Sorry, buddy.”

  A few seconds later he announced, “Wallet. Mechanical pencil. Gum. Loose change. Gus is clean.”

  “You’re a pervert, Uncle Marty,” Gus said.

  “So?” said Marty.

  “Just a minute,” I said. “Hand over the wallet, please.”

  “Awww, Gaby.”

  “Hand it over.”

  I looked inside the billfold section. Sure enough, tucked among a few one-dollar bills was a wrinkled but very fat joint. I took in the wide-eyed concern on Gus’s face.

  “Nothing in here,” I lied. And I handed the wallet back to Gus.

  “Sorry,” Marty said. “We’re on your side, Gus.”

  “No problem,” said Gus. “Anyways, you’re right. It’s probably too cold to go out.”

  We watched Tom add a big log to the fire. Toby and Gabrielle were mesmerized by the initial blaze of sparks that the log made. I passed around more fudge. And Bart filled the brandy snifters with a second helping of Grand Marnier. There was something frankly wonderful about having everyone here. Somehow all troubles and cares seemed to diminish when you were with the people you loved.

  Then we all distinctly heard “Ho, ho, ho!”

  Chapter 39

  “HO, HO, HO!” We heard it again.

  The sound of two ridiculously happy voices came booming from the kitchen.

  “It’s Seth and Andie!” Emily said. “They made it!” We rose as a unit, like a tired but reenergized football team, and hurried into the kitchen.

  Seth held his hands up in a “stop” gesture. “I know. You weren’t expecting us tonight. And we weren’t expecting to be so late. And yes, we are sorry. And yes, we are very cold. And yes, we are very tired…”

  “But we are also very happy to be here,” Andie said.

  Then the hugging and kissing officially began. I immediately started apologizing for the lack of food. Then, of course, the Crazy Tuna Hash jokes began all over again. Same jokes too. And thoughts of togetherness kept running through my head. There’s a star rising in the east, and in two days there’ll be Christmas and a wedding. And we’re here. Together. What could be better?

  “Mom, you with us? Seth to Mom…Seth to Mom…Come in, Mom,” Seth said loudly as he hugged me and twirled me around as if I weighed nothing.

  “I’m afraid I was off on a cloud somewhere,” I said.

  “You’re allowed, Gaby,” Andie said.

  “So, here’s what happened,” Seth said. “We had a little spinout just outside of Auburn on the Mass. Pike.”

  “A little spinout?” Andie said. “Listen to the writer spin his tale. A truck practically flattened us. There could have been a funeral instead of a wedding. But we ended up on the side of the road. And we were too scared to move. And…”

  “Andie’s exaggerating. Jeez. Everyone knows what a good driver I am.”

  A chorus of groans rose from the group.

  “Anyway, your Crazy Tuna Hash has nothing on us. We were really hungry. So we got off the Mass. Pike in Worcester and had an elegant meal at Taco Bell. I had the new half-pound Nacho Crunch Burrito. Andie, always watching her waistline, had…What did you have, my sweetie pie?”

  “The Volcano Double Beef Burrito.”

  “Right. Man, try sitting in a car with her for an hour after that.”

  “Enough with the frat-house humor,” Andie said. “To continue—when we tried to start the car again, the engine was dead. So this nine-hundred-year-old lady—at least I think it was a lady—gave us a jump-start…Anyway, it was an adventure.”

  “Well, here you are,” I said. “Here we all are.”

  Seth looked around at the faces in front of him. “Yep. Here we all are. And in two days Gaby will be marrying somebody in this room. I assume it’s somebody in this room?”

  Silence. Then my grandson Toby piped up: “Well, I sure know it isn’t me.”

  At that moment the kitchen door flew open, and Stacey Lee shouted above our laughter.

  “Get your coats on and come out to the barn. You’ve just gotta see this.”

  Chapter 40

  IT HAD BEEN a wonderful night with our family. And the transformation Stacey Lee had brought to the barn made it even more wonderful.

  The splintery old beams had been wrapped in yards and yards of lacey gold-and-white cloth. Evergreen sprays were dotted with holly and ivy and hung from the doors of every stall. The goats and donkey and pig and my white mare looked like they might really be part of a Nativity tableau.

  Round tables, each of them big enough for a dozen diners, encircled a raised white dance floor. Each table held bouquets of evergreens and white roses. Hundreds of sprigs of mistletoe hung from the rafters. It would be impossible to walk three feet without inviting a kiss from somebody.

  And finally the lights—the thousands of sparkling, twinkling white lights that blanketed the walls and the ceiling truly made the scene look like the most exquisite winter night ever. I hugged Stacey Lee.

  “How can I thank you?” I said. “In my wildest dreams I never imagined anything this beautiful.”

  “Honestly, me neither,” she said.

  “It’s like that old line about Venice,” Tom said. “It’s what God would have done—if He only had the money.”

  Then I had an idea. I took the cell phone out of my pocket and speed-dialed Lizzie.

  “Did I wake you?” I asked, but I didn’t wait for an answer. “I hope not, but even if I did, you’ll be glad I called. We’re all standing in the barn, the barn that Stacey Lee has turned into a Christmas palace. And we’re all oohing and aahing and crying and laughing, and I thought…well, I’m going to hold the phone up…I just wanted you to be here too. And Mike, if he’s up.”

  My singing voice should be called my croaking voice, but I sang “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” as loud as I could.

  Everyone joined in, including Lizzie on the other end of the phone. Within seconds we were the most beautiful choir in all of New England. The lights sparkled. The old horse whinnied. And my heart filled with such joy it actually hurt. There was nothing like having your family together, especially if you were all friends.

  Chapter 41

  LIKE LOTS OF OTHER people in Stockbridge, we counted on the Red Lion Inn for special-event dinners. Graduation parties and sweet sixteens (Emily didn’t seem like a sweet-sixteen type, but she couldn’t get the gifts without the party), significant anniversaries, and, best of all, those early-autumn afternoons when the tourists had gone back to New York and Boston, and the locals could get a table without a reservation.

  It was at the Red Lion that we celebrated the day thirteen-year-old Seth astonishingly had a hole in one. And, leave it to Stacey Lee, the Red Lion was the place she selected to celebrate making her goal at Weight Watchers. “I had fresh fruit for dessert,” she always said defensively about
that dinner.

  So the Red Lion had to be the place for the rehearsal dinner.

  I had another reason for choosing it: The food was good, simple fare. At times it seemed that the wedding was turning into a feast of food rather than a feast of love.

  The dinner was held in the Rockwell Suite, a big dining room hung with the art of Stockbridge’s celebrity, Norman Rockwell. It was billed as a rehearsal dinner, but, as I told everyone, there was nothing to rehearse. I’d done this show before.

  The fact was, though, the rehearsal dinner would have almost as many guests as the wedding itself.

  Kurt’s daughter and son-in-law were here from Burlington. The twins who did odd jobs around the farm, Jonny and Nick Ramiro, asked if they could come. Then there were a few decades’ worth of students whom I adored, and who’d sat through my lectures on Emily Dickinson, Fitzgerald, the Brontës, and Stephen King, and the not-to-be-missed “Proper Use of the Hyphen” talk. And so the invitations went out, until the manager at the inn said we had to cap it at one fifty.

  Finally, the night arrived.

  “Gaby, I owe you, like, a big thank-you,” Gus said when he saw me at the door. I assumed he was referring to my lie about his wallet and the marijuana.

  “Sometimes a little fib solves more problems than the truth ever could,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, that. But I wasn’t talking about the joint. I mean, thanks for covering for me. That was cool, but I really want to thank you for not putting me at the kids’ table tonight. Really. Seriously. Thanks so much.”

  “That’s because I don’t think you’re a kid. Now make sure you don’t act like one.”

  He didn’t exactly smile at me, but I was pleased that he didn’t sneer either. As he turned and walked away I couldn’t resist adding, “You know, Gus, it’s amazing how a fake velvet jacket from H and M can really dress up a pair of ripped jeans.” This time he smiled.

  When I looked up, the room was becoming noisy and crowded, exactly what I wanted. All my rowdy friends and relatives in one place.

  I was most delighted to see Mike walking in with only a cane. Lizzie had told me that he’d been using a walker around the house, but he was determined to look like, in his words, “a normal person” at the wedding events. I rushed over to him and my strong, wonderful daughter, and we hugged. Then Mike did a little two-step with the cane.

  “No tears!” Mike said in a booming voice. “This isn’t about my bad luck. This is about your fabulous luck.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Tears are for wusses.”

  Suddenly Lizzie exclaimed: “Oh, sweet Lord, will you look at that!”

  Both Mike and I turned to where Lizzie was staring.

  I laughed. “Jacob told me he was bringing a ‘friend’ with him tonight,” I said. “I just didn’t expect his friend to be breathtakingly beautiful and about half his age. He’s trying to make me jealous. And it’s working.”

  “Not the rabbi and the hottie,” Lizzie said. “Look at Seth and Andie!”

  Sure enough, when I shifted my gaze a little to the right of Jacob, there was Andie with huge plastic antlers on her head, small furry velvet ears, and a huge red nose that lit up. That wasn’t all. She wore a brown-and-white sack that made her look like the front half of a reindeer. It came complete with hooves.

  As for Seth, red suspenders held up a costume that replicated the rear end of a reindeer. He too had huge brown hooves.

  “So, what do you think?” Andie said as she walked, or rather pranced, toward us.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Seth said. “We’re such dears, aren’t we?”

  “Well, as for Seth as the rear end, I’d say it’s typecasting,” Mike said. “And that’s not the last time you’ll hear that tonight. Very creative of our star writer and artist from Beantown.”

  “Lizzie, help me get under here,” Seth said. Then he began burrowing under Andie’s part of the costume.

  “This seems sort of pornographic,” Lizzie said as she pulled the front part of the costume up and over Seth’s head. We were now looking at a very lumpy reindeer.

  About a dozen friends had gathered around them, and the three-piece band broke into “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  Andie and Seth began dancing immediately, their hooves tapping in nearly perfect unison.

  The onlookers broke into applause. I turned to Lizzie and said, “I am so happy I don’t have normal children.”

  Chapter 42

  THE PLOT THICKENED very nicely as the night before Christmas continued.

  “I think that Jacob brought this young chick to throw us off the scent,” Claire said. All eyes at our table turned to the quite beautiful Amy Stern, Jacob’s surprise companion for the evening.

  Tom nodded agreement. “Think about it. The very sly rabbi shows up with a date—a fabulous-looking date. So everyone thinks, aha. Let’s eliminate him from the list of marriage partners. He’s got a girlfriend.”

  “You think Gaby’s so diabolical that she’d go to all that trouble to confuse the situation?” Seth asked. “You think my mom would do that?”

  “I do,” said Andie, who had removed her costume’s red nose, thus eliminating the possibility of electrocuting herself during the soup course.

  “Unless, of course,” Marty said. “Unless Ms. Stern really is Jacob’s date. Then that would mean that someone else—like Tom or me or even someone we haven’t thought of—is actually going to marry our Gaby.”

  “Uh, excuse me, please,” I broke in. “If you don’t mind, this woman in the red silk dress and sapphire necklace is the person you’re all talking about.”

  There was laughter at the table, but there was also a sense of “This case has to be solved, Sherlock, and we must do it soon.”

  I caught Gus rolling his eyes. When he noticed me noticing him, he did a startlingly accurate imitation of my voice: “Don’t let your first time at the grown-ups’ table become your last time.” He got the inflection, the tone, the style completely right. He had a future, that boy.

  While we were laughing, while the soup bowls were being cleared, while a very nice crisp Sancerre was being poured, two missing diners showed up. Full of apologies, only slightly frantic, Emily and Dr. Perfect made their way through the crowd to our table.

  “I am so sorry, Mom,” Emily said as she kissed me. “We are such idiots.”

  “Really, we are. We heard everybody leaving the house,” Bart said. “And we were all set to go. I was tying my tie, and then…I don’t know…” His voice trailed off.

  “I bet I know what happened,” Gus said with a high school boy’s knowing smirk.

  “You know a lot more than you need to know,” Claire said as she thumped Gus on the back.

  Yes, this was what I was hoping for. The laughs were coming, the wine was flowing, the music was playing. And, of course, the mystery was going strong, stronger than ever tonight. But I didn’t have too much time to savor this feeling of joy.

  At the front of the room a ridiculous-looking red-nosed reindeer was tapping a glass with a spoon. From the tail of the reindeer emerged a hand. The hand was holding a microphone.

  Uh-oh. The toasts were about to begin.

  Chapter 43

  “MR. CONDUCTOR, if you please” came a voice from the rear of the reindeer. Then Andie and Seth sang the song they were dressed to sing. The tune sounded somewhat like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—I thought.

  Gaby is getting married

  To Stockbridge the family came.

  Gaby will have a partner

  But nobody knows the name.

  The two of them began dancing on the little raised platform, and the roomful of people were so amused, I decided Seth should cancel the idea of becoming a writer and become a wildly successful party planner.

  She says stop asking questions

  She loves this little game

  We say stop acting goofy

  Tell us the goddamn name!

  Andie and Seth m
ight have had more verses to their song, but they trotted offstage while the audience was still in the palm of their hands—er, hooves.

  As the reindeer departed, Lizzie and Mike replaced them. No one had the same hamminess of Seth and Andie, but none of my children or in-laws was particularly shy.

  Lizzie spoke first. “Usually, at rehearsal dinners someone stands up and says ‘I’ve known the bride since she was a little girl.’ In this case, though, I’ve got to say I’ve known the bride since I was a little girl. I’ve actually known her since before I was a little girl, since before I was a baby, since before…Well, you get the idea.

  “Personally, I think the greatest thing of the many great things about my mom would have to be her honesty. She manages to be honest without ever hurting, and that is a talent.

  “When other mothers would tell their kids, ‘Oh, that vaccination needle isn’t going to hurt,’ Gaby would say, ‘The needle’s going to hurt. But it’s only going to last a second.’ When other mothers would say, ‘You look awful in that orange dress. You’re too fat for it,’ Gaby would say, ‘You look wonderful in that orange dress, but, one woman’s opinion, you looked even more wonderful in the blue dress with the black jacket.’ So, thank you, Gaby, for always telling the truth…and never letting me realize how incredibly sneaky and manipulative you were being.”

  The audience roared.

  Then Mike leaned in and said, “Just one more thing. Getting married doesn’t mean you stop being the best nurse in town. Keep the lasagna and chicken soup coming. They work a lot better than the radiation.”

  Tallulah shouted, “Go, Gaby,” and I was determined I was not going to cry.

  This event was well rehearsed, because as Lizzie and Mike were replaced onstage by Claire, Gabrielle, Toby, and the sourpuss known as Gus, there was “changeover” music—a version of “Away in a Manger” played at breakneck speed.

  Claire began, “Most kids present their parents with problems when they’re teenagers—drugs, booze, sex, disrespect. I was different. I waited until I was about twenty-three before I did anything like that. I was the perfect teen, but I was a…challenged adult. No matter. Gaby was there for me. Always. Every time I needed her, she’d get in the car and make the trip to South Carolina in one day and night. She combined just the right amount of listening with the right amount of persuasive scolding. And if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here today with three kids and a job and the ability to run my own life, no matter how rough that turns out sometimes.”