She rolled her eyes and kept talking. “I’m not saying I made the right decision or that I did the right thing. But one day, you might feel like you’re backed into a corner and that no decision is the right one, that you just have to do the best you can. And on that day, maybe you’ll think of me. And maybe you’ll try to understand why I did what I did.”
I saw Caroline and Sloane exchange a glance in the mirror.
It was like Grammy came to me in that moment. I was back in her bedroom with her that day when she asked me to do the unthinkable. My heart was racing, sweat gathering on my brow. Because I didn’t want to have any part in my grandmother’s death. But if I didn’t have a part in her death, wasn’t I playing a role in her suffering? And wasn’t that worse? I knew what Mom meant. I knew what it felt like for your back to be up against the wall, because mine certainly had been that day. I hadn’t had any good options. So I chose as best I could and hoped against hope that if there were a God, he would understand, that he wouldn’t punish me for choosing my grandmother’s comfort, her desire to leave a world that held nothing else for her but pain.
Mom took me away from my thoughts as she continued. “I swear with everything in me, I did it out of love. I didn’t even know or have any of you yet, and I already loved you more than anything else in the world. I loved you so much that I was willing to risk everything I had—my marriage, my family, my life, and my world as I knew it—to get you.”
“I just want to point out,” Caroline interrupted, “that Emerson gets this sweet, mushy talk, and I was snarkily asked what the world would revolve around if I weren’t here.”
I couldn’t help but smile, and Mom smiled back at me.
“I asked Jack to walk me down the aisle,” I said. It wasn’t forgiving her, exactly. But it was a start.
“I know,” Mom said, tears in her eyes again. “I don’t think anything has ever meant more to anyone.”
I finally dropped her hands. “Well, do you want to see your dress?”
When Caroline unzipped the garment bag, Mom gasped for the second time in only a few minutes. She ran one finger along the lace. “How did you do this?” she whispered.
“It was all Ramon’s idea. I took him Grammy’s wedding dress, and he said he couldn’t make the aged lace white again but that he could dye it and use the best pieces to make your dress. So my lace is old, my dress is new, the family veil is my something borrowed, and you’re my something blue,” I said.
Mom was crying in earnest now. “Sloane, get me a tissue. I don’t want to get makeup on Grammy’s dress.”
She slipped it on. She looked perfect. Elegant, beautiful. She looked like the mother of the bride. My mother. The one who hadn’t always been honest with me, who hadn’t always told the truth, but who had loved us before she even knew us. I thought of Grammy again, of how she told me that her biggest regret was the time she’d spent fighting with Mom. “Life is too short to fight with family,” she’d said. “Because no matter what happens between you, you will always come back to one another; like the tide returns to the shore. It is the same blood running through your veins. You were chosen to be together.”
She didn’t know yet that this was going to happen. Or, I had to think, maybe she did know. And maybe that was why this was one of the last pearls of wisdom that she gave me as she got closer to the end. “I’m not the kind of woman to have regrets,” she had said, “but I have the gift of perspective. Life is so short, Emerson. It’s so very short. Don’t waste any of it fretting over things you can’t change.”
I couldn’t change that Jack was Caroline and Sloane’s biological father. I couldn’t change that Jack was marrying Mom, that the four of them were going to be this whole family that I wasn’t a part of. And most of all, I couldn’t change that my own dad was gone. He couldn’t be there to walk me down the aisle.
But then it hit me that of the three of us, I was the only one who would have any dad to walk her down the aisle. Sloane and Caroline didn’t get that, but I had this man right next door who, despite not being my blood relative, loved and cared about me and wanted me to be happy. He wanted to give me away because my real dad couldn’t do that. It was a gift, I realized. One that a lot of people didn’t get, one that my own sisters didn’t get.
And I would take it.
Caroline shrugged at me, and I shrugged back. “We should probably get Jack a Father’s Day gift,” she said in mock seriousness.
I nodded, giving her a small smile. “Maybe a nice tie.”
She caught my eye in the mirror and then Sloane’s. And I looked at Mom, her blue eyes locking with my identical ones. “You can’t lie to me,” she used to say. “You have my eyes.” As I looked back at my sisters, something occurred to me for the first time. Their eyes were exactly the same. Brown eyes. Almond eyes. Jack’s eyes.
TWENTY-FIVE
ansley: very clean hair
It’s funny how we change as we get older, how the things that once mattered to us—like appearances and outside opinions—seem to float away. When I had gotten engaged to Carter, I had been so enamored with his life. As a girl from Georgia, Manhattan had always seemed so glamorous when I visited, and the fact that Carter had really made it there, and that we were going to make our life there, seemed like pure magic. I was as swept away by the idea of our big-city life as I had been by Carter’s proposal.
And a reception at the Plaza, in the Grand Ballroom, no less? It was something out of a storybook. I wanted everyone to be there, to see me in my gown. Weddings then weren’t like they are now. They were fun and festive, but they weren’t over the top. People didn’t take out second mortgages on their houses to pay for them. It wasn’t a contest to see who could have the most flowers and the biggest bands and the most famous photographers. It was a simple celebration of love. And our simple celebration of love was going to be at one of the world’s most iconic hotels. Which, looking back now, I had to admit wasn’t simple at all.
Carter and I wanted a black-and-white wedding, a nod to Truman Capote’s fabulous balls that were held in that very same venue. And as Carter and I swayed in time to the orchestra for our first dance, I looked around at the hundreds of people who had gathered, swathed in finery, champagne in hand, to celebrate us. And when I looked up, I could have sworn that I saw Eloise herself hiding out in one of the room’s massive circular lights, like she did inEloise at the Plaza.
Bathed in lace and held by the man of my dreams, as handsome in his tux as any leading man I had ever seen, I wanted the moment to last forever, wished that the leading man in my life and I could always be so happy. Still, despite my glee, I had to realize that in a lot of ways, nothing about this celebration that I had planned every inch of was actually a reflection of me.
I would be a New York woman now, but in so many more ways, I was still that little girl from Georgia who spent her summers hunting for sand dollars with her toes in the surf.
Now, almost forty years later, I was planning a wedding that I hoped would reflect my daughter and the man of her dreams.
Despite my joy over her upcoming nuptials, my heart couldn’t help but feel heavy. Things with my daughters were better, but they were still very strained. And with only one week until Emerson’s wedding, I knew I had to fix them fast.
A light rap on my door and an urgent “Mom! Mom!” broke me out of my thoughts.
