Chapter 3: What It Costs
Since June.
June was when we did the engagement photos at Freedom Park. June was when Patricia threw me a bridal tea in her backyard with peonies in every mason jar and a banner that said Future Mrs. Morrow. She’d hugged me by the lemonade table and whispered, He’s so lucky.
She’d known then. She’d poured me lemonade and known.
“You decided it was kinder,” I said.
“Emily, think about it. What good would it have done? You’d have been upset, the wedding would be ruined, and for what? Men get cold feet. They do stupid things. Jake’s father…” She stopped herself. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is he chose you.“
“He chose me and her. He just hadn’t gotten around to unchoosing her.”
I hung up on my second mother in one morning. I was getting good at it. Then I sat on Priya’s bathroom floor with the fan running so she wouldn’t hear me, and cried until my ribs hurt.
Here’s the part nobody tells you about calling off a wedding: the grief has a spreadsheet.
I made it that afternoon at Priya’s kitchen table, because I’m a nurse and when I’m scared I make charts. Magnolia Hall: $12,500 deposit, nonrefundable inside sixty days. Caterer: $6,200. Photographer: $3,800, nonrefundable. Florist: $2,100. The band. The cake. The dress, $3,400, which my grandmother had paid for out of her savings and had insisted on, because she’d worn a borrowed dress in 1961 and swore no granddaughter of hers would.
All told: $31,400. Some of it was mine. Some of it was Jake’s. Some of it was my parents’. And some of it was a seventy-nine-year-old woman’s who’d already bought her plane ticket from Tucson.
Priya read it over my shoulder and whistled.
“That’s a lot of money,” she said.
“It’s nine years,” I said. “Which is worse?”
She didn’t answer. Nobody did. That was the thing. Everybody had an opinion about the money, about the guests, about Grandma’s dress, about what people would say. Nobody had an answer to the only question that mattered: could I stand at an altar on November fourteenth and believe a single word he said?
My mother came to Priya’s apartment that evening without calling. She sat on the edge of the couch in her rose cardigan, turquoise pendant at her throat, the same one she wore to every important thing in my life.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I talked to your father. We think you should take a few days. Don’t decide anything yet. Go to the cake place, pick a flavor, go back to normal. See how you feel.”
“Mom.”
“The deposits are thirty-one thousand dollars, Emily. Your grandmother…”
“Then that’s what my freedom costs.”
She flinched. Then she reached for my hand, and her eyes filled, and I thought for one second she was going to say you’re right, baby, I’m proud of you.
Instead she said, very quietly:
“Patricia called me in July.”
I pulled my hand back.
“She said Jake had made a mistake and it was over, and she thought I should know in case you ever found out, so we’d be on the same page. She said it was a mother-to-mother thing.” My mom’s voice broke. “I thought it was over. I thought I was protecting you. I didn’t want you to lose all this.”
I stared at her. My own mother. The rose cardigan. The turquoise pendant she wore to my nursing school graduation.
“How many people knew?” I asked. “Who else, Mom? Who else was going to sit in those pews and watch me marry him?”
She looked down at her hands.
“Your aunt Carol,” she said. “And I think… I think Jake’s best man.”
