Chapter One
The binder had a tab for rain.
It had a tab for the string quartet, a tab for the shuttle schedule, a tab for the allergy list, which had grown over the summer from three names to eleven, because apparently half of Toronto had developed a relationship with gluten that required documentation. It had a tab labelled SUNDAY in Carol’s own block capitals, though Sunday was only brunch, and brunch, as she had told Sylvie twice, would run itself if the coffee urns arrived by nine.
Carol stood at the kitchen island at seven in the morning with the binder open to VENDORS and the phone pinned between her ear and shoulder, on hold with the rental company, listening to a flute arrangement of a song she was fairly sure had been popular when Maren was in diapers. Through the window over the sink the light was coming up gold and slantwise through the maple, which had started turning at the crown, a week early. The forecast said twenty-four degrees by afternoon. Harvest weather. Somewhere east of town, along the Parkway, they would already be picking.
Biscuit lay across the heating vent by the stove, twelve years old and committed to it, thumping his tail once when Glen came down in his golf shirt with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair.
“You’re on hold,” Glen said. “It’s seven.”
“They open at seven.”
“They open their phone line at seven. There’s a man named Dave standing in a warehouse right now watching that phone ring and finishing his coffee, and there’s nothing you can do about Dave.”
“I can outlast Dave.”
“That I believe.” He kissed the top of her head on his way to the coffee maker and stood looking into the cupboard as if the mugs might have rearranged themselves overnight. He took the blue one, the one with the chip he refused to retire, and filled it, and leaned against the counter to watch her the way he watched her every time the household went into what he called tournament conditions. Amused. Proprietary, in the way she had decided long ago to find flattering.
The flute cut off. A human voice replaced it, and Carol straightened.
“Good morning, this is Carol Hastings, order 4471, the Corran Estate wedding this Saturday. I’m calling about the chair count.” A pause. “Yes. The confirmation you sent lists a hundred and forty. The contract says a hundred and sixty-two.” Another pause, longer. She pulled the contract from the tab where it lived and read out the line, the date, the initials in the margin, hers and Dave’s, as it happened. She did not raise her voice. She never had to anymore; she had spent thirty years perfecting a tone that made men in warehouses reach for their own paperwork, and she deployed it now, pleasantly, like a hand laid flat on a table.
By the time she hung up, the count was a hundred and sixty-two, delivery moved from Friday afternoon to Friday morning, and Dave had apologized twice.
“Poor Dave,” said Glen.
“Dave is fine. Dave gets to be a story Dave tells.” She made a note in the margin, closed the binder, and let herself have one mouthful of coffee, which had gone lukewarm on the island and was still, somehow, the best thing that had happened all morning. “Marta’s at eight thirty, Sylvie’s at ten, your sister lands whenever your sister lands, and Trish said noon, which means two.”
“Which means she’ll be here at eleven to prove you wrong.”
“That would be a first.”
“She’ll do it just for you. Special wedding pricing.” He drained the blue mug and set it in the sink, and then, on the way past, he did the thing he did, laying his palm flat between her shoulder blades, warm through her shirt, two seconds, the physical punctuation he had used for thirty years to mean here I am, and there you are, and off I go. “I’m at the shop till two. If Peterson calls about the arena bid, I’ve moved it to Monday. Everything till Monday is moved to Monday.”
“Except the wedding.”
“The wedding,” said Glen, “is the arena bid,” and he went out through the mudroom whistling, and the screen door clapped shut behind him, and Biscuit lifted his head at the sound and put it back down.
The house did not stay quiet for long. It had been filling all week, the way a tide comes in, imperceptibly and then all at once. Maren and Ben had driven down from Toronto on Sunday and were staying at Ben’s parents’ rental in Old Town, an arrangement Carol had privately audited for etiquette and approved. Glen’s cousin’s family had taken over the Pillar and Post. There were relatives in the guest room, or there would be by tonight, Lorraine and Roger, arriving from Burlington with what Lorraine had promised on the phone would be just a few little things for the welcome bags, which Carol had learned over three decades meant a trunk.
She worked through the morning in the pocket of quiet before all of it. The seating chart was printed and taped to the dining room wall, a hundred and sixty-two names on tented cards she had ordered in a serif that matched the invitations, because Maren had asked for one weekend where nothing clashed, and Carol had taken the request as a personal commission. She stood in front of the chart with her second coffee and read it the way other people read a crossword. Table nine still had the empty seat where the Hendersons’ son had dropped out of the count. Table four had two exes at safe diagonal. Table one had the parents, and she stood looking at her own name on its little tented card, CAROL, next to GLEN, next to LORRAINE & ROGER, and thought that there were worse summaries of a life.
At eight thirty-one, Marta called about the flowers, and it went the way calls with Marta went, which was to say beautifully and at great length. The dahlias out of Vineland were, in Marta’s words, showing off. The eucalyptus was a hostage situation, do not ask. The delivery to the house Saturday morning would come between eight and eight fifteen, personal bouquets and pin-ons in one labelled box, and Carol wrote 8:00 MARTA, PERSONAL FLOWERS, ONE BOX in the SATURDAY tab in block capitals while Marta told her a story about a groom in Beamsville who had eaten a boutonniere on a dare.
“Ate it.”
“The rose. Petals and all. The best man filmed it.”
“And the marriage?”
“Thriving, from what I hear. You can’t tell from the outside, Carol, that’s what I always say. Some of them eat the flowers and live happily ever after.” Marta was still laughing when she hung up, and Carol stood in her kitchen smiling at the SATURDAY tab and thinking she might miss this part when it was over, the daily company of competent women on the phone.
Sylvie at ten was crisper, a shared screen and a run sheet, the day broken into minutes. One forty-five, doors. Two o’clock, processional. Two twenty-five, signing table. Two thirty, receiving line on the terrace, and here Sylvie paused and said what she’d said before, which was that plenty of couples skipped the line these days, it ate half an hour and it was murder in heels.
“Maren wants it,” Carol said. “She wants to see every person’s face. Her words.”
“Then we build in the half hour, and I’ll have flats stashed behind the arbour for whoever needs them.” A tap of keys. “You’re my easiest mother of the season, you know that? I had one in July who wanted approval rights on the officiant’s shoes.”
“Give me time,” said Carol. “It’s only Tuesday.”
The morning left her one clear hour, and she spent it on foot. The printer on Queen Street had the welcome-bag maps ready, a hundred of them, Old Town drawn in a wandering hand-inked style Maren had picked because it looked like somewhere you’d want to get lost, and Carol collected them in their paper band and added a spool of navy ribbon from the stationer two doors down, because the ribbon Lorraine was bringing would be wrong. It would be lovely, and it would be wrong, and having the right ribbon already in the house would save everyone a conversation.
Queen Street in the third week of September ran at half its summer speed. The tour buses had thinned to weekenders; the hanging baskets were on their last extravagant legs; outside the bakery the chalkboard had switched from lemonade to cider. She was reading it, deciding against, when Susan Pell came out of the bakery with a box of butter tarts and lit up like a porch light.
“Carol Hastings. The woman of the hour.”
“Susan.”
“Four days. Four days! The whole club’s talking about it, you know, half of us are coming and the other half are pretending they don’t mind.” Susan had been at the club as long as the club had had women in it, and she conducted a conversation the way she played doubles, at the net, taking everything early. “Corran, I heard, the lawn over the chardonnay, oh, it’ll be heaven. And how’s Glen holding up? Fathers are useless at these things, aren’t they, they hold it together for months and then dissolve at the first bar of the processional. Tell him we’re all watching for it.”
“He’s rehearsing his toast like it’s a licensing exam.”
“Of course he is. Of course he is.” Susan laughed, and shifted the tart box, and for a half second something crossed her face that Carol read, in the moment, as sun in her eyes. “Well. He’s a lucky man, and I hope he knows it, and I’ve told him so myself.” She squeezed Carol’s wrist, ringed fingers warm from the box. “Saturday. We’ll be the table having too much fun, you know where to find us.”
“Table nine,” said Carol, who knew her own chart the way a pilot knows a panel, and Susan said table nine, that’s us, and went up the street with her tarts, calling hello to somebody else before she’d finished leaving. Carol walked home with the maps under her arm through the low gold light, past the church, past the hedge the town trimmed into battlements every June, thinking about nothing, or about ribbon, which was the same thing, and let herself in by the side door to a house that smelled of last night’s lasagna and this morning’s coffee and had roughly ninety minutes of quiet left in it.
Trish arrived at eleven, as forecast by Glen, in the elderly green Golf with the driver’s window that no longer sealed, so that they heard her before they saw her, the highway hum and then the radio and then the particular squawk of her parking brake, which she applied the way other people spiked a football. She came up the porch steps with a case of wine on her hip and a garment bag over her shoulder and her sunglasses pushed up into hair that had gone silver in exactly the way their mother’s had, which neither sister ever said aloud.
“Do not,” said Trish, by way of hello, “let me forget the second case in the trunk. It’s the good Cave Spring, I called ahead, I flirted with a child in a vest for it. Where’s my niece?”
“Getting her nails done with the bridesmaids. Hello to you too.”
“Hello, Care.” She set the case down on the porch boards, took Carol by the shoulders, and looked at her the way she had looked at her all their lives, an inspection disguised as affection, or possibly the reverse. “You look like a woman with a binder.”
“You have no idea.”
“Show me everything. I want the chart, I want the run sheet, I want to know who you’ve got me sitting with, and if you say the word cousins I’m sleeping in the car.”
She had her at table six with the Guelph contingent and two of Maren’s old teachers, a table Carol had assembled with the specific pride of a matchmaker, and Trish studied the wall in the dining room for a long minute, wine in hand at eleven fifteen in the morning because it was, she said, technically a special occasion for four consecutive days.
“You did the diagonal thing with Barb and Steve.”
“I did the diagonal thing.”
“You’re wasted on weddings. NATO should have you.” Trish tapped the empty seat at table nine. “Who’s this?”
“Hendersons’ son. Dropped out last week. Some conference he couldn’t move.”
“So there’s a spare seat at the table with, let’s see.” She leaned in, reading the little tented cards. “The club people, the club people, Dana Whitfield, the club people. God, Dana Whitfield. Is she still tall?”
“Still tall.”
“Some people have everything.” Trish moved on down the chart, and Carol straightened the empty card at nine, a small adjustment, a millimetre no one would ever notice, and made a note to ask Sylvie to pull the extra place setting so the table wouldn’t sit staring at a ghost.
They spent the afternoon on welcome bags at the dining table, the two of them and, from four o’clock, Lorraine, who arrived with Roger and, as predicted, a trunk. Local maps. Wine from a place Lorraine knew, better than the place Carol knew, according to Lorraine. Little bags of ice wine caramels that had to be counted into pouches, and the three of them fell into a production line with the ease of women who had been assembling things at tables together for forty years, hand to hand to hand, while Roger and Glen stood in the yard doing whatever men did around a barbecue that wasn’t lit, pointing at parts of it, agreeing, and the production line ran its familiar liturgy, Lorraine narrating each item’s provenance at documentary length, Trish timing the caramel counts against her and announcing splits, Carol quality-checking the tissue fans, and the talk running the whole time on its ancient double track, the hands working and the mouths working and neither interfering with the other, forty years of family assembled around one more table doing one more thing for one more occasion, which was, if you stood back far enough, most of what a family was.
“I said to Roger on the drive,” said Lorraine, counting caramels, “I said, mark me, this’ll be the wedding of the year. She’s been planning it since April, I said. Longer, knowing Carol.”
“Since the engagement,” Carol said. “So, fourteen months.”
“You see? I know my sister-in-law.” Lorraine held up a caramel like evidence. “These are from the place on the Parkway, the little one past the church, you know the one. Divine. I bought three extra bags for the car and Roger’s been into them since Grimsby.”
“One bag,” said Roger, through the screen door.
“Since Grimsby,” said Lorraine.
By six the bags stood ranked on the sideboard like a small army in cellophane, and Maren blew in with her nails done a colour called Ballet Slipper, which was to Carol’s eye identical to her natural nails at twice the price, and hugged Trish for a full ten seconds, and stole four caramels, and stood in front of the seating chart with her ring hand flat against her chest the way she’d been holding it for fourteen months, as if the ring might make a break for it.
“Mum. It’s perfect.”
“It’s a draft,” said Carol, who knew it was perfect.
“It’s perfect, and I want to move exactly one person, and you’re going to say no.”
“Tell me at dinner.”
Dinner was fourteen people, leaves in the table, lasagna Carol had made and frozen in August against exactly this evening, and the noise of it filled the downstairs the way she liked best, Ben’s father telling a story about a bridge inspection gone wrong, Trish topping everyone up, Maren and Ben shoulder to shoulder at the far end laughing at something on his phone, and Glen at the head of the table catching Carol’s eye down the length of it once, in the middle of all of it, and raising his glass an inch off the cloth. To the general, he mouthed. Or maybe to the girl. It didn’t matter which. She raised hers back an inch, no more, their old semaphore, and let the noise close over the table again.
The lasagna went around twice, which was the correct number of times; she had frozen two pans in August against exactly this appetite. Glen served, because Glen always served, standing at the head with the lifter like a man dealing cards, calling down the table for plates, corner piece for Roger, no mushrooms this end for Ben’s sister, and Carol watched him run the table’s small logistics with the pleasure she always took in it, the two of them a kitchen with a wall knocked out, her production, his front of house.
Over the salad Maren tried to open negotiations on the seating chart, the one person, the move Carol was allegedly going to refuse, and Carol held up a hand.
“Chart office hours are nine to five.”
“It’s one person.”
“Nine to five. There’s a form.”
“There is not a form,” said Maren, delighted, appalled, and Trish said if there wasn’t a form yet there would be by morning, give her sister a laminator and a grievance and stand back, and the table went off down the track of Carol’s binder, its tabs, its rumoured index, Glen testifying with his hand on his heart that he had seen the SUNDAY tab with his own eyes and that Sunday was only brunch, and Carol let them have it. It was cheap fuel and it was hers to give. A family roasting your competence was a family that had never once had to live without it.
Later, when the guest room light was out and the dishwasher was churning through its second load, she stood alone in the dining room with the lamp on, in front of the chart, and did her last pass of the day. A hundred and sixty-two names, minus one Henderson. She knew every one of them. That was the thing about a life like hers, built in one place, tended like a garden: you could paper a wall with the people who would come when your daughter got married, and there wasn’t a stranger among them.
She clicked off the lamp. Upstairs, Glen had fallen asleep with his book open on his chest, glasses still on, and she took the glasses off him the way she had ten thousand times, folded them onto the nightstand, marked his page with the flap, and stood a moment in the dark listening to the house be full.
Four more days. She had a tab for all of them.
That was the joke, later, the one she would not be able to tell anyone for a long time and would eventually be able to tell one person, at a kitchen table, in the rain: that on the Tuesday night she went to bed the most prepared mother of the bride in the peninsula’s recorded history, the binder fat with contingencies, weather and vendors and seating and shuttles, forty tabs deep into every catastrophe the world had ever thrown at a wedding, and the one contingency that was actually inbound, already in the air, already at the table in a lilac cardigan drinking the good riesling, had no tab, had never had a tab, was not a category the system knew, and the system was hers, and she had built it, and it was perfect, and it was aimed entirely the wrong way.