Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

"Prepare your mother, now," he told her. "I mean it. Get her ready for doing without you, because it's going to be a shock for her once it happens."

"I will."

"Prepare yourself, Justine."

"Prepare for what?"

"Do you really understand that you'll be leaving here?"

"Of course I do," she said.

Well, naturally she would rather not be leaving. It made her sad just to think about it. But nothing mattered as much as the lurch in her stomach when she saw him. When they sat apart in Great-Grandma's study, some inner selves seemed to rise up and meet while their bodies remained seated. In halls and pantries and stairwells, they kissed until they were sick and dizzy. She missed Duncan's room downtown: his jingling bed, the warm pulse in the hollow of his throat, the leathery arch of his right foot curving exactly to the shape of her calf when they fell asleep.

"Still," Duncan said, "I wish I could be sure you know what you're getting into."

At the rehearsal, Esther took the part of the bride for good luck. It was terrible to see her up there so close to Duncan. Her emerald-green sheath showed off her figure, which was better than Justine's. "Tell me," Justine said to Duncan later. "Did you ever think of marrying Esther?"

"No."

"But why me?" she asked.

"Why me, for that matter?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Why are you marrying me, Justine?"

"Oh, well, Claude is too fat and Richard's too young."

She didn't understand the strange look he gave her.

On Justine's wedding morning, a pale cool day in April, her mother woke her by pulling open the curtains in her bedroom. "Justine," she said, "listen. Are you awake?"

"Yes."

"I want you to listen a minute."

She was wearing a slithery pink silk dressing gown and already her doll-like face was made up perfectly, her curls precisely flattened. She carried a torn scrap of paper. She sat on Justine's bed and held the paper out to her, smiling a coaxing smile like someone offering medicine.

"Your daddy's telephone number," she said.

"My what?"

"Hear what I say, now. I want you to go out in the hall to the phone. I want you to dial this number. It's your grandmother Mayhew's. Ask to speak to your daddy. Say, 'Daddy, today is my wedding day.' "

"Oh, Mama."

"Listen! Say, 'Daddy, this is supposed to be the happiest day of my life.

Won't you make it perfect and come give me away?' "

"But I can't talk like that," Justine said.

"Of course you can. And he has that fine suit that's still in the cleaner's bag, I know he took it with him. Why, it wouldn't be any trouble at all! Justine? I beg you, Justine."

"Mama-"

"Please, I've been counting on it. I know it will work. See, I've written the number so neatly? Take it. Take it."

She pressed it into her hands. Justine climbed out of bed, still unwilling.

"Go on, Justine."

In the hall, the telephone sat on a piecrust table. The window above it was partly open, so that Justine in her flimsy cotton nightgown shivered while she dialed.

"Hello," Sam Mayhew said.

She had been expecting her grandmother, a static-voiced old lady she hardly knew. She wasn't prepared for her father yet.

"Hello," he said.

"Daddy?"

There was a pause. Then he said, "Hello, Justine."

"Daddy, I-today is my wedding day."

"Yes, I saw it in the paper."

She was silent. She was taking in his soft, questioning voice, which reminded her of his baffled attempts at conversation long ago in Philadelphia. For the first time she realized that he had actually left.

Everything had broken and altered and would not ever be the same.

"Honey," he said. "You can always change your mind."

"No, Daddy, I don't want to change my mind."

"I'm about to buy a house in Guilford. Wouldn't you like that? There's a room for you with blue wallpaper. I know you like blue. You could go away to college, someplace good. Why, you used to be a high-B student! Those Pecks think girls go to college to mark time but-it's not too late. You know that. You can still call it off."

"Daddy, will you come give me away at the wedding?"

"No. I can't lend myself to such a thing."

"I'd really like you to."

"I'm sorry."

Her mother tugged at Justine's nightgown. "Tell about the happiest day of your life!" she hissed.

"Wait-"

"Who's that?" her father asked.

"It's Mama."

"What's she doing there?" ' "She says to tell you-"

"Did your mother put you up to this?"

"No, I-she just-"

"Oh," her father said. "I thought it was you that was asking. I wish it had been."

"I am asking."

"Justine, I'm not going to come to your wedding. Don't bring it up again.

But listen, because these are the last sensible words you'll hear all day, or maybe all the rest of your life: you've got to get out of there."

"Out, Daddy . . ."

"You think you are getting out, don't you. You're going to farm chickens or something."

"Goats."

"But you're not really leaving at all, and anyway you'll be back within a year."

"But we're going to-"

"I know why you're marrying Duncan. You think I don't. But have you ever asked yourself why Duncan is marrying you? Why is he marrying his first cousin?"

"Because we-"

"It's one of two reasons. Either he wants a Peck along to torment, or to lean on. Either he's going to give you hell or else he's knotted tighter to his family than he thinks he is. But whichever, Justine. Whichever.

It's not a business you'd care to get involved in."

"I can't talk any more," Justine said.

"What? Hold on there, now-"

But she hung up. Her teeth were chattering. "What happened?" her mother asked. "What happened, isn't he coming?"

"No."

"Oh! I see. Well."

"I feel sick."

"That's wedding jitters, it's perfectly natural," her mother said. "Oh, I never should have asked you to call in the first place. It was only for his sake."

Then she led Justine back to her room, and covered her with the quilt handstitched by Great-Grandma, and sat with her a while. The quilt gave off a deep, solid warmth. There was a smell of coffee and cinnamon toast floating up from the kitchen, and a soft hymn of Sulie's with a wandering tune. Justine's jaw muscles loosened and she felt herself easing and thawing.

"We're going to do without him just fine," her mother said. "I only wanted to make him think he was a part of things."

Later the minister, Reverend Didicott, told the assistant minister that the Peck-Mayhew wedding was the darnedest business he had ever seen.

First of all the way they sat the guests, who were not numerous to begin with: friends clumped in back, and the bride's and groom's joint family up front. There was something dreamlike in the fact that almost everyone in the front section had the same fair, rather expressionless face-over and over again, exactly the same face, distinguished only a little by age or sex. Then the groom, who seemed unsuitably light of heart, followed him around before the ceremony insisting that Christianity was a dying religion. ("It's the only case I know of where mental sins count too; it'll never sell," he said. "Take it from me, get out while the getting's good." Right then Reverend Didicott should have refused to marry them, but he couldn't do that to Lucy Hodges Peck, whose family he had known down South.) The bride was given away by her grandfather, an unsmiling man with a mighty snappy way of speaking to people, although so far as was known the bride's father was in excellent health. The groom refused to kiss the bride in public. But the bride's mother was the strangest.

Perfectly sedate all through the ceremony, if a little trembly of mouth, gay and flirtatious at the reception afterwards, she chose to fall apart at the going away. Just as the groom was enclosing the bride in his car (which was another whole story, a disgraceful greenish object with a stunted rear end), the mother let out with a scream. "No!" she screamed. "No! How can you just leave me all alone? It's your fault your father's gone! How can you drive off like this without a heart?" The bride started to get out but the groom laid a hand on her arm and stopped her, and then they took off in their automobile, which appeared to be led by its nose. The mother threw herself in the grandfather's arms and wept out loud. "We people don't cry, Caroline," he said. The most ancient Mrs. Peck of all put on a genteel smile and started humming, and Reverend Didicott looked inside the envelope the groom had given him and found fifty dollars in Confederate money.