Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

Her father was waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch drumming his fingers on his knees. He wore his black suit; once urged, he had gone all out. “Ah, there you are!” he said when she walked in, and then he rose to his feet and said, in a different voice, “My dear.”

“What?” she asked, because it seemed he was about to make some sort of announcement.

But he said, “Ah…” And then he cleared his throat and said, “You’re looking very grown up.”

She was puzzled; he had last seen her just minutes ago, looking exactly as she looked now. “I am grown up,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s somewhat of a surprise, you see, because I remember when you were born. Neither your mother nor I had ever held a baby before and your aunt had to show us how.”

“Oh,” Kate said.

“And now here you are in your blue dress.”

“Well, shoot, you’ve seen this old thing a million times,” Kate said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

But she was pleased, in spite of herself. She knew what he was trying to say.

It crossed her mind that if her mother had known too — if she had been able to read the signals — the lives of all four of them might have been much happier.

For the first time, it occurred to her that she herself was getting much better at reading signals.

—

Her father drove, because being a passenger made him nervous. Their car was an elderly Volvo with countless scuff marks on the bumpers from other times he had driven, and the backseat was heaped with the mingled paraphernalia of their three lives — a rubber lab apron, a stack of journals, a construction-paper poster featuring the letter C , and Bunny’s winter coat. Kate had to sit back there because Bunny had snagged the front seat lickety-split. When the car jerked to an especially sudden stop at a traffic light on York Road, half of the journals slid onto Kate’s feet. The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.

Rhodos 3 for $25 , she read as they passed the garden center where she sometimes shopped, and all at once she wished she were shopping there today, having a normal Saturday morning full of humdrum errands. It had turned out sunny, in the end, and you could tell by the slow, dreamy way people were drifting down the sidewalks that the temperature was perfect.

She was feeling as if she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs.

Uncle Theron’s church was called the Cockeysville Consolidated Chapel. It was a gray stone building with a miniature steeple on the roof — a sort of shorthand steeple — and it lay just behind the section of York Road that featured clusters of antique stores and consignment shops. Uncle Theron’s black Chevy was the only car in the lot. Dr. Battista pulled up next to it and switched the ignition off and collapsed for a moment with his forehead on the steering wheel, the way he always did when he had managed to get them someplace.

“No sign of Pyoder yet,” he said when he finally looked up.

Pyotr was in charge of the morning rounds today at the lab. “See?” Dr. Battista had said earlier. “From now on I’ll have a trusted son-in-law whom I can depend on to spell me.” However, he had already brought up several details that he worried Pyotr might chance to overlook. Twice before they left the house he had said to Kate, “Should I just telephone him and find out how things are going?” but then he had answered his own question. “No, never mind. I don’t want to interrupt him.” This may have been due not only to his phone allergy but also to the recent shift in his and Pyotr’s relationship. He still hadn’t quite gotten over his sulk.

They went to the rear of the building, as Uncle Theron had instructed them, and knocked at a plain wooden door that could have led to somebody’s kitchen. Its windowpanes were curtained in blue-and-white gingham. After a moment the gingham was drawn aside and Uncle Theron’s round face peered out. Then he smiled and opened the door for them. He was wearing a suit and tie, Kate was touched to see — treating this like a real occasion. “Happy wedding day,” he told her.

“Thanks.”

“I just got off the phone with your aunt. I imagine she was hoping against hope for a last-minute invitation, but she claimed she was only calling to ask if I thought Pyoder would object to champagne.”

“Why would he object to champagne?”

“She figured he might expect vodka.”

Kate shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” she said.

“Maybe she was thinking he might want to smash his glass in the fireplace or something,” Uncle Theron said. He was a good deal more cavalier about his sister when he was not in her presence, Kate noticed. “Come on into my office,” he said. “Does Pyoder know that he should knock on the back door?”

Kate sent a glance toward her father. “Yes, I told him,” he said.

“We can look at the vows while we’re waiting. I know we agreed that you’ll do just the bare minimum, but I want to show you what your choices are so you’ll know what you’ll both be promising.”

He led them down a narrow corridor to a small room crammed with books. Books overflowed the shelves and towered in piles on the desk and the seats of the two folding chairs and even the floor. Only the swivel chair behind the desk was usable, but Uncle Theron must have felt that it would have been rude to sit down and let the three of them remain standing. He leaned back against the front of his desk, half sitting on the edge of it, and plucked a book from the top of one stack and opened it to a dog-eared page. “Now, the beginning,” he said, running a finger along one line. “ ‘Dearly beloved’ and such. You have no objection to that, I assume.”

“No, that’s okay.”

“And should I ask, ‘Who gives this woman?’ ”

Dr. Battista drew a breath to answer, but Kate jumped in with “No!” so she didn’t hear whatever it was that he had planned to say.

“And I’m guessing we’ll do without the promise to obey — knowing you, Kate, heh-heh. Well, in fact almost no one keeps the ‘obey’ in, these days. We’ll just proceed straight to ‘For better or worse.’ Will ‘For better or worse’ be all right?”

“Oh, sure,” Kate said.

It was nice of him to be so accommodating, she thought. He hadn’t said a word about the Battistas’ known lack of religion.

“You’d be surprised at what some couples want omitted nowadays,” he said, closing the book and laying it aside. “And then the vows they write for themselves : some of those you wouldn’t believe. Such as ‘I promise not to talk more than five minutes a day about the cute things the dog did.’ ”

“You’re kidding,” Kate said.

“I’m not, I’m afraid.”

She wondered if she could get Pyotr to promise to stop quoting proverbs.

“How about photographs?” Dr. Battista asked.

“How about them?” Uncle Theron said.

“May I take some? During the vows?”

“Well, I suppose so,” Uncle Theron said. “But these are very brief vows.”

“That’s all right. I’d just like to get, you know, a record. And maybe you could snap a photo of the four of us together, afterward.”

“Certainly,” Uncle Theron said. He looked at his watch. “Well! All we need now is a groom.”

It was 11:20, Kate already knew, because she had just checked her own watch. They had arranged to do this at 11:00. But her father said confidently, “He’ll be along.”

“Is he bringing the license?”

“I have it.” Dr. Battista pulled it from his inner breast pocket and handed it to him. “Then on Monday we’ll get things started with Immigration.”