Born Under a Lucky Moon Read online

  “It’s clean already,” Mom said.

  “Not completely.” I rubbed vigorously.

  “We won’t have any grout left if you keep on like that.” Since she sounded halfhearted I continued scrubbing.

  “What did Lucy tell Elizabeth?” Sammie asked.

  “Elizabeth didn’t ask her,” Mom said, pursing her lips. My family will happily snoop through everything, but we draw the line at letting the others know we’ve invaded their privacy.

  Dad, thinking it was safe to return to the house now that all the women had gone, came in from the backyard.

  “Harold, are the sprinklers fixed yet?” Mom asked.

  He sighed deeply and went back outside.

  Satisfied with my cleaning, I put my equipment away, poured a cup of coffee, and sat down.

  “You don’t even like that stuff. You’re just putting on,” Sammie said over her shoulder as she microwaved tea.

  “Am not,” I retorted eloquently. I had started drinking coffee at college. It seemed a grown-up thing to do, and doused with enough sugar and milk, it was actually okay. I had just come home from my sophomore year at Michigan State. My three sisters had gone to Western Michigan University, which was half the reason I went to State. The other half was that my dad went there. Many years later, he told me that he didn’t care for MSU and wished I’d gone to the University of Michigan instead. I didn’t have the grades for U of M but he still could have mentioned it. Why don’t people ever say what they think at the right time? It sure would save a lot of time and trouble.

  Mom stood at the window and watched Dad dutifully tinkering with a sprinkler head. A small geyser of water shot up, narrowly missing him but catching our dog, Buddy, right in the face. He sputtered away while Dad poured coffee from his always-present thermos and pondered the situation.

  “Elizabeth told me that Lucy said she intended to bring a boy home with her for Evan’s wedding,” Mom said, resuming the conversation from the one going on in her head.

  “Where are we going to put them?” I was concerned because I was usually the one to wind up on the couch if all the beds were spoken for.

  I looked at Elizabeth’s schedule and agenda on the fridge door. As much as we all made fun of her hyperorganization (7:30 p.m. dinner, 9:00 p.m. family fun time), we did grudgingly use it.

  “It says here that Lucy and I have the pink room, Grandma has the guest room, Sammie has the dessert room, Elizabeth and Ron are staying at Evan’s in the Jimi Hendrix room, and Jean-Paul, Anna’s brother, has their back room.” We pondered all of the various options open to us. Chuck could stay on the couch. But no, he was a guest, and furthermore, he was married to Lucy even if we weren’t supposed to know about it. Chuck and Lucy could sleep in the pink room and I would take the couch, since Sammie’s room only had a twin bed, and I really didn’t want to share the double bed with Grandma. She had issues with flatulence. That satisfied everyone, until Dad came back in and heard about the plans for Lucy and Chuck. “No daughter of mine has ever slept under my roof with a man she isn’t married to.”

  “That you know of,” Sammie snickered.

  Dad sighed again, and scooped Maxwell House into the Mr. Coffee.

  “But Lucy is married,” I countered.

  “She hasn’t told us she’s married. Therefore, she still is not married,” Dad announced. Mom was smoking frantically now.

  And so went the conversation, like so many conversations before. I finally went out for a walk, up the tree-lined streets I’d walked for almost two decades, past the Worthingtons’ house, past the Keenes’ house, past the silent grade school, middle school, and high school in one. It was almost ten thirty at night when I pushed open the chain-link gate, went into the playground, and rocked idly on a swing. Why hadn’t Lucy called me? She didn’t call that often, but if any of us were lonely or in trouble the word usually flew through the family grapevine. I hung on to the chains and swung my head far back. The streetlight was shining through the trees above my head. When I was younger, I would lie down in a silent intersection of the road and stare at the leaves above me. I marveled at how many different colors of green there were. Gray greens, lime greens, black greens. It seemed impossible that anyone could capture all those colors.

  I sat up and looked at the darkened windows of the high school. When I was a sophomore and Lucy was a senior, she and all but one of the varsity cheerleading squad were suspended for drinking. The one who got off was the girl who had ratted them out. She had been miffed because she hadn’t been invited to drink beer with them in the cold, windswept parking lot at Lake Michigan.

  I was on the junior varsity squad, which got called up to go to the semifinals with the varsity basketball team. Lucy cried for days. I would hear her sniffling as she lay on her side of our bed. When I asked her if she wanted to talk, she kicked my legs with her heels. She was a senior—this would have been her last game to cheer. That Friday, I dutifully came to school in my cheerleading uniform. My blue and gold pleated skirt was made as short as possible by rolling the waistband. As we cheered through the afternoon pep assembly, the varsity basketball players watched dolefully. They were going to the semifinals without their hot-babe varsity squad, and they were not happy about it. Lucy’s face was blank as she sat in the bleachers watching.

  “In between the calm lake waters, scenes we call our own . . .” I sang the alma mater, hand over heart. That afternoon, I stood waiting with my pom-poms to get on the pep bus. The sky was March gray, and I shivered with the wind against my bare legs. The bus driver, Wes, jokingly asked me if I was coming.

  “No,” I told him, “I’m not coming.”

  I walked away before he could respond. He waited a minute for me to change my mind and then pulled away. The other JV cheerleaders were mad at me for days.

  “We couldn’t do any of our mounts,” they whined. “Lindsey was too heavy to get on top.”

  Back then, I couldn’t have begun to explain why I stayed home. But now, I stared up through the leaves again and remembered Lucy holding my hair back when I got drunk on Stroh’s beer and was on my hands and knees puking into the toilet. She wiped my face, forced me to brush my teeth, and didn’t tell Mom and Dad. Like with every family, there were thousands of kindnesses mixed with the pain. Maybe pain is just easier to remember, or sticks harder. Kindness gets a bad rap that way. Family first, I thought. So why hadn’t she called now?

  When I got home, the house was dark. Instead of going to the pink room, I crawled into bed with Sammie, who was currently in the guest room. I poked her in the side. I knew she had to be awake.

  “What’d they decide?”

  Sammie turned over. “I don’t know. Mom cried for a while. She doesn’t understand her daughter sometimes.”

  “Which one?” I whispered, and we laughed quietly in the darkness. We talked softly deep into the night as we had so many nights before.

  Chapter Three

  Wednesday, June 25, 1986

  I could feel the chaos downstairs as soon as I opened my eyes the next morning.

  “Uh-oh,” Sammie said.

  A vacuum roared into life and there was a clatter of dishes and water. I went downstairs to find Roxie on a stepladder taking down the crystals from the chandelier my mom had salvaged from a garage sale. She waved her dust rag at me. “Your mom’s in the backyard. She said to send you out.”

  I hadn’t brushed my hair and I was wearing my nighttime uniform of boxers and tank top, but I went outside anyway. Mom was pointing in various directions and stepping off measurements on the ground as Dad looked on.

  “And the tent will go here,” she finished. “Jeannie, good, you’re up. Get some clothes on. We have to go to Steketee’s.”

  “God, Mom, can’t I have some coffee first?” This was too much of a launch into the day for me.

  “You don’t like that stuff anyway, and we have to get to Steketee’s.”

  “What for?” I pushed my hair back, hoping nobody would walk by. />
  “We’ve got to get Lucy registered.”

  I began to have the feeling I usually got when Dad told us he got a job in Egypt or Botswana, and we would all be leaving soon, and I would be going to school in Switzerland—half excitement and half trepidation. These things usually petered out after a few months and we never went anywhere, except for the time he moved us to Somalia. But there was a coup six months later and the Americans got kicked out so we came back to Muskegon.

  Sammie wandered out.

  “Sammie, you have to go get the invitations,” Mom told her.

  Sammie stopped short by the rock birdbath. Mom waved the hand with the cigarette in it. “We’re giving Lucy a wedding. I don’t want her looking back in twenty years and wishing for the white wedding with flowers she never had.”

  “Couldn’t we just wait for her next wedding?” Sammie moaned.

  “When exactly is this blessed event to be?” I sat down on a lawn chair and started playing with Buddy’s ears. I stopped when a flea jumped on me.

  “Sunday, the day after Evan’s.”

  I could see how Mom had worked this out. Everybody would be home for Evan’s wedding anyway. Elizabeth was flying in from L.A., Sammie was already here from L.A., and Grandma was coming from Houston.

  “How does Lucy feel about all of this?” Sammie ventured, knowing full well that Mom hadn’t told her.

  “It will be a surprise,” Mom said.

  “That seems like kind of a drastic surprise, Mom, even for us,” I said.

  “I tried calling her. But apparently they are off doing drills or maneuvers or some type of thing and she can’t be reached.”

  “They do drills even at a language school?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged. “It’s still the army.”

  Dad and I went back into the house. Roxie warned us about messing up her clean floors.

  “How are we going to pull off another wedding by Sunday?” I whined.

  Dad gestured out the sliding doors to Mom. “That’s how.”

  There was a flurry of allocating cars and errands and the synchronizing of watches. Sammie was to go get the invitations printed. We wrote down the language on a napkin but got stumped pretty fast.

  Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thompson

  invite you to the wedding

  of their daughter Lucy Caroline

  to . . . Chuck.

  We didn’t know his last name. After a few tries we came up with:

  Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thompson

  cordially invite you to the wedding

  of their daughter Lucy Caroline

  Sunday, June 29, 12 p.m.

  St. Peter’s Episcopal Church

  RSVP by tomorrow

  616-555-3024

  Chuck didn’t know it yet, but he was about to learn that men take a backseat in the Thompson family race car. Sammie went downtown to the printer with strict instructions to wait while the invitations were printed. Dad was told to call Evan and have him and Anna come over at one o’clock to receive the news. Mom and I went to Steketee’s, where we were faced with an alarming amount of CorningWare and Pfaltzgraff in the housewares department.

  “Can’t we at least go to Grand Rapids to register her?” I said while fingering a cheesy flowered tea towel.

  “If we don’t have time to go to Grand Rapids to register her, how would anyone else have time to go there to buy anything?” Mom countered with perfect reason.

  Mrs. Roly Poly waited on us. At least, that’s what Sammie and I called her. She went to our church, and she and her husband sang in the choir.

  “Your hair looks lovely today,” Mom began. Her gray curls stuck tight to her head and didn’t look different than they did any other day to me. I could tell Mom wished it wasn’t Roly Poly waiting on us. “I need to register my daughter for her wedding.”

  “Oh, Anna registered here long ago,” Roly Poly beamed.

  “No, my daughter. Not my daughter-in-law.”

  “How exciting for you! Another wedding! When is it?”

  “Sunday.”

  Roly Poly eyed my stomach suspiciously.

  “No, not me . . .” I said.

  “We’ll just look around for a bit,” Mom interrupted. She dragged me over behind the Mixmasters. “It might be easier if we didn’t tell Mrs. Carpenter much. I haven’t called Father Whippet yet and I don’t want him hearing about the wedding from her first.”

  I cast a nervous glance back at Roly Poly. She was pretending to price faux Hummel figurines while she watched us. I was starting to feel like Mom and I were involved in a conspiracy. Finally, we selected a pretty Lenox pattern with a thin gold rim. I thought Lucy would like it. I’d at least saved her from the Pfaltzgraff stoneware mugs and plates, which I thought were ugly.

  When we got home, Evan and Dad were out staring at the sprinklers like they might start working by themselves. Anna was in the kitchen on the phone and barely nodded at us when we walked in. I could hear that she was trying to change the reservations for their honeymoon trip to Jamaica. From the look on her face it didn’t seem like she was getting very far.

  “Yes, from Sunday to Monday,” she said, then listened, and continued, “I know it’s very short notice. We’d have to do what? Stop in Miami and Cancun? How much more?” The look on her face was thunderous. “Okay, put it on hold and I’ll call back.”

  She hung up the phone and sagged against the counter. Mom went up to try and hug her but she brushed her off. She was trying to hold back tears, but she had that waver in her voice. “As if there weren’t enough pressure trying to have a wedding for three hundred people! Do you know what you’re putting me through?” Anna stomped her foot, which I’d never seen anyone do in real life. “This is about the bridesmaids, isn’t it, Rose?”

  Mom and I eyed each other.

  “You’re still mad that I didn’t invite your daughters to be in my wedding! This is some twisted way of getting back at me!”

  “There are easier ways of getting back at you other than marrying off Lucy,” I volunteered.

  Mom looked at me as though she wished she’d only had four kids, and then she turned to Anna. “Honey, of course not. Don’t be silly. You’re absolutely right. We are putting too much pressure on you and it’s your big day. If you can’t change the reservations for your honeymoon, then that’s just fine. You head on out on Sunday and don’t worry about Lucy’s wedding.”

  Anna regarded her through watery eyes. “Really?”

  “Really.” Mom tried to hug Anna again, but she was already dialing the travel agent. She stretched the phone cord so that she could go through the door to the dining room for privacy.

  “She does have a point,” Mom said. “It is her weekend and her wedding. Maybe we should call this off.” She turned to the stove to light a cigarette. “But I was a little ticked off about the bridesmaid thing.” Anna had not asked any of us girls to be in the wedding because she thought if she had one of us she would have to have all four. And since there were already eight bridesmaids, she would have had to uninvite four of her friends or up the number to twelve. We accepted it and told Evan we would throw extra rice at him to make up for it.

  I followed Mom out to the living room, where Evan and Dad were smoking. She stood by the couch and gave her son a sad look. It did seem like we were shoving Evan aside. This was his wedding and we were supposed to be focused on him. As usual, one of the girls had managed to upstage him. Mom was hoping he would offer up a sign that everything was all right. Sure enough, Evan stood up, walked over to Mom, and hugged her.

  “I may have blown this one,” Mom sniffled.

  “You’ve done better things,” Evan said and rocked her back and forth. “But Dad and I talked it over with Anna. She’ll be fine.”

  “I should call it off. We can, you know. Lucy doesn’t even know about it yet.”

  “Lucy deserves a nice wedding, too,” Evan said. “But I’d better go get Anna before she melts down again.” He left to go find her.


  When the phone rang, I gladly left the room to answer it. Unfortunately, it was Father Whippet. It took me a while to convince him that it wasn’t me who was getting married. I told him it was Lucy, but he couldn’t remember which kid she was even though he had baptized and confirmed every one of us. Finally, I reminded him that Lucy was the one who as a junior usher forgot to pass the plate to half the church and who had, along with Kim Barnett, broken into the wine cabinet. Then he remembered.

  I went ahead and explained what had happened and made the plans for the Sunday wedding. Apparently, it had to happen after the 10 a.m. service and before the 1 p.m. Linen Guild meeting. He couldn’t do it in the afternoon because he was in a foursome of golf. So Lucy’s wedding was set for noon sharp. Which was a good thing, I thought, because that was what was on the invitations. Father Whippet said he would have to meet the happy couple on Friday to give his blessing. Normally, they would have had to go through six weeks of marriage counseling in order to ensure their lifelong happiness together, but he was willing to waive that since Chuck was an Episcopalian. Or so I told him when he asked.

  “An Episcopalian? I’m sure he is. No. Yes. I’m positive. Absolutely.” I got off the phone and wondered what the penalty for lying to a minister was. When I went back into the living room to tell Mom and Dad about my conversation with Father Whippet, I volunteered that Roly Poly had gone straight to the Man. “How did you know the wedding had to be at noon?” I asked Mom.

  “Oh, because he plays golf in the afternoon, and that only left the time between the 10 a.m. service and the 1 p.m. Linen Guild meeting.”

  Dad grumbled, “Christ, after all the money I’ve given to the church, he can’t rearrange his golf outing so we can have the wedding at a decent time? I mean, these people will barely have recovered from Evan’s wedding. You know how they all drink.” He settled back in his chair. “Well, maybe that means our bar bill will be smaller than Anna’s parents’.”

  Sammie came in holding a cardboard box. “Boy, what’s wrong with Anna? I just asked her if we could borrow her invitation list and she burst into tears.”