They Vetoed My Wedding 5 Times I Vetoed Them for Life novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Grandma's Key

Cal blocks the front door in daylight, and Grandma lets Delia in by the sunporch to the dress. Outside, Cal complains that the money did not come.

On Thursday morning I drove up Harbor Hill to get my wedding dress out of my mother's house.

Theo's hand had been on my back when I woke, warm through my shirt, and I carried that feeling up the hill like a coin in my fist.

The Pruitt house was white with black shutters and a porch that wrapped three sides.

Our next-door neighbor was watering her hydrangeas, and she stopped to look at me.

Everyone on Harbor Hill knew by now.

I parked at the curb and walked up the steps.

The front door opened before I reached it.

Cal stood in the doorway in a black polo shirt, with his arms folded across his chest.

"Dad says you're not coming in today," he said.

"I live here, Cal."

"You live over the garage. That's different."

"My dress is in Mom's cedar chest. I'm taking it."

"Dad says you can have your things after the funeral."

"When is the funeral?"

"Dad's still working on it."

He looked at the ceiling.

"After, Dee. Just after."

I stepped to the left, and he stepped to the left.

I stepped right, and he mirrored me.

He was six inches taller than me and had thirty pounds on me, and he had never in his life used either one against anybody.

He was using them now, in front of the neighbor.

"Cal," I said. "Move."

"You're not thinking straight, Dee. You'll thank me."

"I will not."

Behind him, at the end of the hall, my father's voice carried out of the study.

"Yes, Saturday at eleven," he was saying. "No, the family has decided. Yes, the casket will be closed."

Saturday at eleven.

My father had put my mother's funeral on the morning of my wedding.

He had picked the one day that would let him say a family in mourning could not hold a wedding.

I stood on the porch and felt my face go white.

"He moved the funeral," I said.

"It's the best day for the whole family," Cal said, too fast. "Everyone's already in town."

"Everyone is in town for my wedding."

"Exactly. So."

He gave me his easy grin, the one that had gotten him out of every trouble since the third grade.

I knew then that this was not grief.

It was a plan, and everyone in the house had read it except me.

I walked back down the steps.

The neighbor was still watching.

I got as far as the driveway before a thin voice called from around the side of the house.

"Delia."

It was Grandma.

She stood at the door of the sunporch in her quilted robe, leaning on her cane.

She put one finger to her lips.

I followed her inside through the wicker chairs and the dead geraniums, into the back hall that smelled of lavender and old wood.

She walked slowly, and she did not turn on a light.

Mom's sewing room was at the end of it.

The cedar chest sat under the window with a stack of folded tablecloths on top.

Grandma lifted the tablecloths one at a time and set them on the floor.

Then she took a small brass key from the pocket of her robe and handed it to me.

"Your grandfather kept this on a nail by the back door," she said. "Ruth kept it on a ribbon around her neck."

I turned the key.

The lid rose on its hinges, and the cedar smell filled the room.

My dress lay on top in clear plastic, ivory silk with the same neckline we had picked five years ago, taken in a little at the waist each spring.

My mother's veil was folded beside it, the one she had worn herself.

There was a pearl comb pinned to the lace.

My throat closed.

"She had it ready every year," Grandma said. "Every year. She'd take it out in March and look at it."

"Why didn't she just say no to them?" I whispered. "Why didn't she say no to Dad?"

Grandma was quiet.

She looked at the veil, not at me.

"I said my word because Ruth asked me to," she said.

"What?"

"She asked me, and I said it. That is all I'm going to tell you."

"Grandma."

"Ask me nothing else, child." Her hand shook on the cane. "I'm eighty-four, and I have nowhere else to sleep."

She pressed the dress bag into my arms and the veil on top of it.

Then she shut the chest and went back out into the hall.

I carried my wedding dress out through the sunporch with my arms wrapped around it, and I tried to understand what I had just been told.

Ruth asked me.

My mother had stood in front of my grandmother and asked her to blow up my wedding.

I stopped at the end of the porch, behind the screen, where the driveway curved out of sight of the street.

Cal was down at the bottom of it, with his back to me and his phone against his ear.

"No, I'm telling you, it didn't come," he was saying. "It's the twenty-eighth, the bank transfer comes on the twenty-eighth. Nothing."

A pause.

"Then call the bank. Is her account frozen?"

Another pause.

"Dad's is late too? Okay. Okay. No, Lorna, don't say anything to Delia."

I stood very still with the dress in my arms.

Cal turned, saw me through the screen, and went the color of paper.

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