“Those sins,” said Dennis.
They were sitting on the front steps of Margo’s apartment building when we arrived. Through the windshield, I watched the boy stand to greet us: he was short—Margo’s height—and sinewy, with a mop of dark hair that swept across his forehead and crowded his eyebrows, making him seem pensive and fierce. Margo hugged my neck and Stuart shook my hand. “The mysterious man and the concerned parents meet at long last,” he said, then forced a chuckle. He was muscular and his voice was deep, which together with the height and haircut gave his appearance a confused quality, manly and boyish at once, like a cartoon superhero.
“Let’s get out of the heat,” said Dennis.
Margo linked her arm through mine and led me inside. We sat in her living room, drinking mango juice blended fresh by Stuart, and Dennis and I interviewed the man who might—we still considered it a remote possibility—become part of our family. The juice was warm and oversweet. He was twenty-four, originally from Sarasota, and worked as a general contractor. He’d accepted a job with a builder in Miami—there was always something being built in Miami, malls or offices or condos, either on the outskirts of the ever-expanding city limits, or over razed buildings in the city center—which meant that Margo could continue with her plans to start a master’s degree program at the University of Miami the following fall. The degree would be in, of all things, modern dance. She’d stumbled on a passion for dance at the University of Florida, and had mentioned several times, proudly, that she would be the only person in her graduate program without at least five years of technical training. This made me feel inadequate, as if I hadn’t recognized the talent she had hidden away. Instead, I’d pushed ballet classes (not the same, she emphasized), sailing club, piano lessons, swim team, academics. It was like spinning a large wheel and hoping it would stop in exactly the right place. Dancing? How could we have known?
While the men talked—Dennis asked questions, and when the conversation paused, he took a sip of juice and started again—I studied Stuart’s body language. He sat straight-backed on the edge of the sofa cushion, rubbing his hands together, as if preparing to spring into action. I waited for him to leap away, and also waited to recognize something—anything—that might coax from inside me some seed of goodwill. Margo sat cross-legged, listening to Stuart and glancing at me. My skin surged with the early tingles of a hot flash. I stood up, interrupting the conversation. “I feel a nap coming on,” I said.
“Why don’t we plan to meet for dinner?” said Dennis.
“Absolutely,” said Stuart. I would come to recognize such expressions of certainty as one of his idiosyncrasies. “No problem,” he would say in the following weeks, when I called Margo and he answered and we tangled ourselves into awkward chitchat. “Definitely.”
Dennis and I spent the afternoon in our motel room, and I sobbed while he comforted me with one arm and flipped television channels with the other. “Big deal,” he said. “We know plenty of divorce lawyers. There’s Donald Tanner, and that Nordic guy—what’s his name—from the yacht club.”
“One has hopes for one’s only daughter.”
“He could be worse,” said Dennis. “Think of him as a grab bag—there’s a chance, at least, for a wonderful surprise.”
Dennis liked Stuart, despite me and despite himself. He liked the boy’s high-keyed energy, and he liked the idea of welcoming another person into our little family. I’d liked this idea, too, in the abstract, but I had never considered that it might happen so soon. When Margo and Stuart entered the restaurant that night—she in a dress and he in a sport coat—I forced a smile. We ordered wine.
“I was thinking it should be a small ceremony, just close friends,” Margo said. “I’d like to have it in the backyard.”
She was pretty in her sundress, tan shoulders and dark hair and freckled nose. She’d lost some weight in her face since last I’d seen her, which was—it hurt me to think it—four months before, at spring break, when I’d picked her up on the way to Atlanta and we’d spent a week with my mother. We’d hiked every morning and spent afternoons swimming at Anna Ruby Falls; she and my mother had worn straw hats and bathing suits, and I’d packed tuna fish sandwiches and cold dill pickles for lunch. Margo had brought my mother a copy of a novel she was reading for class—I’d read it years before, and declined to repeat the experience—and in the late afternoons they had reclined on opposite sofas, each reading and piping up every few minutes with a comment. After dinner, they’d discussed the novel at the kitchen table while I cleaned up. Margo had mentioned Stuart once or twice during the trip, I recalled, but only in her casual way. You are too young, I thought. “When?” I said.
“August,” she said. Hurricane season. Her eyes searched my face. “We can put up a tent in case it rains, and I’d like Marse to be a bridesmaid, if she wouldn’t mind.” Behind her, a family sat around a table like ours. The father lifted a forkful of pasta, the teenage boy chewed ice from his soda, and the mother cut her steak. A quiet diorama. It seemed to me that my family’s stress must have been evident, each gesture insincere and jolting.
“That all sounds fine,” I said to her. Then I had a thought. “Margo,” I said a bit loudly, “you’re not pregnant?”
“No!” said Margo.
“No way,” said Stuart.
Dennis took my hand. “That’s good to hear,” he said. He raised his glass. “Look, we trust our Margo,” he said. “I won’t lie, young man, we wish we’d met you earlier. But we look forward to getting to know you.”
I raised my glass and took a long sip. This was my husband telling me that there would be no more self-pity. It was time for support.
Margo and Stuart stayed in Gainesville after graduation—we drove up for the ceremony, and I sniffled while Dennis snapped photos of Margo onstage in her gown—and the summer that followed was busy with weekend visits and wedding-themed phone conversations. I grew used to Stuart, if not quite fond of him, and felt alternately exhilarated and saddened by the situation. They moved home the first week of August and we held the wedding at the house, the air conditioner on high and the lawn bedecked in ribbon and sunflowers. Bette flew home from Santa Fe, where she and Suzanne had bought an adobe bungalow behind a strip mall, and she and Marse came over early to help me dress. Marse wore a sleeveless red floral dress with a sweetheart neckline, and her chest was rosy from the heat. Bette wore a lavender suit that I thought aged her; I guessed that it had been selected by Suzanne, who preferred a more conservative look. Dennis was already downstairs, dressed and waiting for guests, and Margo was in her own bedroom with Beverly Jovanovich, who was her maid of honor. Marse insisted on plucking my eyebrows—it was something she’d wanted to do for a decade, but I’d never relented until now—and Bette brought up a bottle of white wine from the kitchen.
My bedroom door was closed, but still Marse lowered her voice to speak. She said, “Am I the only one who thinks this is a little old-fashioned? She’s practically a teenager.”
“Marrying young is back in fashion,” said Bette. I was reminded of the day years earlier when she had prepared to wed in the same backyard.
“That Stuart is handsome,” said Marse.
“In a way, I suppose,” said Bette.
“He’s a flirt. Margo will have to keep an eye on him,” said Marse.
They both looked at me, waiting for a reaction. “I hadn’t noticed,” I said, though I had. Just that morning a young girl had arrived with the florist’s crew, and he’d pulled a daisy from a bouquet to give her, he said, as a tip. He’d done this right in front of me, which told me that there was nothing beneath the gesture, no murky undercurrent.