Always and Forever, Lara Jean Page 10

  “Are you happy?” I ask, looking up at my dad.

  His eyes brimming with tears, he nods and hugs me tighter.

  And just like that, our little family grows bigger.

  15

  IT’S THE FIRST NIGHT WE’VE all been together for dinner since the engagement, and Daddy’s in the kitchen making a salad. Us girls are sitting in the living room just hanging out. Kitty is doing her homework; Ms. Rothschild is sipping on a glass of white wine. It’s all very mellow—perfect timing for me to bring up wedding business. I’ve spent the last week working on a mood board for Daddy and Ms. Rothschild’s wedding: Pride and Prejudice the movie, a whole wall of roses for the photo-booth area, The Virgin Suicides, wine-bottle floral centerpieces as a nod to Charlottesville wineries.

  When I present it to Ms. Rothschild on my laptop, she looks vaguely alarmed. She sets down her wine glass and looks closer at the screen. “This is beautiful, Lara Jean. Really lovely. You’ve put a lot of time into this!”

  So much time, in fact, that I skipped Peter’s lacrosse game this week, plus a movie night at Pammy’s. But this is important. Of course I don’t say any of this out loud; I just smile a beatific smile. “Does this vision feel in line with what you were thinking?

  “Well . . . to be honest, I think we were thinking we’d just go to the justice of the peace. Selling my house and figuring out how I’m going to fit all my junk in here is enough of a headache already.”

  Daddy comes out with the wooden salad bowl in his hands. Dryly he says, “So you’re saying marrying me is a headache?”

  She rolls her eyes. “You know what I’m saying, Dan! It’s not like you have the time to plan a big wedding either.” She takes a sip of wine and turns to me. “Your dad and I have both been married before, so neither of us feels like making a big fuss. I’ll probably just wear a dress I already have.”

  “Of course we should make a big fuss. Do you know how many years it took Daddy to find someone who’d eat his cooking and watch his documentaries?” I shake my head. “Ms. Rothschild, you’re a miracle. For that we have to celebrate.” I call out to my dad, who’s disappeared back into the kitchen. “Did you hear that, Daddy? Ms. Rothschild wants to go to city hall. Please disabuse her of this notion.”

  “Will you please stop calling me Ms. Rothschild? Now that I’m going to be your wicked stepmother, you should at least call me Trina. Or Tree. Whatever feels right to you.”

  “How about Stepmother?” I suggest, all innocence. “That feels pretty right.”

  She swats at me. “Girl! I will cut you.”

  Giggling, I dart away from her. “Let’s get back to the wedding. I don’t know if this is a sensitive issue or not, but did you keep your old wedding photos? I want to see what your bridal style was.”

  Ms. Rothschild pulls a terrible face. “I think I threw out everything. I might have a picture tucked in an album somewhere. Thank God I got married before social media was a thing. Can you imagine, getting divorced and having to take down all your wedding pictures?”

  “Isn’t it bad luck to talk about divorce when you’re planning your wedding?”

  She laughs. “Well then, we’re already doomed.” I must look alarmed because she says, “I’m kidding! I’ll hunt around for a wedding picture to show you if you want, but honestly, I’m not real proud of it. Smoky eye was the thing back then, and I took it a little too far. Plus I did that early two thousands thing with the chocolate lip liner and the frosted lip.”

  I try to keep my face neutral. “Right, okay. What about your dress?”

  “One-shoulder, with a mermaid style skirt. It made my butt look amazing.”

  “I see.”

  “Quit judging me!”

  Daddy puts his hand on Ms. Rothschild’s shoulder. “What if we did it here at the house?”

  “Like in the backyard?” She considers this. “I think that could be nice. A little barbecue, just family and a few friends?”

  “Daddy doesn’t have any friends,” Kitty says from across the living room, her math book in her lap.

  Daddy frowns at her. “I do too have friends. I have Dr. Kang from the hospital, and there’s Marjorie, and Aunt D. But er, yes, it would be a small group on my side.”

  “Plus Nana,” Kitty says, and both Daddy and Ms. Rothschild look nervous at the mention of Nana. Daddy’s mother isn’t the friendliest person.

  “Don’t forget Grandma,” I throw in.

  Grandma and Ms. Rothschild met at Thanksgiving, and while Daddy didn’t explicitly introduce her as his girlfriend, Grandma is shrewd and she doesn’t miss a thing. She gave Ms. Rothschild the third degree, asking if she had any kids of her own, how long she’d been divorced, if she had any student-loan debt. Ms. Rothschild held up pretty well, and when I walked Grandma out to the car to say good-bye, she said Ms. Rothschild was “not bad.” She said she dressed young for her age, but she also said that Ms. Rothschild had a lot of energy and a brightness to her.

  “I’ve already done the big wedding thing,” Ms. Rothschild says. “It’ll be small on my side too. A few friends from college, Shelly from work. My sister Jeanie, my SoulCycle friends.”

  “Can we be your bridesmaids?” Kitty asks, and Ms. Rothschild laughs.

  “Kitty! You can’t just ask that.” But I turn to Ms. Rothschild, waiting to hear what she will say.

  “Sure,” she says. “Lara Jean, would you be okay with that?”

  “I would be honored,” I say.

  “So you three girls, and my friend Kristen, because she’ll kill me if I don’t ask her.”

  I clap my hands together. “Now that that’s settled, let’s get back to the dress. If it’s going to be a backyard wedding, I feel like your dress should reflect that.”

  “As long as it has sleeves so my bat wings don’t flap around,” she says.

  “Ms. Roth—I mean, Trina, you don’t have bat wings,” I say. She’s very in shape from all her Pilates and SoulCycle.

  Kitty’s eyes light up. “What are bat wings? That sounds gross.”

  “Come here, and I’ll show you.” Kitty obeys, and Ms. Rothschild lifts her arm and stretches it out; then at the last second she grabs Kitty and tickles her. Kitty’s dying laughing, and so is Ms. Rothschild.

  Breathlessly she says, “Gross? That’ll teach you to call your wicked stepmother-to-be gross!”

  Daddy looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him.

  * * *

  Later that night in our bathroom, Kitty’s brushing her teeth, and I’m scrubbing my face with a new exfoliant I ordered off a Korean beauty site. It’s walnut shells and blueberry. “Mason jars and gingham—but elegant,” I muse.

  “Mason jars are played out,” Kitty says. “Look on Pinterest. Literally everybody does Mason jars.”

  Her words do have the ring of truth. “Well, I’m definitely wearing a flower crown on my head. I don’t care if you say it’s played out.”

  Flatly she says, “You can’t wear a flower crown.”

  “Why not?”

  She spits out toothpaste. “You’re too old. That’s for flower girls.”

  “No, you aren’t envisioning it correctly. I wasn’t thinking baby’s breath. I was thinking little pink and peach roses, with a lot of greenery. Pale green greenery, you know that kind?”

  She shakes her head, resolute. “We aren’t fairies in a forest. It’s too cutesy. And I know Gogo’s going to agree with me.”

  I have a sinking feeling she will too. I decide to put this argument aside for now. It won’t be won today. “For dresses, I was thinking we could wear vintage. Not off-white, but tea-stained white. Sort of nightgown-style. Very ethereal—not fairy, more like celestial being.”

  “I’m wearing a tuxedo.”

  I nearly choke. “A what!”

  “A tuxedo. With matching Converse.”

  “Over my dead body!”

  Kitty shrugs.

  “Kitty, this wedding isn’t black tie. A tuxedo isn’t going to look right at a ba
ckyard wedding! The three of us should match, like a set! The Song girls!”

  “I’ve already told Tree and Daddy, and they both love the idea of me in a tux, so get over it.” She’s got that look on her face, the obstinate look she gets when she’s really digging her heels in. Like a bull.

  “At the very least you should wear a seersucker suit, then. It will be too hot for a tuxedo, and seersucker breathes.” I feel like I’ve made a concession here, so she should too, but no.

  “You don’t get to decide everything, Lara Jean. It’s not your wedding.”

  “I know that!”

  “Well, just keep it in mind.”

  I reach out to shake her, but she flounces off before I can. Over her shoulder, she calls out, “Worry about your own life!”

  16

  IT’S AN EARLY-RELEASE DAY AND I’m hurrying down the hallway to meet Peter at his locker when Mrs. Duvall stops me. “Lara Jean! Are you coming to the mixer this evening?”

  “Um . . .” I don’t remember hearing anything about a mixer.

  She tsks me. “I sent you a reminder e-mail last week! It’s a little get-together for local students who were accepted to William and Mary. There’ll be a few of you from our school, but lots of other schools too. It’s a nice opportunity for you to meet some people before you get there.”

  “Oh . . .” I did see that e-mail, but I forgot all about it. “I would love to go, but I can’t because I have a . . . um, family obligation.”

  Which is, technically, true. Peter and I are going to an estate sale in Richmond—he has to pick up end tables for his mom’s antiques store, and I’m looking for a cake table for Daddy and Trina’s wedding.

  Mrs. Duvall gives me a lingering look and says, “Well, I’m sure there’ll be another one. A lot of people would kill to be in your spot, Lara Jean, but I’m sure you already know that.”

  “I do,” I assure her, and then I scuttle off to meet Peter.

  The estate sale turns out to be a bust—for me, anyway. Peter picks up the end tables, but I don’t see anything appropriate for an ethereal backyard wedding. There’s one chest of drawers that is a possibility, if I painted it, maybe, or stenciled some rosebuds on it, but it costs three hundred dollars, and I have a feeling Daddy and Trina would balk at the price. I take a picture of it just in case.

  Peter and I go to a place I read about on the Internet called Croaker’s Spot, where we get fried fish and buttery cornbread dripping in sweet sauce. “Richmond’s cool,” he says, wiping sauce off his chin. “Too bad William and Mary isn’t in Richmond. It’s closer to UVA, too.”

  “Just by thirty minutes,” I say. “Anyway I was thinking about it, and it won’t even be a full year until I’m at UVA.” I start counting the months off my fingers. “It’s really like nine months. And I’ll be home for winter break, and then we have spring break.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  * * *

  When I get home, it’s dark out, and Daddy, Trina, and Kitty are at the kitchen table finishing up dinner. Daddy starts to get up when I walk in. “Sit down, I’ll fix you a plate,” he says. With a wink he says, “Trina made her lemon chicken.”

  Trina’s lemon chicken is just chicken breasts with lemon seasoning cooked in Pam, but it’s her specialty and it’s pretty good. Sliding into a seat, I say, “No thanks, I just ate a ton of food.”

  “Did they serve dinner at the mixer?” Daddy asks, sitting back down. “How was it?”

  “How did you know about the mixer?” I ask him, leaning down to pet Trina’s dog Simone, who followed me into the kitchen and is now sitting at my feet, hoping for a crumb.

  “They sent an invitation in the mail. I put it on the fridge!”

  “Oh, whoops. I didn’t go. I went to Richmond with Peter to look for a cake table for the wedding.”

  Daddy frowns. “You went all the way to Richmond on a school night? For a cake table?”

  Uh-oh. I quickly pull out my phone to show them. “It’s a little expensive, but we could have the drawers kind of half-open, bursting with roses. Even if we didn’t get this exact one, if you like it, I’m sure I could find something similar to it.”

  Daddy leans in to look. “Drawers of roses bursting out? That sounds very expensive and not exactly ecologically responsible.”

  “Well I suppose we could do daisies, but it doesn’t really have the same effect.” I cast a look over at Kitty before continuing. “I want to circle back on the bridesmaid dresses.”

  “Wait a minute, I want to circle back on you skipping out on your college mixer to go to Richmond,” Daddy interjects.

  “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’m sure there will be a million of them before fall,” I tell him. “Kitty, about the bridesmaid dresses—”

  Without even looking up, Kitty says, “You just wear the nightgown outfit on your own.”

  I choose to ignore the fact that she called it a nightgown outfit and say, “It won’t look right if it’s just me. The beauty of it is the set. All of us matching, very ethereal, like angels. Then it becomes a look, a moment. If I wear it on my own it won’t work. It needs to be all three of us.” I don’t know how many more times I have to say the word “ethereal” to make people understand what the vibe of this wedding is.

  Kitty says, “If you want to be a set, you’re welcome to wear a tux too. I would be fine with that.”

  I take a deep breath to keep from screaming at her. “Well, let’s just see what Margot says about all this.”

  “Margot won’t care either way.”

  Kitty gets up to put her plate in the sink, and when her back is turned, I raise my hands like I’m going to strangle her. “Saw that,” she says. I swear, she has eyes in the back of her head.

  “Trina, what do you think?” I ask.

  “Honestly, I could care less what you guys wear, but you’re going to have to run it by Margot and Kristen. They might have their own ideas.”

  Delicately I say, “Just FYI, it’s ‘I couldn’t care less,’ not ‘I could care less.’ Because if you could, then you are technically caring.”

  Trina rolls her eyes, and Kitty slides back into her chair and says, “Why are you like this, Lara Jean?”

  I shove her in the side. To Trina I say, “Kristen is a grown woman, so I’m sure she’ll be fine with whatever us kids do. She’s an adult.”

  Trina doesn’t look so sure. “She won’t want anything that shows her arms. She’ll try to convince you to put a matching cardigan on top.”

  “Um, no.”

  Trina puts her hands up. “You have to take it up with Kristen. Like I said, I could care less.” She crosses her eyes at me, and I laugh and so does Kitty.

  “Wait a minute, can we talk more about this mixer you didn’t go to?” Daddy asks, his brow furrowed. “That sounded like a really nice event.”

  “I’ll go to the next one,” I promise him. Of course, I don’t mean it.

  There’s no point in me going to mixers and getting attached to people when I’m only going to be there nine months.

  * * *

  After I make myself a bowl of ice cream, I go upstairs and text Margot to see if she is awake. She is, so I immediately call her to shore up support on the dress situation, and Kitty’s right—Margot doesn’t care either way.

  “I’ll do whatever you guys want to do,” she says.

  “The hottest places in hell are reserved for people who maintain neutrality in times of crisis,” I say, licking my spoon.

  She laughs. “I thought the hottest places in hell were reserved for women who don’t help other women.”

  “Well, I suppose hell has a lot of rooms. Honestly, don’t you think Kitty will look silly in a tuxedo? It’s a backyard wedding. The feel is supposed to be ethereal!”

  “I don’t think she’ll look any sillier than you’ll look in a flower crown all by yourself. Just let her wear it, and you wear your flower crown, and I’ll be neutral. Honestly, I don’t even see the point in me being a bridesmaid when Ms. Roth
schild and I barely know each other. I mean, I know she’s doing it to be nice, but it’s so not necessary. It’s all a bit much.”

  Now I’m regretting stirring the waters and pushing the whole tuxedo-versus-flower-crown issue. The last thing I want is for Margot to get any ideas about dropping out of the wedding. She’s lukewarm on Trina at best. Hastily I say, “Well, we don’t have to wear flower crowns. You and I could wear plain dresses and Kitty could wear her tux, and that would look fine.”

  “How was that William and Mary mixer today? Did you meet any cool people?”

  “How does everybody but me know about the mixer!”

  “It was on the fridge.”

  “Oh. I didn’t go.”

  There’s a pause. “Lara Jean, have you sent in your William and Mary deposit yet?”

  “I’m about to! It’s not due until May first.”

  “Are you thinking about changing your mind?”

  “No! I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Things have been crazy around here, with all the wedding planning and everything.”

  “It sounds like the wedding is getting really big. I thought they just wanted to do a simple thing.”

  “We’re weighing our options. It’ll still be simple. I just think the day should be really special, something we’ll always remember.”

  After we get off the phone, I go downstairs to put my ice cream bowl in the sink, and on the way back, I stop in the living room, where Mommy and Daddy’s wedding portrait hangs above the fireplace. Her dress is lace, with cap sleeves and a flowy skirt. Her hair is up, in a side bun, with a few tendrils that slip out. She’s wearing diamond earrings I never saw her wear in real life. She hardly ever wore jewelry, or much makeup, either. Daddy’s in a gray suit, but no gray in his hair yet; his cheeks are apple smooth, no stubble. She looks the way I remember her, but he looks so much younger.

  It hits me that we’ll have to move the picture. It would just be too awkward for Trina to have to look at it every day. She doesn’t seem bothered by it now, but after she’s living here, after they’re married, she’s bound to feel differently. I could hang it in my room, though Margot might want it too. I guess I’ll ask her when she’s back.