Cancel the Wedding (24 page)

Florence whispered, more to herself than to me. “I'm so glad she made it.”

I felt awful having to be the one to tell Florence that Jane hadn't actually made it, that she had passed away last year. But when I said it Florence didn't stop smiling. She kept staring at me with tears in her eyes, shaking her head at my apparent misunderstanding of her comment.

She pulled herself together but never let go of my hand. “I meant she was able to move on.” Patting my hand. “I'm so sorry to hear that she passed though. Oh, it would've been so good to see her!” Florence turned to Betty. “No wonder you insisted I come today!” Then back to me. “We need to get into some store-bought air and have a nice long chat. It's too damn hot out here and I want you to tell me absolutely everything about Janie.” Florence was looking around for someplace to duck off where we could talk. She looked me up and down again, shaking her head. “Aren't you just the most gorgeous thing?” She glanced at her watch to check the time, apparently not liking what she saw. “I wish Grant were here. He would have loved to meet you. You know he played ball with George and Oliver starting when they were about three years old and all the way through high school.”

She was a dervish and was talking so quickly I was having a hard time following her. I asked, “I'm sorry. Who's Oliver?”

That question seemed to grab Florence's full attention and she finally became still. The transformation was alarming. She immediately stopped talking, pausing as if to figure out what to say. “Janie never told you about Oliver?” I suppose the look on my face answered that question for her because she just kept talking. “Oliver was George's twin brother.”

Elliott and I shared a look, nodding.
Ah, the twin.
We knew from the birth certificate that George had been a twin. Now the twin had a name: Oliver.

I turned back to Florence, explaining, “We literally just found out about George. We saw on his birth certificate that he was a twin but we didn't know the name.”

Florence sounded stunned. “Your mom never told you about George?”

“No, nothing about George or even growing up in Huntley. She never talked about her past. I mean the time before she married my dad. We're just starting to learn some things about her younger years.”

Florence looked sad about our ignorance of Oliver but devastated about our ignorance of George. She had stopped the maintenance of her brow and sweat began dripping down her temples. She looked back and forth between Elliott and me, assuming that the “we” I kept referring to was us.

Elliott seemed to clue in to that. “I'm sorry. I didn't introduce myself. I'm Elliott Tate, from Tillman. I'm helping Olivia research her mother's story.”

Florence had managed to compose herself and was adjusting to the fact that I was clueless about my mother. She was backing out of any shorthand or quick name-dropping, knowing that anything she mentioned would require an extensive back story.

Her voice sounded drained. “And what about your father, dear?”

I told Florence about my dad and gave her the
Reader's Digest
version of my mother's life with him. When they got married, the places we had lived, her teaching at the university, a tiny bit about Georgia and myself.

She was genuinely happy to know that my mother had managed to endure George's death. Happy and surprised. The impression Florence gave me was that one of them could barely survive without the other.

Florence checked her watch one more time, angry for what it was telling her.

“I'm so sorry, Olivia, but I have to get back to Gainesville. We're in the middle of renegotiating our concession contract.”

I deflated. I finally had someone in my grasp who had been a friend of my mom's growing up. Elliott put his arm around me sensing that I would not take this well. I was getting ready to ask for her phone number.

But Florence saw my face and smiled. “Honey, you can't get rid of me that easily. I can come back tomorrow.” She grabbed Betty's attention from the crowd surrounding her. “Betty, can you spare a room at the inn tomorrow?”

I wrote down the address to my rental house and we made a date for the following afternoon. Florence hugged me three more times before she left and kept saying, “You look just like her,” and shaking her head in disbelief.

I had a hard time sleeping after meeting Florence. Finally I went out to the dining room and sat down among the papers and articles we had found since arriving in Tillman and made lists of the things I wanted to ask her about my mother. If I could just get everything out of my head and onto a piece of paper I might get some sleep.

An hour later I was back in bed and having a dream. My mother, Florence, and I were sitting around a table talking. My mother was a young girl; she sat there angrily pouting with her arms crossed high over her chest, furious that I was interrogating Florence. She stared straight ahead with a scowl on her face. Florence looked exactly the same as she had at the garden party. She was talking nonstop, her hands waving around wildly as she spoke. Sometimes she would say something she found funny and she would laugh, playfully hitting my mom on the back, old friends. I was trying to read her lips as she spoke because there was no sound coming out.

I woke early the next day feeling not at all rested. I had nothing to do while I waited so I cleaned the little rental house. I scrubbed and dusted and polished until it was shining. Logan was finally dropped off from work and rushed to her room to change before Florence was due to arrive. Elliott showed up with a pad of paper to take notes and a little tape recorder. I looked at my watch again. It was one minute later than the last time I had checked it.

At exactly four o'clock Florence rang the doorbell. She breezed in, as much of a force as she had been the day before. She gushed over Logan and then me and then the view of the lake from the porch. She emanated so much energy the little house felt smaller with her inside of it.

We had a nervous few minutes where we all four stood in the small living room making bits of small talk about the weather and the house, not sure where to begin. Logan cut through it, not one to bother with such formalities; she just wanted to dive in.

“Mrs. Baker, would you mind if I set up my computer to record you? I promised my mom we would try.”

Florence sat down, looking relieved at the idea of getting down to it. “I don't mind at all.” She looked at me as Elliott and I sat across from her. “And I want you to know that I will answer every question you ask, fully and truthfully, but I was thinking about this all night. There must have been reasons that your mom didn't want to talk about her life here, and I need to respect that.”

I looked up from my notes. “I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

Florence's gaze was firm. “I mean I'll answer what you ask, but I won't offer up information if you haven't asked about it.”

Logan looked at me and then to Florence. “Is there something we don't know about?”

Florence sighed as she sat back crossing her legs, our interview apparently beginning. “Honey, I'm meeting Janie's daughters”—she motioned between me and the computer that represented Georgia—“who don't even realize they're named after George and Oliver Jones, so yes, I'd say there's a fair amount you don't know about.”

Of course. We must be named after them and I didn't even see it. What else wasn't I seeing? I said, “It hadn't occurred to me that we were named after them.” I felt stunned, not the best way to begin an interview. And now I knew that if I didn't ask about something, she wouldn't talk about it. I pulled out my list of questions, which seemed completely inadequate. Did I really care what the house at Rutledge Ridge looked like? My eyes were going back and forth between the list and Florence as she waited expectantly for me to ask her a question. I was at a loss. “How could she just keep all of this from us?” That wasn't on my list of questions.

Florence sounded sympathetic about my frustration, but it wasn't the kind of question she could answer. All she said was, “People always have their reasons.”

Right. I looked at the first question on my list. “Did you know my mom when you were little? Did you know her when her mother died?”

Florence and Janie grew up together. There wasn't a time she could remember when she didn't know Janie. And yes, everyone knew Janie's mother, Martha, not just because the town was so small, but because Martha was so kind.

Florence explained that the illness had been hard on Janie; she hadn't really understood how dire the circumstances were. “People didn't talk about things like that the way they do now. And we were just kids.” Florence shrugged. “Mrs. Rutledge coughed a lot. That was really all we knew.”

Then she told us her fragmented memory of the funeral. Janie, just ten years old, had become hysterical when the lid to the coffin was closed. She began crying in the church and screaming that her mother couldn't breathe. Janie was so bereaved they had to carry her out.

She obviously wasn't able to comprehend the fact that the coffin held the body of her mother but her mother was gone.

I knew the closing of that lid was the event that created my mother's claustrophobia and suddenly I felt horrible for every time Georgia and I had hidden under the bed and dared her to come in after us. The first days after the funeral were the worst for Janie. She couldn't be in any confined space; she couldn't even sleep in her canopy bed.

The week following the services Janie camped out in her backyard with George and Oliver every night. She needed to have nothing but air above her head. George set up the pallets and built the campfire; Oliver provisioned the food. The memory of that made Florence laugh a little. “I tried to get my parents to let me stay with them, but they wouldn't hear of it.” She affected an old Southern accent. “Young ladies do not camp out for days at a time with young men.”

Logan spoke up. “But they were just little kids, right? I mean it's not like they were dating when they were ten years old.”

I jumped in. “When did they start dating?”

Florence shared the story. It was Margaret's birthday party; she was turning fourteen. I remembered Margaret's name from talking to Buddy. She was the girl that Nate Jr. married. She was the young wife who had called the sheriff when my mother's house caught on fire.

The birthday party was being held in the deliberately dim basement with the long brown plaid couch pushed to one side and a small table against the wall stacked with bowls of chips and pretzels. In the background a long-playing album was scratching out ballads on a record player.

Grant and Florence were already dating at this point. They stood against the far wall with George, the three of them looking on at the latest party game. Someone, probably Oliver, had suggested a game of spin the bottle. The players were all in the center of the room sitting in a circle atop a dusty oval braided rug, tugging at collars and smoothing out skirts. Everyone was nervously picking at their nails or playing with their hair trying to look as if they weren't nervous. Except for Oliver, of course. Oliver was never nervous.

Florence could tell that George wanted Janie to leave the circle. He was staring at the back of her head with an intensity that he thought could bring on mind reading.
Leave. Quit this stupid game.
Everyone could tell they were starting to like each other, starting to see each other differently. They weren't just best friends anymore or neighbors who had known each other their whole lives. There was a new tension when they were together that anyone could feel. And watching Janie sit there and potentially get her first kiss with some other boy was about to undo George.

With a flick of Oliver's wrist the thick green bottle whirled around and finally came to a slow wobbling stop right in front of Janie. Florence remembers hearing George gasp a little and then Grant said, under his breath, “This ought to be good.”

Janie's back became ramrod straight and she was visibly fighting the urge to turn and catch George's eye to see his reaction. She didn't dare turn around. Everyone knew Janie wouldn't want to kiss Oliver of all people. He was like her brother. Everyone's eyes were darting back and forth between Janie and George, knowing something was about to blow.

Oliver didn't seem to care about the growing tension or maybe he just wanted to get George's goat. He made a big show of licking his lips as he leaned in to the center of the circle to kiss Janie. Janie sat there frozen to her spot. She was supposed to meet him in the middle for the payoff. Oliver glanced up at George and raised his eyebrows like,
I bet this is gonna bug you.
George got across the room in two steps, pulled Janie to her feet and announced, “Janie and I are going out.”

George dragged Janie up the stairs and out the front door. The wolf whistles and laughter followed them all the way outside. There was a horrible screech as someone dragged the needle off the record so that everyone in the room could better hear the fight outside. Everyone ran to the tiny windows at the top of the basement wall to eavesdrop. Florence could see Janie's feet as she paced back and forth, stomping occasionally. How dare he do that to her. He had no right, the nerve! She went on and on and poor George was just standing there like a fool staring at her, taking it all, saying nothing.

She finally realized he wasn't fighting back and she stopped yelling at him. Florence couldn't hear what George whispered to her at that moment, but the next thing you know Janie was walking over to him and they were kissing. Just like that. That was the night they officially started dating.

I could picture the whole scene in my mind. I imagined the embarrassed look on her face when he dragged her away in front of all of their friends. The look in George's eyes when he whispered something so sweet to her that she stopped yelling and started kissing. I decided that this was each one's first kiss. Whether it truly was or not seemed irrelevant. How sweet that George didn't want anyone else to have Janie's first kiss? This was the exact kind of sappy romantic crap I usually hated, but I just couldn't help myself. It was flowing effortlessly out of my subconscious. The whole vision was causing me to feel heartbroken for young Janie and perhaps a little bit infatuated with my dead mother's dead first husband.