Chapter 3 - What Aunt Susan Heard
Every face at the table swung toward Susan.
She was Gerald's younger sister — a soft-spoken woman who usually parked herself in a corner at family things and let the noise happen around her. The kind of person you forget is in the room until she decides otherwise. She'd said maybe ten words all afternoon.
She set her coffee cup down, careful with the saucer.
"I wasn't going to bring this up," Susan said. "I kept telling myself it wasn't mine to bring up. But I'm sitting here looking at these pictures, and —" She stopped. Pressed her lips flat. "I can't sit on it."
Margaret had gone completely still.
"Susan." Low. A warning wearing the shape of a name.
Susan looked right at her. "You called me, Margaret. Six days before the wedding. You called and asked me to talk to her. To — talk some sense into her. That was the phrase you used."
Nobody said anything.
I looked at Ethan. He was staring at his mother.
"She told me the photographs were going to be ruined," Susan went on. "That she'd already tried with the two of you and you wouldn't listen. She wanted me to take another run at it." Susan flattened both hands on the tablecloth. "And she said — I'm going to give it to you word for word — she said, 'A wedding album should be something you're proud to show people. Not something you have to explain.'"
My mother made a sound. Not a word. Just air leaving her.
"I told her no," Susan said. "I told her a man walking his sister down the aisle is not something anybody needs to explain to anybody. She hung up on me."
Margaret's jaw went tight. "You're pulling one sentence out of a long conversation."
"Then give me the rest of it," Susan said. "Give me the context that makes that sentence all right."
"I was worried. I was thinking about their future — about what they'll want on their walls when they're my age —"
"You were thinking about your mantel," I said.
It came out before I'd decided to let it. No heat. Just flat and true, sitting in the middle of the table where everybody could see it.
Margaret turned to me. "Excuse me?"
"You said it at dinner. 'The portrait that goes over our mantel.' That was the worry. Not my marriage. Not my brother. Your wall."
Gerald set his fork down. He hadn't spoken in ten minutes. "Margaret."
Just her name.
She looked at him, and something moved in her face — not shame yet, but the first small understanding that the room had rearranged itself around her while she wasn't watching.
"I was trying to help," she said. "I was trying to protect this family's —"
"Toby is this family," Ethan said.
First thing out of his mouth since Susan started. He said it the way a man says something he's been carrying for weeks and has finally set on the floor.
Margaret looked at her son.
"He walked my wife down the aisle," Ethan said. "He wore Dad's cufflinks. He called the church by himself to make sure he did it right. He's the reason that day felt like anything at all." He stopped. "And you tried to take it away from her. From both of them."
"I didn't take anything away. She still had her —"
"You tried," Ethan said. "You called Susan. You sat at this table, at your own dinner, and told my wife his face didn't belong in the pictures. He was right there, Mom. He was in the next chair."
The quiet after that had a different texture to it.
Susan reached over and laid her hand on top of mine. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
Margaret picked up her coffee. Set it back down without drinking. "I think this has turned very theatrical over something very simple."
"Don't," Gerald said. One word.
She looked at him.
"Don't call it simple," he said. "Not tonight."
Margaret closed the album. Slid it a few inches toward the center of the table. And I caught it — she pushed it away from her own body. Not toward me. Just away. Like she was finished with it.
I wasn't finished. Not close.
Because that night, when Ethan and I got home, he sat down on the edge of the bed and said, "There's something else. About what she did after that first dinner. The one three weeks out."
May you like
I sat down next to him.
"She didn't just call Susan," he said.
