“So how was it?” She smiled at me as I came walking up, my bridesmaid’s bouquet dangling in my hand. I held it up as I got close and she examined it. “That’s beautiful. You know what that’s called? Polemonium caer uleum. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a bouquet before. Maybe I should try some of that next year.” She bent over and tugged at a weed until it gave way, coming up with a poof of dirt around it.

“It was fine,” I said, wondering what words I should use to describe such an event, the details I should go into. “The food was good.”

“It always is at weddings.” She reached down and picked a few shiny leaves, rubbing them together in her hand. “What do you think of this?”

I took them from her and held them to my nose when she motioned for me to do so. They smelled sweet and lemony, like the cough drops my grandmother always gave me instead of candy. “What is it?”

“Lemon balm.” She picked some for herself, pressing it to her nose. “I just love the way it smells.”

I could hear Ashley laughing from the front porch, where she was sitting on the steps, leaning against Lewis. “Ashley’s drunk,” I told my mother, who only smiled that sad smile again and yanked up another weed. “She had about a million glasses of wine.”

“Oh well.” She tossed the weed aside and wiped her hands against each other. “We all have our ways of getting through.”

I could have said it all right there, all the Hallmark kinds of things that I felt I should say to my mother, words of support and solidarity and comfort. But with this opportunity so neatly presented I could do nothing but follow her down the stone walk past her rosebushes and flower beds and bird feeders to the back steps and into the kitchen. She went to the sink and washed her hands, and in the suddenly bright light I looked at her in her faded jeans and flowered shirt and thought how much she looked like Ashley: her long, dark hair done up behind her head, her tiny feet that tracked garden mud across the floor. They were both so small and precise. I wondered what she’d done that afternoon and watched my mother at her sink and said no right things, only pressed those shiny leaves to my face and breathed in their strong, sweet smell.

Chapter Three

I woke up the next morning to a wedding crisis. By July I could sense one from miles off, but I didn’t have to go that far thanks to the vent in my bathroom and the fact that all major family confrontations seem to take place in our kitchen below. I was lying in bed at eight A.M., already awake but staring at the ceiling, when I heard our neighbor Lydia Catrell knock at the back door and come in with a flurry of high-pitched chatter, matched by my mother’s lower, softer voice as they sat at the table drinking coffee and tinkling spoons. I listened as they talked about the invitations and the guest list; Lydia Catrell had married off four daughters and was our senior advisor on Ashley’s wedding. It was Lydia who arranged for the hall and the church and Lydia who recommended the flowers and Lydia who bustled around our kitchen acting important and dispensing advice, most of it welcome. And so that morning I knew even before Ashley did that she was about to have more problems from the troublesome bridesmaid.

The bridesmaid’s name was Carol Cliffordson and she was twenty-one, a distant cousin who had spent one summer with us when her parents were splitting up; she and Ashley had bunked together and giggled and driven the rest of us crazy being twelve-year-old best friends. They were inseparable. At the end of the summer Carol returned to Akron, Ohio, and we never heard much from her again except for Christmas cards and graduation announcements. When Ashley picked her bridesmaids she was firm that Carol be included even though we hadn’t seen her since she was twelve and even then only for that one summer. Carol accepted and then proceeded to cause more problems than you could ever imagine one little bridesmaid being capable of. It started with the dresses, which Carol objected to because they are low cut in front. Being that she is rather flat chested (although she would never admit it), she called Ashley to say they were too revealing and could she please wear something else. Lydia Catrell and my mother and Ashley all sat around for hours talking about that one five-minute phone conversation, dissecting it and discussing its issues etiquettewise, before Carol called again to say she didn’t think she’d be able to attend the wedding at all because her fiance’s family would be in town that weekend and they expected her to partake in the annual family cookout and square dance. With this, it looked like we might have gotten rid of her altogether, except that the dresses (still low cut but a different style) had already been ordered and it was too late to find anyone else. This set off another round of arguing and consoling between my mother and Ashley, not to mention Lydia Catrell, who wondered out loud several times if this girl was raised in a barn. Finally it was decided that Carol would still attend the wedding with her fiancé, then leave immediately afterwards to make the square dance.

Now there was another problem. Apparently Carol had called early in the morning, hysterical, and cried and cried on the phone, saying her fiancé had decided he would not attend and neglect his own family for the wedding of someone he had never even met. They’d had a big fight and Carol had called to cry to my mother, who clucked sympathetically and said she’d have Ashley call back right away. Then Lydia came over, was filled in, and I lay in bed listening to them go on and on about it, fretting about what Ashley would do when she was clued in to the situation. I heard Ashley going down the stairs and then their voices suddenly jerked to a stop.