Read Online Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? by Melissa Senate - Free Book Online
Authors: Melissa Senate
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Halloween costumes.”
“Can someone please turn down the stereo?”
“I thought we were meeting Eloise’s family.”
“No family?”
“I hear she has a sister.”
“No, a brother.”
“Eloise has no family—no one. So sad.”
“Hmm, this chopped liver is delicious!”
“She has a sickly grandmother. I hear the poor little old lady is in a nursing home.”
You hear wrong. You all hear wrong. My grandmother wasn’t sickly and didn’t live in a nursing home. Five feet ten inches tall and weighing one hundred and seventy-six pounds, seventy-nine-year-old Bette Geller, of the cashmere sweater sets, heavyweight dungarees, rouge and lipstick, was as robust and full-of-life as you got, despite the partial paralysis that made it difficult for her to get around or travel, which was why she wasn’t here tonight. She played poker and adored Rodney Dangerfield and hooted with laughter at his movies.
It was true that my grandmother had been sick. A little over a year ago, she’d had a stroke. One minute she’d been fine, sitting across from me in the diner where I met her for lunch every Saturday afternoon, and the next minute, she wasn’t fine.
She’d been sipping the chocolate egg cream that she always got for dessert and telling me a joke, one of her favorites of Rodney’s that embarrassed her and delighted her at the same time, when she suddenly stopped, just sort of froze, and things had gotten worse from there.
There was a rush of waiters, people sitting around us, the diner manager, and then the ambulance sirens. Then there were doctors and nurses and Jane and Amanda and Natasha, baby Summer cooing in her stroller. There was Noah, whom I’d been dating somewhere between casually and seriously for almost a year. There was my old boss at Posh Publishing, a couple of girlfriends from high school and one from college. Even Michael, my ex-boyfriend from a decade before, showed up in the hospital with a bouquet of red tulips and a box of Whitman’s Samplers, which my grandmother had kept on her shiny mahogany coffee table every day of the year. There were my grandmother’s friends, who’d come every day and sat for hours, playing cards by her bedside, talking to her, telling her who was having a sale on rib roast, whose husband was in the doghouse, whose granddaughter just had a baby.
There was no Emmett, but no one asked why.
It was understood that Emmett was traveling.
My brother was one of those “march-to-their-own-drummer” types who graduated (barely) from Yale, then got a job driving a truck to Alaska, where he fished for a while until he decided to climb a mountain in Africa, funding for which was provided by the occasional wealthy older woman he was sleeping with.
I was the only one who asked where Emmett was.
“Where the hell is Emmett?” I’d scream and rage at the top of my lungs in the tiny studio apartment I lived in at the time.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know!” shouted back the guy who lived in the apartment above me. The walls, floors and ceiling in that dumpy walk-up were so thin, you could hear way too much of what went on in your neighbors’ lives. I mourned for the days, the years, when Jane lived above me. Before she moved into a swanky Upper West Side apartment with Ethan, Jane and I could conduct entire conversations via our kitchen cabinets.
Where the hell is Emmett? I started raging silently.
Despite the many warm, caring people, from friends to doctors to co-workers to strangers I met in the hospital elevator and in the hallways where I prayed that my grandmother wouldn’t die, there was no family.
My family was Grams, myself and Emmett, and Emmett was nowhere to be found.
He often took off for weeks at a time and couldn’t be reached.
“What if something happens!” I had yelled at him for years. “You have to be reachable!”
“What’s going to happen?” he’d say. “Stop being so melodramatic.”
“Get a cell phone!” I’d scream.
“Stop
“Can someone please turn down the stereo?”
“I thought we were meeting Eloise’s family.”
“No family?”
“I hear she has a sister.”
“No, a brother.”
“Eloise has no family—no one. So sad.”
“Hmm, this chopped liver is delicious!”
“She has a sickly grandmother. I hear the poor little old lady is in a nursing home.”
You hear wrong. You all hear wrong. My grandmother wasn’t sickly and didn’t live in a nursing home. Five feet ten inches tall and weighing one hundred and seventy-six pounds, seventy-nine-year-old Bette Geller, of the cashmere sweater sets, heavyweight dungarees, rouge and lipstick, was as robust and full-of-life as you got, despite the partial paralysis that made it difficult for her to get around or travel, which was why she wasn’t here tonight. She played poker and adored Rodney Dangerfield and hooted with laughter at his movies.
It was true that my grandmother had been sick. A little over a year ago, she’d had a stroke. One minute she’d been fine, sitting across from me in the diner where I met her for lunch every Saturday afternoon, and the next minute, she wasn’t fine.
She’d been sipping the chocolate egg cream that she always got for dessert and telling me a joke, one of her favorites of Rodney’s that embarrassed her and delighted her at the same time, when she suddenly stopped, just sort of froze, and things had gotten worse from there.
There was a rush of waiters, people sitting around us, the diner manager, and then the ambulance sirens. Then there were doctors and nurses and Jane and Amanda and Natasha, baby Summer cooing in her stroller. There was Noah, whom I’d been dating somewhere between casually and seriously for almost a year. There was my old boss at Posh Publishing, a couple of girlfriends from high school and one from college. Even Michael, my ex-boyfriend from a decade before, showed up in the hospital with a bouquet of red tulips and a box of Whitman’s Samplers, which my grandmother had kept on her shiny mahogany coffee table every day of the year. There were my grandmother’s friends, who’d come every day and sat for hours, playing cards by her bedside, talking to her, telling her who was having a sale on rib roast, whose husband was in the doghouse, whose granddaughter just had a baby.
There was no Emmett, but no one asked why.
It was understood that Emmett was traveling.
My brother was one of those “march-to-their-own-drummer” types who graduated (barely) from Yale, then got a job driving a truck to Alaska, where he fished for a while until he decided to climb a mountain in Africa, funding for which was provided by the occasional wealthy older woman he was sleeping with.
I was the only one who asked where Emmett was.
“Where the hell is Emmett?” I’d scream and rage at the top of my lungs in the tiny studio apartment I lived in at the time.
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know!” shouted back the guy who lived in the apartment above me. The walls, floors and ceiling in that dumpy walk-up were so thin, you could hear way too much of what went on in your neighbors’ lives. I mourned for the days, the years, when Jane lived above me. Before she moved into a swanky Upper West Side apartment with Ethan, Jane and I could conduct entire conversations via our kitchen cabinets.
Where the hell is Emmett? I started raging silently.
Despite the many warm, caring people, from friends to doctors to co-workers to strangers I met in the hospital elevator and in the hallways where I prayed that my grandmother wouldn’t die, there was no family.
My family was Grams, myself and Emmett, and Emmett was nowhere to be found.
He often took off for weeks at a time and couldn’t be reached.
“What if something happens!” I had yelled at him for years. “You have to be reachable!”
“What’s going to happen?” he’d say. “Stop being so melodramatic.”
“Get a cell phone!” I’d scream.
“Stop
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