“What is it?”
Another pause. Then she said it the way you say something you have been carrying and have finally decided to put down regardless of where it lands.
“I don’t think you should come to the wedding.”
I sat with this for a moment. The wedding was in four days. The ceremony would take place near the rose garden I had planted and tended for twenty-two years. The tent was being erected on my south lawn. The wine served to two hundred guests would come from grapes grown in my soil, harvested by
my crew, aged in my cellar. I had written the checks for the caterer, the florist, the string quartet, the tent company, the rental furniture, the guest accommodations in the stone house I had spent two years and considerable money restoring.
“What do you mean I shouldn’t come,” I said. It did not come out as a question.
“Greg thinks you might make his family uncomfortable.” She said this quietly, the way people say things they know are wrong while they are saying them. “You’re just different from them. You don’t really fit in with his crowd.”
I looked through the kitchen window at the vineyard. The rows were green and orderly in the morning light, each vine trained along its wire with the disciplined patience of twenty years of attention. The grapes were not yet ready. August harvest, if the weather held.
“My husband doesn’t want you there,” Samantha said.
Greg was not yet her husband. I noticed she had already begun calling him that.
