When I was in first grade I had a teacher named Mrs. Thomas. She was young, sported a flip hairdo that made her look just like Snow White, smelled like Lily of the Valley, and kept a picture of a man in a uniform on her desk, staring stiffly out from the frame. And even though I was shy and slow at math, she didn’t care. She loved me. She’d come up beside me in the lunch line or during story hour and smooth her hand over my head, saying “Why, Miss Haven, you’re just no bigger than a minute.” I was compact at six, able to fit neatly into small places that now were inaccessible: under the crook of an arm, in the palm of a hand. At five-eleven and counting, I no longer had the sense that someone like Mrs. Thomas could neatly enclose me if danger should strike. I was all bony elbows and acute angles, like a jigsaw puzzle piece that can only go in the middle, waiting for the others to fit around it to make it whole.
The church was filling up with people, which wasn’t surprising: my father is the kind of person who knows everybody, somehow. Mac McPhail, sportscaster, beer drinker, teller of tall tales and big lies, the latter being told mostly to my mother in the last few months of the marriage. I can remember sitting in front of the TV watching my father on the local news every night, seeing the sly sideways looks he and Lorna Queen exchanged during the leads into commercial breaks, and still not having any idea that he would leave my mother for this woman best known for her short skirts and pouty-lipped way of saying “upper-level disturbance.” She didn’t know the half of it. There had been no disturbance before like the one that hit our house the day my father came home from the station, sat my mother down at the kitchen table right under the vent that leads to the floor beneath the counter in my bathroom, and dropped the bomb that he’d fallen hard for the Weather Pet. I sat on the side of my tub, toothbrush in hand, and wished the house had been designed differently so I wouldn’t have been privy to this most painful of moments. My mother was silent for a long time, my father’s voice the only one wafting up through the floor, explaining how he couldn’t help it, didn’t want to lie anymore, had to come clean, all of this with his booming sportscaster voice, so agile at curving around scores and highlights, stumbling over the simple truth that his marriage was over. My mother started crying, finally, and then told him to leave in a quiet, steady voice that made the room seem suddenly colder. Two weeks later he had moved into the Weather Pet’s condo. He met me and Ashley for lunch each Saturday and took us to the beach every other weekend, spending too much money and trying to explain everything by putting his arm around my shoulder, squeezing, and sighing aloud.
But that had been a year and a half ago, and now here it was wedding day, the first wedding I was dreading this summer. We walked into the lobby of the church and were immediately gathered up in the large arms of my aunt Ree, who was representing the bulk of my father’s side of the family, most of whom were still upset about the divorce and sided with my mother, family loyalty notwithstanding. But Aunt Ree was ample enough to represent everyone in her flowing pink muumuu, a corsage the size of a small bush pinned to her chest.
“Haven, you come over here and give your aunt Ree some sugar.” She squashed me against her, and I could feel the flowers poking into my skin. She’d clamped Ashley in her other arm, somehow getting her away from Lewis, and hugged us both as tightly together as if she was trying to consolidate us into one person. “And Ashley, this should all seem pretty familiar to you. When’s your big day again?”
“August nineteenth,” Lewis said quickly. I wondered if that was the answer he gave to any question now. It was what I usually said.
Aunt Ree pushed me back, holding me by both arms as Ashley made a quick dash back to Lewis. “Now you are just growing like a weed, I swear to God. Look at you. How tall are you?”
I smiled, fighting the urge to slouch. “Too tall.”
“No such thing.” She tightened her grip on my arm. “You can never be too tall or too thin. That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“It’s too rich or too thin.” Ashley said. Leave it to my short, curvy sister to correct even a misworded compliment.
“Whatever,” Aunt Ree said. “You’re beautiful, anyway. But we’re running late and the bride is a mess. We’ve got to go find you your bouquets.”
Ashley kissed Lewis and clung to him for a few more seconds before following me and Aunt Ree through the masses of perfumed wedding guests to a side door that led into a big room with bookcases covering all four walls. Lorna Queen was sitting at a table in the corner, a makeup mirror facing her, with some woman hovering around picking at her hair with a long comb.
“We’re here!” Aunt Ree said in a singsong voice, presenting us in all of our pink as if she’d created us herself. “And just in time.”
Lorna Queen was a beautiful woman. As she turned in her seat to face us, I realized that again, just as I always did when I watched her doing her forecasts in her short skirts with color-coordinated lipsticks. She was pert and perfect and had the tiniest little ears I’d ever seen on anyone. She kept them covered most of the time, but once at the beach I’d seen her with her hair pulled back, with those ears like seashells molded against her skin. I’d always wondered if she heard like the rest of us or if the world sounded different through such small receptors.
“Hi, girls.” She smiled at us and dabbed her eyes with a neatly folded Kleenex. “Y’all look beautiful.”
“Are you okay?” Ashley asked her.