“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.
“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head. He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk! He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos. He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo. And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her. That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house. Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go.”
“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”
“He says it was already dying.”
“Hmm.”
“Merrick and her bridesmaids have to get dressed at crack of dawn on her wedding day because taking those two photos is going to use up so much time,” Dane said. “Mrs. Whitshank says he’ll make Merrick late for her own wedding.”
“And those full-length skirts! They’ll get all leafy and twiggy!”
“Mr. Whitshank claims they won’t. He’s laying white carpet down the whole walk, and then extra on the sides near the house where the bridesmaids are going to stand.”
Abby looked at Dane with her mouth open. Behind his dark glasses, he gave no hint what he thought of this plan.
“I’m surprised Merrick’s going along with it,” she told him.
“Oh, well, you know Mr. Whitshank,” Dane said.
Abby didn’t, in fact, know Mr. Whitshank at all. (Mrs. Whitshank was the one she was fond of.) She had the impression, though, that he was a man of strong opinions.
They passed the church where the wedding would take place in six more days. People were heading toward it in clusters, perhaps for Sunday school or an early service—the women and girls in pastels and flower-laden hats and white gloves, the men and boys in suits. Abby looked for Merrick, but she didn’t see her. It was Dane’s church too, not that he ever seemed to attend.
Abby had known Dane, at least by sight, since her early teens, but they hadn’t gotten together till this past May, her first week home from college. She’d run into Red Whitshank one evening in the ticket line at the Senator, and he had two of his friends with him, one of them Dane Quinn. And Abby was with two of her friends; it had all worked out very neatly. Possibly Red had been hoping to sit next to her in the theater (it was common knowledge that he had a little crush on her), but she took one glance at Dane, at his forbidding scowl and his defensively hunched shoulders, and then stepped between him and her friend Ruth like the most brazen hussy (as Ruth said teasingly later). Something just came over her; she felt pulled to him. She liked his edginess, his wariness, his obvious grudge against the universe. Not to mention his good looks. Well, everyone knew his story. He’d been a standard-issue Gilman boy who went on to Princeton, like his father and both grandfathers before him, but just this past September—the start of his junior year—his mother had up and left his father and gone to live in Hunt Valley with the man who boarded her quarter horse. And as soon as Dane heard about it, he’d dropped out of school and come home. First he moped around the house but eventually, at his father’s insistence, he got a job of some sort at Stephenson Savings & Loan. (Bertie Stephenson had been his father’s college roommate.) He never talked about his mother; he iced over at any mention of her, but that just proved to Abby how deeply hurt he must be. Abby had a special fondness for people who tried to hide the damage. He became her newest worthy cause. She flung herself at him, worked to bring him out of himself, zeroed in on him at every gathering, wouldn’t take no for an answer. But no was his answer, at first. He stood around separate from the others and drank too much and smoked too much and made sullen one-word responses to her most sympathetic remarks. Then one evening—on Red Whitshank’s front porch, as it happened—he turned on her almost threateningly and backed her against the wall and said, “I want to know why you keep hanging around me.”
She could have offered any number of good reasons. She could have said it was because of his obvious unhappiness, or her conviction that she could make a difference in his life. But what she said was, “Because of that up-and-down groove between your nose and your upper lip.”
He said, “What?”
“Because your hair falls down all shaggy as if you’re a little bit crazy.”
He blinked and took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.