Cover

Dedication

For JCC

Who always had a cocktail napkin for every glass

Part One

From the Website of Dearly Beloveds and Betrotheds

From the Website of Dearly Beloveds and Betrotheds

Dear B & Bs . . .

As wedding season approaches and families are aflutter, it’s time for my annual column directed at Mothers of the Bride (MOBs) and Mothers of the Groom (MOGs). Think of this as the ultimate public service performed by your Aunt B. You’re so welcome. My goal is to make every wedding a joyous and heartfelt celebration, filled with goodwill toward all. Add in a few lovely touches, some good behavior, and plenty of cake and you have the makings of a memorable day. If you can just keep your mouth zipped about every little thing. In other words, pull it together for one single day, MOBs and MOGs, and everyone at the wedding will benefit. How hard could that be? As you know, my motto in all things is “Propriety first.”

I think of these nuggets of wisdom not as rules, but as wishes. My wishes for you, Mothers and Others who care, so you can be your best self throughout the process. But a gentle reminder that while my position has evolved over the past thirty years of writing about all aspects of matrimony, much as weddings themselves have evolved from a spectacle with well-known standards and traditions to a free-for-all of personal expression, one idea remains steadfast: Dear MOBs and MOGs, this is not your wedding.

Big Kiss & Wedding Bliss,

Your Aunt B

Chapter 1
The Call

The Mother of the Bride

“Mom! It’s me. It’s us. Sorry to call so early there. I have some news.”

News! Despite the early hour in Montecito, California, Alexa Diamandis was all ears. Could Penny be pregnant? Please, let it be that. “Give me two minutes. I need my coffee,” she said to her only daughter while positioning the tablet on a stand in the kitchen, as she did every morning to take video calls from all over the world. Her family lived in Greece. Her friends lived in England. And her business was travel. She was used to early-morning conversations in her small but airy California kitchen. It was why she rose at five most mornings and put on her face first thing, at least a modified version of her face. Moisturizer, a light coat of foundation, a swipe of mascara and lip gloss. She even had a rotating collection of velour tracksuits that worked well on camera, like the soft pink one she was wearing now. But first, coffee.

Alexa worked the magic of the espresso maker, grinding, pounding, pulling, and steaming until the dark elixir dripped into her tiny cup. Her morning routine started with a quick shot, followed by a more leisurely cappuccino. She loved this gleaming machine as much as she’d ever loved any object and most people. Except Penny, her daughter, the light of her life despite being her complete opposite in personality and preferences. A grandchild would be a tiebreaker of sorts, Alexa thought. “Hold on, I’m almost done.”

Alexa’s back was turned to the camera, but she heard her daughter laugh and then explain. “She’s a fiend about the coffee. She’s Greek; she doesn’t function without it. Give her a minute.” A man’s voice answered back, something about how they should have waited to call.

Alexa didn’t turn, but she knew it must be the boyfriend. Chris? Chess? Ah, Chase! Yes, he was a charming guy, the type you do bring home to Mother. She scrolled through her mental files to conjure up an impression of him. She’d only met him once, on layover in New York City, and Penny had brought him to dinner unannounced, disrupting Alexa’s plans for a serious mother-daughter talk about Penny leaving her corporate public relations job and coming back to work for the family business. Instead, it was an evening of first impressions and impressing, everyone at the table aware of the stakes. From the moment she met him, Alexa knew he was a serious contender for Penny’s heart.

Chase looked to be every bit a Chase, Alexa supposed. Dark hair, normal build, good suit. In politics. As she recalled, he grew up outside the city in suburban Connecticut and now worked for the Mayor of the City of New York, as he said multiple times. He talked about the city like it was a small town and, of course, he worked for the mayor because who else would he work for? Alexa liked him, liked his confidence, liked the way he held the door for her daughter but also let her tell a story without interrupting. This new generation of men had qualities that Alexa admired. They could share the spotlight in a way the men of her generation disdained. Still, did Penny really need him to live a satisfying life?

Funny, when she and Penny talked most afternoons on Penny’s walk home from work, Chase was rarely a topic of conversation. The Diamandis women talked about work, friends and family, the latest celebrities whom Alexa had seen at Bettina, the star-studded pizza place of choice in Montecito, but almost never about men.

But that was fitting, because men had never been a part of their daily life as mother and daughter. One thing she knew for sure: Chase and Penny would make handsome babies. She swallowed down the single shot of espresso and went to work on the cappuccino.

“Steaming milk now,” Alexa called over her shoulder to the couple in her pan-Euro accent, an asset in a town like Montecito, a Pacific Coast gem with European aspirations. The Positano of California. Over her decades as a resident of the hamlet, she’d used her background as part of her brand, working with clients to plan their dream vacations in the Greek isles or the Amalfi Coast. Her gentle Mediterranean lilt informed by a British university education had served her well in this sophisticated beach town. So had her hustle. It’s why she needed her coffee. Steam, press, pour, foam, layer. Perfect.

Turning with cup in hand, Alexa positioned herself at the marble-topped island, a spot she knew had great morning lighting that blew out her wrinkles on camera. “Now I’m human. Tell me your news!”

Penny, lovely Penny, who with her olive skin and green eyes didn’t need good lighting to look stunning. She’d been blessed with favorable genetics and a strong sense of self that shaped her style. Even on a Sunday morning, she looked pulled together, polished, in a white linen shirt, small gold earrings and necklace, and her hair swept up in a messy bun. A swipe of color popped her smile. No filter needed. The couple appeared to be huddled together on Penny’s couch in her Upper East Side apartment. Alexa recognized the art on the wall, the work of a painter on Patmos, her own birthplace and the island where Penny spent most of her summers. The slashes of blue and pink in the painting brought a little bit of the Dodecanese to Manhattan. It soothed Alexa.

“Are you sitting down?” Penny asked dramatically as she held up her left hand. “We’re engaged! Isn’t it gorgeous?” She thrust her ring into the camera. It was a stunning light-blue square-cut gem surrounded by baguettes of a light-pink stone. Sparkly and special, like her daughter. Like the painting. But Alexa refused to get weepy. Or swept away. She stayed as pragmatic as ever. “Is that an aquamarine?”

“Yes, three carats with tourmaline baguettes. No blood diamonds for us,” Chase said, looking satisfied and proud of both the rock and his newly acquired vocabulary. “The mayor knows a guy.”

“Chase picked it out all by himself!” Penny said, as if this act alone made him marriage worthy. But did it? He had failed, Alexa noted to herself, to inform her of the proposal. It wasn’t as if she expected him to ask for Penny’s hand in marriage like it was the Middle Ages. And she didn’t want to react like her own Greek father might have at the slight, with a torrent of patriarchal language and a curse on Chase’s family. But some sort of advance notice would have been appreciated. She would cope with that slight later.

Penny continued because that was the purpose of the call: to tell the story. “He got down on one knee at the top of the Empire State Building. The lights of the city were amazing. Nobody else was there. It was so romantic, Mom.”

Alexa knew she needed to react in exactly the right way, or her daughter would never let her forget it. She had one chance to get this right. That was the tricky part about being an only parent: Her reaction was the only reaction. There was no backup, nobody to smooth out the rough spots, to fill in when she failed. She willed herself to smile and raised her voice half an octave. “How thrilling. Wonderful for you both. Do we need to talk about your plans now?”

She hoped not.

This was so unexpected, and she had so much on her schedule for the rest of the year. A long engagement would be ideal, twelve or maybe even eighteen months. And maybe Penny would want to get married on Patmos at her family’s hotel. It would be practically free. And then the happy couple could have a long honeymoon somewhere she could use her connections to get them a good deal, like Croatia, even though the service was terrible there. “Do you have a date yet? Or a place?”

“We can follow up on that next week, Mom,” Penny answered like a pro. Alexa knew her daughter worked the calendar months in advance, planning five steps out while everybody else was still on square one. It was what made them both so good at their jobs, and, Alexa thought, at their lives. “We want to enjoy the engagement for a bit.”

“A lot of it will depend on our work schedules,” Chase added, to Alexa’s satisfaction.

“Whatever you two decide will be the right thing, I’m sure,” Alexa said, a line she had heard one of her friends use with her adult children. She didn’t believe it, but she was committed to selling the sentiment. She lifted her coffee mug in a toast. “Welcome to our family, Chase.” She even choked up a bit as she said that last part.

Of course she did. Because what Alexa Diamandis was really thinking was, why on earth would anyone ever get married at all?

Chapter 2
The Call

The Mother of the Groom

“Mom. Mom? Are you there?”

“Hello? Hello? Chase, is that you? Wait, what button did I hit? Did you call me? Or did I call you?” Abigail Blakeman asked, then pulled her phone away from her ear to stare at it. It was new. Not the latest version, of course, because those were expensive and complicated and really more computer than phone. She bought the reasonably priced older version, which would soon be obsolete. It seemed smaller than her last phone. Or her eyes were rapidly deteriorating. Or her joints were swelling. Either way, she was constantly dialing people she didn’t want to speak to and hanging up on people she did want to talk to. She missed landlines.

“I called you, Mom.”

“Well, that’s nice.” And surprising on a Sunday morning. Her eldest child, Chase checked in every few weeks, usually when he was in the back of a car stuck in Manhattan traffic en route to a meeting. The tactic ensured that the call was no more than seven minutes, half of which was Chase giving instructions to the driver. The other half was Chase apologizing for being so busy that he hadn’t had time to call.

Chase was the chief of staff for the Mayor of the City of New York, Timothy “Timmo” Lynch. It was an impressive title and an impressive accomplishment for a B student who’d just turned thirty. Abigail couldn’t stand the mayor even though he was a well-respected Independent who was fiscally conservative and socially progressive. An Irish immigrant, the son of a construction worker and a schoolteacher, young Mayor Lynch had used his University of Galway education, street smarts, and charm to make his way to Harvard for an MBA, then to New York City to build a financial empire. When Timmo decided to trade in his career in finance for a career in politics, the voters fell for this naturalized US citizen with his Irish accent and Gabriel Byrne looks.

Abigail thought the mayor was smug, too charismatic for his own good. And Chase had picked up the same skills, the easy conversation with everyone from world leaders to old ladies, the ability to break down complex ideas into simple, digestible chunks of information. Her son had even started dressing like his boss, in handmade suits when Brooks Brothers’ ready-made suits were perfectly fine. She loved Chase, but she wished he’d find another line of work, maybe even one where no one knew his name. Politics could be so tawdry. You could get dragged through the mud through no fault of your own. Or just a tiny little fault of your own. Why couldn’t he have a high-powered career and make gobs of money, but in something not so objectionable? Like law.

“Are you and Dad around today?”

“I am. Puttering in the garden,” Abigail lied. In truth, she was drinking coffee and staring out the window at the sailboats bobbing on their moorings, using the first weekend of the summer season as an excuse to skip church. It was a blue-sky Connecticut day in Fair Harbor. She might rally and do a little weeding later, but for now, she was content to do nothing. “Your father’s golfing.”

“Penny and I thought we might come out for the afternoon. To stop by. There’s something I want to tell you.”

Immediately, Abigail had two thoughts. The first: I wish I had spent the money on that gazpacho at Nutmeg, the specialty market. The second: He’s finally getting out of politics and going to law school. “We’d love to see you. For lunch?” she asked cautiously.

“No, we’ll arrive around two. Penny and I will take the train out and then walk to the house.”

Abigail was relieved about the lunch. She really didn’t keep company food in the house anymore. “Wonderful. Your father should be home from the club around then and do his usual, fall asleep on the couch while watching more golf. Sarah might even be home. She’s teaching some sort of clinic or something this morning.” That was it, the totality of the Blakeman family: Abigail Ellsworth Blakeman, sixty-five, mother of two, former private school development person, now working the front desk for minimum wage at the senior center; George Blakeman, late sixties, former stockbroker forced out under suspicious circumstances and for overall underperformance, now a competitive bridge player; and Sarah Ellsworth Blakeman, twenty-seven, living at home, the health teacher and head coach of the junior varsity field hockey team at Fair Harbor High School, unattached and uninterested in men or women. All co-residing in the circa-1834 center-hall Colonial on the water in a small, picturesque village on the Gold Coast. Travel sites called it the Nantucket of Connecticut.

Only Chase had escaped to Manhattan, forty miles down I-95 and a world away. “We’ll see you then, Mom. Thanks.”

“Love you.” She did.

“You too, Mama,” Chase said in return, like he always did.

*  *  *

Four hours later, after Abigail had done a quick cleanup, made fresh iced tea, and defrosted some brownies from the Mother’s Day gift basket her son had sent after missing brunch, changed into a linen shift dress, applied sunscreen, and arranged some of the early blooms of her showstopping blue hydrangeas in a pewter pitcher, Chase burst through the back door with Penny in tow. He added energy everywhere he went, and this bolt lit up Chez Blakeman. “Hey, we’re here.”

“Wake up,” Abigail hissed at George as she made her way through the house from the patio. He was sound asleep and still in his golf clothes.

“I’m awake,” he insisted, as if a second ago he hadn’t been snoring.

Abigail shook her head and made her way to the kitchen—the new kitchen, is how she thought of it, even though the remodel had been during the first term of the second Bush administration. “You came in through the back door!”

“Since when are we allowed to come in through the front door?”

“Guests are allowed in through the front door,” Abigail said, nodding at Penny, who was even more striking than she remembered with her dark hair, olive complexion, and bright eyes. Abigail expected all California girls to be blond and bikini’d. But Penny was wrapped in layers of sophistication, with her floral maxi dress, espadrilles with ankle ties, and the silk scarf in her hair. She didn’t look like the preppy girls from Fair Harbor whom Chase had dated in high school. Nothing like them at all, which Abigail took personally.

“Good to see you again, Penny,” Abigail said, extending a hand. She’d only met the girl a few times; it didn’t seem like a hug-and-kiss situation.

Penny swapped a bag of bagels into her other hand to shake properly. “Thank you for having us.”

Thank you for having us? This is Chase’s house. He’s not the guest, you are, Abigail thought. “You brought my favorite bagels. I look forward to breakfast tomorrow. Though I limit myself to only half a bagel at a time.”

Chase came in for a proper hug and said to his mother, “One day you should really go for it, Mom. Cut loose and have a whole bagel.”

“Your mother looks amazing, Chase. She should keep doing what she’s doing. No carb shaming! Right, Mrs. Blakeman?” You can take the girl out of California, but you can’t take the California out of the girl.

“Thank you,” Abigail said, thinking about whether now was a good time to invite Penny to call her by her first name and then deciding against it. She wanted to remain Mrs. Blakeman until she knew exactly where this relationship was going. “Why don’t we go out on the porch? There are drinks and brownies out there.”

“We just finished lunch,” Chase said. “We grabbed some food at Nutmeg’s and then ate it at the park. I don’t think we’re hungry, are we?”

“We can take a brownie for the train ride back,” Penny suggested.

Abigail tried hard not show her disappointment. They ate in the public park instead of accepting her lunch invitation, albeit a tepid one? And now they were going to take her Mother’s Day brownies to eat on Metro North? Who ate on Metro North? Again, Abigail dug deep. “Wonderful plan.”

*  *  *

The patio off the back of the house, overlooking the harbor, was a point of pride for Abigail. The blue-gray slate. The white vintage Brown Jordan furniture that she maintained herself because the professional refinishers were a fortune. The multitude of Gertrude Jekyll pink rosebushes surrounding the enclosure. And the view! The view led the eye down the rocky slope to the water and out across the harbor to the vibrant marsh on the other side. When visitors exclaimed that it was “a million-dollar view,” George always responded, “Let’s hope it’s a three-million-dollar view.” And there was knowing laughter all around.

Not only did Abigail hope, but she also prayed it was a three-million-dollar view. Every night.

“Do you want something stronger than iced tea?” George asked, alert and awake now, even though he was still in his pink golf shirt and lime-green shorts.

“Not right now,” Chase said, giving his sister, Sarah, a hug. She had arrived on the scene, fresh from the field hockey pitch. It didn’t matter what time of year it was; for Sarah, it was always field hockey season. “You reek,” Chase teased.

She put up her hands in an inviting gesture. “You want to see if you can do more burpees than me? Let’s go. In the grass. I am the champion of my league team, which is coed.” Nothing got Sarah more fired up than a squat thrust competition. Abigail hoped that someday, somewhere, someone would appreciate those thigh muscles.

“Sit, sit!” George instructed, and the entire group did as they were told. It was a lovely view. “What brings you out on a Sunday afternoon?”

“We have something to tell you,” Chase announced, then reached for Penny’s hand. “Last night I asked Penny to marry me and she said yes.” Chase could not have looked more pleased and Penny could not have looked more radiant. The announcement was more of a proclamation than an announcement. The mutual adoration seeped out of their pores. If love was a scent, these two would reek.

“Congratulations!” Sarah shouted, jumping up and moving to embrace the happy couple. “I’ll finally have a sister!”

George followed suit with some generic words of encouragement and went off to get a bottle of champagne.

Chase and Penny turned to look at Abigail at the same time, all anticipation. She knew that this response would set the tone for the rest of her relationship with her future daughter-in-law. And still, she couldn’t help herself. “So, you’re not going to law school?”

*  *  *

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