Matthew smiled, too, then frowned a little anxiously. “She is joking, right?” he clarified—with Emma’s family, he was not always entirely sure.
“I’m pretty sure she is.” Nor, now that she thought of it, was Emma. Emma occasionally wondered just how it had come about that such a practical and sensible person as she was had emerged from the Atwater household. “It’s hard to tell, sometimes,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t matter because she’s not the one in charge, is she? I am, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it.”
“Of course you are,” said Matthew, smiling at her with quiet pride: a practical man himself, he took considerable pleasure in his fiancée’s administrational skill. “You were always going to. If anyone in your family can organize a wedding, it’s you. I worry about Sophie’s husband, though, whoever he is. If that’s her idea of a wedding, I hope he’s a rich man.”
“If he isn’t, she’ll decide it’s the height of romance to trip down the aisle wearing something from the Oxfam shop,” said Emma. “Sophie’ll be okay, she always is.” She frowned a little. “I wish Lulu would find someone nice, though,” she added. “We’re not allowed to talk about it, but I know she’d like to.”
Unwisely, Matthew allowed himself a snort.
“Now, I’d really worry about him,” he commented.
“Hey.” Emma had made it plain early on that, while she and Sophie were allowed to criticize Lulu on occasion, no one else was, and most particularly no one male.
“Sorry. Can I help it if you’re my favorite?”
“What, not Mom?” Matthew and Fee were particularly good friends. Emma smiled at her boyfriend, forgiving him, splashed milk into the last of her coffee, and rose, stretching luxuriously in the sunshine and savoring the brush of her cotton skirt against her summer-bare legs, to replace the bottle in the fridge.
“It’s louder,” she said.
“Saturday,” said Matthew.
“Can’t wait.”
Closing the fridge door, Emma smiled again secretly to herself, overhearing their own conversation as a stranger might, impenetrable to the rest of the world, but to them and only them a crystal-clear update on the hum in their elderly fridge, which they were planning to replace, with a sensibly priced model they had already selected at John Lewis, their favorite shop for such purposes, at the end of the following week, when Matthew’s next paycheck would have brought up to budget the account they had established for such expenditures. It was the sort of conversation she loved to have with Matthew, the sort of conversation that grown-up couples had with each other, expressing quietly but unmistakably their domestic stability, their shared priorities, their good sense with practical matters like money.
“Mom’s funny about the wedding,” she said, sitting down again. “She keeps peering at me like a professor studying some little-known Aboriginal tribe and asking things like, Would it be better luck or worse if your borrowed thing was also blue, and what would happen if you forgot to give it back afterwards.” Fee and David had been married by a Native American shaman on a beach in Rhode Island, with readings from The Prophet and plaited twine for rings; the ceremony had not been considered legal by the British immigration authorities, and they had later been required to perform another in a registry office in order to qualify Fee for citizenship. “She seems to be happy for me, though. Even though weddings aren’t necessarily her sort of thing.”