The First Wedding: Saturday, 11:00 am
I heard Tom’s car enter his driveway as I helped Mary prepare for her wedding. I was her Maid-of-Honor. I looked out and saw my Mother get out of the car with Tom and walk towards the house. I dashed away from Mary, saying my Mother had arrived and that I’d be right back and rushed down the stairs to greet her. Kerry, though, who had been helping Betty get ready, beat me to it. And when Tom opened the door and waited for my Mother in a dress she must have bought after we left her, to enter the house first, I saw Kerry rush to her and hug her and I followed.
My Mother was treated as an honored guest at the wedding, although there was an undeniable tension in the air. But we made it through and enjoyed the wedding of Mary Elizabeth Nelson to Betty Anne Elliot.
Parties to the First Party
It was a month later. The hug nearly crushed me. I had taken the subway up to 72nd and was in Carol’s apartment just off Broadway and Carol was hugging the breath out of me.
Carol is Kerry’s boss and was my boss when I was a paralegal at Sullivan & Wilson. I came for a cocktail party the firm was holding in Carol’s apartment for the firm’s three Summer associates. Kerry was one of the three.
“I’m so happy for both of you,” Carol, slightly taller than me, was whispering in my ear. I had not seen her since I left the firm for Trallis. I liked the firm, and especially its people, and was instrumental in getting Kerry her Summer associate gig, and their liking her was mutual. Kerry planned on working at the firm after she graduated and took the bar exam. She was a Summer associate at a Big Law firm after the first year and that was enough to convince her she wanted a future with a medium-sized firm with partners like Carol and Tom Sullivan, who were instrumental in my getting my job at Trallis.
We were interrupted by Carol’s wife, Rachel, who said she too was thrilled to see me. I updated them on what I was doing at Trallis, a major Sullivan & Wilson client, and about my Aunt’s wedding. I lowered my voice a smidge when they asked about our wedding and I said, “Between us, we keep hemming and hawing.” I noticed Rachel rolling her eyes as she pointed her head toward her wife, with a “tell me about it” which garnered a slap from said wife.
Just then, I looked over Carol’s shoulder and I caught my first glimpse of Kerry. She’d not noticed my coming in and seemed deep in conversation with Jordan Miller, an associate for whom I had done some work as a paralegal. He must be a third- or fourth-year associate by now. And as I recalled he tried to hit on me when I worked at the firm.
The two were a bit outside the main circle of people, maybe twenty-five in total, at the party and the two were a bit inside what was an appropriate circle for two professionals. My attention to what Carol was saying flagged and Rachel noticed, turning to see what my eyes were burning a hole in and then Carol turned to see what we were looking at. The conversation stopped, and they both turned back to me.
Rachel asked, “Can I show you the apartment?” and I half-heartedly followed. It was a nice place, a four-bedroom in a pre-War building—someone was doing well for herself—and a large living room that looked down across the small park and subway kiosk created where Broadway crosses Amsterdam and then to the south towards Columbus Circle.
Nice modernized kitchen, abuzz with a caterer’s activity for the party, a den in which a computer station was set up and with a love seat along one wall, and three bedrooms, one shared by the couple’s two kids—twins at an uncle’s for the evening—one for guests, and the third for Carol and Rachel. It was into this room that Rachel ended the tour.
Rachel was not a lawyer, and she and I were two of the few non-lawyers at the event. She sat me down on the bed and sat next to me.
“If you can get out of your engagement to Kerry, do it. Never marry a lawyer. You end up having to go to parties like this.”
“A little late for that. You do know I did finish one year in law school.”
“I heard. You leaving just confirms my opinion that you are the smart half of the pair-of-you.”
Rachel diverted my attention from my seeing Kerry and Jordan until Kerry came in and Rachel quickly excused herself. Kerry leaned over to kiss me but I turned my head in time so that she only got my cheek.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Really.” Carol, she said, had gone up to her and Jordan and asked to have a word with her. She went with Carol into the kitchen where amid the chaos Carol was blunt: “What are you doing?” To Kerry’s asking what Carol was talking about: “I’m talking about how close, how inappropriately close you and Jordan were to one another. That’s what I’m talking about. You freaked Suzanne out.”
According to Kerry, she had no idea what Carol was going on about. She and Jordan were discussing and disagreeing about a brief they were both working on. “That’s it.”