Page 8 of A Complicated Bride

“That’s very healthy of you.”

“Of course. It’s all about the mental health.” I laughed too and surprised myself at how damn healthy I felt at that moment with my heart pumping away and my blood coursing along at a very healthy rate.

I dressed in blue jean cut-offs saved from being cliché by the emerald green silk tank top.

“You sure you want to risk spit up on silk?”

I stepped down the stairs with more lightness than I’d felt in …. Months if I were being conservative.

“It’s the best I could do. If you must know, this bag was pre-packed for my honeymoon.”

Saying the words didn’t hurt me as much as it should have. Maybe a slight palpitation and a squinch of a sharp abdominal pain.

To Julie’s credit, she didn’t stop until she reached the bottom and then turned to catch me in another hug when I reached her.

“It’s okay. Really.”

“If not, it will be before you leave here,” she said.

I felt the promise in those words lift me, and my insides, like a roller coaster because I believed them.

She had a conversation on their way through the kitchen at Uncle Billy—who was my uncle, not hers, but apparently she hadn’t moved forward in their relationship since her mother, Aunt Nora had married him. They agreed to terms on the clean-up and she grabbed her keys and turned to the door.

“What about Brad?” I felt a nervous trill saying his name like a fool keeping his picture under the pillow of my imagination.

“Oh, right.” She paused and licked her lips, looking at me with more thoughtfulness than I thought warranted. We’d already had this discussion. Brad was healthy.

“Before I invite him, let me just say that I love Brad, but he’s subscribes to the revolving door school of dating women. I…never mind. He’s great eye-candy and I know you’re starving.”

“Bet your ass. I’m pathetically famished.”

Uncle Billy harrumphed and when I turned to see him with his arms folded like and looking like Popeye the sailor with the black and gray stubble, big chin and nose and minus the pipe, I smiled because whatever he said would be held in a cartoon bubble.

“You two up to trouble?”

“Of course not,” Julie said. “We’re going home to see the babies. Have you seen Brad? I figured I’d take him along—“

“He went out.”

Of all the things Uncle Billy might of said, I hadn’t predicted those deflating words.

“Any idea where?”

Uncle Billy shook his head and scratched his whiskers in true cartoon Popeye form. I resisted asking him if he ever watched Popeye, maybe that morning.

“Not exactly. But I can make a guess.”

I had no idea what to make of that, but when I turned to Julie I saw without doubt that Julie knew exactly what to make of that.

My not so fair-skinned cousin turned paler than me and then her lips firmed in a look I hadn’t seen since I’d ruined her favorite white dress with chocolate ice cream when we were fourteen. I’d thrown it at her. Our last summer together.

*****

Wherever we were going in the sporty little convertible Mercedes—the kind I dreamed of driving around in wearing oversized sunglasses and a kerchief like Grace Kelly in It Takes a Thief—I knew it wasn’t to the Lamont mansion—to her new home. The mansion—I’d continue calling it that inside my head because that’s what it would always be to me since our childhood summers rowing the boat up behind the sweeping lawns to get a look at the boy—Jack Lamont, Julie’s dream-come-true-husband—was less than a mile down main street from the Inn.

They were headed somewhere else and I’d asked, but I’d swear Julie didn’t even hear me either because they were racing through the air, stirring the noisy wind, or because she was hell bent on scheming something in her head. Whatever she was scheming—and I could see this clearly from vast ancient, but still fresh in my mind experience—I feared for Brad’s safety. Something was not right with this picture and so I ran a few calculations through my head as to what it could possibly be.

It wasn’t hard to come up with the answer to the simple equation of one plus one. Take one revolving-door dating bachelor and add one dear close friend of Julie’s and I came up with the solution. It equals Tammy. They were headed to Tammy’s house because Julie figured that’s where Brad, who must be a self-destructive man if she were right—had gone.

Even I knew Tammy was happily married to a man who knocked the socks off women regularly as well as some men—especially if they were to look at Tammy the wrong way. Rourke was irish through and through and he had a moody tough streak even I spotted from where I sat at their wedding. I shuddered, taking the side of poor doomed Brad. I had no idea why I should feel empathy with him, but I did.

He was going to visit an old flame, a harmless visit, a let-bygones-be bygones and let’s-be-friends visit. It was a leap for me to assume this because Brad had not been invited to Tammy’s wedding after all—I’d have noticed.

But there’d been something about him, something vulnerable I’d sensed. I felt like when I bumped into him I’d experienced one of those Vulcan mind-melds from startrek only it was a soul-meld. I sensed, really felt who he was down to his soul. I hadn’t been at all surprised that Julie said he was a player. I’d already known.

I was really good at feeling people. I had empathy. That’s why I loved acting, playing parts and giving free roam to all those feelings and people I could feel, all those characters I read on the page and saw on the screen felt real to me because I fleshed them out with my own feelings, understood where all the emotion came from in a visceral way.

I sensed people instinctively. I couldn’t tell you how or what they were about in words. It was all an implicit understanding, no explicit words to explain to others. I had to work on that. I wanted to explain it all, I wanted to give my feelings explicit meaning.

Otherwise I feared I’d go through life always feeling too much for others and not expressing myself, not doing what I needed to do for myself.

By the time I worked this all out, made sense of what was going on, Julie screeched the car to a halt at the end of a driveway with a breathtaking view of a lake, attached to a gorgeous contemporary lake house, the kind I’d seen in magazines meant to entice you away for an escape.

Julie jumped from the car and I hurried behind her with the urgency of an EMT.