Chapter 3
— The Caterer Downstairs
The caterer arrived on a Tuesday morning with a van full of boxes and a clipboard full of questions, and the house turned into a small, cheerful kind of chaos. His name was not one I ever learned to spell, and I will not try to invent it here, because the truth is that I was too busy to remember it. He was a broad-shouldered man with flour on his apron and a voice that carried from the kitchen to the front hall, and he had come to finalize the rehearsal dinner, to walk through the menu one last time and to measure the kitchen for the serving tables. He had brought samples of the bread and the soup and the little cakes Veronica had chosen, and the kitchen smelled of warm butter and fresh herbs by ten o'clock.
"Mr. Langley," he said, shaking my hand, "we need to settle the numbers. How many guests, how many children, how many who cannot eat nuts?"
I did not know the answers to half his questions, because Veronica had kept the lists, so I called her downstairs and she came with her notebook, and for the next hour the two of them talked about portions and plates and the order in which the courses would be served. I stood by the counter and nodded when I was asked to nod, and I signed a paper when I was asked to sign it, and I tried to pay attention to the details of a dinner I had never wanted to plan in the first place. All I had ever wanted was a small wedding, a few friends, a garden full of light. Veronica had wanted something larger, something that would be remembered, and I had given way on most of it because it seemed to matter so much to her.
Poppy was upstairs in her room, playing with her dolls. I could hear her voice through the ceiling, soft and high, telling her dolls a story about a queen who lived in a tree and a girl with brave curls who saved the kingdom. Dolores was downstairs with us, moving between the kitchen and the dining room, counting chairs and checking the tablecloths, and every few minutes she looked up at the ceiling, the way a person does when they are listening for a child they love.
"She is happy up there," Dolores said to me quietly, when the caterer went out to the van for another box. "Let her play. She has been asking about her mother all morning."
"What did she ask?" I said.
"She asked if her mama would have liked the wedding," Dolores said. "I told her yes. I told her your wife would have wanted you to be happy, and that she would have loved to see Poppy in her flower girl dress."
I nodded, and I felt the familiar ache, the one that came whenever Poppy asked about Meredith. I had never lied to her about her mother. I had told her that Meredith had been ill, and that the doctors had done everything they could, and that her mama loved her more than anything in the world and would always be watching over her. Poppy had accepted that with the grave seriousness of a six-year-old, and she had made it her own. She talked to her mother sometimes, when she thought nobody was listening, and she told her about her dolls and her curls and the tree in the garden.
The caterer came back inside with a tray of little cakes, and he asked me to taste one. It was good, sweet and light, and I told him so, and he beamed. Veronica tasted one too, and she asked him to make them a fraction smaller, and to dust them with a little less sugar, and he wrote it down on his clipboard with the air of a man who had heard such requests a hundred times before. The morning went on like that, one small decision after another, and the house filled with the smell of food and the sound of voices, and for a while it felt almost like a celebration.
At noon, the caterer packed up his samples and his clipboard, and he shook my hand again and told me he would see us on the night of the rehearsal dinner. Veronica walked him to the door, and Dolores went upstairs to check on Poppy, and I stayed in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, listening to the house settle back into its usual quiet. I thought about the wedding, and about the days ahead, and I told myself that everything was in order. The dinner was planned. The flowers were ordered. The dress was hanging in the spare room. Poppy was happy upstairs with her dolls, and the sun was shining over the garden, and the tree stood at the far end of the lawn the way it always had.
I did not know that while I had been downstairs tasting cakes and signing papers, the most important thing in my life had been left unguarded. I did not know that Veronica had gone upstairs while the caterer was talking, and that she had gone into Poppy's room with a purpose I would only understand later. I did not know that the next time I saw my daughter, everything would have changed. All I knew was that the kitchen was quiet, and the coffee was warm, and the day seemed ordinary, and ordinary days were the ones I had learned to be grateful for.