Did You Ever Have A Family Read Free Page B

fifty or so jelly jars they’d collected after they were engaged. Seemed childish to me, especially since June Reid wasn’t exactly putting her daughter’s wedding together on a shoestring. But who was I to have an opinion? Putting daisies in jelly jars is hardly high-level flower arranging, more like monkey work if you want to know the truth. Still, work is work, and the flower business around here is thin, so you take what you can get.
    The jars were at June’s place, stored in boxes in the old stone shed next to the kitchen. I was supposed to bring the daisies that morning and arrange them on the tables in the tent behind the house once the linens and place settings had been laid. I’d picked them the day before, from the field behind my sister’s house, which is chock-full of the things. I’ve never been much a fan of daisies—they’ve always struck me as bright weeds more than actual flowers. Never mind that they’re cheap, but for a wedding, they’re not appropriate. Roses and lilies and chrysanthemums, even tulips and lilacs if you’re going for something less fancy—but daisies, no.
    I remember when the two of them came into the shop. Hands held, dripping with dew. She looked like her mother, but curvier. June has, at least as far as I can remember, more of a boyish figure. And he was just fine, perfectly handsome, I suppose, in the way that nice, clean-cut boys who went to college can be.
    They were young. That was the strongest impression they made on me. I didn’t think people got married that young anymore. At least not from well-to-do families. Local girls with no plans and knocked up, that’s one thing, but a Vassar girl with a job at a magazine in New York and a law student at Columbia, these are not the types of kids you see rushing willy-nilly to the altar. But they certainly were sweet together and had a cloud of luck and love around them that not only stung a little, old, bitter spinster that I am, but surprised me. That kind of affection is not something you see so much around here. Local couples, even the young ones, are worn-out from two jobs, school schedules, family obligations, and too much debt. And the older ones, with their late mortgage payments to make, propane-gas tanks to be filled, and sons and daughters skipping school and smashing cars and getting in fights at the Tap, are too tired, not to mention too busy performing their roles as jolly country folk on the weekends for the pampered and demanding New Yorkers, spending every last drop of civility and patience on these strangers with none left over for their wives and husbands. The weekenders from the city notonly take the best houses, views, food, and, yes, flowers our little town has to offer, but they take the best of us, too. They arrive at the end of each week texting and calling from trains and cars with their demands—driveways to be plowed, wood to stack, lawns to mow, gutters needing cleaning, kids to be babysat, groceries to be bought, houses to be cleaned, pillows needing fluffing. For some, we even put up their Christmas trees after Thanksgiving and take them away after New Year’s. They never dirty their hands with any of the things the rest of us have to, nor shoulder the actual weight of anything. We can’t bear them and yet we are borne by them. It makes for a testy pact that for the most part works. But every once in a while there are some slips. Like when Cindy Showalter, a waitress at the Owl Inn, spat in the face of an old woman who muttered something insulting under her breath when Cindy did not understand the type of cheese the woman was asking for. Who has ever heard of an Explorer cheese?!? she asked me at church. I shook my head and later went on the Internet to find a cheese called Explorateur, which I’m sure has never been served in any restaurant around here. There was also the fire that broke out in the barn at Holly Farm and killed three horses. No one ever proved it, but we all know it was Mac