Going to the Chapel Read Free Page A

says loyally. She looks Doug in the eye. “Any man should be happy to be your date—it’s a privilege, not some dreaded commitment hanging around your neck.”
    Doug swallows nervously and then stands up. “I think I’ll go outside and check my cell phone—maybe I…ah…got a message from work.” Doug glances over at me with a tight-lipped smile. “If they need me at thehospital, maybe…ah…you were going to ride back with Cassie anyway, weren’t you?”
    I smile right back at him. And, I don’t show any teeth, either.
    The coward. He doesn’t even wait for me to finish my smile before he slinks away. Unless I miss my guess, he’ll pile one of those little paper plates high with some of those crab-stuffed mushrooms that have just arrived and then head out to his car. I doubt he even looks at his cell phone. I would have expected more fortitude from a man who wanted to plunge into ice water.
    “You’re still good with me getting a ride home with you?” I ask Cassie.
    “Of course.”
    Going home with Cassie makes sense anyway. I’ve been staying with her in her apartment in Hollywood ever since I got laid off from my job at the bank in Blythe six weeks ago. Outside of Aunt Inga, the one person I can always count on in my life is Cassie. I thought she was my cousin when I first met her. The whole town of Blythe, or as much of it as I knew in my five-year-old world, seemed to be related to me so I just assumed she was, too. I was really quite pleased when I discovered she wasn’t a cousin, but was prepared to be my friend instead.
    My cousins weren’t always that nice to me.
    My mother explained to me that the reason my cousins weren’t always nice to me was because I’m a black sheep. Being a black sheep is hereditary in our part of the family, she told me. Just the way she said it made me feel important. I was fine with being a black sheep if it made me more like my mother.
    My mother said that she was the original black sheep. She was born to that role simply because she had a different mother than the aunts. My grandfather married my grandmother ten years after his first wife, the aunts’ mother, had died.
    The aunts’ parents had both emigrated from Norway and the aunts thought that, if their father did remarry, it would be to an older Norwegian woman like their mother. They never expected him to marry a young beautiful American woman like my grandmother.
    To make it even worse, my grandmother didn’t know how to cook anything, let alone anything Norwegian. She’d never heard of lefse or lamb and cabbage stew or any of the foods that the aunts’ mother had cooked. She didn’t know how to darn a sock. Or kill potato bugs. I’m sure the aunts could give you the complete list of what she couldn’t do.
    What my grandmother could do was wear a scarf in a hundred ways and she had a hatbox filled with sheer floating scarves. If the aunts saw anyone dress up, it was on a Sunday. They were shocked when my grandmother wore her scarves every day of the week, but my grandmother said a woman needed to live her life with flair.
    I’ve often wondered what my mother’s life would have been like if my grandmother hadn’t died when my mother was nine years old. The aunts raised my mother after that. The aunts took good care of my mother even if my mother said that Aunt Ruth was forever calling her a half sister. It made my mother feel as though she was halfway in the family and halfway out of it. She didn’t like it.
    My mother was seventeen when she met my father. She left high school and married him a few months after meeting him. My mother had seven years with my father and then he died, too.
    When that happened, my mother told me later that she hadn’t known what to do so she went to Aunt Ruth. My mother had never held a job in her life and Aunt Ruth told her she’d never find a job, either, because, as Aunt Ruth apparently saw it, my mother was just like my grandmother and so it was pointless to