The Wedding Read Free

strands. Her long-lashed eyes were gray-blue. Muffin had chestnut hair that looked like burnished bronze after a brushing. Her round, inquiring eyes were dark violet.
    “Daddy,” said Barby contentedly, “you brush better than anybody.”
    “Daddy,” echoed Muffin, “you brush better than anybody.”
    Lute was working expertly, smoothing out the waves, brushing away from Barby’s face whatever stray locks were forming curls on her forehead.
    “That’s just because I’ve done it longer than anybody,” Lute said. “But mothers are the best. You’d be surprised how good mothers are at everything.”
    “Isn’t GiGi our mother?” asked Muffin, who had no idea what a mother really was.
    “Of course not,” Barby said with a weary sigh for Muffin’s ignorance. “She’s our housekeeper.” And Mrs. Jonesreally was just that, Lute having got rid of the one who was something more soon after seeing Shelby.
    “She’s our housekeeper,” Muffin repeated agreeably, though she still didn’t know the difference.
    “Did I ever have a mother?” asked Tina shyly. She was terribly afraid it was a stupid question, that she ought to know the answer. But it had puzzled her all summer to hear the children in the Oval talk about their mothers as if they had always had them.
    Lute was plaiting Barby’s hair now, weaving it into two tight braids. If before the day’s end her hair, or her sisters’, cascaded free, adding allurement to the beauty of their faces, at least Lute was trying to teach them modesty.
    “All of you had mothers,” he said to Tina, making his voice very matter-of-fact.
    “Where are they?” asked Muffin in surprise, involuntarily looking around, half expecting they must be somewhere.
    “They’re divorced,” said Barby calmly, not knowing that was a sad thing for a child to say.
    “They’re divorced,” said Muffin happily, pleased that she had learned a new word.
    “What does that mean?” Tina demanded. She did not want it to mean that they were dead, just when she was finding out that anybody could have one.
    “That means Daddy wanted us and they didn’t,” said Barby, not minding.
    Lute tweaked Barby’s braids, the signal that he was through with her and ready for Tina. She and Tina shifted places, crawling over Lute like puppies.
    He settled Tina between his knees. Reflectively he rubbed the back of the hairbrush along his nose, trying to figure out how to explain.
    “It doesn’t mean they didn’t want you, mothers always want their babies. It means that when a mother and father get a divorce they can’t divide the baby, so they have to draw straws. I was always lucky enough to draw the long straw.”
    “How many divorces did we have?” asked Tina, not sure she approved of them.
    “Well, going on three,” Lute said, trying to make them sound like perfectly normal happenings.
    “Three,” said Tina wonderingly. “Three divorces and three mothers.” Next door there were three children and only one mother for all of them. Somehow she liked that arrangement. She knew that she would have hated it if she and Barby and Muffin had had three fathers. It was better to have just one of each. Except that they didn’t have even one mother, for all that once there had been three. She wondered if Barby wanted a mother. Muffin never wanted anything but dolls so that she could boss them the way the housekeepers bossed her. But if Barby wanted a mother, maybe Daddy would do something about it. Daddy always said Barby had the most sense.
    But Barby would never want a mother. She knew about mothers. They cried. She could not remember the face of her mother, but vividly, chillingly, she remembered the sound of her sobbing and, after her, Tina’s mother’s wilder sobbing, and now the one Daddy called Delia, who was probably Muffin’s mother, because in the night she sobbed too.
    She said bluntly, before Tina could even ask, “I don’tlike mothers. They make me nervous. They cry too much. They