“Chin up. Your great-grandmother never took no for an answer. Neither will you.”
She laughed. “Channel your inner Gladys.”
“Exactly!”
The light flickered off her calm face then, and I said, “Julia, is that what’s bothering you? Facing Professor Winchester? Or is it the veil?”
She just shrugged, and I realized then that this absurd obsession was more about Julia’s ruined wedding day than it would ever be about the veil.
To bolster her spirits, I said, “We might be in possession of the Vanderbilt veil! What’s more marvelous than that? Old ladies don’t get that many adventures. We have to capitalize on each of them.”
“Babs! We might be fugitives! We could be in possession of a priceless family heirloom that doesn’t belong to us!”
I blew air from between my lips. “Julia, yes, the veils sort of look alike, but so what?”
“I just have this… feeling.” She tucked her legs up under her and turned to face me. “What else do you remember about the veil, Babs? What else did Gran say about how she got it?”
I closed my eyes and squinted, trying to remember. That’s usually not a great tactic. The faster you run toward the thought, the more quickly it runs away. “Mother always said that Daddy proposed to her, and she didn’t know what to do. She felt incredibly conflicted and wasn’t sure if a life with him was the right choice. And then she came across a woman who gave her a wedding veil.”
I could feel my brow furrow. It wasn’t that great of a story when you got right down to it. And my mother was the world’s best storyteller, so I had to be forgetting something.
“Why would a random woman give Gran a wedding veil?”
“A Russian woman,” I added.
“How can I wear that wedding veil in good conscience one day without knowing its true origin? How can I walk down the aisle in this veil that has totally changed for me now?”
I sighed. “You’re thinking of this all wrong. How can you not walk down the aisle in the stunning and blessed veil of your great-grandmother and possibly the Vanderbilts?”
A tiny smile played on her lips. “It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?” she whispered.
I said nothing, only smiled. I had no intention of ever getting rid of that veil that had become a symbol for my family of all we had been through, all we had fought for. It was a symbol of my parents’ happy life that almost wasn’t, my glorious years with my husband. There was something magical in that veil, something sacred. Something ours.
I thought of when I’d worn that veil to marry my dear departed Reid, of all the memories we’d made together. The births of our beautiful girls, saving and scrimping to buy our first house, our annual mountain trips, and the time we went to Morocco for a taste of another life. I loved him so much. But Reid could never come back to me.
Miles, on the other hand, was here. He was alive and well. And, though he hadn’t said it in as many words, I knew he was offering me a shot at another love to carry me through until the end. There was, of course, always the chance that I would have to mourn his loss too. But I’d be mourning him whether we were together or not. If I was honest, I had fled like my mother because Miles was getting too close. I had escaped to sort out in my head what my heart already knew.
“I think we need wine to really figure this out,” Julia said, interrupting my thoughts.
As she walked into the tiny kitchen of the open-concept cabin Reid and I had enjoyed for so many years, I wondered: Would I never return to Miles? Or, like my mother, would our temporary separation reveal a deeper truth—that we were meant to be? I looked over at Julia. And what in the world would the future hold for her, the next generation?
“Hey, Babs?” she called from the kitchen.
She reappeared, handing me a glass of wine, and sat beside me on the sofa, curling her legs up under her again. “Do you remember that day I got in trouble in seventh grade, when Mom brought me over to do the dishes from your book club meeting as punishment?”
“Oh, you poor thing. All those china plates and crystal glasses. What did you do? I don’t remember.”
She crossed her arms. “It wasn’t my fault, Babs. A friend asked me to pass a note to her boyfriend but I got caught with it, so I got detention.”
I laughed at how incensed she was over the whole thing, even now.
“Mom didn’t believe that it wasn’t my note.”
I squeezed her knee. “But I did. I believed you.”
She nodded. “Do you remember what you did to cheer me up?”
I gasped, the day coming back to me. “I got the veil out of the closet and let you wear it with your rubber gloves!”
She nodded seriously. “It was the best day of my life.” She paused. “But wait. If you believed me about the note, why did I still have to wash the dishes?”
“Well, honey, good help is hard to find.” I winked.
She looked down into her glass. “Babs, that veil had always been a symbol of the great love that was going to find me one day. And now that’s all tainted.”
I put my arm around her, gazing at the roaring fire, thinking of my mother holding me close when I was so very afraid of my own future. “Darling girl, it isn’t tainted.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “Don’t you see? It’s saved. You made the hardest decision of your life by walking away from Hayes. And, by doing so, you saved the veil. And I believe very much that your great love is still going to find you.”
“You do?”
“Without a doubt.”
Suddenly, I was swamped with sadness. I had found my great love and now he was gone. And, looking into the face of my granddaughter, I couldn’t help but remember the day it felt like my life truly began.
My twenty-one-year-old self opened one eye and peered warily out the window as my stomach dropped from both the hairpin curve and the dizzying drop. We were running parallel to the French Broad River, on our way to the Grove Park Inn, and if Daddy steered our 1958 Ford even six inches too far, we would be over the side and in the river. I glanced at him, whistling in his short-sleeved, blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt and khaki pants. Not a care in the world.
I am a person who loves room for error. Planes with two engines, not one. Getting the paper written the week before the deadline in case of unexpected sickness, a sudden death in the family. This was a drive I did not like.
I closed my eyes again and, pretending I had a rosary in my hand, began to pray out loud, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” I would pray ten Hail Marys and one Glory Be, as I had been taught, right after. We weren’t Catholic, but after twelve years at the all-girls Catholic school Mother had insisted I attend, the tenets of Catholicism had gotten in somewhere. Mother had believed that sending me to Catholic school would make me chaste, something I suspected she herself had not been.
It had almost worked.
As I began my second “Hail Mary, full of grace…” Mother chimed in from the back seat, “For heaven’s sake, Barbara. Enough!”
Mother never rode in the back seat. But I got horrible carsickness and years of pulling over had taught her that giving up her seat was less of a sacrifice than the alternative.