“And we can’t wait for the wedding.”
“You won’t cry, will you?”
“I’ll try not to cry too much. Can’t vouch for your father. What do you want for dinner tonight? If I were here alone, I’d probably eat cereal.” She’d moved to the edge of the sofa, her hands on her knees, suddenly practical.
“Cereal sounds great.”
Abigail waited for her mother to rise and go to the kitchen, but she stayed seated for a moment, then said, “You know, Abby, we’ll always be a family, the three of us. That will never change.”
“I know, Mom,” Abigail said.
That night Abigail woke just before dawn, struggling up from a bad dream that slipped away as soon as she tried to recollect it.
Her chest hurt, and there was perspiration in her hairline. She lay still for a little while, wondering if she’d be able to fall back to sleep, but her body tingled, as if she’d had too much coffee. She watched the bedroom window fill with gray light and thought about her parents. They’d never seemed so vulnerable to her as they did this weekend. Even so, it was clear to her that Bruce’s plan to fund the Boxgrove Theatre again was a nonstarter. Or seemed to be.
Her mother wasn’t interested in going down that road again, and she wasn’t sure that her dad would have the energy, either.
Her train was leaving Northampton at ten that morning, and for a few minutes Abigail wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to New York. She didn’t necessarily want to spend any more nights in her childhood home consoling her parents. But she suddenly imagined life if she lived here in Boxgrove, maybe in a cute studio apartment near the town center, the rent cheap enough that she wouldn’t have to work full-time, and she would have time to write. She’d get coffee at the Rockwell Diner and go to the tavern at the inn on Friday nights, where she’d probably know everyone in the place.
She thought of Bruce, and for a surreal ten seconds couldn’t picture his face. Then it came to her, and with it, her fantasy about returning home disappeared.
CHAPTER 8
Bruce, after Abigail returned to the city, suggested that Abigail and he should spend the remaining nights before the wedding in their own apartments. At first Abigail thought it was an unnecessary restriction, but she soon grew to like the arrangement. There were only two weeks left before the wedding, and there was something old-fashioned and romantic that, after eating dinner together, Bruce would accompany her back to her apartment and they would kiss under the streetlamp as a way of saying good night.
Bruce also suggested that they watch a film together—Abigail in her apartment, he in his, and they could talk about it later. They’d watched The Omen and Carrie （Abigail’s picks） that way, then watched The Descent and Kiss the Girls （Bruce’s picks）。 After a brief bout of hot September days, the weather had cooled, and the city was bearable again. Those post-dinner walks home, her arm casually looped through Bruce’s, discussing what film to watch that night, made Abigail feel as though she were falling in love with not just Bruce, but New York City all over again.
The wedding was all planned. They were getting married in a refurbished barn in the Hudson Valley, home to a Michelin-starred restaurant and a boutique hotel. Just ninety guests, sixty of them coming from Abigail’s friends and family. In some ways, planning the wedding had been relatively easy, with Bruce accepting all of Abigail’s decisions. It didn’t hurt that money was not a consideration. Even so, Abigail made sure that, except for the rustic opulence of the actual location, the wedding itself would not be over-the-top. No caviar service at the reception, no specially made designer dress. Also, no DJ who might play Ed Sheeran.
She found an interesting band that specialized in covers of 1960s French pop.
Bruce had several friends coming to the wedding, but very little family, just his father, plus his father’s sister and her family. Bruce’s mother was alive, but they were estranged. “She knows I’m getting married, but, honestly, weddings are not her thing. Marriage was not her thing,” he said. Both of Abigail’s parents came from fairly large families and there was going to be a glut of cousins coming from near and far. Despite their circumstances, Lawrence and Amelia Baskin remained excited for the wedding, looking forward to seeing extended family, probably looking forward to a weekend that would take their minds off the failure of both their theater and their marriage.
Abigail was keeping her job at Bonespar Press but cutting her hours in half, figuring that she and Bruce didn’t need the money, and that she could use the extra time to start real work on her novel. It was a psychological thriller about twin girls being raised in a rotting brownstone in the city, their parents both artists who refused to leave the house. Of the twins, one wants to stay in the house forever, and one wants to leave. That was all Abigail had so far, definitely not enough to mention it to any of her friends, including Bruce. But she’d written the first ninety or so pages, and didn’t hate it, and now she just wanted to see where the story would take her.