I had imagined this day for years, wondering how conflicted I’d feel—if I’d have one foot in the past, remembering that other June day 25 years earlier at the Navy Chapel in Washington.
I wondered how Jay’s family would feel about me getting remarried. I wondered what it would be like for my girls…our girls.
I’d invited Clare and her husband, Jeff. After the ceremony, she grabbed my arm and looked at me with her beautiful ice-blue eyes and said, “I want you to know, we are all so happy that you’ve met someone. I’ve prayed for you to meet a wonderful man. And I couldn’t be more thrilled for you.” It was an extraordinary gift, giving me permission to love John while still loving Jay.
Clare being there was so important to me. The person who’d helped me grieve my husband—her brother—was now here to help me celebrate my new life.
After Jay died, I tried to maintain a bond with his family, and yet the Monahan diaspora extended to Delaware, Kansas, New Mexico, and beyond. Distance and busy schedules made getting together a big challenge, especially without the linchpin—Jay. Even though we have drifted apart, I’ll always love the Monahans.
I understood how they might feel. When Emily’s husband, George, remarried, I was so happy for him. But at the ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel, it was impossible not to think about Emily and what might have been. At the same time, I had great empathy for George, knowing what it felt like to be trapped in that purgatory between loss and finding love again. My parents, though…they couldn’t come. They simply couldn’t.
They say when you marry someone, you marry their family. I hit the jackpot in that department. Ellie and Carrie had already lost three grandparents, and now they had a new set in the divine Paula and Herby, who immediately started referring to the girls as their granddaughters. It meant so much to me when, four years later, they came to Carrie’s Stanford graduation. Meanwhile, I had always wanted more children, and here they were: Henry, who inherited John’s sense of humor, wowed us with his hilarious wedding toast, and Allie, sweet and self-possessed, welcomed me into her life without hesitation. Add Tom, Andy, and John’s bon vivant little brother, David, and we had the makings of a thoroughly modern family.
It took me 16 long years and so many false starts. After all this time and all my searching, it felt like I had made my way home. Of course, I thought about Jay that day. But I was excited about this new chapter of my life. With another John Paul—another JPM. This one John Paul Molner.
After a reception at the Topping Rose House in Bridgehampton, we plugged in an iPhone and had a spontaneous dance party （I love John, but he doesn’t move his feet when he dances, which makes him look like one of those gas-station windsocks）。 My friend Kathleen brought my mom back to Amy’s Lane. Standing at the kitchen island, they ate wedding cake and relived the highlights before Kathleen helped my mom into bed. The next day, she told me how happy my mother was that finally, after all these years, I seemed settled and content.
85
Labor Day
FIVE WEEKS AFTER tying the knot, we were in Martha’s Vineyard at Laurie David’s bucolic spread, Wise Owl Farm, formerly known as Camp David. She and her husband, Bart, grew sweet potatoes by the thousands there, plus tomatoes, kale, garlic, parsnips, edamame, shishito peppers, and these twisty-looking shiitake mushrooms that sprout from holes drilled into logs.
On Saturday, we took their Boston Whaler on Menemsha Pond to Bart’s secret spot, where we dug clams out of the muck with our toes. Laurie’s ex, Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, had a house nearby that Bart built and Laurie decorated—how’s that for an amicable divorce? Larry wasn’t there at the time, so Laurie decided to show us around （pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty invasive—sorry, Larry!）。 That night we steamed the clams and washed them down with rosé.
The next morning I went out to the chicken coop and gathered fresh eggs, with which Laurie made a killer kale-and-mushroom frittata. Then the four of us headed to the tennis court. As I was picking up the fluorescent green balls that littered my side of the net, I saw my phone, which I’d set down on the brick wall encircling the court, light up.
My childhood phone number. Feeling a familiar pang of anxiety, I answered immediately.
“Katie, please come take care of me.”
My mother’s quavering voice alarmed me. It was the first time I ever heard her sound helpless. We hightailed it to the ferry.
After our dad died, my mom didn’t want to relocate to Boston to live with Kiki or to New York to live with me. She may have bitched about how small and basic our house was, growing up—referring to it derisively as “the box”—but there was no place she’d rather be, surrounded by her needlepoint pillows and my dad’s books, even the bathroom wallpaper that had been installed upside down so it looked like the butterflies were doing an airborne backstroke.