It hadn’t hurt, Sarah thought, that Annette had no discernible interest in parenting. Annette was an artist with no actual career and no permanent address. She had always focused on herself and her current passions, whatever they were at the moment: learning to throw pottery or to apply henna designs, performing slam poetry in Seattle, or building costumes for an avant-garde theater company in Brazil. （Annette loved to tell the less theater-literate that the proper terminology was not sewing or creating costumes but building them.） Annette’s creative pursuits came first; her romantic partners came second. Her only child might not have even made the list.
And now Ruby was getting married! Maybe if Sarah had been Ruby’s birth mother, she’d have been comfortable telling Ruby no, she was too young to be promising her entire life to someone; that her brain was not done baking; that she still had the whole world to see and explore. Her father and her biological mother could have said those things, and Ruby might even have listened; but Sarah, as a stepmother, had to keep quiet, knowing that if she spoke up she’d only send Ruby running faster in the wrong direction.
“We don’t want a big wedding,” Ruby was saying, with Gabe’s hand still clasped in hers. “Just family and our closest friends. There’s not a lot of planning that we need to do. So there’s really no reason to wait.” Daintily, Ruby speared a drumstick from the platter and set it on her plate.
“What about your dress?” Sarah managed. “And flowers? You’ll need a caterer… and invitations can take weeks. Months!” Maybe she could convince Ruby that there were actual, practical reasons why this plan would never work. When Sarah herself had gotten married, she and her mother had spent six months planning the big day. There’d been a rehearsal dinner at her parents’ house in Truro, then the ceremony on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and, finally, the reception at a vineyard, underneath a tent, on a gorgeous night in early September, when the air was still soft and full of the smell of summer rose hips, the bay still warm enough for skinny-dipping. Late at night, after their rehearsal dinner, she and Eli had gone down to the beach, taken off their clothes, and run into the water. I thought it was bad luck to see the bride the night before the wedding, he’d said. So close your eyes, she’d whispered back, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his shoulders.
“We’re going to do email invitations,” said Ruby, waving one hand in an airy dismissal of Sarah’s concerns.
“What?” Sarah squawked, wrenched out of her memory of skinny-dipping and rudely returned to the tragedy currently in progress.
“Better for the environment,” said Gabe, making his first contribution to the conversation.
“Siobhan said she’d make me a dress as a wedding gift.” Siobhan, Sarah knew, was an NYU classmate who’d majored in costume design. “And Safta said she’d help me with the rest of it.”
Again, Sarah mentally cursed her mother. Again, she wondered why Ruby hadn’t told her first, or at least at the same time. She looked down the table, at her husband, wordlessly begging him for help. Eli’s face was expressionless. He still had his eyes on his plate and his fork in his hand. As Sarah watched, he shoved another wad of stuffing into his mouth and started chewing.
“Can we be ring bearers?” asked Miles.
“Are dogs invited?” asked Dexter. “I bet we could tie the ring around Lord Farquaad’s neck!”
At the sound of his name, Lord Farquaad, the family’s corgi, who’d been sleeping on his bed in the corner of the dining room, lifted his head and peered around. Once he’d determined that no food was on offer, he gave a chuffing sigh, settled his snout back on his paws, and closed his eyes, looking vaguely disgusted at having been woken up for nothing.
“You guys can be ushers. How about that?” Ruby offered. The boys had cheered and Sarah relaxed the tiniest bit. When Sarah had gotten pregnant, she’d worried that the new arrival would further alienate Ruby, but Dexter’s arrival had been the event that finally turned them all into a family. Prickly, angry Ruby had loved the baby unreservedly. The first day in the hospital, she’d begged to hold him. As her dad watched, murmuring instructions, Ruby had seated herself carefully in the armchair and tucked the blanket-wrapped bundle against her chest. “Hello, Dexter,” she’d said. “I’m your big sister. And when you’re old enough, you can come stay with me, and I’ll let you do anything… you… want.” Eli had looked a little alarmed at that assertion, but Sarah’s eyes had filled with tears. Maybe this will be all right, she’d thought. She’d greeted Miles with just as much enthusiasm, and all through college no matter what else she had going on, she’d spent a week or two each summer with her half-brothers at Sarah’s mom’s place on the Cape, shepherding them through meals and nap times, driving them to swim lessons and Audubon camp, hunting for clams or hermit crabs on the beach, or going for a bike ride and an ice-cream cone.