6 Laura and Sunny

Griffin was worried that he and Joy would be among the first to arrive, but dozens of people were already milling around, drinking mimosas on the hotel’s back porch. From there a vast expanse of manicured lawn sloped a good hundred and fifty yards to the water’s edge.

“You made it,” Laura said, then she and her mother went into their customary clinch, hugging as if one of them had been in grave danger and they’d feared they might never see each other again. Actually, Joy’s journey the evening before had been harrowing. Unbeknownst to Griffin, cloudbursts of the sort he’d experienced in the parking lot of the Olde Cape Lounge had pummeled the entire region. Three different times she’d been forced to pull off the turnpike, and her car was a lunar landscape of hailstone pock-marks. Farther out the Cape, Laura and her friends had also gotten pounded. First bird shit, then torrential rain and hail. Suddenly Griffins everywhere were coming under attack (as Tommy had put it) from above. What next, frogs? He checked the sky, but it was a cloudless blue.

“You look-” Joy started to say “great,” Griffin could tell.

“-like Snow White,” Laura finished.

Which she did. Her bridesmaid’s dress might have been on loan from the Magic Kingdom. She also looked as happy as Griffin had ever seen her. His daughter had spent a long time between boyfriends, searching for Mr. Right with no interest at all in Mr. Right Now, which had made Joy proud. Griffin supposed he was proud, too, but he’d also been worried. As a girl she’d once flirted with the idea of a religious vocation, and he’d wondered if her willingness to put off intimacy might be a vestige of that romantic and utterly perverse impulse. But more likely it was exactly what Joy thought it was, a brave refusal to settle that was at long last paying off. She’d gone to a lot of her college friends’ weddings, and this was the first where she had someone of her own. She seemed to think she’d soon be engaged, and Griffin couldn’t imagine what he’d do, how he and Joy would console her, if that didn’t happen.

“Andy actually likes it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Men. No taste and plenty of it.”

“Speaking of Andy, where is he?” Joy said.

“Around,” their daughter sighed. “He disappears.”

Which gave Griffin pause. Was the boy naturally shy, or did he already understand that disappearance would become a necessary survival skill if he married into Laura’s family? He hadn’t met the rest of them yet but had probably heard stories, and of course he’d already overheard scores of half-hour phone conversations between Laura and her mother. If he turned out to be the one, Griffin would have to take him aside and validate his instincts.

“Tough duty for him,” Joy said, with genuine sympathy, since Andy wouldn’t know anyone at this particular wedding.

“He’s fine,” Laura said, turning to Griffin now. “Everybody loves him.” The hug she gave him was very different from the one she’d just given her mother. His assumed he was fine, maybe even indestructible, and he was glad if that’s how he seemed to her, though he had to admit that it puzzled him, too. “I’m sorry about Sid, Daddy. Will you go out for the funeral?”

“Maybe. Tommy’s going to call when he hears-”

“There’s the boy,” Laura said, her face suddenly radiant, all thoughts of mortality evaporating. She’d spied her boyfriend halfway down the lawn, talking to one of the groomsmen under the big tent that had been erected for the reception. The wedding ceremony itself would take place by the water under an ornate arch. A hundred and fifty or so folding chairs had been set up there-yesterday, by the look of it, since several hotel employees were busy wiping them down with towels.

“By the way,” Laura said, looking at the card that Joy had picked up in the hotel foyer. “I’m really sorry about table seventeen. I wasn’t consulted.”

“The leftover table?” Griffin guessed.

She nodded. “You aren’t going to know anybody,” she said, then was visited by a happy thought. “Actually, that’s not true. You’ll know Sunny Kim.”

“Little Sunny?” Joy said.

“He’s about six-two now and very good-looking. Anyway, I should get back to the bridal party. I’ll tell A-boy you’re here.”

They watched her go, tripping down the lawn in her Snow White dress. Joy took Griffin ’s hand. “Have you ever seen anyone so happy?” There was a certain wistfulness in her expression as she watched her daughter and this new boy she’d chosen, as if she knew all too well he could turn out to be Mr. Wrong and end up breaking Laura’s large, generous, trusting heart. Or maybe, Griffin thought, it was the knowledge that what was just now filling that heart to overflowing could in the end leak away, and that in thirty-four years, love’s urgency, if not love itself, might have dissipated.

While she studied their daughter, he studied her, trying to decide which it might be.

Then Sunny Kim emerged onto the porch, where he squinted into the bright sunlight. He hadn’t looked so tall the night before, but of course at the Olde Cape Lounge he’d been sitting down.

• • •

Kelsey Apple, the bride, had been Laura’s best friend through middle school, back in L.A. Laura’s had been the more dominant personality, or so it had seemed to Griffin. Wherever she was, that’s where Kelsey had to be, and whatever she had was what Kelsey wanted, including Griffin and Joy for her parents. Her own were dour and dull, her father some sort of bean counter for a movie studio, her mother religious. “It’s so weird being in your house,” Kelsey once told Laura. “Your parents, like, actually talk to each other. You can tell they still have sex.”

When Griffin accepted the teaching position back East, they feared Laura would be devastated to leave her L.A. life and friends, but it was Kelsey who’d come unglued at the news. “You can’t,” she told Laura matter-of-factly as they walked home from school, as if that declaration meant the end of the discussion. That evening after dinner, Mrs. Apple had called the Griffins to say that Kelsey had pitched the mother of all fits and locked herself in her room. Could Laura maybe come over and reassure her that their moving to Connecticut wouldn’t mean the end of the girls’ friendship, that they could still write and even talk on the phone? Joy had gone along with Laura for moral support and also ended up talking to Kelsey through her locked bedroom door, a conversation that quickly devolved into a negotiation. Of course Kelsey and Laura wouldn’t lose touch, and of course they could talk on the phone each and every week, and of course Laura wasn’t going to go out and find a new best friend and replace her. And next summer (Joy had to promise this, too, not just Laura) Kelsey could come visit them in their new home and stay as long as she wanted. Leaving no stone unturned, Kelsey then insisted both her parents join them in the crowded hallway, grant their permission and promise they’d somehow find money for the trip. Only then did she open the door and embrace her friend. “I’d still rather you wouldn’t,” she told Laura, clearly suffering buyer’s remorse now that the deal had finally been struck. Walking home Laura confided to Joy that she was just as happy to be moving far away, that Kelsey’s friendship, always needy, was becoming impossible.

New England was different, though, and she found it tough sledding in her new high school. The cliques were long established, and since Laura wasn’t the type to crash them, she spent most of her free time babysitting and wishing she had a best friend again, even a needy one. Kelsey visited for two weeks that summer, and after that first year’s separation both girls seemed profoundly happy together. Kelsey had a boyfriend now, Robbie, but he was from her mother’s church and he thought he might become a minister, so in some respects it was a lot like not having a boyfriend. She told Laura she was thinking she’d break up with him as soon as she got back to L.A., though then again maybe she’d wait until she had someone to replace him. The following summer, when she visited again, Kelsey was still with Robbie, who now was pretty sure, at least when they were necking in the backseat of his parents’ car, that he didn’t have a vocation after all. It wasn’t until junior year that Laura got a boyfriend, the son of one of Griffin ’s colleagues, and this ended her isolation, because being a couple allowed them access into the same social circles where they’d been unwelcome as singles.