The Shower My Mother In Law Planned

The Toast

The pale green linens were the first thing I noticed, because Hazel Calloway had chosen them herself, and Hazel did not choose anything by accident. Sage for growth, she told the caterer. Sage for a family finally getting what it deserved.

I stood near the archway between the front parlor and the dining room of her house on Sycamore Row, holding a glass of sparkling water I never once drank from, trying to take up as little space as a grown woman can take up in a room full of people who used to be, on paper at least, her family. Forty guests. The Cotton Bend Country Club’s finest, the same women who had sat across from me at a hundred luncheons and asked, in that particular Alabama way that manages to sound like concern and land like a blade, whether Orlan and I had any news yet.

I wore the dress Hazel had laid out on my bed that morning without asking. Soft cream, high neck, the kind of dress a woman wears when someone wants her forgotten before she has even left the room.

I was not the point of the party. I understood that the second I walked in and saw where the flowers were pointed.

She was the point. The Reyburn girl, twenty six years old, sat in a wingback chair someone had dragged in from the study and dressed with a white bow, as if she were already a fixture of the house rather than a guest in it. Six months along. A hand resting on the curve of her belly with the kind of practiced grace that comes from being told, more than once, that this is the most important thing she will ever do. Her hair was the color of wheat in October. She looked, in that room full of diamonds and old perfume, like the only genuine thing in it.

I want to be fair to her here at the start, because I was not always fair to her in my own head, and it took me the better part of a year to get there. She did not know everything Hazel Calloway knew. I believe that now more than I believed it the day of the shower, when all I could see was her hand on her belly and my husband’s eyes on her face.

Orlan stood beside her chair with a glass of champagne he had not earned, in the navy blazer I had picked out for him three Christmases ago, and he did not look at me one single time.

Hazel tapped a silver spoon against her champagne flute, and the room did what it always did for her. It went quiet on the first note.

“The past few years have not been easy for this family,” she said, scanning the room the way a woman scans a courtroom she already owns. “As you all know, my son and his wife have faced difficulties starting a family of their own.”

Heads turned toward me. Pity dressed up as sympathy, the way it always is at the club. I kept my face as still as nine years of practice had taught me to keep it.