The Wedding Sisters Page 3

About six months into her relationship, Meg let it slip that the Campions were in New York for the weekend. Big mistake; Meryl thought for sure they would reach out and suggest coffee or a drink with the parents of their son’s girlfriend. They didn’t. Eventually, Meryl decided to just suck it up and do the reaching out herself. Phone tag ensued, and the end result was that the two mothers never actually spoke until the day after the engagement, when Tippy called Meryl to say she was “so delighted” for “the kids” and that they would be in New York soon to take them to dinner.

  But Meryl didn’t want to be “taken” to dinner. She wanted to host dinner at the apartment, so they could all get to know one another. “After all,” she’d said to Meg, “We’re going to be family.”

  Meg didn’t have the heart to tell her mother they would never really be family—not in the way her mother envisioned. The Campions were a closed circle, and they had their own way of doing things. More was not merrier. The Campions were more like a club than a family, and they were certainly not looking for new members.

  Patricia “Tippy” Gaffney Campion was a Main Line blue blood who had been born, bred, and educated in the rarefied air of the Philadelphia suburbs—the Baldwin Academy and then Bryn Mawr. She’d raised her three boys in a sprawling stone home in the woods of Villanova. They summered at “the shore” and at the country club, Philadelphia Racquet and Hunt. Meg, having grown up in Manhattan and attended one of its more exclusive private schools (albeit on a free ride since her father was on staff), was no stranger to elitism. But she had never encountered anything quite like the sheer myopia of Tippy Campion. Nothing, absolutely nothing, outside her sphere of interest and influence mattered.

  Meg was already dreading the land mine that would be Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, when she would be forced to alternate between being with her parents and Stowe’s. There was a chance the Campions would invite her parents to family events, but she knew that Meryl liked “having the girls at home.” Meg liked it too.

  And what about Amy and Jo? They wouldn’t want to travel to Philly to have holidays at the Campion house.

  She rose again to look out the window. This was just part of merging your life with another person’s. These things would work themselves out. I just have to get through tonight.

  “My mother is going to talk to your mom about the wedding planner,” said Stowe, coming up behind her, his arms circling her waist.

  Meg turned, and mistaking the expression of surprise on her face for happiness, he kissed her.

  “Stowe, I told you my parents aren’t wedding-planner-type people,” Meg said. “Mom won’t want a stranger getting involved and second-guessing her. My mother wants to just run with this—she’s so excited about it. It would break her heart not to do it herself. And frankly, I’d rather just plan it with my mom.”

  “Hon, of course you’ll be planning it with your mom. The wedding planner will just help with some of the logistics that would bog you guys down, like dealing with all the vendors. She’ll make sure everything is efficient, easy.”

  Meg pulled away from him, crossing her arms in front of her chest and frowning. This was a vote of no confidence from Tippy. Not for her mother, but for her. The wedding-planner issue was a reminder of the one thing Meg didn’t want to think about this weekend: her certainty that Tippy did not approve of her.

  Meg Becker was never disliked. Meg was the one people aspired to be around, to be like, and to be liked by. She was occasionally intimidating, but just until you got to know her; she was a girl’s girl—a loyal friend, a straight shooter at work, the voice of reason among her squabbling sisters. She never stole someone else’s boyfriend, took credit for work that wasn’t hers, or upstaged someone when it was their turn to speak. She was polite and well-informed, opinionated but not judgmental. She dressed stylishly but not flashily. She was ambitious but not cutthroat. She was beautiful, yes—but in an understated way. Jo was less classically beautiful, but when she walked into a room, every head turned. Meg could fly under the radar if need be.

  But with Tippy …

  “Stowe, I don’t want to worry about efficiency. Planning our wedding isn’t something I want to just check off my list like an article I have to write. In some ways, I’ve been looking forward to this my whole life.” Meg smiled, thinking of all those times she and her sisters had played “wedding” as little girls.

  Stowe took her hands in his, drawing her closer. “That’s not what I meant, Meg. It’s just there’s a lot to do, we’re all busy—including your mom—and we are lucky to have a pro at our disposal. Why not use her?”

  She didn’t want a pro. And yet, she found it difficult to say no. It was a new and undesirable side of herself that had somehow appeared to coincide with her relationship with Stowe: people pleaser. And this people-pleasing was undeniably specific to one person in particular: Tippy Campion.

  * * *

  Meryl unwrapped the triangular brick of Jarlsberg from its cellophane wrapper and removed the lid from the plastic container of mixed, pitted olives. No, she “didn’t even really cook.” But the table was set with beautiful dishes, the crystal candlesticks she and Hugh had brought back from a trip to Ireland, and Meg’s favorite tablecloth, the green and red bird toile print that Meryl had bought on Madison at a cute little shop that had long since been replaced by a Gucci or Alice + Olivia or someplace else she’d never set foot in. In the oven, Meryl was reheating bruschetta, and the house smelled like she’d been cooking all day. So there.

  Hugh walked in, heavily dropping his books and messenger bag on the entrance table.

  “Hugh, put that stuff in your office, please. They’ll be here soon. Oh, and my mother isn’t coming after all,” Meryl told him.

  Hugh shrugged as if to say, What’s new?

  He seemed quiet, distracted. Usually, when he was stressed out, it was because he was grading subpar exams, failures that he took personally. But it was only October—too early for end-of-the-semester nerves. Maybe he’d hit yet another “wall” in writing his book. But it was doubtful after all this time that he was letting his ever-stalled project get to him. So it must be Meg’s engagement.

  She had to admit there was something both thrilling and unnerving about Meg marrying into such extreme wealth—that money would never be an issue for her. It was something Meryl could barely imagine. And Amy seemed headed on the same track with Andy. Only her youngest daughter, Jo, seemed to be living a normal existence for a twenty-something, working at a Brooklyn coffee shop and dating an equally cash-strapped law student.

  Meryl tried to imagine the early years of her marriage, only without worrying about money. While Meryl and Hugh had never been impoverished, there had been many months in the early days when they lived on cereal and missed payments on the electric bill. Not that they cared; they were just happy to be together. But since the Yardley job, they managed to live extremely well within their means. The girls had attended Yardley for free. Meg earned an academic scholarship to Georgetown, and Jo had gotten a partial scholarship to NYU. They paid full tuition only for Amy’s four years at Syracuse. They had been renting the same summer house for two weeks in August on Fire Island since Meg was a toddler—and the fee somehow barely went up. And, of course, the one thing that made their life in Manhattan infinitely more livable than those of a lot of their friends: the beautiful, three-bedroom, prewar apartment with a view of the river that Yardley provided them for a fraction of the market value.

  They had been lucky. But their daughters were about to become even luckier. So it surprised her when Hugh said that he liked both Stowe and Andy, “despite the money.”

  “Despite the money?” Meryl said. “Doesn’t every parent dream of their kid marrying rich?”

  “No,” Hugh said, frowning at her. “They dream of their children being happy.”

  “Yes, well, you have to admit, money helps in that regard.”

  But in saying that, she felt like she was betraying some core value they had on
ce shared—a pact they had made to live a life in the pursuit of art and culture. Certainly Hugh, a high school English teacher, and Meryl, with a career in book publishing, were not motivated by making a fortune. A fact that made the extravagant wealth of their daughters’ partners all the more curious.

  And though she hated to admit it, her life with Hugh suddenly seemed provincial, as if they’d raised their girls on a farm. At least, she was afraid that’s how it seemed to the Campions.

  Maybe Hugh sensed that attitude as well, because he certainly didn’t seem to share her excitement about the engagement.

  “Can you at least pretend to be looking forward to dinner tonight? Between you and my mother, I feel like I’m in this thing alone.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m preoccupied.”

  She wanted to tell him to snap out of it, but he looked so defeated. So she put her hand his arm and softly asked, “What’s going on?”

  “It’s just work stuff,” he said, shaking her off.

  Then she remembered: the call earlier in the day when she’d been running to her mother’s. Janell South.

  Janell South was a senior who had come to Yardley two years earlier, a scholarship student. There weren’t many of them at Yardley, but the ones who made it there and lasted tended to be exceptional. She had grown up in the Bronx, shuttled between foster homes, before recently settling with her adult half sister in Harlem. According to Hugh, she was a talented writer who shared his passion for the American classics.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Janell handed in a plagiarized paper,” Hugh said.

  “Oh, Hugh—are you absolutely certain?”

  “I recognized entire passages from McKnight’s book on Hawthorne.”

  “I’m sorry! I know this is a huge disappointment. Will they let her finish out the semester?”

  Yardley had a zero-tolerance policy toward cheating, a hard-and-fast rule that was enacted in the wake of massive cheating scandals at Stuveysant High School and Horace Mann. Hugh sat on the advisory board that had passed the measure.

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t.”

  “You mean, won’t.”

  “No, I mean if I had reported it, they would expel her immediately.”

  Meryl’s eyes grew wide. Just last year, Hugh had overseen the dismissal of Todd Boswick, a junior who cheated on the Regents Exam.

  “You didn’t report her? Hugh, you can’t be serious. You can’t just take it upon yourself to make exceptions to the rules. That’s why you and the board voted for zero tolerance—to take the guessing and favoritism out of it.”

  “This is different.”

  Todd Boswick, son of a hedge fund billionaire, was barely passing his classes. He skipped class, routinely got busted for having his cell phone or other contraband, and he talked back to teachers. Todd was a kid who thought the rules didn’t apply to him. And sadly, in the grand scheme of things, they didn’t. Because of his father’s wealth and stature, he was already ensconced at a neighboring private school.

  But there would be no such safety net for Janell South.

  “Hugh, I understand why you feel that way and that you feel bad. But it’s not your job to cover for her. You have to report this or you’re as much at fault as she is.”

  “Well, it’s too late for that. I told her I was giving her a warning.”

  Meryl looked at him in shock. “Hugh! You helped put that code of ethics in place, and now you’re just ignoring it?”

  “Don’t Monday-morning-quarterback me, Meryl,” he responded angrily. “I was agonizing over this all day, and you couldn’t be bothered to talk for five minutes. And I couldn’t just wait to deal with it. So I did what I thought was right.”

  It was then that Meryl realized this was about more than just Janell South. Hugh was pissed. He was pissed that their daughter was marrying into a family that expected a lavish wedding. He was pissed that Meryl was on board with that idea even if it meant straining them financially. And yes, he was pissed that a rule put in place to keep spoiled rich kids in line had bitten his pet student—a poor student—in the ass.

  “Fine. You did what you thought was right. In that case, don’t hide in here, ‘agonizing over it’ when we have a family dinner tonight. Please, just forget about this for now. Enjoy tonight.” She looked at him imploringly. “For Meg.”

  After a moment, he sighed, his shoulders relaxing. “You’re right.”

  “We have a wedding to plan.” She smiled, hoping to make the school stuff recede, to bring him into a joyful moment.

  “Make sure to keep the spending under control, okay? Within reason.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He kissed her, and as if on cue, the doorbell rang.

  “That’s them!” she said, her voice shrill, her heart leaping.

  “Meryl, relax. It’s just dinner.”

  three

  Josephine “Jo” Becker never thought twice about what to wear, but tonight it was somewhat of a problem. Her usual jeans, high tops, and T-shirts were out: the Campions were coming to dinner. Or, rather, THE CAMPIONS. She had come to think of them in all caps.

  She made herself a soy latte, ignoring her waiting customers. Café Grumpy was wall-to-wall Brooklynites. Contrary to its ironic name, the café was warm and pleasant, with earth-toned exposed-brick walls, tin ceilings, and bright orange accents, simple wooden furniture, and eclectic design details everywhere—the occasional freestanding bookshelf, a potted plant, round wall clocks. Today, the entire staff happened to be moving in slow motion because last night one of the baristas had her burlesque debut nearby at the Bell House. Jo made it home a little after three in the morning—she was considered an early defector, lame, a “pussy.” She would have made it an all-nighter if her girlfriend hadn’t declined to join the Café Grumpy crew in their night of debauchery. But Caroline was in law school and always studying; nights out were temporarily on hold. Jo did not—would not—complain, even if every single minute apart left her feeling raw-nerved and aching, still, three years after they got together.

  Jo’s heart sped up erratically just thinking of her. God, I love her.

  She pulled her phone out and texted Caroline. Clocking out soon—will u be ready to go? My mother will stroke out if we’re late for this one.

  There had been a time when Jo would have dreaded dinner with her uptight mother, her cranky grandmother, her two bickering older sisters, and her dad checked out thinking about his book or his students or whatever else occupied that man’s mind—he never seemed to be quite there. The bad vibes used to stress her out. But not anymore. With Caroline by her side, even her crazy family was something she could take in stride. That’s what the kind of head-over-heels love they had did to a person.

  Jo could still barely believe her luck; she’d fallen in love with her best friend—and somehow, in the most unexpected and gloriously dizzying turn of events, that friend loved her back.

  Caroline. Smart, funny, beautiful—in a way Jo never thought could exist—Caroline.

  For half of college, Jo suffered in agonizing silence. Jo knew as soon as she met her that Caroline Winter was straight as straight could be. She was from Vermont. She dressed in L.L. Bean and J.Crew, and when frustrated she said, “Shoot!”

  They had been assigned as roommates freshman year of NYU. Jo had been just a little bit awed by Caroline from day one. She was like a different species, with her translucent milk-white skin and deep red hair the color of autumn leaves. She’d never taken the subway and she’d never eaten Indian food.

  Jo became her tour guide to New York City. As the youngest of three sisters, she was rarely the one to introduce someone to something. She was always the last to know, to experience, to discover. It was intoxicating to be the more experienced one, the person in the know. And experiencing her hometown through the eyes of someone new made her appreciate it in a completely different way. She’d always prided herself on be
ing a freethinker and very different from her older sisters, but sometimes it was hard to really know where their influence stopped and her true likes and dislikes began. She was the first to admit that a lot of the time she found her own interests simply by rejecting Meg’s and Amy’s. But in the budding of her friendship with Caroline, Jo’s passions and personality seemed to crystallize for the first time. In getting to know Caroline, she discovered herself. And one of the things she discovered was that she was in love for the first time.

  Jo swallowed this love, keeping it a tiny ice-hard secret deep in her heart. She and Caroline were inseparable, meeting after classes, grabbing dinner at Dojo or John’s Pizza, and pulling all-nighters studying.

  It was heaven. Until November, and Christmas break was on the horizon. The thought of being separated for two entire weeks was unbearable to Jo, though she couldn’t admit it to Caroline. The fact that she couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep was crazy, she knew. She flubbed at least one exam over her preemptive heartache. One thing was clear, she needed some distance from Caroline.

  Jo started sneaking off to study by herself, finding other friends to meet for dinner, waking up early on weekends to go running and avoid their usual routine.

  “I never see you anymore!” Caroline said good-heartedly one afternoon.

  “Well, you’re going home in ten days, so we might as well get used to it,” Jo said, trying to sound nonchalant and failing miserably.

  “Yeah. Unless you come with me.”

  What to say about that first trip to Vermont? Chastely sharing that queen-sized bed in Caroline’s childhood bedroom was the most erotic experience of her life. That first morning she woke up before Caroline, and in the sunlight shining brightly through the gauzy pink curtains, reflecting off the snow on the ground, she was able to stare unabashedly at her friend’s porcelain skin, the curve of her cheekbone, the cleft above her full upper lip. Every morning in that house was Christmas morning.

  And then, second semester, just weeks after New Year’s, disaster struck. His name was Derek Ebernoff.