Page 66 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

I was working on my parents’ wedding picture when my bedroom door opened. Holy shit, you have got to be kidding. I jumped up and lunged at it before Mom could come in. “Mom. Stop.”

“What are you doing in there?” Mom looked over my shoulder as if she could see through the door I’d closed behind myself.

I almost said I was just texting, but both of us knew I could do that in the living room. I glared. “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise tomorrow.”

Her look softened into a little smile. “Oh. Secrets!”

“Yes, secrets. Leave me alone for a few minutes, then I’ll come out and watch TV with you, okay?”

“Okay.” As she went back down the hall, she called to my dad in that disgusting singsongy voice. “John! Samantha is doing something secretive in her bedroom.”

Oh, Mom. No. “For tomorrow,” I yelled quickly, then closed the door and made sure it clicked.

My mother legit just came into my room without knocking, I texted Lisa.

She wrote back right away. Hope you weren’t doing something scandalous.

Welcome to my childhood. If she does it when I’m in bed I’m going to kill her.

Sleep naked so she’s sorry.

Oh, she’d just tell me how goddamn fat I am.

I was sure my parents were going to figure things out when I had to swap the photo albums out for other, more recent ones, but they stayed put in the living room, the TV blaring Game Show Network. I found pictures I’d never seen of my family when Kevin and I were tiny, and pictures with Grandma that I scanned for myself even though I wasn’t planning to use them in the slideshow. I debated adding Kevin’s and my high school graduation pictures, wondering if that would take too much emphasis off of Mom herself, but decided to include them mostly because Kevin had a terrible mullet.

I finally closed up the last book and lay on my bed. I’d just been through hundreds of posed photos of smiling children and laughing adults. To look at them, one would think I’d had a stellar childhood. I thought about every time my mother told us to “look at the camera and smile” even when we’d been fighting. I remembered hearing “don’t move” so we could re-create a supposed candid, only this time looking happy. I was sure that since these were from long before digital photography, my mother had taken three times as many and thrown out the bad ones. Was everyone’s life like this?

Does your family have ten million photo albums of you and your sister smiling even though you were decking one another thirty seconds before?

It took a long time for Lisa to respond. I have a hilarious album my grandmother put together. I should show you sometime.

I wasn’t sure if that meant there were others filled with shots like my mother’s or if the rest were real, full of scraped knees and hair pulling and tantrums in front of the Magic Kingdom. It wasn’t quite the answer I wanted, but I stuffed my phone in my pocket and went out to watch Family Feud reruns.

The next day, I spent two hours before breakfast editing what I felt turned out to be a really good slideshow. After we ate, Kevin and Missy picked me up in their huge van and we went to a store twenty miles away for flowers to put on each table. There were actual professionally done arrangements coming to the country club later. We spent what felt like hours in the ballroom placing them in little vases Missy had found and tying baby blue ribbons around them while Kevin went around to each table matching little blue place cards to a diagram Missy had drawn, Jeremiah on his back in a carrier. The older boys were at some sport or another with Missy’s parents, and the girls sat in a cozy heap in the corner watching a movie on Kevin’s tablet.

We went home at four to change clothes. I was almost ready to head back over to the venue when Mom barged in again. “Aren’t we riding together?”

I looked up from my eyeliner. “I need to go early to make sure everything is okay.”

“You spent all day there. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Mom, someone has to check on the caterers and the florist and the bartender and—”

“Kevin and Missy can do that.”

“Okay,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “I need to finish my makeup and do my hair.”

“I’m sure you look lovely,” Dad called from the kitchen. “We can leave in a few minutes if you want.”

Sorry. I’ve been detained, I texted to Kevin.

Yeah we figured. We’ve got this – no problem.

Then I texted a photo to Lisa. Here goes nothing.

It took a few minutes, but she got back to me. You are stunning. It’s all going to be great.

Chapter Sixteen