Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [80]
“Yes,” Mary said. “I know.”
“Oh, okay.” Button seemed relieved. “I just wanted to make sure. I just didn’t know why you would ever serve shrimp at your wedding if you knew your husband could break out in hives.”
Mary went to the bathroom and locked herself in the handicapped stall. She stood in her dress and breathed deep breaths until she heard Isabella walk in.
“Mary?” Isabella called. “Are you in here?”
Mary unlocked the stall and stood there. “Button,” she said.
Isabella nodded. “Harrison’s mother told me last weekend that she thought polka dots were out of style.”
“So?” Mary asked.
“I was wearing my pink-and-white polka dot dress,” Isabella said.
“Okay,” Mary said. “Okay.” She and Isabella walked back out to the reception.
When Mary found out she was pregnant, Ken called his mother right away. “She’s crying,” he mouthed to Mary. Mary smiled.
They all went out to dinner to celebrate. “We should know the sex of the baby soon,” Mary said.
“Oh no! You’re going to find out?” Button looked horrified.
“Yeah, we thought it would be nice to prepare.”
“But it’s the greatest surprise of your life. Why would you ruin that?”
Mary didn’t know what to say.
“You’ll have to move out of that neighborhood,” Button said. “You can’t have a baby there. It’s rather sketchy.” The neighborhood they lived in hadn’t been sketchy since the seventies. Now it was stuffed full of Starbucks and Baby Gap and no one in their right mind would call it sketchy.
“Maybe,” Ken said. “We’ll think about it.”
“Have you thought of any names?” Button asked. Mary knew she was trying to be nice.
“We thought maybe Parker if it was a boy. And if it’s a girl, we like Lola.”
“Lola? You can’t call a baby Lola! It sounds like a prostitute.”
“Mom,” Ken said, laughing. “It doesn’t sound like a prostitute.” Mary stayed silent.
“What about Brittany or Tiffany?” Button offered, looking at Mary. “Or Mandy or Christina?”
“Maybe,” Mary said. “We’ve got some time to decide.”
Button nodded. “Well, if you name her Lola, then maybe I’ll call her something else.” She looked pleased, like this solved the problem. Mary tried to catch Ken’s eye, but he was looking at his cheeseburger.
“She wants her grandchild to be a teenybopper!” Mary said. “Brittany and Tiffany? What kind of names are those? Those are pretend names that you gave your pretend children in second grade!”
“Really?” Isabella asked. “I always went with Brandy at that age.”
“Isabella.”
“Sorry, okay. So she has bad taste in names.”
“Bad taste? She wants her granddaughter to be a teenage singer who wears leather pants and vows to stay a virgin before getting pregnant at seventeen.”
Mary started to cry and Isabella patted her back. “Maybe it will be a boy,” she offered.
The baby was born with all of his fingers and toes, which made Mary happy. She hadn’t been that worried, but there’d been one night before she knew she was pregnant when she and Isabella had drunk enough wine for a small country. And so, when she was able to count everything for herself, she was relieved.
He was a chunky little baby and they named him Henry, after Ken’s dad. Mary knew it made Ken happy and also she liked the name Henry. Mary liked to hold his feet and put them in her mouth.
He had light blond hair and blue eyes, like Ken. Sometimes when he was concentrating on going to the bathroom, it looked just like Ken when he was working on a case he thought he was going to lose.
“He’s the cutest baby you’ve ever seen, right?” she asked Ken.
“Yes,” he said. “I think he is.”
Button came over the day they got back from the hospital. “I just can’t wait to see him!” she said to Mary when she walked in.
“You could have come to visit in the hospital,” Mary said.
Button shook her head. “No,” she said. “I remember how it is. You need some time alone to get it together. My mother-in-law stormed into the hospital right after I had Ken, and it was just too much! People didn’t do that in those days.” She leaned down to whisper to Mary. “Between