Her train was leaving Northampton at ten that morning, and for a few minutes Abigail wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to New York. She didn’t necessarily want to spend any more nights in her childhood home consoling her parents. But she suddenly imagined life if she lived here in Boxgrove, maybe in a cute studio apartment near the town center, the rent cheap enough that she wouldn’t have to work full-time, and she would have time to write. She’d get coffee at the Rockwell Diner and go to the tavern at the inn on Friday nights, where she’d probably know everyone in the place. She thought of Bruce, and for a surreal ten seconds couldn’t picture his face. Then it came to her, and with it, her fantasy about returning home disappeared.
CHAPTER 8
Bruce, after Abigail returned to the city, suggested that Abigail and he should spend the remaining nights before the wedding in their own apartments. At first Abigail thought it was an unnecessary restriction, but she soon grew to like the arrangement. There were only two weeks left before the wedding, and there was something old-fashioned and romantic that, after eating dinner together, Bruce would accompany her back to her apartment and they would kiss under the streetlamp as a way of saying good night. Bruce also suggested that they watch a film together—Abigail in her apartment, he in his, and they could talk about it later. They’d watched The Omen and Carrie (Abigail’s picks) that way, then watched The Descent and Kiss the Girls (Bruce’s picks). After a brief bout of hot September days, the weather had cooled, and the city was bearable again. Those post-dinner walks home, her arm casually looped through Bruce’s, discussing what film to watch that night, made Abigail feel as though she were falling in love with not just Bruce, but New York City all over again.
The wedding was all planned. They were getting married in a refurbished barn in the Hudson Valley, home to a Michelin-starred restaurant and a boutique hotel. Just ninety guests, sixty of them coming from Abigail’s friends and family. In some ways, planning the wedding had been relatively easy, with Bruce accepting all of Abigail’s decisions. It didn’t hurt that money was not a consideration. Even so, Abigail made sure that, except for the rustic opulence of the actual location, the wedding itself would not be over-the-top. No caviar service at the reception, no specially made designer dress. Also, no DJ who might play Ed Sheeran. She found an interesting band that specialized in covers of 1960s French pop.
Bruce had several friends coming to the wedding, but very little family, just his father, plus his father’s sister and her family. Bruce’s mother was alive, but they were estranged. “She knows I’m getting married, but, honestly, weddings are not her thing. Marriage was not her thing,” he said. Both of Abigail’s parents came from fairly large families and there was going to be a glut of cousins coming from near and far. Despite their circumstances, Lawrence and Amelia Baskin remained excited for the wedding, looking forward to seeing extended family, probably looking forward to a weekend that would take their minds off the failure of both their theater and their marriage.
Abigail was keeping her job at Bonespar Press but cutting her hours in half, figuring that she and Bruce didn’t need the money, and that she could use the extra time to start real work on her novel. It was a psychological thriller about twin girls being raised in a rotting brownstone in the city, their parents both artists who refused to leave the house. Of the twins, one wants to stay in the house forever, and one wants to leave. That was all Abigail had so far, definitely not enough to mention it to any of her friends, including Bruce. But she’d written the first ninety or so pages, and didn’t hate it, and now she just wanted to see where the story would take her.
She’d also negotiated with Bonespar Press for two months’ unpaid leave that began a week before the wedding. She had spent two days training the temp employee who would be covering for her while she was gone, and then she’d gone out for celebratory drinks with her coworkers on the last day before her leave. They’d gone to Abigail’s favorite East Village bar, and it was there that she ran into her ex Ben Perez, who came in at midnight by himself. For one brief moment Abigail thought that he had come there to confront her, but then she saw the surprise on his face and she realized that it was just coincidence. They said hello; he was drunk and kept telling her that he’d just been out with a bunch of writer friends and he was stopping in for one last drink before heading home. Abigail bought him a bourbon sour and told him she was getting married. “Yeah, I know all about it,” he said. “I run into your friends all the time.”
“Who do you run into?”
“Kyra, for one. She said you’re marrying a gazillionaire, and that she thinks you’re doing it just for the money.”
“She said that?”
“Something like that.”
It had occurred to Abigail that when you marry someone so conspicuously wealthy people are going to talk, but, still, hearing that Kyra had said something so catty made her chest hurt.
“I’m not marrying him because he’s rich,” she said, instantly annoyed that she was defending herself to Ben.
“I didn’t say it. She did.”
Her work friends were beginning to put on coats and settle up bills, and Abigail, who didn’t want to get stuck rehashing things with Ben at the bar, left with them. The next day she almost called Kyra to confront her, but called Bruce instead. She thought he might worry a little that she’d run into her ex-boyfriend of six years the night before, but he didn’t seem fazed.
“I’m sure Kyra’s not the only one who’s made a comment,” Bruce said. “People are strange about money. You’ll probably lose at least one friend after we get married, someone who just won’t be able to handle it. I did when I got rich. The way I figure it is that they weren’t great friends to begin with.”
“Okay, thanks,” she said, feeling better.
After the talk with Bruce she stopped worrying about Kyra, and about what her other friends might think about Bruce. She had other things to deal with, mostly the logistics of who was staying at the Blue Barn Inn, which had only twenty-five rooms, and who was staying at the bed-and-breakfast half a mile away, and whether they should offer some sort of shuttle service back and forth so that people wouldn’t have to worry about drinking. And she had her own apartment to worry about. She’d given notice, and now it was just a matter of boxing up her possessions, mainly books, and figuring out what to do with her few pieces of furniture, most of which were not coming with her to Bruce’s place. And she was worried about Zoe, who still lived in Boxgrove, because she’d just had another massive fight with her boyfriend of seven years, and now she didn’t want him at the wedding. Zoe was a rock—well, she was Abigail’s rock—but when things went bad with Dan, all bets were off.
With the wedding looming, these were Abigail’s biggest worries, and she realized that she was in pretty good shape, considering. The memory of the stranger at the vineyard in California now felt like a fuzzy, unreal dream, something that had happened to her either very long ago or maybe not at all. In some ways, it had even helped clarify for her how much she wanted to marry Bruce. The fact that the evening had been intriguing and romantic made her only crave the solidness, and coziness, of marriage more. Everything was going to be all right.