Everything but the Baby

At first, when Allison Cabot realized that her bridegroom wasn't just late, stuck in Boston's rush-hour traffic or locked in battle with a recalcitrant tuxedo, it felt like a dream. One of those ridiculous over-the-top nightmares, the kind you recognize as fiction even while you're sleeping, because nothing that bad ever happens to you in real life. Oddly, she felt no anger, certainly no pain, though someone shoved a tissue into her hand as if they expected her to dissolve into a puddle of tears. Instead, she felt numb. She floated about an inch above the floor, bathed in the sweet scent of altar roses, watching the drama play out while she waited to wake up. Maybe, she thought, she had finally absorbed a little of her father's elegant WASP restraint. Public displays of emotion were unacceptable for the Cabots.Play through, play through,that had been Ripley Cabot's motto, whether Allison was coping with her mother's death or a broken toe at soccer practice. Or getting jilted at the altar. While she was floating peacefully--the lobotomized bride--someone else sent the two hundred wedding guests home. Probably Bitsy Bohannon, her best friend and wedding planner. Bitsy looked like a golden fairy but had the field instincts of a five-star general. It was Bitsy who had come back into the dressing room afterward and askedAllison what she wanted to do next. "Actually," Allison had said, after considering the matter for a minute, " I'm hungry. I'd been looking forward to that filet mignon at the reception." Bitsy's blond, angel-wing eyebrows had risen slightly, but she didn't seem to find the comment cold-blooded. "Me, too," she'd said. "Let's feast." That had been an hour ago. Since then, they'd sat together at one of the ten blue-silk-draped tables in the Freedom Ballroom of the prestigious Revere Hotel and shared a tender nine-ounce steak, a bowl of creamy herbed asparagus and two bottles of Bollinger Grand AnnÉe. They weren't drunk, but Allison was definitely feeling less straitlaced than usual. And less peaceful. Anger was starting to bubble to the surface. There might be other emotions, too, deeper down in the mix, but she hoped she could, for once, be as strong as her father would have wanted. A high-strung child, she'd disappointed her dignified father so often: when she cried for days over her dead gerbil; when she asked for a night-light to banish the monsters she imagined hid in her shoes; when their housekeeper resigned and Allie tearfully chased the woman down the street, begging her to come back. he'd even tried to break Allison of her habit of wishing on stars, a piece of nonsense he believed she'd inherited from her superstitious Irish mother. Eileen O'Hara Cabot had died when Allison was only three, so if she was was responsible for her daughter's emotional lapses, it must have been by way of DNA. Today's fiasco would have been the ultimate disappointment for him. Poor Allison, never quite a beauty, now a shade past her prime, falling for such an obvious cad. So foolish. Though her father had been dead only five months and she missed him every minute, she was almost glad he hadn't lived to see this humiliation. Of course, that also meant he hadn't lived to see his grandchildren. Assuming she ever got around to providing any. After today, that looked more unlikely than ever. Twisting one of the blue ribbons from the centerpiece around her finger, she surveyed the sumptuous hotel ballroom. Each chair was covered in blue silk, tied at the back with a knot of white roses. Allison could almost catch the sickly sweet smell of petals wilting, fading. She glanced down at her own hand, as if she might be able to see it aging, too. "You know what?, She looked at Bitsy. "I think I've wasted my life." Bitsy had been concentrating on making an effigy of Lincoln Gray out of the fruit from the tables" center-pieO'Brien, Kathleen is the author of 'Everything but the Baby ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373714117 and ISBN 0373714114.