Chapter 2
Before I could answer him, Daniel took my overnight bag from the server and carried it into the guest room.
“Daniel.” I followed him across the landing. “Take it back.”
“It’s one weekend, Claire.” He set the bag beside the guest bed. “Mom’s exhausted.”
In my bedroom across the hall, a hanger struck the floor.
I walked in. Ryan was pulling my dresses out of the closet and dropping them into an open box. Marilyn stood beside him, hanging hers in the space he cleared. Daniel’s shirts were still on the other side of the rail.
Ryan reached for the dress I had worn to my father’s last birthday dinner. I caught the hanger before he could lift it.
“Put my clothes back.”
“Mom needs room,” he said.
“She has a room.”
Marilyn pushed one of my empty hangers aside and hung up another dress. My perfume and hairbrush had been swept into a drawer. Her makeup bag sat open on my dresser.
“The guest room overlooks the garden,” she said. “This one overlooks the lake. I’d like to wake up to it after the day I’ve had.”
My father had put those windows in so I could see the water from my bed. Ryan let go of the hanger, but he left the box of my clothes on the floor.
I picked it up and put it on the bed. Then I took Marilyn’s dress from the closet and handed it to Daniel, who had stopped in the doorway.
“Take this to the guest room.”
Marilyn turned to him. “Daniel, tell her we settled this.”
“We didn’t,” I said. “You settled it without me.”
Daniel held the dress between two fingers. “Can we talk downstairs? The speeches are about to start.”
“Ryan has my clothes in a box. We’re talking here.”
Ryan moved toward the box again. I stepped in front of it. He looked to Daniel, but Daniel was watching his mother.
Marilyn folded her arms. “I raised you better than this. Are you really going to stand there while your wife sends me down the hall?”
“I’m asking you to use the guest room, Mom,” Daniel said.
“You offered me this one.”
“And he had no right to,” I said.
She turned on me. “My son lives here now. Do you plan to remind him whose house it is every time he opens his mouth?”
“Only when he gives away my bedroom.”
Daniel’s grip tightened around the hanger. For a moment, he looked at me the way he had downstairs, waiting for me to make his life easier.
I pointed to the box on the bed. “Either you put her things in the guest room and bring mine back, or you can both spend the weekend at a hotel.”
Marilyn gave a short laugh. “You wouldn’t throw your husband out on your wedding day.”
“He knows where the door is.”
Daniel looked at me, then carried the dress across the hall. Marilyn called after him, but he came back for the next one.
Ryan slammed the closet door open for him. “Happy now?”
I handed Daniel another dress. He took it. By the time he had moved Marilyn’s makeup bag, she was standing in the hallway with Ryan, telling him in a voice meant for me to hear that she would remember this.
Daniel brought my overnight bag back from the guest room. I put my dresses on their hangers while he waited by the door.
“Can we go down now?” he asked.
I passed him and headed for the speeches. From the stairs, I could see the table where we had placed my father’s photograph before the ceremony.
His picture was gone. Daniel’s family portrait stood in its place.