The house was cramped and musty and low ceilinged. There was beige carpet from the seventies, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, secondhand furniture that smelled incurably of smoke. Someone had taped a hand-drawn sketch of a mallard to the lintel above the stairs, reminding you to duck. Board games, stacked into ziggurats, cluttered the floor. An antique sign—sweet cherries u-pick-m—hung on the wall of the narrow kitchen, where every appliance was brown. Brown was the stove. Brown was the refrigerator. Brown, brown were the microwave and dishwasher. Brown was the toaster but rarely its toast, which popped up at random, unforeseeable intervals, like a jack-in-the-box. There was a charming porch—recently rebuilt, with a gorgeous prospect of the lake—and yet you couldn’t soak in the view, or hear the wakes of speedboats lapping the beach, because the yard was cut off from the shore by a major trucking route. (The whoosh of semis and logging trucks, the fart of Harleys speeding by, was the sound of summer.)
Still, Cece loved it more than any place on earth. There were orchards behind the house, ancient apple trees planted by Mr. Margolis’s grandfather, varieties of fruit with names like racehorses: Sweet Sixteen and Hidden Rose and Northern Spy. There was a hammock where you could lie in the shade and read while the sun flickered through the pines. There were raspberry bushes, magically replenishing, like something in a fairy tale. (In July you could go at them like a machine—fill six, seven buckets—and the bushes wouldn’t look any different.) And the cherries! Somehow there always seemed to be a tree within reach. Fingers stained red, bloated with fruit, you’d run across Route 30 and jump into the lake to clean off, whooping lustily at the cold, feeling like a character in a Russian novel. At least that’s the way Cece felt, as if she’d opened a door in her imagination, entered some pre-digital world where lusty whooping was all the rage. She loved the place as much as Charlie did. They loved it so much they were getting married there, more than a thousand miles from home. Some of their friends were upset – it was expensive to fly in from either coast, and not at all easy—but Cece didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine getting married anywhere else.
Now here she was, her first day in the house by herself. She’d flown out from LA a month early. Charlie’s parents were back home in Hancock Park, and of course Charlie couldn’t leave the hospital for more than a week: he was a cardiac anesthesiologist, tethered to the OR. So it was up to Cece to make sure the wedding came off. To save money—but mostly because it felt more genuine to her—she was planning the whole thing herself. She stared at her laptop, combing the pictures of square-dance callers before snagging on one that featured a young guy in a cowboy hat looking vaguely hungover. She was attracted to the wedding band’s name, Rod-O and the Feckless Fiddlers. That was the advice she’d been given about square-dance bands: the more ridiculous the name, the better it would be.
“What does the ‘O’ stand for?” she asked Rod-O on the phone. A TV blared in the background. The band she’d originally booked—the Fiddle Faddle Stringtet—had canceled the week before.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just liked the way it sounded. I’m from Mamaroneck, New York. I needed something to stand out.”
