That Old Cape Magic

hundred and fifty or so folding chairs had been set up there—yesterday, by the look of it, since several hotel employees were busy wiping them down with towels.
    “By the way,” Laura said, looking at the card that Joy had picked up in the hotel foyer. “I’m really sorry about table seventeen. I wasn’t consulted.”
    “The leftover table?” Griffin guessed.
    She nodded. “You aren’t going to know anybody,” she said, then was visited by a happy thought. “Actually, that’s not true. You’ll know Sunny Kim.”
    “Little Sunny?” Joy said.
    “He’s about six-two now and very good-looking. Anyway, I should get back to the bridal party. I’ll tell A-boy you’re here.”
    They watched her go, tripping down the lawn in her Snow White dress. Joy took Griffin’s hand. “Have you ever seen anyone so happy?” There was a certain wistfulness in her expression as she watched her daughter and this new boy she’d chosen, as if she knew all too well he could turn out to be Mr. Wrong and end up breaking Laura’s large, generous, trusting heart. Or maybe, Griffin thought, it was the knowledge that what was just now filling that heart to overflowing could in the end leak away, and that in thirty-four years, love’s urgency, if not love itself, might have dissipated.
    While she studied their daughter, he studied her, trying to decide which it might be.
    Then Sunny Kim emerged onto the porch, where he squinted into the bright sunlight. He hadn’t looked so tall the night before, but of course at the Olde Cape Lounge he’d been sitting down.
    •   •   •
    Kelsey Apple, the bride, had been Laura’s best friend through middle school, back in L.A. Laura’s had been the more dominant personality, or so it had seemed to Griffin. Wherever she was, that’s where Kelsey had to be, and whatever she had was what Kelsey wanted, including Griffin and Joy for her parents. Her own were dour and dull, her father some sort of bean counter for a movie studio, her mother religious. “It’s so weird being in your house,” Kelsey once told Laura. “Your parents, like, actually talk to each other. You can tell they still have sex.”
    When Griffin accepted the teaching position back East, they feared Laura would be devastated to leave her L.A. life and friends, but it was Kelsey who’d come unglued at the news. “You can’t,” she told Laura matter-of-factly as they walked home from school, as if that declaration meant the end of the discussion. That evening after dinner, Mrs. Apple had called the Griffins to say that Kelsey had pitched the mother of all fits and locked herself in her room. Could Laura maybe come over and reassure her that their moving to Connecticut wouldn’t mean the end of the girls’ friendship, that they could still write and even talk on the phone? Joy had gone along with Laura for moral support and also ended up talking to Kelsey through her locked bedroom door, a conversation that quickly devolved into a negotiation. Of
course
Kelsey and Laura wouldn’t lose touch, and of
course
they could talk on the phone each and every week, and of
course
Laura wasn’t going to go out and find a new best friend and replace her. And next summer (Joy had to promise this, too, not just Laura) Kelsey could come visit them in their new home and stay as long as she wanted. Leaving no stone unturned, Kelsey then insisted both her parents join them in the crowded hallway, grant their permission and promise they’d somehow find money for the trip. Only then did she open the door and embrace her friend. “I’d still rather you wouldn’t,” she told Laura,clearly suffering buyer’s remorse now that the deal had finally been struck. Walking home Laura confided to Joy that she was just as happy to be moving far away, that Kelsey’s friendship, always needy, was becoming impossible.
    New England was different, though, and she found it tough sledding in her new high school. The cliques were long established, and since Laura wasn’t the type to crash them, she spent most of her free time babysitting and wishing she had a best friend again, even a needy one. Kelsey visited for two weeks that summer, and after that first year’s separation both girls seemed profoundly happy together. Kelsey had a boyfriend now, Robbie, but he was from her mother’s church and he thought he might become a minister, so in some respects it was a lot like not having a boyfriend. She told Laura she was thinking she’d