time I saw you Cam, you were up to here on me,” says the woman, indicating a place in the air level to her belly button. “You sure turned out good,” she says.
Cam chuckles at his own expense as the groom’s mother interrupts her tuxedoed son from a conversation.
“Blake, look who’s here!”
The groom turns, “Ms. Daltry!”
Cam watches his mother’s eyes dim with the matronly title. The groom gives her the same cautious hug he gave her on the last day of school when he was twelve.
“She looks like a lovely girl,” says Cam’s mother, dryly enough to take back a little of the power lost by her being seen as just the old teacher; the one who gets a place card at the table with third cousins and clergy.
“I wouldn’t have gotten into SMU to meet her if you hadn’t been such a good teacher,” says the groom.
“Awww,” says the groom’s mother, overwhelmed by her son’s compliment as she looks at Cam’s mother, expecting gratefulness.
Cam’s mother just smiles and says, “Well, you know I would have been proud no matter where you went to school.”
Cam knows what she’s doing. Southern women have a gift for using downplayed compliments to maintain a social advantage, and Carol Daltry can play this game with the best of them.
“So great you both could make it,” says the groom’s mother, gently brushing them off to move on to other introductions. The groom takes this as his out, too, and goes back to his conversation with an old man filling his ears about the bride’s beauty––tonguing otherwise innocent words as if he’s secretly conjuring up a splayed-leg image of her beneath the lucky groom in a few hours time.
The groom is still growing into his looks, with a rounded jaw and plump cheeks that will be nicely chiseled by the next ten or twenty years. But the bride has reached the crest of the beauty life has dealt her. Her hands stray compulsively down to her waist every few seconds,
advertising the fact that she’s more familiar with her weight six months ago and her weight six months from now than she is with the trim frame she slaved for in preparation for today. Cam decides that she has gotten the better end of the looks deal, but the fact that her father has the cash to rent this place out for the reception more than evens things up.
Cam remembers that his mother is a great dancer when she drags him out onto the dance floor. He used to watch her teach Andrew ballroom dancing in the living room with a metronome before his high school prom nights. Cam turned down the dance lessons when he got to high school, since his only interest in proms was what he’d do afterwards lying down. But his awkwardness on the dance floor makes him wish he’d taken his mother up on her repeated offers at least once or twice. She does what she can for him tonight on the fly, whispering his dance steps to him as they go. A few minutes into the song, as Cam is just getting comfortable with his feet, something over his shoulder catches his mother’s attention.
“Kelly Brady’s here,” she says.
The Champagne that Cam finished a few minutes ago comes up and tickles the back of his throat, and his palms leave sweat on his mother’s satin dress. He turns her around with a graceless twirl so he can trade his view for hers.
Kelly is with her parents, and Cam wonders whether they remember him as their daughter’s first love or first heartbreak. When they notice Cam’s glance, he gets a smile from Kelly’s mother and a look of slight recognition from her father before Kelly looks over with startled blue eyes and an open pair of bee-stung lips.
Kelly is prettier in her plain black silk dress than the bride in her four-figure gown, so the bridesmaids make a point of ignoring her as she mingles with the room. When Kelly catches on, she kindly pulls her hair up into a ponytail to help keep the men’s eyes on the female portion of the wedding party. But her parents still gloat around with the confidence that their daughter could upstage nearly any bride in town. Competition between people is a stronger force than reverence, Cam decides. People compare their babies behind glass in maternity wards, they compare their family headstones in graveyards, and they compare their way through every step in between.
Cam makes his way across the room to Kelly and her parents but he’s beaten to her by one of the groomsman, so he stops another tray of Champagne to give purpose to his useless position in the middle of the room. The groomsman doesn’t allow any lulls in the conversation, and eventually the bandleader interrupts the room’s chatter to tell them all to take their seats for dinner. People slowly scatter from their conversations to find their assigned places at the tables. The groomsman gets a spot at the table right next to Kelly’s––their chair backs nearly touch when they sit down. Cam finds his mom at the riffraff table at the back of the room, and takes a seat in front of the place card that reads “Melanie Thurmond.”
Kelly was Cam’s summer girlfriend between his junior and senior years of high school. They went to different schools, but their parents were in the same society. Or at least, his grandparents’ legacy was still strong enough back then to allow his parents a place in it. Munna still kept up with the annual dues at the Shreveport Country Club in those days, so Cam could hang around the pool in the summer. Andrew would play tennis in the mornings and caddy on the golf course in the afternoons, while Cam spent his days talking up the sorority lifeguards in their red one-pieces, stealing golf carts for joyrides on the green, and charging ten-dollar burgers and five-dollar milkshakes on the family tab.
Kelly took tennis lessons all summer, and would always take a dip in the pool afterwards. Cam first noticed her that summer on the high dive, her arms at her sides and her toes gripping the narrowed tip of the board. Her wet, thick brown hair was slicked down her back and her chest and hips cut a subtle hourglass form out of the cloudless June sky. The previous summer, at fifteen, she was still a skinny-legged child––her hip bones more noticeable in her bathing suit than her breasts. But just nine months later, she stood there on the high dive with the full breasts and rounded hips of a young woman, though she’d somehow kept the childish sweetness in her face. As she raised her arms above her head, her suit stretched tightly against her recently acquired curves. She bounced on the board to get a little momentum, her thighs flexing just enough to show their tone, and then she sprang off and took her time bringing her arms around in front of her––her flattened hands coming together at the thumbs just in time to break the surface and let her rigid body slip into the water with barely a splash. By the time she came up for air at the base of the ladder, Cam was on his way around the pool to where she’d left her towel.
At first, Cam was all nerves and no balls when it came to Kelly. He’d been dating seniors since he was a freshman, and could always talk his way through any of them. Yet there was rarely a single sentence he put together for Kelly that he didn’t want to do over once it came out. But he met her by the pool every day, nervous as he was, and every day they talked a little bit more. Other club brats talked about how Cam and Kelly were going out before they even realized they were.
Cam had had sex with six girls in the three years of high school before Kelly, but she was the one who had to make the move when they first kissed. By August he’d made it to third without any stolen bases, and she asked him if he’d ever done it with anybody. He said he had, but left out the plural. As she put it, she had decided that her first time would be with him, when the time was right. A hot-blooded eagerness shot through him when she said it. But then came a weight that he’d never connected to sex, a responsibility far beyond condoms and cuddling.
Two weeks later, the night came when they were making out under an LSU blanket on the couch in her basement, and her parents
