Pete, Pearls, and Pictures

“I just don’t see what the problem is,” Jared frowned.

I glared at him. “You don’t,” I asked him monotonously. My arms were folded across my chest, and I was tapping the toe of my black, patent leather stiletto heel on the brand new vinyl flooring in our kitchen. You look defensive and impatient, I heard my mother’s voice criticize, followed by a few disappointed tsks.

Self-conscious now, I uncrossed my arms and planted my hands on my hips. Too confrontational, my mother’s voice scoffed in my head. I had finally settled on twirling my pearl necklace around my finger when a wave of nausea hit me. I gave up on trying to perfect my body language. I leaned back against the marble countertop behind me, also brand new, and closed my eyes. I gingerly massaged my temples to fight off the oncoming migraine. But between Jared’s ignorance and my mother’s psychoanalysis, even from beyond the grave, I probably needed something a bit stronger to get rid of this one.

Jared came over and gently placed his hands on my upper arms. “Another one?” 

I nodded. Jared pulled me into a hug. I’d known Jared long enough that his presence alone was sometimes enough to get rid of the migraines I’d been getting lately. They’d started in the past few months, and I had no idea why. I’d gone to the doctor about it, but they just shrugged and wrote me a prescription, adding in that I should manage my stress.

I took a deep breath and embraced Jared’s hug. I’d been trying to practice some patience with Jared during the wedding planning process. So far, he’d had completely opposite opinions from me about every detail. I wanted a winter wedding, he wanted a summer wedding. I wanted a destination, he wanted to stay home. We’d been able to compromise so far on most everything, but this was where I drew the line at compromise. This was something that I was right about, and I wasn’t going to change my mind.

The pain started to dull, so I gently pushed out of the hug.

“I don’t want your ex-girlfriend at my wedding,” I explained calmly. “Just knowing that she once knew you like I do makes me feel fucking sick. It’s the same reason that I wouldn’t want any of my ex-boyfriends there.”

“But you didn’t invite any of your ex-boyfriends to begin with,” Jared pointed out, albeit rather stupidly. My head throbbed. I pinched the bridge of my nose so that Jared wouldn’t see the “I’m with stupid” facial expression that I made every time I grew impatient with him. I took a long, slow deep breath.

Jared, who could read my body language better than anyone, sighed, understanding that my position on this was unchanging. “I’ll call Pete and tell him to bring a different date.”

“Thank you,” I exhaled. Jared walked away, already dialing Pete’s number.

I groaned as I plopped down on our gray, squishy sectional and draped an arm over my closed eyes. I kicked off my shoes and stretched out as far as I could on our enormous couch. It felt so good to lie down, and even better to see nothing but complete and total darkness. Where the hell did I leave that migraine prescription?

I heard Jared bustling around in the kitchen, starting up our electric kettle and opening and closing cabinets. A few minutes later, I felt a blanket cover me. My eyes still closed, I placed my fingers over them and squinted through, just in time to see Jared sit down next to me on the couch and tucked a piece of my straight brown hair behind my ear. He handed me a pill and a glass of water. I gratefully took the pill, wondering where he’d finally found my migraine medicine.

“What’d Pete say?” I managed to squeak out.

“Well…” Jared started. I started to sit up, but Jared ushered my head back down to a pillow. I buried my eyes in the crook of my arm again. “I told him that it was weird for him to bring my ex to my wedding.”

“And?” I asked impatiently. Dear me, lovebug, but you’ll never keep a man around with that tone of voice. My mother’s voice sliced through my head, followed by a searing pain that shot across the space behind my eyes. I groaned in pain and tightened my arm’s grip around my head to block as much light as possible.

I felt Jared’s weight lift from the couch, but I didn’t dare open my eyes to see where he was going. A few moments later, I felt his weight sink into the couch once more.

“Anyway, I told Pete he couldn’t bring Sarah. He just…well, he didn’t react respectfully, like I thought he would,” Jared explained.

“What’d he say?” I growled.

“He said that I was being stupid, that her coming didn’t change anything, that it wasn’t weird for her to be there, and that ‘everyone else’ wants her to come,” Jared relayed, throwing air quotes around ‘everyone else.’ He continued. “It was all false and disrespectful. So I told him neither you nor I want Sarah at our wedding. I said if Pete wants to come, he has to find a different date or come alone. So he backed out of the wedding.”

“You’re kidding,” I groaned. “Why the fuck does he want to bring her so bad, of all fucking people?”

“Beats me. I only dated her because I was bored,” Jared shrugged. He rubbed his stubble, recalling his old relationship. “She’s kind of crazy, and doesn’t really have much going for her above her shoulders.”

I snorted. “From what you’ve told me about her, I agree.”

“I guess I’ll have to find another groomsman,” he said. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Jared was fine with all of this, but when he gets upset, he becomes more reserved and rational than usual.

“Hey,” I said, grabbing his hand. “I appreciate you supporting me on this.”

He squeezed my hand. “I know.”

“And I’m sorry Pete’s being such a dick,” I added. “Maybe ask Isaiah if he can knock some sense into Pete.” Pete, Jared, and Isaiah had been best friends since college, and the three were practically inseparable.

“Good idea,” Jared grinned. He handed me my favorite mug, a tea bag string dangling over the edge. He must’ve grabbed it from the kitchen when he got up just now. “Here, have some tea. The caffeine should help your head, and the antioxidants should help your stomach.” I blew on the piping hot green tea, grateful that I didn’t have to endure these migraines alone.

Jared retreated to his home office to finish up an assignment he’d been working on most of the day. I closed my eyes for a bit, and had just started to fall asleep when Jared sat on the couch next to me, jolting me awake.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “Are you feeling any better now?”

I nodded. I didn’t know if it was because I was more concerned with wedding plans than my aching head, or if the medicine was kicking in, or if the power nap had reset my brain, but I was actually feeling better. I nodded and attempted a few sips of green tea, pulling back from the mug once I burned my tongue. How was it still this hot? How long had my eyes been closed?

“If you’re feeling up for it later, maybe you could go through some of your mom’s boxes?” he suggested softly.

I couldn’t help but grimace. I nodded weakly in response and massaged what remained of my headache out of my temples. It had only been a few months since my mother had suddenly passed away in a car accident, and, as her only child, I still couldn’t bring myself to go through her things yet. There were boxes and boxes of trinkets, memories, clothes, accessories, kitchen equipment, you name it, and they were currently taking up half of my garage. 

Jared grabbed my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze before returning to the office.

My mother, Polly, in her prime, was a very elegant southern woman with a voice like honey. She spent much of her youth and young adulthood as a model and a singer, and had always spent a great deal of time maintaining her beauty. She was always dolled up to leave the house, especially in the summers. She was beautiful year-round, but something about the warm weather made her thrive more than usual. Her summer sundress collection was extensive, rivaling the inventory of a store at the mall. She donned the dresses in an effortlessly beautiful way, usually paired with a short, fitted jean jacket rolled up at the sleeves, and some sort of small sneaker or cowboy boot. Her ancient string of pearls hardly ever left her throat. It was a tradition in my mother’s family for the women to pass down their pearls to their daughters upon their deaths. I touched the string of pearls now strung around my own neck, rolling the smooth pearl beads in between my fingertips. It was in surprisingly good shape for having originally belonged to my great-great grandmother.

Honestly, I resented the string. It didn’t look right on me, not now. I wasn’t supposed to get the pearls at 28. I wasn’t supposed to have them until much farther into the future.

I sat upright on the couch to take another few sips of tea. I hunched over my cup, inhaling the fumes. Tess, are you a question mark or an exclamation mark? Your choice, lovebug. One of her many rotating catchphrases to train me into presenting myself well, even in private. Growing up, I often bitterly wondered if her constant nitpicking was why my dad had left. My mother always told me that they split up mutually because they got together too young and grew into different people. I would believe her if I’d ever been able to talk to my dad about it. He’d left when I was about four, and died in a motorcycle accident a few years later. It had always been my mother and I, whether I liked it or not.

I finished the cup of tea, stood up, and let out a deep groan as I stretched. My eyes wandered to the kitchen, stopping on the garage door. I guess I could just go through one box today. It would be a slow start, but a start nonetheless. I padded up the carpeted stairs to the main bedroom, changed out of my work clothes and into leggings and a t-shirt, and headed out to the garage. 

The first box was my mother’s office supplies, taken from her desk in her home office. There were a lot of pens, markers and highlighters, and I don’t even know how many pads of sticky notes. There were laptop chargers and extension cords, a large monitor, a mouse, a keyboard, and a few laptops. We’d probably keep the box’s entire contents. I wondered what was on the laptops as I folded the cardboard flaps back up, squatted down, and picked up the deceptively heavy box. I lugged it inside to the office, huffing and puffing the whole way. 

I wobbled into the den, ready to lose my balance. Luckily, Jared saw me struggling and jumped out of his desk chair to help. He gently grabbed the box out of my hands and set it down in the middle of the floor. I rested my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

“I thought you’d be going through the boxes in the garage,” Jared said with an eyebrow raised. 

“It’s office supplies,” I panted. “Mostly pens, a few laptops.”

“Oh,” Jared said brightly as he opened the cardboard flaps and stuck his head in the box, confirming the contents. Jared reached through the sea of pens and dug out a stack of three laptops with one hand and a handful of charging cords with the other. The laptops were stacked in thickness order. The bottom one, an ancient-looking Dell, was the thickest, and had multiple HDMI and USB ports, headphone jacks, and a CD reader built in. A permanent coat of dust had affixed itself to the once-black exterior. The middle laptop was an HP model that was less thick, with less ports, but otherwise still relatively the same. The top one was a MacBook, with two USB-C ports on the side and nothing else. “I wonder if she left anything on the laptops,” Jared wondered under his breath. 

“Probably modeling photos,” I guessed.

Jared quickly matched the cords to the charging ports on the laptops and plugged them all into outlets. I watched in silence as he did this, and then reached for the box to unpack the rest of the contents while the laptops charged up. Jared turned back to his assignment, and we worked quietly beside each other. It was a comfort, really, to be able to do things together in silence. I was truly looking forward to the rest of my life with Jared. 

After almost an hour of unpacking the first box, Jared shut his laptop and spun back around to face me. He picked up the largest computer, the dusty old Dell, and pried it open. The hinges squeaked in protest, as if Jared had just awakened them from hibernation earlier than expected. It was one of those computers that still had the small, round button in the middle of the keyboard to move the mouse––a trackpoint. I hadn’t seen one since I was a kid. An early version of the Windows login page lit up the screen, asking for a password for the user “Polly.”

TeSsLoVeBuG95!

I reached across Jared to enter the password. The screen changed when I pressed enter, showing a loading screen. A minute passed, maybe two. Neither Jared nor I said a thing. My heart was beating fast. I wondered what was on here.

Finally, the default home screen popped up. Jared used the trackpoint to navigate the mouse to open the computer’s files. It had clearly been a while since he’d used one of these keyboards, too. A list of alphabetically organized, precisely labeled folders filled the window. I forced my eyes to scan past folders like Divorce Information, Diary Entries, or Modeling Photos, because there were dozens of folders that began with my name: Tess School Info was one, Tess Medical Info another, and Tess Pregnancy Diaries. I took over the mouse from Jared and selected one labeled Tess Photos.

My mother, with her bright blonde hair and pale green eyes, was a stunning person to look at. Her modeling photos had been blown up in size to be hung up all over our house. I used to spend hours staring at her high cheekbones, sharp jawline, and intense stare. I looked like my dad, apparently, with jet black hair, soft features, and a round face. I was always grateful that I at least got my mother’s eyes, and I secretly hoped it made her see more of herself in me, but it seemed like the only times she’d ever pay attention to me were to criticize my appearance. She was always fussing over my hairstyle or fixing my makeup, never pleased or satisfied with how I looked.

But when I opened the folder, hundreds of photo icons began to load, painstakingly, one by one. I scrolled through the icons, beginning with mommy-and-me photoshoots, ballet recitals and tutus, and lots of messy cake and spaghetti photos. As I continued to scroll I saw myself, older now, in mock trial competitions, at prom, homecoming, soccer games, and more dance recitals. I saw myself in crutches, studying hunched over at my desk, and smiling widely, cheering, at football games in college. There were photos saved that I had only posted to my social media accounts, and I was shocked to see that they were mostly photos I’d worried about posting because I worried that they’d invoke my mother’s criticisms. I couldn’t believe how many photos she had of me. I hardly ever remembered her picking up the camera. She was always in front of it.

My eyes stung with tears as I realized that her criticisms, despite being unhelpful and hurtful, were how she showed that she cared. I wished she was around to see me wear her old wedding dress, or to help plan the wedding. She would’ve made sure everything was done well and done properly. She would’ve known how to handle this stupid situation with Pete. Tears silently rolled down my cheeks.

Pete is Isaiah’s problem right now, not yours. And hire a new florist. Those peony arrangements you have right now are a disgrace. You deserve the best, lovebug.

“I’m sorry about Pete,” I said, finally breaking our silence.

Jared shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll come around.”

Jared’s phone pinged. His eyebrows furrowed even further as he scanned the message. “Pete said he’s sorry. Isaiah was able to talk some sense into him, apparently. Pete’ll be at the wedding, without Sarah.”

“That was fast,” I snorted.

Mother knows best, lovebug.