At the gym, Lucy uses a yoga ball to stretch. Large and blue, the rubber globe has teats to hang on to and Lucy does, all the while envisioning the bright-hued cow that might have the ball as an udder. In the locker room, she doesn’t bother to shower but notices the skin all around her in various stages of sagging and figures herself somewhere in the middle. All of the imperfections; moles and hip-flanking stretch marks, the puckered folds of back skin, all seemed wonderful to Lucy. After Matt proposed, they laid still in their swimsuits on the lake shore with his hand like a map-x on her belly.

“I love this part of you,” he said, touching the pigmented splotch below her ribs. Like something melted, the spot spread each time she breathed out. “I wonder if it will get bigger when you get pregnant.”

They speculated, tried to guess which state outline the birthmark might resemble as her body changed. Propped up on her elbows then, Lucy looked at the smooth plane of water, watching for fish ripples and feeling her newly ringed finger. Matt kept his hand on her as they stayed there, paper-weighting her as if she might become air-born at any moment.

When she thought about that day, she could make any of the objects huge in her mind – the birthmark splotch could seem to take over her belly, or the striped beach towel they were on could enlarge to blanket size, but usually, the water took over, breaking out of its lake-hold and seeping onto them. The ring never grew, though. Once, in a dream, the diamond band had actually become minute, baby-earring size and then the size of a small-fonted ‘o.’ When Lucy woke up, she went to the box on her dresser where she kept the engagement ring and checked to see if it still fit.

On the back deck are the flats of pansies and new strawberry plants Lucy will earth later in the day. She walks past the small bobbed flower heads and tangled stems to the back door, going inside to change into non-athletic clothing, something her mother would call ‘an outfit.’

“It’s hard to say,” she says into the phone to Kyla, “I feel like it should feel weird, but it doesn’t.”

“Maybe you’re just blocking it out,” Kyla says, the slur of highway noise and radio coming through.

“I hope you’re using your earpiece,” Lucy picks at dirt under her thumb nail and then, unable to flick it out, uses her teeth, feeling the sand grit on her tongue.

“It’s called an earbud, Luce,” Kyla says.

“I know. It just sounds gross – like an earwig or something that’s going to bite you or something. Anyway, I think I’m just going with the black pants white top.” “Good,” Kyla says, “You’ll look like a very stylish waiter.”

At Unveiled, the bridal boutique downtown, Lucy steps in the door only to have the sensors go off.

“I’m not even holding anything,” she says trying to make light of the loud buzzers and the tomato-shaped and colored lights flaring atop the electronic gate. One of the saleswomen comes with a key to unlock and restart the device.

When Ginny, Lucy’s mother, arrives with her black binder full of bridal ideas, Lucy tells her about the sensor incident saying, “It’s like even they know I’m not supposed to be in here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ginny says and splays her bridal book onto the counter. “Now, let’s figure out some options.”

Two saleswomen, bridal assistants they call themselves, peck and hem at Ginny’s book, fondle the fabric samples she’s pinned inside and remark about the work that went into the collection of torn magazine pages, clipped tapestry samples, articles about shoe-dying.

One of the assistants turns to Lucy and says, “Can I just do one quick thing?” With out a response, the assistant sticks her hands into Lucy’s hair and fluffs out the matted locks.

Ginny nods as if there’s been some conversation that Lucy’s missed, “I know, her hair has always been baby fine. No body – wouldn’t even hold a perm. It looks so nice when it’s just been cut, though. A blunt cut to frame the face.”

Lucy rolls her eyes; she’s heard the hair-speech many times before. She suspects the pale skin talk will follow but before Ginny can tell of the way a tan suits her daughter’s coloring, the assistant says to Lucy, “Now, tell me – will you wear your hair up or down for the ceremony?”

“Actually, my mom’s the one getting married,” Lucy says which prompts instant fussing from the assistants who cover up their assumptions by fawning over the bridal binder again.

They self-correct and distract by saying to Ginny, “Well, this makes much more sense. The designs you’ve picked out are far more suitable for a more mature bride, the closed sleeve for example.”

Lucy wanders to the garment racks by the bay windows. Unveiled prided itself on being less a store than an elegant townhouse that just happened to house hundreds of bridal gowns, tiaras, and corsets. Shifting through the hangered dresses, Lucy wonders if her mother will wear white or settle on something more common for the déjà vu bride.

“How about celedon?” Ginny shouts across the room, holding up a wrap the color of treacle.

Lucy nods and then, to make sure she seemed enthusiastic enough, nods again emphatic as a seizure. The gowns are set on the puffy silk hangers that make Lucy think of ballet slippers, trickling ribbons, the old poster she had in her room of a ballerina with torn tights and bruised knees. Shopping with her mother as a girl, Lucy would loose herself in the racks of clothing, stepping into the center or underneath the displays. She wants to do that now, not just to remove herself from the tea sandwiches and tiara talk, but to feel the cool satins and rustling crinolines against her skin. She imagines sitting under one of the wide bell skirts like one of Mother Commedia’s children in the Nutcracker who suddenly burst from the fabric folds and dance. Suddenly, Lucy remembers that the role is danced by a man and this makes her sad. She goes to find Ginny in the dressing room and sits watching her mother being buttoned into a cream-colored gown that casts a pink hue in the light.

“Well,” Ginny says into the three-way mirror, “The color’s no good. I feel like a cheap wine. But I do like the style I must say.”

“It’s very popular with our second wedding brides,” Assistant says. She touches the waistline and adds, “It’s very flattering through here.”

“Yes,” Ginny says, “I’m small, so you know; I have to be very particular about the cut of my clothes.”

Lucy likes to refer to her mother as short, since it annoys her that Ginny will only say small or rarely, petite.

“My whole family is short,” Lucy says.

“The women are small, that’s true,” Ginny twirls around. “And with poor circulation to boot.” She holds up her mottled hands, pressing to show how slowly the spot under the skin refills with blood. “But we live a long time, so that’s what’s important.”

Ginny always connected her circulatory issues with the fact that her mother and grandmother lived past ninety-six, and it never made sense to Lucy, who also had blotchy blues and purples on her toes and whose hands were always cold.

“My grandmother always said to marry for height,” the assistant says.

Ginny instantly looks to Lucy – they both are thinking about how tall Matt was – about his extra-long shirtsleeves and size thirteen feet.

“You look nice, Mom,” Lucy says and goes back out into the living room section of the store and sits, fairly shrunken, on the loveseat and assumes her mother is telling the Matt Story. No doubt the bridal assistants would be riveted as Ginny told of the courtship, engagement, and then pre-wedding widow her daughter had become after Matt’s drowning two summers before.

Lucy didn’t enjoy overhearing her mother talk about it, but she found she would deconstruct the way the story was told – was the emphasis on their meeting? The beach proposal? The son-in-law Ginny almost had? Lucy barely spoke of it now, but she found that when she did – to Kyla, or to some old man next to her on the subway who wondered why a pretty girl like herself hadn’t been snatched up yet – that she rushed through the beginning and middle of her time with Matt and zeroed in on the end.

There was the last time she’d seen him, at the ferry port on his way to Block Island, the grease stain he had on his shorts from fixing the slipped bike chain, the scab on his forearm where he scraped himself on an upturned trowel in the garden. Lucy liked to pick at Matt, look for blackheads on his nose or pluck the stray hairs that he missed shaving, and she found that if she talked enough or if Matt were tired enough, she could dig at a hardened scab for a couple of seconds without making him wince or hold her back from scratching at his skin with her thumbnail.

She’d wondered about the scab when she found out Matt had been tangled in the sea-reeds and drowned. The casket was closed, but Lucy had put her hands to it, and thought about checking to see if the scab was still there. The drowning part, or the way she watched the ferry boat take Matt away from the mainland and out towards the island where he would two days later die, was the section of their relationship Lucy focused on. Ginny was wrapping it up now, Lucy could tell. She could make out her mother saying something about other fish in the ocean, not even realizing the tastelessness of her expression. She’d said it once before and Lucy had said, “If there really are other fish in the sea, I hope they’re live ones.”

Then Ginny usually went on to say something about moving forward, about Lucy joining a law practice in town, maybe. Ginny still introduced Lucy as a lawyer though she never practiced, never even passed the bar, even when she took a part-time job at the bookstore café in town. She had only just received her degree when Matt asked her if she minded spending Memorial Day apart. His friend, Justin, had a boat out on Block Island and they were planning on fishing the shallows for the bluefish that invaded the reefs and rock piles. Lucy agreed, thinking she’d start her bar exam studying with nothing to distract her but the sounds of the garden at night. Sometimes Matt would lead her to the window and they’d peer out at their plantings as if they could catch them in the act of growing.

Ginny had liked Matt. She would say sometimes, since he had been in agriculture, just setting up his own organic farm that her future son-in-law had grown on her. Matt laughed at the joke every time. Of course, she assumed Lucy would marry someone from the law school or maybe an engineer. But she watched Lucy and Matt in the garden together, seen them turning the soil, watched them lay pine branches loosely over the broccoli plants they grounded to protect them from the late-season snow. Stamping snow and dirt from her boot soles, Lucy’s cheeks would be cold and ruddy, and while she assumed Ginny, who might have popped by for coffee, was studying her daughter’s mismatched layers of clothing, Ginny was really overwhelmed by how much the outside suited Lucy, how appropriate she was amongst the curling vines and stalks that bent, boneless, over the swollen zucchini.

Ginny goes to sit on the loveseat next to Lucy and puts her hand on Lucy’s knee. Lucy defends the milk stain on her black pants immediately, “They were clean, seriously, but then I spilled something on my way here in the car.”

“It looks like milk,” Ginny says and points to her daughter’s white shirt, “Too bad you didn’t spill it on you shirt.”

“Kyla said you’d think I look like a waiter,” Lucy says.

“Waitress, yes,” Ginny says. “You do, a bit.” Ginny shakes her head. “Poor Kyla, she’s just saying that because she is a waitress.”

“Don’t start, Mom,” Lucy says but is glad to deflect the critique onto the non-present friend.

“Lulu, I asked you to come with me today because I kind of needed the support.” She gestures to the assistants hovering by the dressing room. “They’re too much for me. I need your opinion, someone who knows me.” Lucy nods.

By the dressing room, Lucy inspects the two gowns Ginny is deciding between. “This one has the dip in the waist that I like,” Ginny says moving her hands across the garment like a game show host displaying a new leather luggage set. “But this one had the boat neck which I think is very becoming on someone my age.”

Lucy agrees with this last bit and says, “I think the boat neck works. And you should get it in cream, not white.”

“Not lilac?” Ginny laughs. “The color of old ladies?”

“You’re not old, Mom,” Lucy says and touches the gowns again.

“Neither are you,” Ginny says.

It’s late spring by the time Ginny’s wedding outfit is stitched and fitted. She picks it up from the tailor and hangs it, sheathed in plastic, from a hook above the passenger side window of her car. In the back of the Jeep, spread out on flat black garbage bags, are flats of tomato plants she plans to deliver to Lucy.

Along the dirt driveway up towards Lucy’s house, small lights shaped like Chinese boat hats are still on, confused by the day’s dark clouds. Pre-storm, in the hush of the blue spruce trees that back the garden, Lucy slips her feet out from her red plastic garden clogs and sets them by a bag of Nurseryman’s Preplant fertilizer. Far off, eggplant colored clouds suspend from thinner gray ones, looming bulbous and full.

Rooting into the loose dirt with her bare feet, Lucy thinks about Matt’s lips, about the way he kissed her first on the side of the mouth and then looked at her, surprised, as if the action had come before the thought. She thinks about what they would have been doing on this day two years ago – were they planting the Early Girl tomatoes that were the first full-sized ones to ripen in the summer? From inside the kitchen she used to watch Matt pick the small deep red ones, mouth one, and collect the rest in a shallow basket and bring them to the counter. Lucy would have drizzled maple syrup, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice on a plate. When the Early Girls were halved and put open side down onto the plate, Matt and Lucy would stand there, staring at the tiny red bluffs in a darkening sea.

Lucy was the first to give in, to pluck a tomato half and eat it. The Early Girls had a slightly tough skin with a rich and sugary juice and Lucy liked them best of all the heirlooms. After the drowning, Lucy forgot to change the location of the tomato plants, though, and cutworms invaded despite the aluminum foil wrappers she put around the base of the seedlings.

Lucy enjoys thinking about Matt. Not what they might have been doing if he were alive, breathing in the dark lull of the raked dirt, but what they had done at an exact moment years before. Maybe this was the day they went to the fair on the town green and been caught in tacky caricature, balloon-talking love to each other from grotesque mouths. Each day could have been a day marked by an event, like when they first boarded a plane together, or had sex by the beehive-stacked wooden logs at the farm.

Some days, Lucy looked in her date book to see if she kept a record and could be sure if today was when they walked to Petrovia’s for soup before seeing a revival of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the square, commenting on their movie-couple likenesses – didn’t all lovers go to black and white cinema revivals? Or maybe it was a Thursday, the day they replaced the light fixture in the kitchen; slipped the dead moths from the old one’s curves and watched their flat bodies fall into the trash. Other days, Lucy’s date book revealed no details and Lucy couldn’t remember where they’d been, what they discussed, and all day she would find herself edgy – what had she and Matt done on regular days, on days when they’d just been around and with each other?

In the shower sometimes, Lucy will indulge herself and count her life since he’d been gone; how many haircuts has she had since Matt died? It occurs to her, thinking about her hair that someday with enough haircuts and growth, there won’t be any hairs on her head that Matt has touched.

When Ginny’s car stops by the Copper Beach tree, Lucy looks over and waves, suddenly excited to show her mother all the garden rows, to hold up the small placards she printed with herb names and then laminated. She’d gone to the coffee shop in town and taken more than her share of wooden stirrers and super glued them to the cards. Heaped by the back door, they were ready to be staked, shoved past the topsoil down deep enough to avoid being relocated by the wind.

“Come see the dress!” Ginny shouts and opens the car door. The breeze has picked up. Past the trees and house are ocean swells topped with white caps. From the car window, the plastic garment bag billows out, flag-waving and rustling until Ginny tucks it back in, holds it steady.

“It’s beautiful, Mom, really,” Lucy nods to the dress. “I don’t want to touch it.” She shows her dirty hands.

“I have to take it home and put it in my closet until Saturday – I don’t want Dr. Jim seeing it!” Ginny says.

“When will you stop calling him Doctor Jim?” Lucy asks.

“Oh, who knows, maybe never,” Ginny smiles like a bride. She met Dr. Jim Thorensson first when she was still married to Lucy’s father, Mark, was admitted for observation after showing up with left and chest pain in the emergency room. He announced himself as Dr. Jim as if he was in pediatrics, but Ginny was so grateful, so overwhelmed by his knowledge, that she hadn’t been bothered. After she and Mark divorced Ginny had played mixed doubles at the club, usually losing cheerfully, until she was paired with Dr. Jim and they took each set from Aubrey Deltin and Trish Leonard. Since their introduction, even after he took her to St. Bart’s and engaged her at the Georges V in Paris, she still thought of him as Dr. Jim.

“I hope you don’t call him that to his face,” Lucy laughs.

“Not too often,” Ginny says and then, with her arm spread wide like she’s in a musical set in a garden she says, “Dr. Jim the cardiologist – he’s all heart!”

Lucy rolls her eyes. “Charming, mother,” she says and fixes her mother’s scarf so it lies flat against her tee-shirt, leaving soil crumbs on her mother’s chest. “Sorry – now it looks like you’ve eaten an Oreo.”

“Unlikely,” Ginny sighs. She looks at Lucy’s bare feet and is about to offer to buy her new shoes, something appropriate for gardening, when she remembers the load in the trunk.

“I brought you something,” Ginny says.

They unload the flats, supporting underneath the flimsy plastic until the plants are near Lucy’s red clogs.

Ginny holds up a shoe. “Oh, you already have an outdoor sandal. I was going to take you for a pair.”

“Yeah, that’s okay, these work well,” Lucy says, slipping them on.

Ginny, perched above the soil, tries to uncoil the seedlings. Lucy asks, “Are you nervous for the big day?”

“A little, I guess,” Ginny says. “I suppose I never really saw myself marrying anyone other than your father. But this is a good thing for me. Don’t you think?”

“I do,” Lucy says. Then, more dramatically, she says, “I do!”

From her pocket, Ginny takes out the slip of paper that the nursery gave her with the plants.

“I got you these,” Ginny says. “They’re supposed to be very sweet. Tiny, but really delicious.”

“Thanks, you didn’t have to.” Lucy scoops dirt out and into the holes puts a sprinkling of fertilizer before placing the first plant inside. Ginny, allowing her crouch to topple so the knees of her khakis are dusted with dirt, begins to undo the tomato seedlings from the flat boxes, holding each one a short time before passing them to her daughter.

After the row is complete, the leafy stems watered, Ginny puts her arm around Lucy and says, “Do you know the name of these tomatoes?”

Lucy shakes her head. She is overcome with emotion watching her mother sink in the dirt for her, with her.

“Matt’s Wild Cherry,” Ginny says. “I thought – I don’t know what I thought, really. Just that it was a lovely name, and that you’d like them.”

Lucy looks at her mother, the bride-to-be, and cries. Where will she be in August when the peas are podded, the eggplants bosom-heavy, the rose potatoes and onions quiet underground?

“Sweetheart,” Ginny rubs at Lucy’s hair, doesn’t try to calm in into order or slip it into an elastic holder.

“I have a date tonight, Mom,” Lucy says, crying harder but looking out to the ocean. Ginny nods. Before the sky lets down its swelling, the wind picks up. Unhinged, the weathervane on the housetop tips up until it points skyward. Lucy takes her mother’s hand, thumbing impressions that stay mottled. She traces the hedgerows of Ginny’s raised veins like she’d done as a kid. What is shadow one day, is water the next.