A Summer to Die by Lois Lowry Page B

"what's wrong with Molly?"
    I told them about her illness, about the nosebleeds, the hospital, the transfusions, and the pills that were making her hair fall out. They were both very quiet. Ben reached over and ran his hand gently over the top of my head. "That's rough," he said. "That's very rough."
    "Well," I explained, "it's not that big a deal. And she's lots better. Look." I pointed to one of the photographs. "See how round her face is getting? She's gained ten pounds since she came home from the hospital."
    Maria poured more tea into our cups. "I'm glad we came here, Ben," she said suddenly, "for Molly. She's so excited about the baby."
    That reminded me why I had come to see them. "Ben? Maria?" I said. "You know the little church in the village?"
    "Sure," Ben said. "The white steeple. It looks like a postcard picture. Why? You going to photograph it?"
    "No," I said. "But last Saturday, when I was in town with Mom to buy groceries, there was a wedding there. It was really neat. The bride came out and threw her bouquet from the step. The
bridesmaids all had light blue dresses on, and—" I hesitated. "Well, I don't know. It was just nice."

    Ben and Maria were both making faces. Ben is quite good at making faces; he screwed his mouth up sideways and crossed his eyes. "Weddings," he said. "Yuck."
    Maria rolled her eyes and agreed with him. "Yuck," she said.
    "
Why?
" I asked. "What's wrong with getting married, darn it?"
    They both looked surprised. "Nothing's wrong with getting
married,
" Ben said. "It's weddings that are so awful. What do you think, Maria, shall we show her?"
    Maria grinned and nodded. "Yeah," she said. "She's a good kid."
    Ben went into the living room and took a box out of the closet. He brought it back to the kitchen table and set it down. He leered, fingered his beard, and said in a diabolical voice, "Ya wanna see some feelthy pictures, lady?" Then he opened the box.
    I started to laugh. They weren't bad photographs; in fact, technically, they were very good photographs, even though I'm not crazy about color.
    But they were
awful.
And they were of Ben and Maria's wedding, for pete's sake. They were in a thick white leather album that said
Our Wedding
on the cover in gold letters. And I could see, while I
looked at them, what Ben and Maria meant about yucky weddings.

    There were the tuxedos, and the tails, and the top hats. There was Maria with her dress pulled up to show a lacy blue garter. There were the huge baskets of flowers beside the altar of the church. "Know what happened to those flowers?" Maria asked. "Two hundred dollars' worth of flowers? They got thrown away as soon as the service was over."
    There was the wedding cake, about three feet high, decorated with birds and flowers and frosting ribbons. "Know how much that cake cost?" grinned Ben. "A hundred bucks. Know what it tasted like? Cardboard."
    There were hundreds of people drinking champagne. "Know who those people are?" asked Maria. "My parents' friends. Ben's parents' friends. Know what they're doing? Getting drunk, on five hundred dollars' worth of champagne."
    And there were Ben and Maria, surrounded by people, flowers, food. They were smiling at the camera, but they both looked as if they didn't mean it much.
    "Know who that is?" Ben asked. I nodded. "That's Ben Brady and Maria Abbott, who wanted to get married in a field full of daisies beside a
stream. Who wanted to have guitar music instead of a five-piece band; homemade wine instead of champagne," he said. He slammed the book closed and put it back in the box.

    "Why didn't you?" I asked.
    They shrugged. "Oh, sometimes it's just easier to please people," Maria said finally. "Ben's parents wanted a big wedding. My parents wanted a big wedding. We did it for them, I guess."
    "Can I ask you a funny question?"
    "Sure."
    "Why don't you both have the same last name?"
    It was Maria who answered me. "You know, Meg, I had the name Abbott all my life. Maria Abbott did things