Chapter 1
My cousin didn’t try to catch the bride’s bouquet. She knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t try to catch it, either.
“Come keep me company,” she said, and drew me firmly to one side of all the colorful commotion. “I need to sit.”
My father’s wild Aunt Lucy, nearly lost in layered flounces of bronze taffeta, tried once to herd us back as we went past. “Oh, girls, you mustn’t run away. Go on, get in there. Have a go.” Smiling at my cousin, she said, “Third time lucky, Jacqueline, so they say. And Sara, dear,” she added in a cheering tone, to me, “there’s always hope.”
I might have pointed out there wasn’t, really. Catching things had never been my strong suit, and it always seemed ridiculous to go through all that effort just to field a bunch of flowers that, while pretty, only showed which of the women at the wedding was the most determined to be married next, not which one would be.
Jacqui didn’t give me time to point out anything. She simply answered, “Yes, Aunt Lucy, thanks for that, but Sara isn’t feeling well.”
And then she steered me off again.
I looked at her. “I’m feeling fine.”
“I had to give her some excuse, or she’d have never let us be. You know the way she is. And I could hardly say I wasn’t feeling well—she’d only think that I was pregnant.”
I had to admit that was true. Jacqui’s love life—including her two short-lived marriages, one to a singer flamboyant enough to ensure their divorce had been given a place in the tabloids—was frequently a source of gossip at these family gatherings. She fueled that gossip on her own sometimes when she got bored, and had been known to start a rumor in one corner of the room to see how long it took to travel to another, but this evening she did not seem bored.
I asked, because I couldn’t see the man she’d come with, “Where did you leave Humphrey?”
“Over there. He found the punch bowl, I’m afraid, before I had a chance to warn him. Drank three glasses of it.”
Uncle Gordon spiked the punch at every family wedding. No one knew with what, but even those of us who’d only ever heard about the hangovers knew better than to drink the stuff. “Poor Humphrey.”
Jacqui sighed. “Poor me, more like. I doubt he’ll make it into work on Monday, and we’ve got a sales meeting. That’s what I get,” she said, “for bringing my assistant to a Thomas family wedding.”
I agreed she should have known better. I hadn’t brought a date myself, but then I didn’t have a Humphrey, clever and good-looking, sitting handily outside my office door. And no one here expected me to bring somebody, anyway.
“Let’s find a table,” Jacqui said.
We found one tucked quietly off in a corner, half-hidden by one of the faux-marble columns that held up the wedding hall’s high ceiling, painted ethereal blue with winged cherubs. The whole setting was a bit over-the-top, but it suited our young cousin Daphne, whose wedding this was. Daphne lived and breathed drama, which made her quite fun in small doses but very exhausting in larger ones.
“All a bit much?” Jacqui asked me. At first I assumed she was thinking, as I was, about the wedding, but then she asked, “How are you coping?” and I understood.
She had always been something of my guardian angel, since I’d been put into her arms as a baby when she had been ten. She was, if one worked out the family tree, more properly my father’s cousin, daughter of his youngest uncle, but that made her still my own first cousin once removed, and I had claimed her and was keeping her.
It had been Jacqui who’d first noticed something was a little different in the way I saw the world, and through my childhood and my teens she’d been close by to show me what to do, like an interpreter to guide me through the labyrinth; to pick me up and dust me off if I stepped off the path and took a tumble. And the first year I had spent at university, that awful year when things had started coming all unglued for me, it had been Jacqui who had taken me to lunch with a new author, whose first book she had been editing.
“He’s a psychologist,” she’d introduced him. “Brilliant book, just fascinating. All about these children who have—how do you pronounce it, Colin?”
“Asperger’s.” He’d said it with a hard g, as in hamburgers.
At Jacqui’s prompting, he had talked all through our lunch about the syndrome that at that time was believed to lie midway along the sliding scale between the “normal” world and full-on autism, making those who had it all too miserably aware that they were different without understanding why, unable to read and interpret all the complex social cues most other people took for granted—tones of voice, and body language, and the strange figures of speech that made a person say that he had been “knocked sideways” when he hadn’t moved at all.
And I had known.
It had, if I was honest, been a great relief to finally put a name to what the issue was. I’d gone for consultations later with that same psychologist, and with my cousin waiting just outside his office door, we’d done the proper tests. He had explained it very clearly, using terms I could relate to.
“You’re a programmer, aren’t you?” he’d asked me. “You work with computers. Well, if you think of your own mind as a computer, which it is, then your basic architecture is different from most of the other computers around you. You’re wired differently, you connect differently, and you run different software on a different operating system. You’re like the lone Mac,” he’d concluded, “in an office of PCs. They’re all running Windows, and you’re running OS X.”