Nearly Wild

by Linda Seed

  “Will,” she said. “If I were to tell Rose what I suspect, she would immediately erect walls so high and thick that they would rival those at San Quentin.” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you think I’m wrong?”

  “Uh …” He straightened his glasses. “No. I think you’re probably right.”

  “And that’s why you’ve kept quiet about it as well.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, then. We understand each other. And we both understand Rose.” She nodded at him, a crisp goodbye nod that one might see in a movie about British royals, and walked out the door.

  Will had been working with the assumption that Pamela didn’t understand Rose at all. But now he realized he might have to reassess in light of her spot-on analysis. That was one thing to consider. The other was that she’d clearly come here to size him up, and had left without telling him her conclusions.

  Well, she was going to have to accept him, one way or another. He was her grandchild’s father, and that much wasn’t going to change.

  He was here to stay, whether Pamela Watkins liked it or not.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  With only a week to go until the wedding, Gen was getting nervous. She hadn’t been nervous before; at least, she didn’t seem that way to Rose. But now, with the countdown nearing its end, she was losing her usual calm, forcing her friends to ply her with liberal amounts of wine just to keep her functioning.

  “Ryan’s cousin Richard isn’t coming! Which wouldn’t be a big deal, since Ryan barely even knows his cousin Richard, except for the fact that five people—five!—now want to bring additional, uninvited guests to take his spot!” Gen was pacing, her wild, red curls in a state of disarray that mirrored her mood. “Do you have any idea what kind of family politics are involved in deciding who gets Richard’s spot? Do you?!”

  Rose, Kate, and Lacy were sitting in the living room of Gen’s new house with a seating chart spread open on the coffee table in front of them. The empty spot was at Table Five, between Ryan’s aunt Molly and Gen’s second cousin Jake.

  “And then there’s the goddamned seating chart!” Gen went on. “You’d think I could just drop whoever gets the spot into the seat I was going to give to Richard. But, no. Oh, no! Depending on who it is, I’m potentially going to have to scrap the whole thing and start over!”

  “Honey.” Kate got up from the sofa, went to Gen, and put a hand on her arm. “This isn’t a disaster. This is just … a detail. None of this matters. Whoever sits in the open spot at Table Five, you’re still going to be married to Ryan a week from now. That’s what’s important.” She rubbed Gen’s arm with gentle strokes.

  “Right. It’s just a detail,” Gen said. “That’s what you’d think. That’s what they want you to think.”

  “Who?” Kate looked mystified.

  “The people who write the bridal magazines with all those happy, glowing brides!” Gen picked up one of the magazines in question and threw it onto the coffee table with a smack. “They want you to think that it’s all about love, and butterflies, and … and champagne flutes! But in fact, if I put Ryan’s cousin’s girlfriend in that spot, then my uncle’s secretary’s daughter is going to be all bent out of shape, and she’s going to call my aunt Eleanor, and my aunt Eleanor is like a pit bull with a goddamned chew toy when she wants something, and she’s going to call everyone I know, and I will never hear the end of it. Never!” Gen fell into the club chair that was positioned to one side of the sofa, her arms and legs limp.

  “Sweetie, you need a drink. And a hot bath. And … I don’t know. You need to watch some mindless television and forget about all this for a while,” Lacy suggested.

  “Ugh. I can’t. Everybody who wants Richard’s seat needs to know yesterday whether they’re going to get it. Because there are flights to book, reservations to make …” Gen plunged her hands into her hair.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Rose said. “Put me in charge of the seating chart. I’ll do rock-paper-scissors and pick somebody, and then all the malcontents can blame me. When they complain, you can roll your eyes and tell them how badly I bungled everything. Then you can tell them—sorrowfully, of course—that it’s just too late to fix my screwup.”

  Gen sat up straight and looked at Rose. “That’s not bad.”

  “There you go,” Lacy said in a soothing voice. “Rose will take the fall, and you and Ryan will live happily ever after.”

  “That’s really good,” Gen said thoughtfully. “That could work. Rose, you’re a great friend.”

  “This is true,” Rose agreed.

  “Just pick whoever you want,” Gen said, calmer now. She closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. “I don’t care anymore.”

  Rose looked over the list of potential invitees. “Well, I guess I can cross Ryan’s ex-girlfriend off this list.”

  “No!” Gen’s eyes flew open.

  “No?” Rose said.

  “I may or may not have this little, immature fantasy about her coming to the wedding and ruing the day she let him go.” Gen sighed. “If she loses rock-paper-scissors, then so be it. But I want to have my fantasy a little while longer.”

  After they dealt with the seating chart crisis, the seamstress came over so they could all do the final fittings for their dresses. Doing that in the last week before the wedding had seemed to Rose to be cutting it close, but the seamstress had insisted that people gain or lose weight in the emotional turmoil of wedding planning, so it was best to do a fitting just one week out.

  Rose shouldn’t have been surprised when the zipper of her dress—a silky, swooping, blush-pink strapless number with a tea-length skirt—wouldn’t go up. But she was. The first thing she thought was, I’m only eight weeks pregnant. I can’t be getting bigger yet. But then she realized that the first trimester of pregnancy had brought with it a ravenous hunger that had her eating constantly and indiscriminately. So, there was that.

  “Oh, my,” the seamstress said as she tugged at Rose’s zipper, to no avail.

  “Well,” Kate said, appraising Rose with her hands on her hips. “You have been eating like a lumberjack.”

  “I can’t help it!” Rose wailed. “It’s the hormones! I’m hungry all the time! What am I supposed to do, starve the baby?”

  The seamstress raised an eyebrow at Rose. “You’re pregnant? You might have mentioned that before.”

  “I didn’t think it would matter! I’m only eight weeks!” For some reason, it was this—the bridesmaid dress being too tight to zip—that threw her into despair about the pregnancy. Up until now, she’d been holding herself together well, probably because the idea of a baby seven months from now seemed abstract and obscure. But now, the fact of her expanding waistline was impossible to ignore, and she burst into tears.

  “Oh, hey,” Gen said, rushing over to Rose and rubbing her back. “Don’t worry. It’s okay. Sheila can fix it. You can, can’t you, Sheila?”

  “Of course.” The seamstress nodded crisply. “That’s what these final fittings are for.”

  “See?” Gen said encouragingly.

  “No, she can’t!” Rose wailed. “Sheila can’t fix the fact that I’m single and pregnant, and my job doesn’t pay enough to support a baby, and I’m never going to be able to go to college now. And Sheila can’t fix it that … that Will’s probably going to forget he ever knew me as soon as he knows that I’m knocked up. Can you fix all that, Sheila? Can you?!”

  “Well, no,” Sheila allowed.

  “Oh, Rose. If you really think Will’s going to abandon you and the baby, then I don’t think you’re giving him enough credit,” Lacy said. Lacy, looking radiant in the same bridesmaid gown that Rose couldn’t zip, gazed at her with concern.

  “You know, she’s right,” Gen said. Gen, whose own fitting was done, was the odd one out in jeans and a T-shirt. “I don’t think you’re being fair to him.”

  Rose dropped into Gen’s club chair, the half-zipped dress billowing around her like a si
lky cloud. “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I’d leave me if I were him.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Kate said.

  Rose let out a sigh. “No. I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “You’re just scared,” Lacy said. “Anyone would be. But it’s going to be okay. And if you’d just tell him—”

  “I can’t!” Rose wailed.

  “If you’d just tell him,” Lacy tried again, “then you’d see that he’s a better man than you’re giving him credit for.”

  “You don’t get it.” Rose shook her head and wiped the tears from her face. “I don’t want him to stay with me because he’s a good man. I want him to stay with me because he wants to be with me. And once I tell him … once he knows …”

  “Then you won’t know which it is,” Kate finished for her.

  “Right!”

  The others were all gathered around Rose as she cried. Kate was perched on the arm of the sofa, Gen was sitting on the coffee table, and Lacy was kneeling next to Rose’s chair. They all formed a protective barrier around her, and she wished she could just go through life that way, with her friends shielding her from anything that might hurt her.

  “You know, at some point, you’re just going to have to trust him,” Kate said.

  “I don’t know how,” Rose said in a voice that was small and scared.

  “You do it by just … deciding to do it,” Gen said.

  “Listen,” Sheila said from where she was hovering in the doorway to the living room. “I hate to interrupt, but I’ve got another appointment at two. If I could just take Rose’s measurements …”

  Rose took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and hoisted her new, heavier body out of the chair. “Let’s do it,” she said. “I’ll have time to cry some more later.”

  Melinda had arrived on Saturday, as scheduled. He didn’t see her much the first couple of days, and Will wondered if that was because she was setting some kind of trap. He stayed away from Cooper House as much as he could, working with his laptop and his research notes at a table at Jitters during the day. In the evenings, he spent his time working on Project Rose.

  They’d fallen into a pattern: He would ask her out, she would refuse, and he would show up at De-Vine when she got off work as though she’d never turned him down. She’d see him, make some noises about how she had things to do at home, and he’d persuade her to have dinner with him or just take a walk with him. Sometimes it resulted in him going back to her place and spending the night. When it didn’t, that was fine, too. Just spending an hour or two with her before going back to Cooper House gave him the strength and comfort he needed to get through the following day.

  He figured, if they kept this up long enough, she’d have to admit they had a relationship. And once she admitted it, well, that was something they could build on.

  He was at Jitters, working on his dissertation and thinking about what he could do that evening to persuade Rose to see a movie with him, when his phone dinged with a text.

  I can’t figure out the remote for the TV. Please come to the main house and help me.

  Melinda.

  He texted back:

  Sorry, I can’t. I’m not on the property. Call Chris, I’m sure he can help.

  Will supposed it was less than subtle of him to mention Chris—reminding Melinda that she had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t Will—but he was willing to try anything.

  Less than an hour later, she texted again:

  The water in the pool isn’t warm enough. I need you to come and adjust the heater.

  Will rolled his eyes, took a deep breath, and then texted back:

  Again, I’m not on the property. Call Chris. He can tell you how to do it yourself.

  When an hour went by without any further texts, he figured she’d given up. With a latte and a scone in front of him, he delved into his work. He was fully absorbed in a chapter detailing his conclusions about the increase in the snowy plover’s bill length when his phone dinged again.

  This time, it wasn’t Melinda. It was Chris.

  Mel says she needs help with some things at the house, and you’re refusing. What’s going on???

  Will considered the option of drowning his phone in his coffee, but then he remembered how expensive phones were and how many student loan payments he had ahead of him. Instead, he responded:

  What’s going on, as I explained to Melinda, is that I’m not on the property. I’m doing errands in town. I didn’t think it was urgent.

  In a moment, Chris texted back:

  Got it. I’ll tell her to be patient. If you could help her out when you get home, I’d appreciate it.

  Telling Melinda to be patient was like telling the ocean not to be wet, so Will had little expectation that it would help. The only thing he could do was delay going home a little longer.

  He finished his latte and wrote another paragraph, trying not to stress himself out about what Melinda was going to do, but failing miserably.

  Lacy came over to his table and picked up his empty mug. “Get you another coffee?” she offered.

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “Really?” Lacy looked at him appraisingly. “Because you don’t look like you’re good. You look like you’re worried about something.”

  “Is it that obvious?” He looked at Lacy miserably.

  “Yeah, it is. So, what’s up?”

  Will took a moment to privately assess the situation. Lacy certainly knew about Rose’s pregnancy—assuming Rose was, in fact, pregnant, which he thought was a fair bet. Lacy though that Will didn’t know, but seeing him brooding at his table with Dostoyevskian angst, she probably wondered whether he’d figured it out. He wasn’t quite ready to tip his hand yet, so it would be good to make her think he was still in the dark. Also, when Melinda made her inevitable move against him—whatever that turned out to be—the more people who knew what she was really up to, the better.

  “Have a seat, and I’ll give you the short version,” Will said.

  Lacy sat, and Will closed his laptop and gathered his papers into a neat pile.

  “Did Rose tell you about what’s going on with my ex?”

  “You mean the stuff about the crazy stalker texting?”

  “Exactly. Well, she’s at Cooper House from now until the wedding, and she’s still doing it.” He was telling her this partly as a means to his own ends, sure. But it was also possible that Lacy might have some useful advice for him. Lacy was a woman, and Melinda was a woman. Maybe Lacy spoke Melinda’s strange and unfathomable language. Will most assuredly did not.

  “You mean she’s there alone? Without Christopher Mills?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Exactly. Lacy, you’re a girl.”

  She gave him a wry grin. “Nice that you noticed.”

  “What is Melinda after?” He raised his hands helplessly, then let them drop. “She doesn’t want me. She never did. We used to fight over all of the many, many ways she thought I wasn’t good enough for her. So what is she doing? What’s the point?”

  Lacy leaned forward and propped her elbow on the table, her chin resting on her hand. “I don’t know Melinda, but I know women like her. And I think it’s more about competition than anything. Rose said she tried to kiss you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you blew her off.”

  “Well … of course I did.”

  “Right. Okay, here’s how I see it. You two broke up, and that was fine, because she hooked up with a mega gazillionaire and that made her the winner. But then she saw you with Rose, and you seemed to be happier with her than you ever were with Melinda.”

  “I didn’t just seem to be happier,” Will put in. “I was.”

  “Okay. So Melinda had to kiss you, because if you kissed her back, she was still the winner. It would mean you preferred her over Rose. But you didn’t kiss her back.”

  “And I don’t prefer her over Rose,” Will said. “Just to be clear.”

 
“Sure,” Lacy agreed. “So now, Melinda is a double loser. Not only did you break up with her, but you also refused her advances. Now, what does a compulsive gambler do when he’s losing and he really needs to turn things around fast?”

  If it were Will, he’d leave the table with his chips and call it a lesson learned. But he’d never been much of a gambler.

  “He bets more?” Will guessed.

  “Exactly.” Lacy looked at him with satisfaction.

  Will thought about that. “She’s escalating because she doesn’t want to walk away a loser.”

  “I think so,” Lacy said.

  “So, how do I make this stop? Tell her that Rose is dead to me and I’ll only love Melinda until the day I die?”

  “Well.” Lacy cocked her head slightly in thought. “That would probably do it, but being a winner is no fun if no one else knows about it. So, she’d probably tell Chris, Rose, and whoever else she could get to listen that you’d declared your love for her.”

  “So, no, then. It’s good I didn’t do that.”

  “Probably,” Lacy agreed.

  Will raked his hands through his hair. “Well … I appreciate your analysis. I do. And I think it’s probably right. But what I need now is advice. How do I make this stop?”

  She sat back in her chair and looked at him with pity. “That, I don’t know. I guess you’ve just got to Melinda-proof yourself and wait it out until she moves on to something else.”

  “Melinda-proof?”

  “Sure. You know, make it so she doesn’t have anything to use against you.”

  “Which I accomplish how, exactly?” He was growing increasingly flustered by this conversation, even though Lacy was offering him some valuable insight.

  She shrugged. “I guess you do it by telling Rose everything she’s done and everything she’s doing, so there won’t be any surprises if Melinda decides to pull something.”

  “I’ve done that already. Rose knows everything.”