by Meg Cabot
“—in exchange for doing his bookkeeping,” I point out.
“Oh, please,” Patty says. “Like the man couldn’t afford to hire a bookkeeper. You’re not that good with numbers. He had designs on you the whole time. I’m so happy for you, Heather, really.” She reaches out across the table to grasp my hand and squeeze. “So happy for you I can almost forgive you for letting those bratty little twin sisters of his be bridesmaids.”
“Oh, come on,” I say again. “You’re matron of honor. Why can’t you let Jessica and Nicole have their moment in the spotlight too?”
“Because they’re spoiled little troublemakers,” Patty replies, releasing my hand to dab at her eyes again. She isn’t crying anymore, she’s indignant. “Did you know one of them—I can’t keep their names straight, but the chubby one who thinks she can write songs—”
I hear footsteps and voices in the kitchen behind me. Patty hears them too, and her gaze flicks past me—she’s sitting facing the glassed-in kitchen addition, whereas I’m looking out toward the yard—and I see her expression change from one of annoyance to wide-eyed alarm.
I turn in my chair to see who Cooper has let inside the house, but not before I recognize one of the voices. My blood goes cold in my veins, despite the warm evening air.
“What are you talking about?” A trim, middle-aged woman dressed in a cream-colored pantsuit is asking Cooper as she clip-clops behind him in a pair of high heels. “She’ll be delighted to see me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Cooper says. His voice is as cold as the wine in my glass. He’s leading the woman past the kitchen table and toward the open door to the back deck, his expression grim, while Frank follows behind them both, Indiana squirming in his arms.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” the woman says. She has an expertly coiffed auburn bob and a tastefully made-up face, a filmy cream-colored scarf thrown around her throat, probably more for dramatic effect than to hide whatever the ravages of time have done to her neck—she was always a fan of plastic surgery. “She wants to see me. I’m here because she invited me.”
Patty’s hand closes around my wrist. Her fingers feel as cold as my blood has gone.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” she whispers. Like mine, Patty’s gaze is glued to the woman in the kitchen. “Your future sister-in-law, the do-gooder—”
“Nicole,” I say, through lips gone numb with shock.
“Yeah. She told me at our last fitting—the one you couldn’t come to because you had that emergency drug-and-alcohol-awareness training session—that she felt bad because there were so many more people on the groom’s side than the bride’s. So she got some kid from where you work to swipe your Rolodex, and your dad to cough up an address book I guess he copied from you a while back, and then she went through them both and added a whole bunch of people to the bride’s side.”
I feel a swooping sensation in the pit of my stomach, and it isn’t the good kind, the kind I get when Cooper comes walking into the room and I realize all over again how handsome he looks and how lucky I am that he chose me (of course, he’s lucky I chose him too). It’s the bad kind of swooping, the kind that means Warning, warning, get out now.
This is what I get, I think to myself. This is what I get for being too busy at work to pay attention to my wedding, and leaving it all up to Perry. Who, Cooper informed me earlier, hadn’t been too pleased about the fact that we’d canceled lunch. She’d stressed how busy and important she is, and implied her schedule is so tight, we might not get another appointment with her before our actual wedding day.
A day I can now see is going to be a disaster.
“Jessica and Magda and I told Nicole she shouldn’t have done it,” Patty goes on rapidly, “that you’d invited everyone you wanted to, but she said that it would be a nice surprise, and that your dad and Cooper approved them all, but now I’m guessing—”
“She didn’t tell anybody,” I say. My throat has gone as dry as sand, but I can’t move a muscle to reach for my wineglass. “Except my dad, I’ll bet, who’s been hoping for a reconciliation between us two for a long time.”
The woman standing inside the glass addition sees Patty and me sitting beneath the string of party globes and claps her hands dramatically.
“There she is!” she cries. “There’s my girl!”
Then she rushes through the open screen door and out onto the deck to embrace me, nearly choking me in a thick cloud of Chanel perfume, a scent I’ve only ever associated with her, and not in a good way.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
9
I don’t want to look like a big white lightbulb
I don’t want to shine too bright
I don’t want to look like a marshmallow
I only want you to hold me tight
“Wedding Gown,”
written by Heather Wells
Uh, honey,” Frank says to Patty from the doorway. “We need to get going now.”
“In a minute.”
Patty’s gaze is riveted on my mother, who has taken a seat in the chair Cooper had vacated to answer the door.
Lucy, usually friendly to strangers (she’s a wonderful companion, but the world’s worst watchdog), slinks out from beneath the chair and goes inside. Perhaps she, like Patty, suspects that fireworks are about to go off. Unlike Patty, however, Lucy has the sense to get out of the blast range.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your little party,” my mother says, looking down at the detritus of our meal. “I’m so glad you learned how to cook, Heather. That’s a skill every bride should have.”
“I didn’t,” I say coldly. “Cooper made it. What are you doing here, Mom?”
“Patty, we really need to leave,” Frank says, his tone more urgent than before. “It’s past Indy’s bedtime.”
Frank’s son is wriggling in his arms, crying to be put down, pointing in the direction Lucy has gone. He wants to run over my dog’s feet with his trucks some more.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” my mother asks. “You’re the one getting married. You sent me an invitation!”
She opens her arms wide, and silver bangles jangle on both her slim wrists. She’s wearing quite a bit of jewelry. Rings on almost every finger, long silver chains and pendants around her neck, and a diamond stud in each earlobe that peeks out beneath her red hair—hair that was frosty blond the last time I’d seen her.
“And can I just say, I approve,” Mom goes on, dropping her arms with a smile. “I always liked Cooper. He’s so much more stable than Jordan. I never wanted to tell you while you two were dating, of course, Heather, but I always thought Jordan was a little bit of a putz.”
My mother winks companionably at Cooper, who has taken up a defensive stance, leaning against the deck railing, his arms folded across his chest. He’s watching my mother like she’s a suspect in one of his cases, and at any moment he’s going to tackle her to the ground.
“No offense to your brother, of course, Cooper,” Mom adds.
“No offense taken, Janet,” Cooper replies.
“Oh, please,” my mother says with a wave of her hand, causing the silver bangles to jingle again. “We’re practically family. Call me Mom.”
“I’d rather not,” Cooper says politely.
His tone is so dangerously devoid of emotion that I glance at him, and find that his blue-eyed gaze is fastened on me. I can almost feel the protective waves radiating from him.
I know if Cooper had had his way, he never would have let my mother in the house. There’s got to be a good explanation for why he did.
“I didn’t send you an invitation to my wedding, Mom,” I say. “There was a mix-up. And even if I had sent you an invitation, that doesn’t explain why you’ve shown up here now, at nine o’clock at night, a whole month before the ceremony.”
“A mix-up?” Mom looks shocked. She does shocked very well because she’s had so much work done on her face, her eyebrows seem frozen into semisurprised arches. �
��But when I called your father, he said—”
“I don’t care what Dad said,” I interrupt her. “You know perfectly well he’s been on a redemption jag since he got out of jail. He’s all about making amends. Plus, he’s still gaga for you. He’d tell you anything you wanted to hear.”
“Oh, Heather.” My mother looks down modestly, then rearranges her scarf so that more of her necklaces show. “You know that isn’t true. Your father and I split up long ago. It has to be twenty years now. You have to give up hoping that we’re ever going to get back together—”
“Trust me,” I say. “I’m not entertaining any such thoughts. Where’s Ricardo?”
“Ricardo?” My mother’s gaze skitters away, as if my former manager—with whom she fled the U.S., along with all the money in our joint account—might be hiding somewhere in the shadows of our backyard. “Oh, he’s back in Buenos Aires, I suppose. He and I had a bit of a falling-out.”
Things are suddenly becoming clearer.
“You mean he dumped you,” I say. “And took what was left of my money with him?”
“Oh, Heather,” Mom says again, this time in an irritated tone, her gaze skittering back toward me. “Why do you always assume the worst in people?”
“Gee, Mom, I don’t know. Look at the role models I had in my life.”
My mother shakes her head, her auburn bob shimmering under the party globes. “You know better than to talk that way, especially at the dining table. I didn’t raise you to be such a poor hostess. The least you could do is offer me a glass of wine. It’s been a long flight, and I’m really quite thirsty.”
“You just got off the plane?” I cry in astonishment. “From Argentina?”
“Her bags are in the foyer,” Cooper points out. “All ten of them. Louis Vuitton.”
Now I know why he let her in. My mother has never traveled light. Even Cooper—who knows better than anyone how much I despise Janet Wells—wouldn’t leave a middle-aged woman fresh off the plane from Argentina standing on his stoop with ten Louis Vuitton bags, especially at night, a block from Washington Square Park, where the late-night drug-dealing trade is brisk (if for the most part nonviolent).
“I didn’t realize New York City had gotten so popular as a fall tourist destination,” my mom says, giving Patty a dazzling smile for handing her a glass full of wine—Patty’s own, but from which Patty hadn’t sipped, being pregnant. She says she only “likes looking at it.”
“But there are literally no hotel rooms available right now. Even the Washington Square Hotel, which I don’t remember as being particularly luxurious from the days when you and I used to stay there, Heather, is booked solid. And it’s three hundred dollars a night!”
“Those hotels aren’t filled with tourists,” I say to her acidly. “They’re filled with concerned parents here to drop their kids off at New York College, the place where I work and go to school now on tuition remission because you stole all my savings—”
“Oh, honey,” my mother says, looking vaguely amused as she sets down her wineglass to lay a hand on mine. “You aren’t still mad about that, are you? Because you have to know it isn’t healthy to hold on to old grudges. Those kinds of feelings will eat away at you over time and cause you to have a stroke or heart attack if you don’t let them go. I’m not saying I was the perfect mother. Sure, I might have done some things I’m not proud of. But I was under a heck of a lot of pressure, raising you all by myself while your father was in jail for not keeping track of our taxes. I did the best I could under pretty lousy conditions, let me tell you. And keep in mind you loved it out there on that stage. You took to performing like a fish takes to water.”
I glare at her. “And you and Ricardo took all the money I earned for it like a couple of sharks.”
“But you’re doing all right now, aren’t you?” she asks. “You have a beautiful home, and lovely friends, and this marvelous man here who loves you and wants to marry you. That’s so much more than many people have. You should really learn to count your blessings, Heather.”
She flips my hand over and holds it toward the flame of the nearest citronella candle, causing the sapphire at the center of the cluster of diamonds in the engagement ring Cooper gave me to glow with the same blue intensity as his eyes.
“Ho-ho!” my mother cries. “That’s quite a rock. I guess you’re doing very well indeed. So what are you complaining about? It’s only money, Heather. You’re starting your new married life, so why not use this opportunity to forget the past and let bygones be bygones? Don’t you think that’s healthier than holding on to old grudges?”
I’m so stunned, I can’t summon a reply—at least not out loud. Plenty flash through my head. Only money? You think this is only about the money? I want to ask her.
What about everything else she took from me? Because when she took that money—my money, money I could have used to go to college, or help pay for my own kids’ college, if I ever have any—she also took my future, and my career, and my pride, and in very short order after that, my boyfriend, Jordan, my home, my life, and, yes, my hope. My hope that there was justice and fairness in the world. My own mother took that from me.
And yes, everything’s turned out fine—better than fine—but not thanks to her. Because there’s one thing she took from me that I will never get back, and that’s a mother I could trust, one who loved me. Janet Wells certainly didn’t. Because she didn’t merely steal from me: she abandoned me. Dad left because he had to. She left because she wanted to.
How can she not see the difference?
But I can’t say any of those things to her. I can’t even seem to move. I’m frozen stiff, as cold and unmoving as poor Jasmine Albright, whose body I sat with all afternoon.
Cooper, on the other hand, moves very quickly, pushing away from the deck railing as if he’s about to lunge at her. Frank steps into his path, still holding his son, saying urgently, “Don’t, man. It’s not worth it.”
My mother is blinking bewilderedly at all of us.
“What?” she asks. “What did I say? Oh, good heavens. You can’t still be upset about the money. That was so long ago! And it wasn’t only Heather’s money. I was Heather’s agent, and Ricardo was her manager. We earned that money—”
“Ten percent,” I say, finally finding my voice. “That was your cut. Ten percent, not all of it.”
“Oh, honestly, Heather,” Mom says, taking a sip of her wine. “I’m not saying what I did was right, because of course it wasn’t. I made poor choices. But you were still a child. Ricardo and I were adults, with adult issues. You know Ricardo had a gambling problem. There were criminals—real criminals, with guns, wearing very thick gold chains—after him. What was I supposed to do, let him die?”
“No, but you didn’t have to go with him.”
“But I loved him! Would you leave Cooper if gold-chain-wearing thugs were after him?”
“Of course not,” I say. “I would stay and help him fight.”
“Against men with guns?”
“Heather’s been to the range with me a few times this summer,” Cooper says mildly. He’s looking calmer. “She’s a pretty good shot.”
“Of paper targets,” I say modestly.
“What I find interesting, Janet,” Cooper says, “is that for someone so convinced she didn’t do anything so wrong, you were awfully careful to wait until the statute of limitations had run out before you returned to the United States . . . five years, with an additional five years while the prosecutor sought, unsuccessfully, to locate you for extradition. That sounds about right, doesn’t it, for a class-B felony—grand larceny in the first degree—for New York State?”
My mother chokes a little on the mouthful of wine she’s just swallowed. “Don’t . . . don’t be ridiculous. I told you, I came back to be with Heather during this important time in her life. And I don’t know why the money is still such an issue with her; she could always have earned more if she’d simply laid off the hot fudge sundaes and hadn�
��t been so insistent on singing all those silly songs she wrote herself—”
It’s Patty who interrupts, which is surprising since she’s normally the most easygoing of creatures, slow to take offense.
But that’s the thing about people like my friend Patty . . . and maybe me. When we do form a grudge, we hold it for years, and then like a kettle left to simmer on a back burner, before you know it, we’ve burned the house down.
“Frank is right,” Patty says, getting up from her chair. “We have to go now. Janet, where can we drop you? We brought our car. It’s parked out front. We’ll be happy to take you anywhere you want to go.”
“Go?” my mother echoes, looking as shocked as if someone swapped her pinot grigio for a merlot. “But I told you, I have nowhere to go—”
“You were resourceful enough to find your way from Buenos Aires to my door,” I say sweetly. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”
“Frank, honey,” Patty says, getting up, “why don’t you go put Indy in his car seat while Cooper puts Janet’s suitcases in the trunk. It’s a Range Rover,” she explains to my mother, “so there should be more than enough room for you and all your bags.”
“Great idea,” Cooper says before my mother can utter another word. He strides from the deck, Frank following him, still looking a little confused, his son slung over one shoulder.
Frank isn’t the only one who looks confused.
“But I thought I told you,” my mother is saying, “I couldn’t get a hotel reservation. I’m sure Heather and Cooper don’t mind if I stay here. They seem to have more than enough room, and I’m family. I don’t expect special treatment. They’ll hardly know I’m here.”
“That isn’t the—” I begin with irritation, but Patty cuts me off.
“Oh, I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Janet.” Patty steps toward my mother and leans down to take away her wineglass. “You know the old saying about in-laws: If you want a loving relationship with them, put them in a hotel when they come to visit.”
