by Jane Graves
Mona turned to her son. “What do you think, darling?”
Randall looked up from his phone. “What do I think about what?”
“The flatware, of course. This one?” Mona asked, making a lemon-sucking face as she pointed to Sarah’s choice, “or that one,” she said, looking rapturous at the mere sight of the filagreed pattern.
He looked back and forth between the two patterns. “The gaudy one, I guess. This is a wedding, right?”
Mona flashed Sarah a smug smile. I raised him well, didn’t I?
Giselle looked back and forth between them. “So we’re going with…?”
“The filagreed pattern, of course,” Mona said.
Sarah felt a headache coming on. A great big stress headache that could only be cured by saying I do and having Mona leave the country.
She glanced back at Randall, who had shifted his focus to the doorway leading to the recreation room across the hall, where a big-screen TV was blaring a soccer game. She let out a silent sigh. Why had she even asked him to come?
Then Mona launched into a commentary about napkin folds, flowers, and the rehearsal luncheon. Half an hour later when all the choices were made, most of which were Mona’s, Sarah’s fists were closed so tightly her nails dug into her palms. But every time she opened her mouth to object, she imagined Mona flinging her arm to one side and ordering her off the premises. Sarah had fought long and hard to fit into this family, and she wasn’t going to screw it up now. But little by little, Mona was turning this into the wedding Sarah had never dreamed of.
But as bad as this was, the fun was only beginning. God only knew what was going to happen when Sarah’s parents showed up tomorrow. To say they were unsophisticated was the understatement of the century, and they’d never met Mona. If Sarah was intimidated by her, Carl and Treva Renfro wouldn’t know what hit them. What was Mona going to think about two people from Big Fork, Texas, a town where cows outnumbered people?
Then Sarah had a thought. "The wedding is in the gazebo on the beach," she said to Giselle. "The weather makes me a little nervous. Do you know the forecast for Saturday?"
"Blue skies," Giselle said. "There's a possibility of thunderstorms on Friday, but they should clear the island before Saturday morning."
Thank God. She hated rain. The last thing she wanted was a storm on her wedding day.
“Oh, look at the time!” Mona said. “I’m having a facial in fifteen minutes. But we still need to decide which champagne to serve at the reception.”
As Giselle poured samples of their choices, Sarah nudged Randall. “We need your opinion, too.”
“Not necessary,” he said, with one eye still on the soccer game. “You girls work out the details. I’m sure whatever you pick will be just fine.”
Sarah sipped. Mona sipped. Sarah liked one. Mona liked another.
Another it was.
“Well, I’m off,” Mona said, only to turn back when she reached the doorway. “Sarah, darling. Remember your sunscreen. You have such fair skin. We don’t want future little Baxters looking at their parents’ wedding photos and asking why mommy looks like a lobster, now do we?”
Sarah’s nails digging into her palms really hurt.
“I’ll see you both for dinner this evening,” Mona said, and swept out of the room.
Wait a minute. Dinner? Tonight?
Once Mona was out of earshot, Sarah spun on Randall. “We had dinner with your mother last night."
“My father won’t be here until the day of the wedding. Do you expect her to eat by herself?"
“No," Sarah said on a sigh. "No, of course not. Of course we’ll have dinner with her.” And I’ll pull out the rest of my hair. “But the other stuff…Randall, your mother…”
“What about her?”
What about her? Had he not been listening? “We’d planned to have an appetizer of prosciutto-wrapped asparagus at the rehearsal luncheon. Your mother changed it to ceviche.”
“What difference does it make?”
“My parents have never had ceviche in their lives. If my father finds out he's eating raw fish marinated in lime juice, that could be a little…problematic."
“So now they have a chance to branch out.”
Branch out? Her parents didn't branch out. In spite of Sarah's attempts to bring them into the twenty-first century, they still had a landline phone. With a cord.
“I wanted white carnations in my bouquet,” Sarah said. “Your mother insisted on calla lilies.”
“Carnations are cheap. You don’t have to stick to a budget. Spend whatever you want to.”
“It’s not about the money. I like carnations.”
“They’re both white flowers. Who’s even paying attention? You need to relax. Here.” He reached into his pocket. “Take my credit card. Go to the spa. Get the works.”
She hated this. Randall was handing her his credit card as if she was a child he was trying to placate, as if throwing money at a problem was the only way to solve it. “I don’t want to go to the spa.”
“Fine,” Randall said, returning the card to his wallet. “But you're too tense. You need to find a way to relax.”
“Don’t you think the bride and groom should decide what they want for their own wedding?”
“What I think is that you should be thankful my parents are footing the bill for this wedding so your parents don’t have to.”
That hit Sarah hard. Her parents had struggled financially most of their lives. Nothing new for farmers, but putting her through college by taking a second mortgage on their farm had put them right up to their necks. If they had to pay for her wedding, it would wipe them out for good. Unless, of course, she and Randall got married at the First Baptist Church of Big Fork, Texas, where Pastor Jenkins would perform the ceremony, after which they would retire to the parish hall for punch and cake served by a gaggle of church ladies.
Speaking of the wedding Sarah had never dreamed of.
"I do appreciate that," Sarah said. "I just wish more of my family were coming to the wedding."
"You told me you were fine with just your parents coming."
She had been, right up to the time that the guest list on the Baxter side exploded from half a dozen to eighteen. If not for her two bridesmaids, she'd have nobody else.
Randall had met the majority of her extended family during the one and only trip he'd made to Big Fork with her. Her Uncle Murphy had treated Randall to photos of the javelina he'd shot, stuffed, and put on their front porch. Randall, who'd never seen a taxidermied animal in his life, kept looking at the photo as if the dead animal was going to leap out of it and grab him by the throat. Murphy was six five and weighed at least three hundred pounds, with a scraggly beard and a perpetual grin. He played Santa Claus every year at the VFW hall, and that beard was getting so gray that pretty soon he wouldn't have to wear the fake one.
Murphy's wife, Marva, told Randall stories about Sarah at age two, running through the front yard naked. Then there was their son, Dickey, who lived in a trailer at the back of their property. He talked constantly about his prowess with women, but he never seemed to have one. Within five minutes of meeting Randall, he told him if he only had Baxter money, he'd be the new Hugh Hefner.
There was Aunt Imogene, who swore she'd been abducted by aliens, Uncle Fred, who never stopped talking about his rheumatism, and an assortment of other relatives who were as different from the Baxters as rowboats were from luxury yachts. On the drive back to Houston, Randall asked if any of them were likely to come to the wedding. Sarah said it probably depended on where the wedding was. It hadn't occurred to her until later that there might have been another reason besides the beautiful location that made Mona suggest a destination wedding.
“The trip is just too expensive for the rest of my family," Sarah said. "Maybe we should have gotten married back in Texas."
"No," Randall said. "That wouldn't do at all. Our wedding has to be in a place as beautiful as you are." He took Sarah in his ar
ms and gave her a kiss. “You're worried about nothing. It’s going to be a beautiful wedding in a beautiful place with a beautiful bride. Isn’t that what’s important?”
Yes, she told herself. Yes, yes, a hundred times yes! After all, hadn't she'd grown up feeling like Dorothy sitting on that fence, singing about that place over the rainbow where bluebirds fly and troubles melt like lemon drops and brides had storybook weddings?
Okay, so a storybook wedding hadn't been over Dorothy's rainbow, but it was definitely over Sarah's. And now that she was so close to Oz, the last thing she wanted to do was click her heels and return to Big Fork, Texas. Then all at once she had a flash of Mona, only this time she had a sharp, jagged nose, wore a pointy black hat and carried a broomstick.
Okay, enough of that analogy.
The reason Randall wouldn’t stand up to his mother wasn’t because he wasn’t assertive, but because he failed to see the problem in the first place. If she couldn’t get him to see her point of view about this, sooner or later she was going to have to confront Mona herself.
Sarah shuddered at the very thought.
It wasn’t as if she had a problem taking on a difficult person. She did it all the time at her job. But when that difficult person was on the verge of becoming her mother in law, it could cause hard feelings that wouldn’t go away until somebody lay gasping on a deathbed. Maybe not even then. Sarah told herself she was going to have the kind of wedding not one in a thousand brides could hope for, so the details didn’t matter. Mona was just trying to give them the most beautiful, most sumptuous, most memorable event she possibly could. Was there really anything wrong with that?
Yes, there’s something wrong with that. Because it’s not going to stop with the wedding.
That feeling had been eating away at her since Randall first put an engagement ring on her finger. Since they arrived in Montego Bay, it had only grown stronger.
No, no, no! Pre-wedding jitters. That's all it is!
“So are we heading to the pool?” Sarah asked with a smile. “The lounges there are wonderful, and the sun in the late afternoon--”
“Can’t. I have a conference call.”
“From Montego Bay? How long will it last?”
“Could be an hour. Then I’ll need to consolidate my notes.”
“By then it’ll be almost time for dinner.”
“Can’t be helped.” He looked at his watch. “The call’s in ten minutes. I need to get back to my suite.”
My suite. Not their suite. Mona had expressed dismay that she and Randall were going to share a suite at the resort, so they agreed to occupy separate rooms until their wedding night. Evidently “everyone” would be horrified if they did it any other way. Sarah thought it was a pointless exercise in phony appearances, but Randall, as always, caved to his mother’s demands.
Yet another bad feeling passed over Sarah. Part of the reason she was attracted to Randall was his drive and ambition. But this was their wedding, and he worked in the family business. Couldn’t somebody fill in for him in the Houston office long enough for him to get married?
“I’ll pick you up for dinner at a quarter till seven,” Randall said. “We don’t want to be late.”
No, of course they didn’t want to be late for dinner with his mother. What would “everyone” think?
2
By the time Sarah went back to her suite to dress for dinner, any poolside relaxation she’d felt had disappeared and she was a ball of nerves all over again. She wished her bridesmaids were coming in today instead of tomorrow. She needed somebody to hang out with. To talk to. To commiserate with.
She sighed. How pitiful was that? Why in the world did she need to commiserate with anyone? Commiseration was only necessary when things were going wrong, and nothing was going wrong here. Not wrong wrong, anyway. This was just a speedbump on the long road of her life.
Bad metaphor.
Just like that, she remembered. Bad metaphors in movies are like frogs in punchbowls, Nick had said. Everybody notices them, and nobody likes them.
She’d raised an eyebrow. Do you realize you just made up a bad metaphor about bad metaphors? Nick had laughed and tossed her on the bed, and suddenly movies and metaphors were the last things on her mind.
Sarah squeezed her eyes closed to drive away the memory, but every time she thought she'd been successful in putting him out of her mind, he popped up again at the most inopportune times. She glared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Stop thinking about him, do you hear me? He was wrong, wrong, wrong for you! What else could you have done but leave?
Sarah had just slipped into her dress when she heard a knock at her door. As she was getting ready, she’d entertained a small fantasy that maybe Randall would show up early, slip inside her room, and insist on making love to her. They’d fall together onto the bed, laughing and shushing each other the whole time lest anyone find out they were together, before collapsing with satisfaction in a tangle of arms and legs.
But no. He’d arrived on time. Precisely on the nose. Punctuality was one of his strong suits.
Sarah opened the door and gave him a sexy look. “I was hoping maybe you’d show up a little earlier.”
“Why? Do you have a dress that needs zipping?”
Sarah let out a silent sigh. “Nope. No zipper issues here. I just yanked this one on right over my head.” She grabbed the stretchy fabric at the waist of her dress, pulled it out, and released it. When it bounced back, she said, “See? Miracle fabric.”
But Randall’s attention was already somewhere else. He opened Sarah’s mini bar. “You got Oreos? How did you do that?”
“I didn’t. They were just in there.”
“And a full bottle of Crown?”
“I’m sure your concierge would give you one if you asked for it.”
“I shouldn’t have to ask. If you book five stars, you should get five-star treatment. I’ll have a word with the management.”
“Or you could just ask your concierge.”
Randall rummaged around a little longer, then shut the door. He looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows. “You have a better view than I do.”
“Do you want to switch rooms?”
He actually looked as if he was pondering that. “No. Of course not.”
She gave him a smile. “You could hang out here with me. I’ll share my view with you.”
“We’ve talked about this. My mother would freak out.”
“You’d just be visiting. It’s not like we’d be having sex in the Jacuzzi. Though if you wanted to drop back by later tonight—“
“Let’s leave well enough alone, okay? Are you ready to go?”
Sarah sighed again and grabbed her purse, feeling more than a little annoyed, with so much tension in her neck she was surprised she could turn her head. They went down the hall and stepped outside into the courtyard. A warm Caribbean breeze wafted across her face, then lifted her hair to swirl it around her shoulders.
Aaah. That’s better.
They made their way across the courtyard, where a three-piece band played cocktail hour music with a Jamaican flair. At the nearby bar, a smiling bartender poured a tropical drink, then finished it off with a swizzle stick of fresh fruit. She handed it to a woman in a bright pink dress.
Yum. I need one of those sometime.
Overhead, palm trees swayed in the breeze, and in the distance, a sailboat glided in front of the setting sun, gently tossed by the evening surf. Sarah breathed deeply, taking in the salt air. With every step she took, the worry she’d felt earlier seemed to seep out of her, replaced by warmth and relaxation.
They climbed the steps to the outdoor restaurant and walked to the hostess stand, where a petite woman greeted them by name and escorted them to a table that sat on a deck over the water’s edge.
Ahhh. This was it. This was the life she'd dreamed about since she was thirteen years old, when she and her cousin Liz talked about the kind of men they were going to marry. Liz wanted a guy w
ho played the guitar and wrote poetry, who would backpack with her through foreign countries and swim with dolphins. Sarah saw herself living with a rich, important man in a mansion with a maid, a gardener, a limo driver, lion sculptures at the front gate, and a helipad on the roof.
“I’ll escort Mrs. Baxter here as soon as she arrives,” the woman said.
Randall pulled out Sarah’s chair, and they sat. It felt amazing to have dinner at a restaurant that had place settings of crystal, linen, china, and silver at the same time they enjoyed a spectacular sunset and a warm ocean breeze.
“Beautiful view,” Randall said.
No. It was more than beautiful. It was paradise. A perfect setting for a perfect wedding.
No problem, mon. Don’t worry, be happy!
“My mother is here,” Randall said.
And just like that, all Sarah’s happy disappeared.
She rolled her suddenly-tense shoulders and told herself she was going to relax in the face of anything that might screw up this wonderful experience, her future mother in law included. She closed her eyes, took a cleansing breath.
There. That’s better.
When she opened them again, Mona stood at the edge of their table. For the first time since Sarah had known her, she looked distressed. Her mouth was set in a horrified frown, her face as white as her hair.
“Mom?” Randall said, leaping up to pull out her chair. “What’s wrong?”
Mona sat clumsily and slid her hand to her throat. “Something terrible has happened.”
“What?”
“Nicholas,” she whispered harshly. “He’s in Montego Bay. He’s coming to the resort.”
For at least the count of five, both she and Randall sat motionless, as if a single breath from either of them might bring the world to an end.
“Are you sure?” Randall croaked.
“Edward at the front desk told me he booked a room.”
“What time was that?”
“He didn’t say.”
“So he could show up anytime.”
“Yes.”
“Did you invite him to the wedding?”
