Better Than Your Dreams

by Dee Ernst

  Lily’s eyes opened wide. “David? Why, he is a divine young man. Aren’t you the lucky one. To think, we’ll have two of those fabulous Cutlers here in the family.” She poked Jessica with her elbow. “There’s still one more floating around out there,” she teased. “I’d start in on young Ethan now if I were you, Jess, darling.”

  Jessica blushed, rolled her eyes, and slouched back down into her chair.

  “Aunt Lily,” I said, “did you hear me? They’ve only known each other three months.”

  Lily crossed the room to give Miranda a kiss on the cheek. “I know exactly how you feel,” she murmured to my daughter. “That’s how long Vincent and I have known each other. Isn’t wonderful when you’ve found the right person?”

  Miranda beamed. Aunt Lily was not going to be much help here, obviously. After all, Lily had made the same snap decision in roughly the same amount of time. But Lily, at least, had a long life going for her—she must have picked up a bit of wisdom along the way, right? Lily had been happily married for a long time, as well as having lived a very successful widowhood. She at least knew what she was getting into. But Miranda was a baby—my baby—and had never even had a serious relationship before. How could Miranda be so sure? I’d dated men, married, divorced, and dated a few more men before I finally found Ben, and after all that, I still had doubts.

  Lily waved her hand at me, an annoyed, swatting motion, so I got up off the couch, and she settled in next to Miranda. “Tell me, dear, is the sex good? Believe me, that’s a very important part of marriage. You want to be sure the two of you fit, if you know what I mean.”

  I swallowed hard and fled.

  I ended up in my living room. Fred was stretched out in his favorite patch of sunlight. Lana was perched on the back of the couch. Joan and Olivia were tangled together in the window seat. It warmed my heart that my animals got so much use out of this room.

  My parents had been happily married up until the time my father died, and it was from them that I learned what marriage was supposed to be. When I married Brian, our own marriage was very different from theirs, but I made it work because I loved him. And because I wanted it to work.

  But being in love wasn’t enough. It was never enough. How to explain that to Miranda, especially if she was in that first-love–induced haze of extreme happiness and lust?

  I sat and tried to figure out an angle until Lauren came looking for me.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, honey. How long have you known about all this?”

  She shrugged as she sat beside me. “She called me right away. She fell fast. So did he, I think.”

  “How serious is she?”

  Lauren snuggled beside me and rested her head on my shoulder. “They found a place to live. And she’s sent me pictures of about forty possible wedding dresses.”

  “You realize this is crazy, right?”

  She sighed. “Wait until you see them. They light up together. It’s like they’re in some sort of shiny bubble.”

  “But you realize this is crazy, right?”

  “Maybe. But there is such a thing as love at first sight, isn’t there?”

  “No, honey. Not really.”

  Now, anyone who’s read any of my books would probably be surprised by that answer. After all, hadn’t Lady Beatrice Whitcomber taken one look at filthy and exhausted Will Markham and known at once that beneath all that grime and pain was the perfect man? Didn’t James, Earl of Chestmont, know from the very first glimpse that sweet young Daphne Nethers would grow into the woman he would most certainly marry? Yes and yes. In fact, love at first sight was as common a theme in my books as hate-at-first-sight-turning-to-love. And both scenarios always had a happy ending. But that was why it was called fiction.

  “Daddy once said that you told him on the very first date that the two of you would end up married.”

  “Yes, and we all know how that turned out.” Brian had looked to be my ideal—big, handsome, charming, and on the short road to financial success. Our first date was spectacular—he had ticked off all the must-haves on my list, and many of the desirable options. I learned, however, that being a good boyfriend is one thing. Being a good husband is something entirely different. Brian had been a spectacular boyfriend. He had been a lousy husband. He’d been cheating on me for years, and I never knew it. In fact, I thought our marriage was going along just great. I loved him with all my heart, and I thought he loved me. We’d celebrated our twentieth anniversary just months before he walked into our kitchen and told me he was leaving me for another woman. Maybe if I’d seen signs of trouble, it wouldn’t have hit me so hard. It was painful for me to find out that our marriage had been something of a sham all along. And I didn’t even realize it until after he had walked out the door.

  I put both arms around Lauren and hugged her. I could hear Miranda and Lily laughing in the next room. I sighed.

  “Do you want Jess and me to run to the store for you?” Lauren asked.

  I nodded. “Yes. More steaks. And baking potatoes. I have more than enough salad and broccoli. Something for dessert, maybe?”

  “Are you really going to invite Dad and Dominique?”

  My shoulders slumped. “Do I have to?”

  “Well, it would be fun to see Tyler,” Lauren said, a little wistfully.

  I glared at her. “Not fair playing the little-brother card.”

  She made a bit of a pouty face.

  My ex-husband Brian never did marry the woman he left me for, but he did live with her, and they had a son. I guess I should have felt grateful about the fact that Dominique was not just a casual fling like the other women he had slept with over the course of our marriage. It was hard to feel warm and fuzzy toward the woman who took your husband away after twenty years of what I had thought was wedded bliss. But after I realized he was going to have to go through sleepless nights and poopy diapers all over again, and at a more, shall we say, advanced age, I began to feel downright friendly about ol’ Dominique. And when the fabulous Hoboken condo he bought with her was traded in for a McMansion in suburbia, it gave me a bit of the shits and giggles. My daughters were thrilled about their baby brother, but even they appreciated the irony of their father, after leaving a conventional home and family for the possibility of a new, exciting adventure with a younger woman, was ending up having to live a complete do-over.

  “Oh, all right. Get enough for them. Why the hell not? If I know your sister, she’s going to marry that boy no matter what I say, so we may as well start this off with a bang.”

  She kissed my cheek and got up off the couch, calling for Jessica. A few minutes later the kitchen door slammed. I could still hear Miranda and Lily. They were probably comparing bridesmaid’s dresses.

  Lana leaped down next to me and arched her back. I stroked her a few times before she jumped back up to her perch. She stared at me.

  “You realize this is crazy, right?” I asked.

  Lana yawned.

  Just the kind of advice I’d learned to expect from her.

  We had enough prime Angus beef to feed the entire defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. The salad was in a bowl roughly the size of your average kiddie pool. Lauren and Jessica put the extra leaf in the dining room table and laid out the good china. There was even champagne chilling. Ben had already texted me that he’d do the grilling. Lauren had splurged—with my debit card, of course—on designer cupcakes and a fabulous-looking lemon tart. Miranda had even offered to rinse the potatoes and put them in the oven.

  Brian, Dominique, and baby Tyler would be there by six thirty. Ben and David would arrive around the same time.

  What a warm, happy family gathering this had turned out to be.

  Sadly, Vincent was stuck out in Brooklyn—some sort of business social club event. I imagined a Retired Gangsters’ Dining and Gun Club meeting, so I just lied and told Lily how disappointed I was he wouldn’t be joining us.

  I texted Ben: Did David talk 2 U?

  He answered ba
ck: Yes—thrilled.

  What? He was thrilled? How could he be thrilled? Our children were about to make a huge mistake. What if they were miserable together? What would that mean for Ben and me if our two oldest children ended up hating each other? I wanted Ben and me to be together. I wanted our mutual families to feel comfortable together. And this rushed marriage had disaster written all over it. All I could imagine was Miranda, six months down the road—or worse, six years down the road—coming home in tears because she realized she’d married the wrong man.

  Ben apparently didn’t have the same reservations, which made me feel a bit uneasy. He just assumed they would make it work. Just like I knew he assumed that I would marry him, and the two of us would also make it work. How could he know that?

  But just making it work…was that enough? What about being happy? Because I was pretty sure that if I got married again I would not be happy. At all. Even married to Ben.

  It wasn’t like I was against marriage. I just knew that, for me, it was not an ideal state. I had failed terribly the first time around. I had no interest in trying again.

  I slipped into the downstairs powder room, sat, then tried to breathe deeply.

  This was the bathroom that had started it all. Years ago, one of my then interchangeable toddlers had flushed something down this same toilet, causing the entire sewage system of Westfield, New Jersey, to back up into my house. I had called a plumber. That plumber turned out to be Ben Cutler. And now, many years later, Ben Cutler was the love of my life, and his beloved son was about to ruin our future together by marrying my beloved daughter.

  I took a few more cleansing breaths.

  I tried to analyze my thoughts. Maybe my initial knee-jerk reaction was wrong. Maybe Miranda and David were meant for each other. Maybe theirs was a love story written among the stars. They would beat the odds. They would make it work. In years to come, there would be songs and poems written about their undying love. Maybe a TV movie. At least an article in People magazine.

  After all, these were two very smart young people. David had gone to Yale, for God’s sake. Miranda, although she sometimes acted like she didn’t possess a lick of common sense, was graduating—early, mind you—with a degree in computer something. Coding maybe? I don’t know, but hey, you had to be smart to do anything with computers, right?

  I knew my daughter. I knew that when she wanted something, she went after it one hundred and fifty percent. So if she was determined to marry David Cutler, I had to figure out a way to be okay with it.

  Ben and I really needed to talk. We needed to be on the same page with this thing. Maybe his whirlwind marriage had ended well—except for her dying, of course—but let’s face it, the odds are against all marriages. Ones entered into without a long period of thoughtful consideration were doomed. Maybe if we both came at Miranda and David with the same thought…

  But…why was he thrilled?

  Fred started barking. By this time I recognized all of his accents—that was his Brian bark. Oh, joy.

  Brian and I had decided to act like adults about our now-separate lives. We had our moments, of course—like four years ago, on the morning of our court appearance to finalize our divorce, when he told me he had made a mistake, and could we give it another try. (My answer, FYI, was no.)

  Some folks say that living well is the best revenge. That may be true, but in looking at Dominique, I held to another theory. She had my ex-husband. Brian was still an attractive man, although his hairline was starting to move backward while his waistline was starting to move forward. She also had the knowledge that Brian had commitment issues. I don’t know when he had started cheating on me, exactly, but Dominique had not been the first. So, what did that say about his loyalty to the woman he was currently living with?

  I, on the other hand, had Ben.

  Snap.

  Because our daughters tended to celebrate everything they could think of—college acceptances, National Honor Society inductions, beating a speeding ticket—Brian and Dominique had become fairly regular guests. And their son, Tyler, was adorable: big brown eyes, curling blond hair, and dimples all over his little face. He was also approaching two years old, and rapidly turning the corner from enchanting to a real brat.

  The din outside the bathroom door rose, then fell, as Tyler stopped screaming at the dog, and Fred stopped yapping in response.

  I leaned against the wall of the powder room and sighed.

  On the other side of the coin, Dominique had not lost what we in the motherhood sphere call “baby weight.” In fact, we can call it that for a whole five years after the actual delivery. So, stick-thin Dominique had been replaced by stuffed-sausage Dominique, because she refused to buy clothes any bigger than her original size double zero. I only weighed about twelve and a half pounds more than I did the day I got married. Would I have liked to lose the extra pounds? Sure. But since I already lost the largest and most significant weight that I acquired at my wedding—that is to say, Brian—I was happy to just let the extra pounds sit there. I’d prefer it to sit in my boobs instead of my butt, but you can’t have everything.

  There was a gentle tap on the door.

  “Mona?”

  It was Ben. I threw open the door, wrapped my arms around his neck, and gave him a big kiss. A long, sloppy, wet kiss.

  “Hello again,” I said when my mouth stopped being busy.

  He grinned and ran his hands down my back. “Hello again to you. Isn’t it great about the kids?”

  Oh, boy. Were we going to have this conversation now? Couldn’t we just enjoy a few minutes without this impending doom hanging over our heads?

  “Ben,” I started. Then my shoulders slumped.

  “What?”

  “It’s just…” I looked over his shoulder, and David and Miranda were standing there together, looking like they were under their own private spotlight.

  “David! Hi.” I broke away from Ben and hurried over to give David a hug. He was a bit taller than Ben, and thinner—still a young man’s body—but so handsome.

  He kissed my cheek. “Mona, hi. Listen, Randi said you had some initial reservations about us getting married. We really want you to be with us one hundred percent.”

  “Randi?” I glanced at my daughter. She had, since she was old enough to speak her own mind (which, I believe, was roughly sixteen months of age), resisted any effort to shorten her name. She was and always had been Miranda. Yet here was this young man referring to her as Randi, with no sign of lightning being hurled down from the sky.

  “Listen, everyone,” I said, “this is a very big deal, but now is not the time to talk details. Now is the time for someone to start the grill and someone else to start steaming the broccoli and making the cheese sauce—and since you’re of age, could you open the wine, Randi?”

  She did not give me a withering look, but rather nodded happily. “Sure, Mom. David, you can help.” They trotted off.

  I turned to Ben. “And you’ll light the grill?”

  He was frowning. “Reservations? Really? Mona, this is such amazing news. What reservations?”

  Oh, Lord. I needed someplace quiet. And secluded. I needed to try to explain to Ben why it was not his son that I was worried about—I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry anyone after only three months. In the middle of my hallway an hour before dinner was not the time or place.

  “Ben, listen. I’m sure the kids are crazy about each other, but—”

  “Nona!” That would be Tyler Whitman Berman, half brother to my three daughters, almost two-year-old son of my ex-husband, an adorable child I was not related to in any way, shape, or form, and who, for some reason, loved me with all his heart. He was hard to resist.

  I scooped him up as he ran to me, his fair hair in ringlets, big brown eyes wide with excitement.

  “You know my name is Mona, right?” I asked him.

  He giggled as he gave me sloppy kisses. “Nona!” he shouted again.

  “Mmmmm…”

&nb
sp; He squished his nose against mine. “Na-na-na-na…”

  “Say monkey.”

  “Monkey!”

  “Say motorcycle.”

  “Motorcycle!”

  “Say mountain.”

  “Mountain!”

  “Say Mona.”

  “Nona!” More giggles. More kisses.

  “You’re killing me, kiddo,” I told him. “Are you going to eat steak tonight?”

  He nodded and was already squirming out of my arms and down to the floor. He looked up at Ben. “Hey, Ben!”

  Ben squatted down. “Hey, Tyler. What’s new?”

  Tyler shrugged elaborately. “Nothin’.” Then he ran off.

  Ben straightened. “Almost makes you want to have another one, doesn’t he?” he said, somewhat wistfully.

  “Ah, no,” I said. “That’s what grandchildren are going to be for. Listen, let’s get the steaks started. We can talk about all this, I promise, but let’s get everyone fed.”

  Ben went through the kitchen and out the back door to light the grill. I turned right and went into my living room, where Brian and Dominique were getting the good news from Miranda and David.

  Brian looked shell-shocked. Well, to be honest, he’d kind of had that look ever since Tyler was born, but his jaw was slack, his mouth open, and a slight glaze was over his eyes. Dominique, ignoring her son’s not-too-subtle demand for attention, was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Married?” she squealed. “Really? Oh, how exciting. I love weddings.” She turned and looked pointedly at Brian. “Don’t you, dear?”

  Brian remained silent. Tyler was chanting, “Mom, Mom, Mom.”

  “Do you have a date?” Dominique asked.

  Miranda glance at me, squared her shoulders, and nodded. “January sixteenth. About two months from now.”

  Dominique frowned. “That doesn’t leave you much time to plan a wedding. In fact, you probably won’t be able to find anywhere halfway decent in just two months.”

  Lily had never thought much of Brian when he was married to me, and cared even less about him now. But she loved being in the same room with him and Dominique, and she was known to say things in French that none of us could understand, but that often caused Dominique to blush, turn white, or storm off in anger. Lily’s floor show was worth any price.