Bringing Home a Bachelor (16 page)

They all chatted about this and that for a while, before Jocelyn offered seconds to all the men, who gladly took her up on them. Meat, vegetables and biscuits were loaded up a second time, and complimented.

The girls may as well have been invisible.

Pete’s sense of outrage grew.

Melinda’s jaw worked as she looked down at her empty plate. “May I have another slice of beef, Dad? And Mark, please pass the biscuits.” Melinda’s voice was serene, but firm. She reached out a hand and pulled the butter dish toward her from the center of the table, as her mother’s face blanched in horror.

Yes! Pete wanted to cheer for Mel.

“Sweetheart,” Jocelyn admonished, “there’s a lot of fat in that roast. And half a cup of butter in the biscuits already!”

Mel continued to put food on her plate. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mother, but you invited me to a meal, not a fasting session.”

Jocelyn pinched her lips closed, with an expression that suggested it was painful to do so.

All the guys continued to eat, their eyes on the table. But Pete felt choked by the food. These people! Couldn’t one of them stand up for Mel?

Kendra looked longingly at the biscuit platter and then away, out the window.

Mel poured gravy onto her meat, then slathered butter on her biscuit. She took a large bite of it, her eyes on her mother.

Twin spots of pink appeared high on Jocelyn’s cheeks. She opened her mouth again, but closed it when Richard caught her eye and shook his head.

“No, go ahead, Mom, really,” Mel said, with her mouth full. “Tell me how overweight I am. Tell me the exact number of carbs in this biscuit. The number of fat grams. And break down the nutritional content of the gravy, while you’re at it.”

“Melinda, is the hostility necessary?” Richard asked.

She swallowed her food. “Yes. Yes, actually, it is. Because ignoring her doesn’t work. It just eggs her on. And asking her to stop politely doesn’t work, either. And nobody else in this family will take my side, or stand up to her. Mom, maybe you should know that Dad has a little freezer in the garage, hidden behind his fishing gear.”

Jocelyn gasped in outrage and skewered poor Richard with her eyes. He closed his.

But Melinda wasn’t done yet. “Maybe you should clue in that when we were out on the patio, everyone was eating contraband fried food out of the ice bucket! Because people hate your disgusting cheese cubes and cucumber rounds.”

Mel put her fork down, took a deep breath and stood up. “Food should be appreciated, not treated like an enemy. Food should be enjoyed, not despised. Meals should bring a family together, not drive them apart. So I’m thirty pounds overweight. I am not going to apologize for liking food!”

Utter silence reigned at the dinner table until Pete put down his own fork and applauded.

“I’m FAT,” Melinda shouted at her mother. “So what? I’m happy! I am not going to live in misery, with stomach cramps, in order to fit into a pair of size-zero jeans!”

“Melinda,” Pete said. “You’re not fat.” He turned to her family. “She’s not. She is the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, she’s gorgeous, and this family had annihilated her self-esteem when I ‘re-met’ her only a few months ago. That’s just wrong, people. And if you can’t love her the way she is, well, then…” He stared at each person around the table for a good beat. “If you can’t love her the way she is, then I feel sorry for you. But I
do
.”

Melinda’s mouth trembled. Her eyes filled and spilled over, tears running down her cheeks. “God, I love you, Pete Dale. You are my hero.”

22

P
ETE
FOLDED
HER
into his arms, hugged her tightly and kissed her repeatedly.
Please don’t let this be the last time I ever do this.
“I love you, too, Mel. Please remember that.”

Jocelyn was trembling with genuine hurt and suppressed fury.

He knew the other shoe was about to drop, and that it was a steel-toed construction boot with a guided missile system. Target: his ass.

“He’s not your hero, you stupid, ungrateful girl!” she exclaimed. “And it’s your family, it’s me who loves you, not Peter Dale—who only called you again as part of a business deal, but seems to have a very selective memory about that.”

Richard choked, while Mark and Kendra gasped in unison. Pete froze as the color drained from Melinda’s face.

Jocelyn got up and threw her napkin down on the table like a gauntlet. “Why don’t you explain to our darling Melinda, Pee-ter?”

“Why don’t you explain, Jocelyn?” Pete countered. “And while you’re at it, why not elaborate on how you can destroy your daughter just to spite me and get the upper hand in an argument? Why don’t you apologize for treating Melinda the way you do?”

Mel looked from Pete’s face to her mother’s and back to Pete’s.

“What exactly is going on here?” Richard demanded.

“I am sorry, Melinda,” Jocelyn said unexpectedly. “I truly am. I don’t mean to hurt you. I love you…and all I have ever wanted is the best for you.”

But it was too little, too late. Mel seemed to barely hear her. She turned to Pete, eyes huge, her expression almost pleading. “What business deal?”

Her mother’s face crumpled. “I made a mistake.”

“You think?” Pete snapped.

Melinda’s breathing had become fast and shallow. A pulse jumped below her jaw as she cut her gaze to her mother again. “What did you do?”

Jocelyn’s mouth worked, but evidently she couldn’t get the words out, which left the excruciating task to Pete.

He wanted to run, hide from this conflict, slide under the bed or slip out the window as he had so many times as a kid. But he stood his ground for Melinda. If she had to hear it, then she deserved to hear it from him.

He could hear his own heart beat dully in his ears; feel his blood sluggish in his veins, like pudding stuck in a straw. He even had difficulty drawing breath into his unwilling lungs.

“Mel,” he said. His very voice sounded foreign to him, probably because he wanted to disown it and disavow what he had to say. “I had every intention of calling you after the wedding. But evidently your mother didn’t have faith that I would. So…” He swallowed convulsively. “So she came to me and offered to do all of her charity functions at Playa Bella if I did. Call you, that is.”

Melinda’s whole body began to tremble as she absorbed the implications of his words.

Pete spoke faster and faster. “I told her that I was planning to call you anyway, but she didn’t believe me. My instinct was to throw her out of my office, Melinda—I should have—but I needed that business, and I told myself that it didn’t matter because I was going to call you anyway. So it didn’t count as a bribe.”

She didn’t move a muscle; she simply exhaled an odd little puff of air. It decimated him—he suddenly remembered why people said “God bless you,” when someone sneezed: the belief that the soul popped out of the body and could be snatched in an instant by the devil.

He felt that something had left Melinda with that tiny exhalation, something precious that he could never recover for her.

“You’re
despicable.
”

He barely heard her words; they were so quiet. And yet they were more devastating than a death rattle. “Mel. Oh, God. I swear to you, Melinda, that—”

She turned away, turned to her mother as if in slow motion, and looked her up and down from head to toe, in utter disgust. “And you. There aren’t any words bad enough to describe you. You’re a sick, unnatural woman.”

Jocelyn lowered her head and put her hand out as if to ward off a blow. She no longer looked like a powerful socialite with the tongue of a viper. She looked old and frail and miserable.

Pete would never understand why he said it, but he did. “Mel, she didn’t want you to be hurt. I doubt she thought beyond that.”

She threw her head back. “Shut up!” she shouted. “So I was your pity-fuck. At least she was smart enough to see it. I was so dumb that I believed your lies and fell for your manipulation.”

She was shaking with emotion, her blue eyes raw with betrayal in her stark white face.

“No, Mel. You were never that. Please believe me,” Pete pleaded.

“I’ll never believe anything that comes out of your mouth again, you son of a bitch.”

“Mel, I called you because I wanted to. Mel, I love you.”

“Liar! You’re still telling everyone what you think they want to hear, Mr. Customer Service. You can’t even stop, can you? You soothe, you placate, you suck up, you kiss ass. You make me sick.”

Richard got up from the table, went to his daughter, and put his arms around her. Over her shoulder, he inspected his wife as if she were a particularly repulsive species of maggot.

Mel said brokenly, “Dad, take me home. Oh, please…just get me out of here and take me home.”

“I’ll do that, sweetheart.” He eyed Jocelyn somberly. “And I’m not sure I’ll be coming back.”

Looking pole-axed, she slid down the dining room wall into a navy puddle on the polished floor. She gave a cry of anguish as they left, slamming the garage door behind them.

After a half moment of silence, Mark surged out of his chair, his face and his fists like granite. As Kendra shrieked, he reached across the table and grabbed Pete by the collar, hauling him through the green beans and biscuits. “I’m gonna kill you, shit head.”

As flecks of Mark’s saliva settled over his face, all Pete felt was bone-weary. He nodded. “You do that, Mark. Go ahead and hit me. I friggin’ deserve it.”

“You sure as hell do! You pick up my sister at my wedding, use her for sex and then lie to my face about it? You—”

Suddenly Pete’s weariness morphed into rage. Without conscious thought, Pete gripped Mark’s shoulders and head-butted him, hard, knocking him backward into Jocelyn’s loaded china cabinet.

“For the last goddamned time, I didn’t use Melinda for sex! Why will you people not get that through your thick heads? Why?”

Mark blinked in shock, then recovered and came for him head down, like a bull. The dining room table went over in a crash of silver, glassware and porcelain and Kendra screamed.

“If you want to know the truth, she came on to me, and I was flattered! I thought she was hot!” Pete yelled the words right before being brutally sandwiched between the floor and two-hundred-forty pounds of pissed-off Mark.

“Don’t talk about my sister that way,” he panted, and then plowed his fist into Pete’s jaw.

“I friggin’ love your friggin’ sister, you friggin’ asshole!” Pete thundered, as he punched Mark in the eye. All the aggression that he’d tamped down and avoided over the years roared out of him. Mark became his brother, his father, and Pete opened up a can of good old-fashioned Whoop-Ass on him, despite the fact that Mark outweighed him by a good thirty-five pounds.

They rolled back and forth on the floor, through scattered utensils and shards of plates and slices of roast.

Mark grabbed Pete by the hair and crushed his face into a mound of onions.

Pete managed to get an arm under Mark and flipped him, then sat on him and rained down punches indiscriminately.

Mark grabbed Pete’s nuts and sent him flying into a wall.

Kendra threw a bowl of cold water on them both, which did absolutely no good.

When they finally came to a screeching halt, it wasn’t out of fatigue or common sense. It was because Jocelyn had brandished a huge serving fork in their faces and Kendra was threatening, at the top of her lungs, to call 911.

* * *

M
ELINDA
CLUTCHED
M
AMI
to her chest as her father drove her back to her townhome in Coconut Grove. She held on to her anger at her mother just as tightly, because if she even gave one thought to Pete right now she’d come apart…and she wasn’t a little girl anymore. Richard couldn’t pick her up and bandage a skinned knee, or kiss an injured funny bone to make it better.

There was something desolate inside her, a dark fissure that had opened at Pete’s betrayal, scorched along the edges and bottomless in depth. That he was the man she’d trusted enough to bare her soul and her body to…the pain was unbearable.

“Your mother,” Richard said quietly, “isn’t a bad person.”

“She’s a witch.”

“No, she’s not. She’s…obsessive about some things.”

“That, Dad, is the understatement of the year. She’s crazy.”

Her father sighed, and dragged a hand through his thinning hair. “Melinda, your mother wasn’t always like this. When you and Mark were kids, she ate birthday cake and cookies right along with you. Do you remember?”

“No.” But in the far recesses of her consciousness, Mel did have blurry images of Jocelyn licking the chocolate frosting off of the bottom of a big wax candle shaped like the number six. And eating something gooey that Melinda had made in her Easy-Bake Oven in third grade…

Her father tightened his hands on the leather steering-wheel of his Jaguar. “I’m going to tell you something that I never thought I’d share with you, because you won’t see me the same way. And I always wanted to be a hero in the eyes of my little girl.” He shot her a wry, sad smile.

She couldn’t imagine anything that would tarnish his image in her eyes, or explain her mother’s personality. But she waited for him to share whatever it was.

“Melinda, this isn’t easy for me to say. But when you were about nine, I had an affair. I cheated on your mother with a young woman in my office.”

Mel gaped at him.

He nodded. “She was…stunning. To this day I don’t know what she saw in me—maybe a man of authority, a man with some money. But she made it very hard to say no, and I was weak. Your mother and I had had the typical marriage problems—fatigue, fights over money, giving up our identities and hobbies to raise you kids. Your mother wanted me to take out the garbage and mow the lawn, and this other young woman treated me like a god, like a superhero.”

Mel closed her eyes. This was really just too much in one night. She didn’t want to know any more.

“Your mother found out about the affair, of course. And she took it very hard. I gave up the girl and we saw a marriage counselor, but your mother stopped eating and dyed her hair blond. She underwent some cosmetic procedures that to this day I don’t think she needed. And she changed—her whole personality changed.”

“Oh, God. She became the cucumber queen.”

Richard nodded. “Melinda, she was very, very angry with me, but she refused to show it—I think she was afraid that it would do more damage to the marriage. Instead, she took to blaming herself. If only she hadn’t gained weight with her pregnancies. If only she’d kept her nails done. It was crazy and I told her that, but…of course I was the last person she was going to believe. I’m so sorry to this day, honey. I am the reason that your mother is the way she is. I’ve tried to make it up to her over the years, and she’s forgiven me, but she’ll never forget.”

“That’s why she got so angry with me at the wedding, Dad. I understand more, now. She was harping about my weight, and I lashed out at her. I asked if she was afraid to gain an ounce because you might not love her if she did…I guess I didn’t even realize how close to the bone I cut that night.”

“Honey, she loves you.”

“Dad, I don’t want to hear it. How could she do what she did? How could any mother do that to her child? It was cruel. It was thoughtless. It was borderline insane.”

“I don’t know. She worries about you. She worries about your self-esteem.”

“And she thought that she’d improve it if she bribed a guy to take me out?!”

“I didn’t say she was right. I can’t defend what she did. But I think in some warped way, she was trying to make up for…things. The negative relationship between you two upsets her.”

“Sure—about as much as breaking a nail does.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I can’t believe you’re defending her!”

“Sweetie, my defense of her doesn’t mean a lack of support for you, okay? This isn’t a war.”

Melinda snorted.

“It really does upset her. She doesn’t know how to talk to you, or be with you, without antagonizing you.”

“Really? Gee, I hadn’t noticed.”

“There’s no need to be snotty to me.”

Mel leaned her head back against the seat. “I’m sorry.”

Her father just squeezed her hand again.

“Are you leaving her?” Melinda got right to the point, as he pulled the car into her driveway.

He sat silently, with his head bowed. “No. I’m furious at her, sweetheart. But she stuck by me when I screwed up. And I’ll stick by her.”

“Do you love her?”

He nodded. “I do. There are times when I don’t want to love her, but people don’t come perfectly assembled in a box, Melinda. They have flaws. They have warts and personality streaks that their partners may not always like. The bottom line is that we are a family, honey. And we love each other.”

“Dad, I’m sorry but I can’t love her right now. She’s crossed a line.”

Richard nodded. He reached out and touched her cheek. “That’s okay. You try to love her again next month.”

“I don’t know, Dad.” But she hugged him, feeling fresh tears form under her stinging eyelids. “I don’t know.”

He squeezed her tightly. “Just try. If not for her sake, then for yours.”