Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (18 page)

I still remembered the day my sister, nine or ten years old, had to go to school dressed as her favorite monster for a
Where the Wild Things Are
celebration, and she borrowed our cousin's Cinderella dress and a tiara and called her costume complete. Half the class moms had been in an uproar.

I smiled. “Try it on.”

“Joe will hate it. He'll totally make fun of it. He'd want something vampish.”

“It's not
his
dress.”

She grinned and brought it over to the saleswoman. They disappeared into the dressing area, complete with settees
for friends and relatives and grooms and four private dressing rooms for the bride-to-be to change in. Along one antique sideboard were several veils and headpieces.

The saleswoman picked up a pair of peau de soie heels in Sara's size, and brought her, the dress, and the shoes into one of the rooms. A few minutes later, Sara, absolutely beaming, came out and stood in front of the three-way, floor-to-ceiling mirror.

“This is my dress. Everyone told me you know it when you see it. I know it. I want to sleep in this dress. I'm never taking it off. I'm still twenty pounds overweight and the dress makes my waist look tiny!”

I stared at her reflection in the floor mirror, my best friend of five years with her crazy Botticelli curls in that princess dress and something kind of unexpected happened: I got all verklempt.

“You look amazing in it, Sara. Gorgeous.”

“Want to try a veil?” the saleswoman asked.

“That one.” Sara pointed to a tulle veil that went perfectly with the dress. “I'll have to do something with my crazy hair.”

“I love your crazy hair,” I told her. Sara's long, thick, curly brown hair was her trademark. I put the headpiece on and fluffed her hair out.

“Oh my God, I'm going to stand here and bawl like an idiot. But I fucking love this!” She looked at herself in the mirror in every possible direction. She looked so happy. “Oh, wait. I
don't even know how much it costs. I'll bet the veil alone costs more than a month's rent.”

I found the gown's price tag. “It's three thousand, four hundred.”

“Okay, what can I sell to pay for it? My car isn't even worth half that. Maybe I should just go with Joe's idea of eloping. He thinks we should wear regular clothes—our absolute favorites. Like the jeans he wears for a month before washing them. ‘The real us,' he keeps saying. I'm not getting married in the gray yoga pants I wear all the time.”

“I'll take a pic of you in the dress—send it to your parents. Maybe they'll offer to buy it as your wedding gift.”

“Ha. My mother keeps e-mailing me links to dresses with turtlenecks. Strapless ain't her thing.” Sara stared at herself in the mirror. “You must think I'm out of my mind. Princess dress. Wanting some big wedding with a cheesy band.”

“You're allowed to want what you want. Let's go have lunch. On me.”

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in Turning Japanese with our tofu shuumai and Samurai beer.

“I'm so jealous of you, Clem,” Sara said, scanning the menu. “You're going to have the big fancy wedding I want and it's the last thing you want.”

“Ha—fancy on the fifty acre vegetable farm. I'm sure Dominique will fight for black tie anyway. I wish Zach and I could elope just to avoid the arguments about three-thousand foot
tents. But I do like the idea of getting hitched with friends and family around us.”

“My mom is really pushing for us to have the wedding in her marshy, mosquito backyard in Louisiana. Although she did say she'd only host the wedding if Joe promised not to curse during the ceremony.”

I laughed, but she looked miserable. “Sara? You okay?”

“My parents can't stand Joe. I hate that. I mean, my parents are . . . my parents are stuck in the early eighties. But I still don't want them to hate my fiancé. Then again, even my best friend hates my fiancé.”

“I do not hate Joe. I love that he adores you.”

“But you don't like
him
.”

“We had a crazy start on his show, that's all.” Had I not beat Joe “Steak” Johansson on
Eat Me
's live cook-off over whose eggplant Parmesan was better, I would not have won the $25,000 that had enabled me to open Clementine's No Crap Café. Then I would have hated him for sure. But a tiny part of me owed the guy.

“I thought about Jocelyn's list all night,” she said. “It took me forever to fall asleep. I don't know if I can check off half the stuff on that list.”

“Maybe we should skip ahead to the one about listing what we love and don't love about our fiancés. Maybe that'll help clarify something.”

“I wish I was as sure as you. Zach is so annoyingly perfect.”

“He's not perfect, but he's definitely perfect for me. And like you said, considering that he's a meat-eating, chemical-using environmental disaster, that's saying something.”

The waiter came over and took our orders. We picked at the rest of the shuumai.

“Do you think I rushed into saying yes to Joe?” Sara asked.

I wanted to scream,
Yes
. But I wasn't sure. I did believe that part of Sara did truly love Joe “Steak” Johansson. “Can't answer that. Only you can.”

She turned over her paper place mat and got a pen from her bag. She wrote
Love
on one side, drew a dividing line vertically down the center, and wrote
Don't Love
on the other side.

“In the Love category: he's six-four, two hundred fifty pounds, and makes me feel petite. He calls me
babe
and
sweet mama
and
hot stuff
all the time. He looks at me like I'm a Victoria's Secret model.” She leaned closer and whispered, “When we're in bed, he looks into my eyes and tells me I'm beautiful over and over. I do love that.”

“Me too.”

“He treats his black Lab, whose name is Meatloaf, by the way, like a prince. He makes me crack up. He's fearless and doesn't care what anyone thinks, even the cable network.” She took a sip of her beer. “Although, let's add our first entry into the Don't Love category: he doesn't care what anyone thinks. He can be a real jerk—seventy-five percent of the time. Not necessarily to me, but to everyone else. Sometimes he's a jerk to me but in a clueless way, you know? He just doesn't
get it, doesn't see it.” She mock pulled out both sides of her hair. “Jocelyn's list is making me crazy. Well, not the list. The stinkin' truth.”

“Zach's mother told me I should rip up the list, that it's crapola and asking for trouble. But what could be bad about figuring out how you really feel?”

“Figuring out how I really feel.” Sara laughed. “I'm not sure I want to know. I
want
to get married in that freaky ball gown.”

Did she just want the wedding and the gown and not this particular husband? Did she just want to get married . . . because her BFF was and her boyfriend asked? I didn't know. “Maybe we should skip ahead to the one about us and not them. Adventure with a girlfriend who tells you the truth—whether you like it or not. That would be you. There are some things I need to think about too. Expectations about married life, for one.”

“Ugh, who wants to hear the truth?”

I smiled at her. “It's settled, then. Road trip to the desert. We'll take the pesky list with us but not necessarily go over it unless we feel like it.”

Sara clinked my glass with her own. “I won't feel like it. Which is why we should tape it to my forehead.”

S
ince we were leaving for the desert on Monday morning for a two-day trip, Zach invited Sara and Joe over for dinner Sunday night at his house—
our
house, he kept reminding me. Not that it felt like
our
house since he kept coming up with excuses about why we couldn't get together, or why I shouldn't come over after I closed up the restaurant.

I wanted to talk to him again, ferret out what was up with him, but with Joe and Sara coming over any minute, I could forget that. He'd issued the invitation, which was something. At first I hadn't wanted to take off a night from the restaurant, but Alanna, who'd been back on track like her usual kick-ass self, was only too happy to take over as chef in my absence.

As Zach cooked—a huge plus on the What I Love about Him side—porcini ravioli, he was quiet.

“Smells good,” I said, snaking my arms around him at the stove.

He froze for a split second. What the fuckety-fuck?

How many times was I was supposed to ask what was going on with him without sounding like some shrewish nag? And how many times was he supposed to say the same thing—everything's fine—when it obviously wasn't?

Maybe he was asking himself a bunch of questions too—without even having a list in front of him. Like
Do I really want to do this? Is she it?

Blast this needy crap. Zach loved me. I knew that.

And just because I loved him didn't mean there weren't some things I didn't love. Jocelyn's sixty-four-year-old list made that timelessly, classically clear. I couldn't remember which number it was, but I did remember what Jocelyn had written:
Make a list of all the things you love about him and all the things you don't. Figure out how you'll deal with what you don't love. (Don't put this off by waiting to cross the bridge when you come to it.)

What I didn't love: this sudden distance. The pulling away. The not telling me what was wrong. Was this how he was when he got stressed? Was he stressed? No clue. And I had no clue because he wouldn't talk to me about it.

Didn't love: that he didn't open up to me with what was bothering him.

Didn't love: that I asked and asked and asked and he still wouldn't tell me.

Didn't love: how he'd shut down my idea for the Outpost without seeing a business plan. Not that I had one yet. But I would in the next couple of weeks. If he didn't think something was a good idea, he eighty-sixed it without a second thought.

Which brought me back to number seven on Jocelyn's list:
Ask him why he loves you and then jot the reasons down on paper. Reread when you're arguing.

Hadn't he told me how smart, driven, and passionate I was about what I did? Maybe I had to remind him of that. To trust me. To say,
If you think it could work, I support you.

What was that one on Jocelyn's list about expectations? About what I expected married life to be like. I
expected
Zach to support me, even if he disagreed with me.

Right, so how was I going to deal with this . . . distance? Zach had never acted like this before. But maybe when he got stressed, he needed space or shut down or something.

Whatever was going on with him had nothing to do with me. Was he not cooking dinner for me and my friend and her train wreck of a fiancé? Did I not just catch him staring at me, in my skinny jeans and flowy top, with the kind of smile that always made me melt, as he walked to the door to let in Sara and Joe?

“Jesus H. Christ, this place is sick,” came Joe's booming voice. He wore an
Eat Me
T-shirt, complete with a picture of him chowing down on a huge slab of meat. And I guessed those were the jeans Sara had mentioned he wore a month without washing, since a mustardlike stain was on the thigh.
As Zach gave him the grand tour, I heard him say that same thing: “Jesus H. Christ, this place is sick,” or some variation, at least ten times. To his credit, the house
was
sick.

We sat outside on the deck, the wine poured, the salad eaten, the bread broken. “The vegan's influence, I see,” Joe said with an exaggerated grimace after a bite of ravioli, upping his chin at me.

“I end up eating vegan most of the time when I'm with Clementine,” Zach said. “No complaints. But nothing beats a good steak.”

That got a good eye roll from me.

“Damned straight,” Joe said. “The other day, on the live cook-off, we had this loser vegetarian on. I'm telling you, this dork's complexion was so pasty I offered him five hundred bucks to eat one meatball just to get some iron into him. Seriously, I thought he was going to pass out from lifting the cast iron pan.” Joe let out one of his trademark snort-laughs.

“I'll bet he won, though,” I said.

“Yeah right, Vegan Girl. I
crushed
him in the taste-off vote. The dipshit didn't get one vote for his vegetarian chili. I swear he started crying. His own mother was in the audience and started yelling at me for humiliating her son. Like I told him to get up on national TV and make an idiot of himself?”

Sara was covering her face with one hand from sheer embarrassment at the story. “I tried to help the guy out, but the audience had turned on him early on in the show. Once the mother starting yelling, the audience began chanting, ‘Mama's
boy! Mama's boy!' It was awful. He ran out after the next commercial break.”