Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (19 page)

Zach's eyebrow went up. “I guess you have to come on strong, take it from him and dish it back, like Clem and Sara did when they were on the cook-off.”

“Exactly,” Joe said. “That's why I'm marrying this fiery chick. She tells me off all the time. I love it.”

As Joe went on and on about another contestant he'd tried to destroy on TV, a soldier recently back from Afghanistan who'd been calm and cool while working on the barbecue-chicken cook-off until he slammed a left hook into Joe's gut and then walked off set, I watched Sara cringe.

She didn't look like a woman in love. She didn't look like a glowing bride-to-be. She looked as if she wanted to run off the set of her life.

But every time I saw her slightly shaking her head, her gaze would go to her ring, and then she'd try to redirect Joe to normal conversation about a movie they'd seen.

Maybe I would tape Jocelyn's list to Sara's forehead. That way
I
could see it.

Sara and I were so sick of talking wedding, guys, and lists that we banned all mention for the road trip to Palm Springs. We blasted the Red Hot Chili Peppers, sang at the top of our lungs, and two hours later pulled into the drive of our swanky hotel,
right on Palm Canyon Drive, which was lined with twenty-foot-tall palm trees, boutiques, art galleries, nightclubs, and restaurants.

We were an hour early to check in, so we left our bags in the car and headed out to the hotel's back deck for their all-day happy hour in the glorious sunshine. Since it was only two o'clock, we practically had the place to ourselves, except for a couple who held hands across the table, leaned across to nuzzle noses, and didn't look away from each other's eyes once.

“Okay, normally that couple would make me stick my finger down my throat,” Sara said. “But you know what? Joe and I kinda get like that. I don't mean just staring at each other with googly eyes, but we get caught up in talking so much and laughing our asses off that we never even notice who's around us.”

Huh. Zach and I were like that too—usually.

“Hey, I can cross that one off Jocelyn's list,” she said. “About what my expectations of marriage are.
That's
what I expect—talking, laughing, hanging out. Like us. But with the bonus of great sex.”

My grandmother once said to me and my sister,
Let me tell you something right now, girls. Don't expect a husband to be like a girlfriend. That's how a marriage lasts.
We'd been in the kitchen at my parents' farm, working on a vegetable soup from produce from the back garden, and our grandmother Lucille was shaking her head and muttering every few minutes about her daughter-in-law, my cousin Harry's mother, who'd moved into the finished basement at Lucille's farm because her husband
ignored her, even when she busted out the sexy lingerie. Elizabeth and I kept saying, “TMI, Grandma! TMI!” but she'd kept on muttering about how Harry's mom expected to be treated like some kind of a queen.

“Why the hell shouldn't she?” Elizabeth had said as she'd peeled her millionth potato for the soup.

Grandma Lucille seemed to realize suddenly she'd been letting loose to her daughter-in-law's two teenaged nieces, and she'd said, “Well, she should and she shouldn't. But for God's sake, let me tell you something right now. Don't expect a husband to be like a girlfriend. That's why we
have
girlfriends.”

“I'm going to expect the f-ing world,” Elizabeth had said. And judging from how incredibly satisfied she was with her life and six-week-old marriage, I'd say she'd gotten it.

Every now and then over the years, Harry would mention that his mother had packed a suitcase and moved downstairs. Last I heard, she was back upstairs.

I didn't expect Zach to act like a girlfriend. But I did expect support—especially based on what he knew to be true of me: that I could run a restaurant and make it a success. That I would put 1,000 percent of myself into it—without letting anything slide at Clementine's. Did I not have a strong staff at the restaurant? I could count on Alanna and Gunnar to hold the fort while I was at the Outpost. I
could
make it work.

But did that mean he was supposed to yes me to death even if he disagreed? Hellz no. But shut me down? Also hellz no. Shut me out?
No
.

Just as I was about to tell Sara about Grandma Lucille's pronouncement to see what she thought, a waiter came over with a bowl of edamame, which I always appreciated, and took our orders of two appletinis. Then a group of people, eight or ten of them, suddenly appeared on the grass on the other side of the fence separating the deck from the open space. They all stood with their eyes closed and one hand touching the bark of a tree.

Sara's right eyebrow shot up. “Are they communing with nature? They look like morons.”

“Do men in suits commune with nature?” I asked, gesturing at the uptight-looking dude in a striped tie. Next to him, with her arms practically wrapped around the tree, was a woman in three-inch heels.

What the hell were they doing?

A tiny redhead dressed all in white walked up and down the grass. “Don't open your eyes,” she said in a loud yet soothing voice. “Just visualize.”

As she neared our table, her hands clasped behind her back as she observed her whatevers, Sara said, “Can I ask what you guys are doing?”

The redhead smiled at us. “This is my Visualize Your Future seminar. You see yourself doing what you want most of all and it helps ground you.”

“What's the tree about?” Sara asked.

The woman stretched her arms over her head and then brought them down slowly to her sides. “Just helps steady you,
something decades old and rooted in the ground. Would you like to try it?”

“Go ahead,” I said, shooting Sara an evil smile as our waiter set down our drinks.

Sara, game for anything, stood up, took a bracing sip of her appletini, and headed over to one of the trees. She stood near the woman in the three-inch heels and stuck her hand on the bark, grinning at me.

“Close your eyes and visualize yourself doing what you want most,” the redhead said. “What that truly is.”

Sara closed her eyes. She kept her hand on the tree, and I saw her shoulders relax.

A minute later, the leader clapped her hands. “All right, everyone open your eyes. You are forever changed. You're a person who knows what he or she wants, and now you're going to list the steps to make it happen. Let's head inside.”

Sara called a thank-you over to the group leader and sat back down. “You know what I visualized?” Sara said to me. “Myself with a regular role on a sitcom. The funny sidekick. The hilarious BFF. Maybe even the star. Same thing I've been dreaming about since I moved to LA five years ago. What else is new?”

This was great. She hadn't visualized herself walking down the aisle in a princess ball gown to Joe dropping F-bombs at the other end of her parents' backyard. She saw herself fulfilling her longtime dream.

“What's new is that I haven't heard you talk about that in forever. You've been working on
Eat Me
for six months, and
before that, you were focusing on commercials as a way into the business.”

“The sitcom just wasn't happening, though. But can't you totally see me as the hilarious, inappropriate best friend next door?”

“Yup. I can also see you as the star.”

“Well, at least I'm on TV, right? Even if it's not exactly what I'd planned.”

“So do the next part and list the steps.”

She took another sip of her drink. “Wasn't it cheesy enough to think deeply while touching a tree?”

I pulled out my little notebook that I used to jot down recipes and shopping lists. “Here. Write down three ways to get yourself on a sitcom.”

She took the notebook and pen. “Hmm . . . I could try to get an agent now that I'm actually working.
Eat Me
is pretty popular.” She scribbled. “And I could ask my friend who's a production editor to make a fifteen-minute compilation of my best clips, my funniest cohost moments.”

“Perfect.”

Her eyes lit up. “And I could take an acting class. It's been a couple of years since I even bothered.” She popped an edamame in her mouth. “You can skip this little exercise since you already
have
everything you really want. Bitch.” She shot me a smile.

“You mean like my fiancé's mother asking if we could ‘spray something to ward off bugs' at the farm? And my new unfireable kitchen trainee who dropped a block of tofu on the floor
the other night and also annoyingly saved me from making a big mistake with my mushroom stew? And then there's my fiancé, who's been kind of . . . something.”

“Kind of what?”

Kind of un-Zach-like. Last night, I'd stayed over, and instead of hanging out in bed and watching old
Seinfeld
episodes, Zach had disappeared into his home office for over two hours. I'd found him hunched over his laptop, his expression grim.

“Zach?” I'd called from the doorway. But only Charlie glanced up at me from his little dog bed beside Zach's desk. “Zach.”

Finally he'd heard me. “I just need about a half hour to go over a few reports. Boring numbers. Go ahead up.” His attention was back on the laptop.

He'd finally come upstairs to bed two hours later, kissed me on the cheek, and turned over.

How were you supposed to get your fiancé to open up to you when he wouldn'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.)

“Distant,” I told Sara, thinking about how exactly I
was
going to deal with it. “Not around. Even last night, when you and Joe were over, he just wasn't himself—and he hasn't been for more than a week. I can't put my finger on it. He keeps telling me everything is fine, but I know him. He's backed off. It's subtle, but I've definitely noticed it.”

“He's probably just insanely busy, Clem.”

“That's what he says.”

This morning, right before Sara and I had taken off for Palm Springs, I'd texted him a quick
Leaving for the desert. Love you
.

It had taken him hours to text back a blah
Ditto
.

An hour later, after I'd checked in with Alanna about how things were going at the restaurant, Sara and I, in bikinis, sunglasses, and slathered in sunblock, were lying on chaise lounges by the pool under the hot, sunny sky. As Sara polished her toenails a sparkly blue, I was half reading and half trying to think about wild mushrooms.
Trying
to think because I kept thinking about Zach instead.

Cremini, shiitake, black trumpets, golden chanterelle. Yes, think mushrooms, Clementine. Think work, the restaurant, specials, recipes. Perhaps a mushroom sauce over pappardelle, one of my favorite pastas. I could do a night of pasta specials, offer little plates of five different pastas.

Sara whipped off her sunglasses. “Holy crap, that guy looks exactly like Gil Gilmore.”

I put down the hardcover of
Essentials of Restaurant Success
and followed her stare to a good-looking guy in his midtwenties climbing out of the pool, dripping wet. A few other women were ogling him too.

“Oh, wait,” she said as he and his P90X abs passed us. “False alarm. This guy's eyes are brown. Gil Gilmore had the bluest eyes I've ever seen, like electric blue.”

“Who's Gil Gilmore?”

Sara put her sunglasses back on and lay back down. “I told you about him. The guy I was in love with during college. He lived in my dorm all four years and I tried to be hilarious and make him fall in love with me, but he always looked at me like I was on drugs. I wonder what he's doing from nine to five now. Probably some master of the universe like Zach.”

“Google him. Maybe he's a used-car salesman with a beer gut and a comb-over.”