Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (9 page)

“Clem. You're forgetting that I know you.”

“The pasta was perfect,” I whispered, hating how stung I really felt. “I made sure of it.”

“I'm sure it was. She's just . . . difficult. Look, you're my brand-new fiancée. She's my mother. Just ignore her when she gets to you. Don't even bother engaging. Okay?”

For a second, as I looked at Zach, this guy whom I loved
so much, I felt all the anger whoosh out of me. But a moment later, it was back.

I motioned for one of the McMann twins to take over my pan. “Zach, if she insults me, I can't just not say anything.”

“You can try. For me. ‘Letting it go' is how she and I manage to have a relationship. If I want her in my life—and I do—I need to accept her. When she crosses a line, believe me, I tell her.”

His expression changed for a second, and I realized he was talking about the incident that had blown up their relationship a few years ago. She had crossed a line—I had no idea over what. And he'd told her. The result? They hadn't spoken for three years.

“I have to pick my battles, Clem. That means letting go of what's really just nonsense.”

Letting it go
wasn't in my vocabulary, though. Since Zach and I had been together, I'd listened to his stories about his mother, how difficult she was, how long it had taken him to accept that she was who she was. That meant not jumping on every misstep she made. But my motto was more along the lines of
Start as you mean to go on.

“I'll try,” I said. “But just like you don't expect her to change who she is, don't expect me to change who I am.”

“I don't want you to change,” he said, pulling me close. “I love you just as you are, Clementine Cooper.”

“I love you too,” I whispered.

“You basically told her she was old,” Zach said with a rueful smile.

“I used the word
generational
,” I reminded him. “Completely different.”

He rolled his eyes at me, but kissed me on the cheek and headed out of the kitchen into the dining room.

I walked over to my station and took over my pans from Evan.

“Ah, fighting over food and relatives. It's like they're already family,” Gunnar said with a firm chop of his knife into an artichoke heart.

A
t just after midnight, Zach and I sat on his couch, Charlie curled up beside me with his warm, little head resting on my leg. I'd taken a long, hot shower so that I no longer smelled like garlic and pancetta and cinnamon churros.

“What's that?” I asked, pointing to a huge, antique-looking book on the coffee table.

He pulled it over to his lap. “It's an old photo album from when I was a kid. I rarely dig it out, but the conversation at dinner got me nostalgic, I guess.”

“What was the conversation at dinner? Besides how much your mother hated my restaurant.”

“She didn't hate it. In fact, she was quite impressed by it, by you. I could tell.”

“Ha.”

“I'm serious. I know her, Clementine. In fact, at dinner, she said you reminded her of Aunt Jocelyn. Even though Jocelyn is my father's aunt, my mother was very close with her when she and my dad were married.”

“I remind her of an eighty-six-year-old woman?”

Zach smiled. “In her day, Jocelyn was a live wire. The first to try something new, anything daring. Tell her no, and she'd find a way to accomplish it. Her least favorite word has always been
appropriate
.”

“I knew I liked Aunt Jocelyn. Are she and your mother still close?”

“They had some big falling out during my parents' divorce and they never recovered.”

He opened up the photo album. I usually wasn't into looking at people's old photos of their family, relatives posing in front of cars on dull cross-country trips, endless shots of sunburned kids at beaches, but
this
family was going to be my family.

“Were you and your mother ever close?” I asked, looking at the next photograph, of his mother on a boardwalk in her swimsuit, absolutely stunning, even with her early-eighties, huge hair.

“Not really. I was much closer to my father.”

“What was the big fight about?”

He leaned back on the couch and rubbed Charlie's belly. “She came between my sister and her boyfriend—someone Avery really loved. The guy was a starving artist, hipster, and
hippie rolled into one, and Avery was about to move with him to New York City and fund his life. My mother did everything she could to break them up.”

What? Awful!
“Like what?”

“Planting seeds of doubt, making up stories about a friend who had fallen into the same ‘trap' of supporting a failed artist—that kind of thing. Manipulation at its worst. Avery became a wreck and all her sudden doubting started huge arguments with her boyfriend. In the end, my mother got her wish, and Avery was left with a broken heart. Three years later, she's never found anyone she loved like she loved that guy. My mother still thinks it's for the best.”

Dominique was some piece o' work. “Did Avery pull away from your mother?” From what I could tell during the family dinner at my restaurant, Avery and her mother were chummy. No bad blood there. And Avery seemed very much her own person.

Zach shook his head. “She actually ended up running
to
her for comfort, and my mother was there with open arms, of course. Dominique got exactly what she wanted. The whole thing infuriated me. My mom and I had a huge argument about it, both said a bunch of stuff we regret, though half of what I said I did mean. We didn't speak for years.”

Not that family discord and estrangements were a good thing, but I was glad to hear Zach had stood up for his sister, stood up for what was right. “What got you talking again?” I asked, looking at another photo, of Zach as a young boy, so
adorable, holding his mother's hand, his twin sister, Avery, on the other side.

“Aunt Jocelyn. She asked me to make peace with her, said life was too short for grudges, just make peace and let live, et cetera. I realized how much it bothered me that my mother and I were on the outs, and for so long, and I decided my aunt was right. We made peace, never discussed the fight, and now we're just having a nice, superficial relationship.”

“Same for your brother and sister?”

“My sister's a bit closer to her, but, yeah, same thing.”

I thought about Jocelyn, that beautiful, elegant elderly woman, more full of life and energy than some slugs sitting around looking bored at Jolie's wedding while Jocelyn twirled around the dance floor. “So did Aunt Jocelyn take her own advice? Did she make peace with your mother too?”

“She said she tried, but my mother wouldn't budge.”

He turned the page and laughed at a photo of his brother, Gareth, no older than five, crying in a mud puddle at a zoo.

I tried to imagine not talking to my mother. I could talk to my mother about anything. I didn't often, but I could. Back when Zach and I were trying to figure out how to have a relationship without killing each other, I'd confided in my mother, and her words of wisdom—that I'd find my way with him, that I'd figure it out—went a long way.

He closed the photo album and slid it back on the coffee table, then pulled me close against him. “So you see why I asked you to just let stuff go? Not important stuff, Clem. The
small
stuff—little zinged comments should roll off, not offend you.”

I wasn't so sure I agreed with that. Why did she get to shoot her zingers? Just because she was capable of much worse? “But then doesn't what needs to be said just go unsaid forever? Are the choices really just no relationship or a very superficial one?”

“Dominique and I are both trying. Taking baby steps. She's who she is—but who she is, is my mother. She's the only one I have.”

I took his hand and held it. “Okay. I'll hold my tongue. For you.”

I could do that. After all, it wasn't as though Dominique would be a huge part of our lives.

My cell phone, on Zach's bedside table, woke me up. I glanced at the time. Just past 9:00 a.m. Zach and I had stayed up talking until two, and how he'd gotten up at seven and headed to his health club for an hour before work was beyond me.

“My mom just called,” he said. “She feels terrible for getting off on the wrong foot and wants to make amends by planning the wedding. We don't have to do anything but show up and then take off for Bali for two weeks.”

What?

I bolted up in bed, hoping this was a dream. A nightmare. But I was definitely wide-awake.

“Zach, considering that your mother and I don't see eye to eye, I'm not sure handing over the wedding is a good idea.”

I couldn't even begin to imagine what a woman who'd dissed the color of the walls of my restaurant—at our first meeting—would try to get me to agree to. And hadn't Zach just shared the extent of her manipulative powers? Not that they'd work on me. But still.

“Clem, didn't you say you wanted to be engaged for years or elope because you were way too busy to plan a wedding? I wouldn't sic my mother on you if I didn't think she was in her element. She has incredible taste. The worst it'll be is too expensive.”

“Zach, I—”

“It's an easy way for her to be a big part of the most important event of my life. And a way for you two to get to know each other. It would mean a lot to me, Clem.”

Oh, hell.

I wanted to shout,
No fucking way
. Instead I said, “You owe me.”

The minute Zach and I hung up, I called Sara.

“Help. Zach's mother insists on planning the wedding. Zach and I just spent hours last night talking about how much it means to him that his mother is back in his life. It's so important
to him that we get along, that she's a part of this. But she's a maniac!”

“Can't you tell her you've already hired a wedding planner?”

“She'd tell me to fire whoever it was.”

“I'll think of something,” Sara said. “Subterfuge is my gift.”