2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) (13 page)

“I can’t just elope,” she said to Connor, in answer to
his brilliantly simplified advice.

Right about now she was wondering why she had bothered
calling him in the first place. Oh yeah, that would be to gloat. Here she was,
happy, and he could do nothing to change that or cheapen it, and to make
matters even better, he had opened with, “How’s that Fynn-ancé of yours?” and
she’d simply said, “Fine, thank you for asking.” It was heavenly. Of course
since then the conversation had spun out of her control.

“Why?” he asked plainly.

“No matter how much I would like to,” she assured him,
“you know what Mrs. Hemmings would say to a quickie wedding like that—”

“Praise the Lord!” he hollered with tent-revival
exuberance.

“As if,” she said snarkily. “She wants the legitimacy
of a
real
wedding for her daughter.”

“I already gave her the real wedding,” he pointed out,
hammering that same fatal nail he’d used time and again. “Remember… a while
back?”

But she was immune to that type of pain now. She was
getting
married.
It no longer mattered that he was younger and had
gotten married first. “
This one
she can actually have a say in.”

“Like you want her to have a say in anything.”

“Maybe not. But she’ll get the mother-daughter
struggle. I owe her at least that much.”

“What makes that any different than an average
Tuesday?”

“Connor, I’m being serious.”

“So am I, and let me just remind you that Mom and Dad
eloped. If it was good enough for them, I certainly don’t think she would mind
if you do it.”

Catherine was momentarily caught off-guard.
There
he goes making a legitimate argument
, she seethed.

“Vegas, anyone?” he offered, filling the space she’d
left unguarded.

“You don’t get a vote,” she spat. “And why do you even
care anyway?”

“If I have to go to your wedding, I figure getting a
vacation out of it will make it more worthwhile.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Like you were remotely interested in my wedding,” he
charged.

“But—” There was no defense though. She had hated
every moment of Connor’s wedding—a bridesmaid along with all of Lacey’s
sorority sisters who were giggling and getting along famously, reminding her of
all the catty girls she’d run into when she had a brush with the Greek
experience in college. It was a misstep really, a ridiculous idea that rushing
would be
fun
. She forced Georgia into it. And in the end Georgia had
been a top pledge pick for several sororities, while she hadn’t gotten any
bids, at least not to any of the sisterhoods that counted. Thankfully Georgia
didn’t join, and they went through college Greek-free but for the parties and
some boyfriends. As far as Catherine was concerned, sorority chicks were the
devil. No wonder Lacey rubbed her wrong.

“You are such a grouch all the time,” Connor noted.

“Did you ever think that maybe it’s you?” she asked.

“I’m the grouch?” he squawked.

“No, that talking to you puts me in a bad mood.”

“I think that life puts you in a mood.”

“Listen, I just don’t want your wedding advice, okay?
I
know
that Mom and Dad would like to see me get married.”

“Everyone is welcome in Vegas—says so on the
commercials.”

“Shut up, Connor. I have a strong feeling about this. And,
if you remember, I was right about being Canadian.”

“One-sixteenth Canadian—from a legal American citizen
no less,” he corrected.

“Still, Canadian is Canadian…. And they did announce
it that night at Trivor’s just like I said.”

“Only because you announced that you already knew
about their secret and you brought your Fynn-ancé as ‘cover’.”

“Do you have to beat a dead horse, Connor? We’re
actually engaged now, the joke is over.”

“It’s never going to be over. The look on Fynn’s face
was too classic when he realized you intended to use him to legally keep yourself
in the country. Guy knew you a few hours and you were already hitching your
marriage cart to his horse.”

“Says the man who had no worries because he was
already married to a legal citizen.”

“Cat,
we’re
legal citizens.”

“Sure, now we know that,” she said righteously. “But
the flag—it was an honest mistake. And after the whole Wyoming debacle it’s
obvious that Elizabeth and William Hemmings aren’t as transparent as we were
led to believe.”

“Because they planned to move to Wyoming and then
decided not to?”

“All out of nowhere,” she reminded him.

“That is some rock-solid evidence,” he said
patronizingly.

“All I’m saying is they were acting loopy and I was
being smart and proactive. And I
happened
to have known Fynn almost a
week before I brought him to dinner with the family…. It just chaps your ass
that your flighty sister might not be as flighty as you think.”

“That’s what you take from all of this? You were wrong
about everything, but it’s okay because you were just hedging your wild bets?”

“Now you’re splitting hairs.”

“I’m stating a fact.”

“Blah-blah-blah”

“You are such a pain in the ass,” he grumbled.

“Badgering.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said badgering.”

“This isn’t court. You are unbelievable!”

“I’m just saying that I’m not always the most right,
but I was hardly wrong,” she pointed out.

“Whatever gets you through the night. But I stand firm
that they were announcing the unexpected windfall sale of the Wyoming homestead
that night,
not
our ancestral heritage as fractional Canadians,” he
asserted.

“Potato—potäto,” she said lightly. “And by the way,
that sale of land is exactly why I think Mom would appreciate a real wedding.”

“What?”

“Don’t you realize it was my wedding fund they used to
buy that property?”

“No it wasn’t.”

“I’m dead serious,” she said, not even remotely guilty
about telling the lie. Anything to shut him up and win the argument.

*****

“So what did Connor have to say?” Fynn asked, turning
his attention from the TV as she came into the room from the kitchen.

“Nothing of importance, as usual,” she grumbled,
coming to the couch and curling up against his body like she owned him. She
needed that comfort right now because just talking to Connor had made her
wonder if she was being ridiculous about having a wedding. Maybe it was better
if she just did what so many people were doing these days—

“Didn’t sound like nothing.”

“He was advising us to elope,” she said distastefully.

“Aaah,” he said, dragging out the sound to fill the
space rather than saying anything incriminating.

“Do you think we should elope?”

“What do you think?” he asked, obviously having no
intention of answering wrong.

She pulled away and looked at him, sitting up on the
couch, challenging him to answer of his own accord.

“I think we should do whatever makes us happy.”

“Exactly. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“So what makes you happy?” he asked.

“I want the dress,” she said dreamily. “I definitely
want that…. Oooh, and the dancing would be nice. And pictures to remember it by….
Oh, and a bouquet to hold because otherwise what will I do with my hands? And—”

“It sounds like you want a wedding.”

She looked deep into his eyes, trying to read something
that wasn’t there. He was entirely open. It was really up to her.

“I do.”

“I can’t believe I’m leaving,” Catherine whined. She
stole a glance around her at the other people bustling through the airport on
the way to and from their homes. Minnesota was simply a quasi-vacation
destination, but Fynn felt like home to her, so even though she was technically
going home it always felt like she was just going away again. “I hate this
part.”

“Me too,” Fynn said, squeezing her hand reassuringly.

The gesture felt strange,
the ring
a hard
immovable object fighting for space between her fingers, reminding her that
everything was different now. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” she asked.
“Everything is about to change.”

“Why would you even ask that?”

“Because you’re ornery and set in your ways.”

“Me? Set in my ways?” His shock was overdramatized.

“Well you are,” she sniffed, thinking back to the man
she’d first met, all singular and irascible. He had no need for her or anybody.
And their whole thing since had hardly ruffled his regularly scheduled life.
“You have to admit that having a weekends-only relationship and me out of your
hair all week long has been pretty ideal,” she prodded.

“But life is real, not ideal,” he reminded her.

“Don’t go throwing my mother’s words at me. It’s bad
enough dealing with them popping in my head at any given time with no warning.”

“First of all, I don’t like being alone. I happen to
like being with you,” he said earnestly, making her tingle deep inside. “So I’m
glad I was all grouchy and crotchety and unlovable so I was available when you
came careening into my life.”

“Careening? Really?” she asked, thinking back to the
tiny little clown car she’d driven into Nekoyah.

“Okay,
whirring
into my life.” He smiled a
crooked smile at her.

“Fair,” she admitted.

She felt a slight hitch at the thought of never flying
back to New York at all. She had spent her entire adult life there, was she
really ready to say goodbye to that part of her? And why did he assume that was
something she wanted?

But suddenly Fynn’s mouth was upon her, stopping her and
her thoughts in their tracks.  

*****

Catherine twiddled her thumbs, bored, wishing she
didn’t have to wait alone. How she longed for the days when people could see
you off at the gate. She hated that all the goodbyes had to be said prematurely—by
airline standards, a whole hour before you actually went anywhere, like eating
before swimming. She’d been here so many times before, the seconds chipping
away at her resolve to go anywhere.

She wondered if Fynn was waiting somewhere else in the
airport at this very moment, just in case her flight was canceled, or to make
sure that she took off safely. She felt oddly a bit like Romeo and Juliet being
kept apart by society at the behest of the TSA.

Her phone came to life and she checked the display:
call your parents. It was like a message from her subconscious. Or Catherine
Marie. Or God.

She blinked and looked again: covered you princess. She
couldn’t believe how bad her eyes had played tricks on her. It was just Tara being
Tara. She’d obviously caved and put in vacation time for her. That made her feel
a
little
bad about not telling her the news of her engagement, but she
wanted to surprise
someone
with that
Bling!
ring moment. 

She checked the time. She had a seemingly interminable
wait ahead and only her phone to keep her company….
Oh, alright!
she practically
screamed at herself, pulling her parents’ number up on the list. Better now
than later, when she would have plenty of other things to do.

So nervous… and this was just listening to the ringing
in her ear. It was like she was about to admit to her parents all over again
that she’d backed into the mailbox with Dad’s Buick.
But this is good news!
She
couldn’t help it; she feared their judgment, seeing as how she’d gone from
broken up to engaged in a matter of days. At this rate she would never outrun
her reputation for being capricious and impulsive, descriptions that had
floated around her name in various circles ever since she was a little girl in
a ballerina tutu who decided mid-recital that she would rather be a police
officer and started handcuffing her fellow ballerinas-cum-criminals on the
stage. Of course Catherine still insisted that was the fault of Madame
LaPierre, the ballet teacher, who had allowed her to wear her gummy bracelets
during the show, giving her the tools to enact her vigilante justice—she should
have known something bad would happen.

“Hello?” Her father’s deep voice greeted her.

She heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe she could just tell
him and be done with it. He had always been more forgiving of her ways, more
understanding of her means.

“Hello?” It was her mother’s pleasant, almost-musical
phone voice this time. Elizabeth Hemmings always showed any caller the utmost
respect, even sales calls received the professional courtesy of a proper
greeting. It was only after she found out who was calling that curtness would
take over if need be.

“Mom?” she asked, bewildered.

“Catherine?” Her mother sounded surprised, as she did
whenever her daughter called, seeing as how the Hemmings household lived in the
dark ages before caller ID.

“Where’d Dad go?” Though it wasn’t really surprising
that as soon as his wife picked up he felt free to hang up.

“Oh, you know him,” her mother said, shrugging off her
husband’s lack of phone etiquette.

“I really wanted to talk to both of you,” Catherine
said carefully.

“Everything’s okay, right?” Elizabeth asked quickly,
but before she could answer she heard her mother calling out to her father to
pick up the phone and talk to his daughter. All of this was done at full
volume, probably because her mother’s hands were too full to cover the
mouthpiece—cooking or ironing or folding something.

There was a click and some scrabbling and then her
father’s voice came back on the line. “Catherine! I didn’t realize it was you!”
The joy in his voice was unabashed.

“Hi, Dad.”

“How did you make out driving back home on Saturday?”
He spoke so loudly, making her pull the phone from her ear.

“Oh, fine. Just fine.”

“I was looking at your tires—”

Elizabeth cut off his concerned-dad spiel. “William,
she said she has something to tell us.”

“Well… Mom, Dad, I have—”

“What is it, dear?” Elizabeth Hemmings asked warily,
as if waiting for the “C” word or some other awful news to accost her. Of
course she would assume it must be something terrible, because Catherine
Hemmings never had anything worthy of parental pride to say, not since high
school when she’d graduated with honors. No, in the last sixteen years her news
had been more toned down, in the realm of moving to a new apartment for cheaper
rent, or needing her birth certificate to get a passport to go to France to
study English of all things—that dream was short-lived as she was in college at
the time and her parents weren’t paying for something that “bass-ackwards” her
father had said, in no uncertain terms. Yeah, her news had been decidedly
un-newsworthy for years. So her mother’s wariness was well within playable
bounds.

Catherine tried again, “I’m getting—”

“Huh? What?” her dad bellowed. “I can’t hear you
through this damn phone.”

“Try the one in the den, William,” her mother directed
through the phone connection, as if he would hear that when he hadn’t been able
to hear anything else.

Catherine listened to the clicks and thumping and
rustling sounds on the other end of the line, imagining the musical-chairs
panic that was probably ensuing in search of a phone that would work for her
father.

Her dad’s voice filled her ear again suddenly.
“Catherine, are you there?” As if she would have hung up in the interim.

“We’re both here,” her mother answered for her,
exasperation heavy in her voice.

“Catherine?” he asked anyway.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m here.”

“Finally… these cordless phones are just crap. A bunch
of cheap plastic crap. Can’t stand any of them.”

“Your father would like to reopen the pony express.
And I think he’s been brushing up on his Morse code.”

“You laugh, Elizabeth, but that was a useful way to
get messages across,” he warned.

“Guys?” Catherine said, reminding them she was there
and present.           

“So what’s going on?” her mom asked plainly, her words
punctuated by the steam from the iron sighing, followed by the unmistakable creak
of the ironing board as her mother shifted the position of the clothing she had
in her capable hands. Catherine couldn’t even remember the last time she’d
ironed… or if she had an iron.

“I just wanted to call because—”

“Elizabeth, this phone is just as bad,” her father
yelled, his voice coming to her not directly through the phone but first
through the house on the other end and finally through her mom’s connection.

“Come here, William, we can put her on speaker phone,”
her mom yelled back.

Great
—Catherine hated speaker phone. It was
like trying to have a private conversation in a crowded terminal.

“We’re both here, dear,” her mother prodded, finally, sounding
distinctly canned.

Feeling significantly less wind in her sails but also
significantly less nervous, she blurted, “I have news.”

“Cough it up,” her dad said, probably intent on
getting this over with so he could get back to watching golf on TV. He should
be playing golf in his retirement, but as of this point—three years in—watching
was about as close as he’d gotten to doing
it. He watched old tournament
reruns, current tournaments, golf tutorial shows, infomercials for golf
products—but he didn’t actually ever golf.

“Well, I—I mean Fynn and I….” She knew all the hemming
and hawing was driving her mother crazy and she got a perverse pleasure
imagining her trying to suck up her prim pride and deal with the illegitimate
child she was most certainly sure was coming—a battle between good and evil in
Elizabeth Hemmings’ head as she most certainly wanted more grandchildren—
but
a bastard?

Catherine Marie,” her mother prodded with all manner
of judgment in the syllables.

“We’re getting married.”

“You’re engaged?” her mother asked carefully, seeming
nonplussed or maybe in shock considering hell must have frozen over.

“Yup.”

“It’s about time,” William Hemmings guffawed, making
her smile. “Glad you straightened that mess out.”

The same thing out of her mother’s mouth would piss
her off—a double standard for sure, but unfair? In Catherine’s estimation, no.

“Mom?” she asked tentatively.

“That’s wonderful, dear,” her mother said, her tone
constrained and more suited to news that her daughter had found a dollar-off
coupon for shampoo.

And there it is,
she thought, self-satisfied
and disheartened all at once. She’d known judgment would come, but in spite of
that she still hoped for something better. Maybe even genuine interest and
excitement. Her mother truly
liked
Fynn; yet Catherine was quite certain
she had been happier when Connor announced his marriage…. And back then
Elizabeth couldn’t even stand Lacey.