Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (16 page)

10. Be sure you want to marry him.

“Wow,” Sara said. “That's pretty intense.”

“Yeah. It kind of makes dresses and ice sculptures seem pretty insignificant.”

Sara stabbed a piece of pie. “Well, Jocelyn didn't cross off any of these ten things and she was married for sixty-four years. So I think we'll both be okay if we just focus on which of our old friends don't get to be bridesmaids.”

I scanned the list again and wondered what these ten things had meant to Jocelyn. I tried to picture her at twenty years old, dancing with then fiancé Frederick Ahern at some country club and asking herself,
Am I sure I love him? Am I sure I want to marry him?
The
him
underlined, no less. And maybe she hadn't had an honest girlfriend to go away with for a weekend adventure.

What do you expect married life to really be like? Does it match his expectations?
Well, shit. I'd kind of rationalized my expectations because I wanted to marry Zach. I could be engaged and deal with distractions of parties and plans and still run my restaurant—and run it well. But a week after getting engaged, Zach was suddenly distant and off on his own. And making me crazy.

I poked at my slice of pie, my appetite gone. “Her letter sounds like it's full of regrets. And according to Zach, Great-Uncle Frederick was a real drag. Obsessed with his work and too serious.”

“I can't see that funny, kick-ass woman married to a drag,” Sara said. “That's not right.”

“Maybe he changed? Or maybe she married him for his good qualities and thought she could overlook the bad—or change him. Maybe that's why she didn't get to check anything off.”

I took off the earrings and put them back in the velvet case, snapping it closed. Something borrowed and something old. I felt as if I owed it to Jocelyn to check off everything on the list.

“Be sure you love him,” I repeated. “I'm sure I love Zach. Madly, in fact.”

“How do you know? Yeah, yeah, you just know, you feel it. But tell me
how
.”

I could feel the stupid grin starting on my face. Sometimes, when I thought about Zach Jeffries, the goofiest, mushy-gushy warmth would start in my toes and travel to every spot in my body, the
ba-bump
heartbeat the constant.

“Well, yeah, I just know. But if I had to write down a top ten list, I'd start with how he makes me feel—from crazy happy to on fire to a total gush head sometimes. When I'm with him, I feel even more
me
, if that makes sense. I feel even stronger, maybe because I know he has my back, no matter what. And whenever I go over to his house for dinner, he makes vegan food for us both. He calls my dad every few weeks to ask how he's feeling. He rubs my back after a long night at the restaurant. He tries with his mother, even though she's . . . Dominique. He's smart about people and business. He makes me think and laugh and wonder about things that never crossed my mind before. He's patient when I'd be screaming my head
off. He lets me blast the Bee Gees in the car. He gives Charlie bones stuffed with peanut butter. He hired my cousin Harry when there wasn't an opening. And every time we take a walk on the beach and we're holding hands and looking out at the water, I feel
complete
.”

“You complete me!” she emoted in her best imitation of the
Jerry Maguire
movie. “And let's not forget the guy eats cheeseburgers and has at least four leather jackets. If Clementine Cooper's marrying a dude who owns a steak house, she's gotta love him bad.”

I did. And thanks for making me think about all that, Jocelyn. If Zach didn't call all day, instead of my wondering what was up, I'd think about those walks on the beach or how he stuffed natural peanut butter in Kongs for Charlie. I loved him. He loved me.

Next time I saw him, I'd ask him to tell me how
he
knew he loved me.

“I can skip number two,” Sara said, ignoring number one entirely, I noticed. “Revisiting boyfriends past. Luckily for me, I don't
have
any old boyfriends to revisit.” She cut another bite of pie, but then set down her fork. “Oh, shitburgers. Do I really love Joe?”

Thank you
again
, Jocelyn's sixty-four-year-old list. “
Do
you?”

She glanced at her ring. “Well, yeah, I do. The guy has a good side—a really good side. And if I thought about it, I could come up with a lot of reasons why I do. But sometimes I wonder if I'm supposed to feel . . . more. Nah. Love is love, right?”

“Well, there's friend love. And then there's romantic love.”

She pushed her plate away, her appetite obviously gone too. “Could I romantically love a guy who'd pass a teenager on the street and tell him he had a giant booger dangling from his nose? Joe did that yesterday. The kid turned bright red.”

Typical Joe “Steak” Johansson. Off camera, too. “Maybe we should both go over the list. One by one.”

“I'm kind of busy,” Sara said. “Doing anything else.”

“Me too.” I chucked the piece of paper on the table. “I guess it's a bad sign that we're both scared of a list.”

“Or a good sign. It means we can mentally check
most
things off.”

“Or it means we should go over the list very carefully.”

“Sometimes, Clem, you're no fun at all. Are you gonna make Zach do it?”

Definitely number one, since who wouldn't want someone to run down the reasons he loved you. But number two: revisiting old girlfriends. Did I really want to have him thinking deeply about a hot French magazine editor named Vivienne?

“I'll show it to him and see what he thinks.”

“Maybe I'll do the same with Joe.” She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of the list. “I'm not eloping to Las Vegas and getting married by an Elvis impersonator. I'm the captain of my own ship. Even if we're steering together.” She crossed her arms over her chest.

I had no idea where this list would take either of us.

At ten the next morning, Dominique and I sat at a round table at Julia's, one of my favorite coffee shops. She'd called a couple of hours ago to say she had a full plan for the wedding at the farm and would love a “quick meeting” to show me the designs she'd had a graphic artist draw up.

“Now, of course you can make any small changes you like,” she said, then took a sip of her iced Americano. “But let's keep changes to a minimum so that we don't upset the overall balance.”

I didn't want to see her plans for my wedding. With Jocelyn's list on my mind, I wanted to ask her why she'd married Zach's father. Why she'd married her second husband. What went wrong the first time.

I wanted to ask her what came between her and Aunt Jocelyn.

She pulled out her iPad and put it between us on the table. All I saw was a scanned-in sketch of a huge, white rectangle. “The tent is three thousand square feet and has—”

“The tent?” The point of having the wedding at the farm was to appreciate the backdrop of nature, of the acres of crops. Not white fabric.

And three thousand square feet?

“My assistant has researched the best-quality tents, and—”

“Dominique, I'm not really into the tent idea. A canopy here and there would be fine. But a tent isn't what I had in mind.”

She stared at me. “You're not expecting people to sit out in the open and look at a barn and a bunch of dirty carrots coming up out of the ground?”

Fuck yeah, I do. “The
farm
is the backdrop.”

She sipped her iced coffee and took a long moment before putting it down on the table. “Clementine, darling, you have a restaurant to run. Staff to manage. Recipes to create. Add in a handsome fiancé and a wedding to fuss over and you'll be stretched so thin you won't know your middle name. You're
so
busy. Just let me handle the wedding plans and you just concentrate on your restaurant.”

Talk about manipulation. “I appreciate that, I really do. But my wedding day is more important to me than I realized. My parents' farm isn't just some beautiful piece of country to me, and it's not just where I grew up.” I saw the flicker of confusion on her face at the word
beautiful
. How had this woman lived on a ranch, albeit a manicured one, for so many years? “Dominique, I mentioned to you that my father has stage-three cancer. I don't know how long he has left. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Well, honestly, no.” She sipped her drink. “My father was a tyrant.”

Oh. The personal comment threw me. Until now she'd always kept our conversations so superficial. “Where did you get married?”

“The Beverly Hills Hotel. Both times. God, I love that place. Since the marriage didn't exactly work out the first time,
I figured I'd reclaim the hotel for myself by having my second wedding there. Now I have lunch there at least once a week.”

Okay, I had to know. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you like living on the Jeffries ranch?”

She burst out laughing. “What do you think?”

“I think probably not.”

“I felt like I was in exile up there. There was absolutely nothing to do but stare out the window and talk on the phone. Nowhere to shop, nowhere to eat. It was awful. But I lived there for fourteen long years. If it wasn't for our weekend place in LA, I might have gone stark raving mad.”

I smiled. “I guess compromise is the name of the game.”

“I don't know about that. What did compromise get me? Fourteen years of living in a place I hated and a divorce to follow. Maybe if I'd put my foot down after the wedding, insisted we live in LA and spend weekends at the ranch, maybe the marriage would have lasted. Who knows?”

“I wonder what you would have done if Aunt Jocelyn had sent you her marriage list.” I sipped my herbal tea.

I was about to explain when she rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Don't tell me she sent you that thing? Do yourself a favor and rip it to shreds.”

Interesting. “You know about the list?”

“That meddling old lady sent me a copy when Zach's father and I got engaged. Make sure of this, do that, know this. It's nonsense.”

“How is it nonsense? The questions and checklist seem full of wisdom.”

Dominique stared at me. “Clementine, do you know what happens when you start digging under rocks? Nice, solid rocks? You find dirt and worms. Why disturb a rock?”

But hadn't she done just that to her own daughter? Disturbed the rock? Made Avery look under it and see all the gook?

She took a sip of her drink and seemed to be thinking about something. “When a relationship is solid, it's solid. You and Zach, for example—solid. I can see that. I knew it before I even met you, just based on what Zach told me about you, the way he spoke about you. You can hear conviction in someone's voice.”

I hated the way I leaned in. Maybe Avery had been unsure about her boyfriend, the starving artist, about moving three thousand miles away to New York City to support him. Maybe Dominique had just helped her to see how she really felt?

“But asking questions can't be a bad thing,” I said.

“Only if you don't already know the answers. ‘Are you sure you love him?' or whatever utter nonsense is on that list? Yes, of course you do. Are you telling me you really need to question that?”

“Well, no, not that.” Ugh, how had
Dominique
managed to be right about this? “But there are some good things to think about on that list. A friend of mine is engaged to someone I'm not sure is so right for her, and—”

“Let me save you the trouble of losing your friend. Back off. I assume she's an adult and knows her own mind.”

So was Avery, I wanted to shout.

“I'll tell you this, Clementine. Had I spent one minute of time going through that stupid list of hers, I might not have married Zach's father. Sure, things weren't perfect. But a lot was. In the end, I have three amazing children who would not exist had I
not
married Cornelius Jeffries. That's right—there'd be no Zach Jeffries. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't be so happy.”

She sort of had me there. What could I say to all that? I held up my tea in a toast and she clinked with her iced coffee. But our solidarity sure felt shaky.