Gimme Everything You Got - Iva-Marie Palmer Page 0,20
big for the space. Its surface was covered in vases of different flowers in varying shades of orange.
“Did someone . . . die?” I asked.
Polly’s smile flickered then returned, like when the TV goes out for a split second and the picture comes back without you even having to mess with the antenna.
“Your dad and I are getting married!” she squealed and then clapped at her own announcement.
My dad sort of shrugged his shoulders like, What can you do?
I stared at them in shock. Couldn’t they have suggested I sit down for this? They had enough chairs for it, even if you couldn’t pull one out from the table without hitting the wall. “Does Mom know?” I asked Dad.
“Yeah, I told her that we wanted to tell you here. In person.” Dad shifted his weight and smiled without his teeth.
“We wanted to tell you over dinner but I couldn’t wait,” Polly said. “The roast has another two hours.”
She took my hands in hers as Dad continued to smile and nod, like this had all gone very well. Then he ambled back to the football game, the life-changing news taking less time to deliver than a first down. He was just leaving me there, clutching hands with his future wife, like this happened every day. Part of me was glad he left—I hated the look on his face, like he was confused by the whole thing. But the way Polly was looking at me was worse, like a desperate animal who’d followed me home and wanted me to keep her.
“I just want you to know that I am going to think of you as a daughter, even though I will never try to take the place of your mom, and I don’t expect you to think of me as anything more than a stepmom,” Polly said in a rush, as if she’d practiced the words in the mirror. A vision of Polly trying to read present-day me the Betsy-Tacy books my mom had read me as a kid flashed before my eyes.
Oh my God, I had to sit.
I pulled out a chair a smidge and then crammed my body between the seat and the table. Polly was my stepmom. Or was going to be. Did I want her for my stepmom? Did I want anyone for my stepmom? Before I had time to consider the answer, Polly turned as much as she could in a room mostly taken up by a hulking piece of furniture and plucked a leather album off the sideboard, then sat down next to me.
She opened the book to a page of drawings that a kid must have done. “This is my bridal wish book,” she said, smoothing her hand over the pages. So she’d done the drawings. “I’ve been keeping ideas for my wedding in here since I was a little girl. Do you have a bridal wish book?” She blinked her blue eyes at me expectantly.
I gulped, thinking that I could fill a wish book with my masturbation fantasies. “Not . . . really,” I said. Candace had an old issue of Brides under her bed, but even she didn’t have something like this. I wanted to ask Polly if when she’d thought about her wedding as a little girl, she’d ever imagined it being to a fifty-two-year-old divorced dad with abundant ear hair and two adult (or practically adult, in my case) daughters.
“I guess I’m just silly that way,” she said, and blushed. In her lilac blouse with its tied neck, smoothly tucked into her purple pants, she was so pretty and neat, just like everything in the book was so pretty and neat, and yet she didn’t seem proud necessarily, or like she thought it was off-putting that I wasn’t pretty and neat, sitting there in my fake Jordache jeans with the patch on the knee and my ratty Sunkist T-shirt. She flipped past pages of pictures, cut from magazines, of crystal and cakes and couples kissing on beaches and the whole thing seemed so lonely. Not marriage itself so much as spending all your time dreaming up a wedding with a cake that probably wasn’t even chocolate on the inside and the kind of fancy wineglasses that never looked as sparkly after you’d used them one time. I decided to be nice to her, at least right now.
“It’s not silly,” I said.
“I’m so glad you said that. I don’t have sisters, or even any great girlfriends, and . . . I was