with startling agility and whisks it away to his lap. “Here you go, Natalie.” He offers me an enormous chunk right out of the middle.
“No!” Deborah cries, rushing to intercept. “Don’t eat that! You’ll look like a sausage in your dress. After your last fitting, I had the seamstress take the gown in to a size zero!”
I drop the cake. It splatters magnificently onto the table. “You what?”
Deborah panics. She wrings her hands. “I was a size zero when I got married. It’s not impossible—you just really have to start buckling down. No more desserts or—”
“I’m not a size zero.” I’m mortified. I hate that I have to talk about this in front of Nicholas’s parents. “I’m not even close. You’d have to remove my organs! I don’t understand—why would you—why’s it so—” I’m close to breaking down because I’ve been trying so hard to be courteous, and I should’ve expected this. I have whiplash. There is no part of me that desires to be a different size than the one I am, and I absolutely hate Deborah for trying to make me feel bad about myself for not meeting some bullshit standard she set over thirty years ago.
“How could you do something like that?” Nicholas thunders. “Whatever you told the seamstress, fix it.” He rises to his feet, so severe and stone-faced that I’m rather intimidated. “Apologize to Naomi right now.”
Deborah can’t close her mouth. Her face is the same color as her raspberry blouse, a seamless match. The validation that he’s siding with me zings through my system like a lightning bolt, and without thinking about it I stand up, too, and reach for his hand. His fingers slide smoothly through mine, locking. We’ve combined armies and we’re a solid force field facing off against his mother’s hail of word bullets.
“I mean well,” she says soothingly. “How am I in the wrong here? I’m looking out for my future daughter-in-law. I know how nasty people can be. Imagine how it’ll look when the dress doesn’t fit right.”
“The dress is made to fit Naomi,” he snaps. “She isn’t made to fit the dress. She’s my fiancée, she’s beautiful and perfect, and I won’t have her spoken to like this by anyone, much less a member of my own damn family.”
“Nicky!” she admonishes in a loud whisper, as if afraid the neighbors might hear.
“Apologize.”
“But …”
She wants to lick her fingers and smooth his hair. Tuck him into bed. Push me from a tower. She’ll steal our infant from his cradle and disappear to Mexico so she can be sure he’s raised with an unhealthy attachment to her. He’ll be christened at St. Mary’s in a white gown monogrammed with roses.
Deborah sputters, eyes pleading, but when they move in my direction they’re sharp as an eagle’s. She never saw this coming. She never thought for a moment that he’d ever side with me over her, because to her I am unimportant. A necessary annoyance that allows her to throw a fancy wedding and get the grandchildren she wants so much, but other than that, I fade into her background. In this house, I have always felt unimportant.
“Pathetic,” Nicholas snarls. “You can’t treat my fiancée that way and expect to still be invited to the wedding.”
I’m not sure whose gasp is loudest—mine, hers, or Harold’s.
Actually, Harold’s isn’t a gasp. He’s choking on his cake. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Deborah snaps, thumping him between the shoulder blades. “Chew! Don’t you know how to chew?”
Harold is beet red, cheeks and eyes bulging. He coughs up flecks of cake that get all over the tablecloth and makes a hacking sound that comes out like Shut up.
“I’m invited to the wedding,” Deborah declares while her husband is still struggling to suck air into his lungs. “Of course I am. Don’t even say that.”
“I’m not saying it, I’m threatening it.”
“No!” Harold cries, interrupting his son. Deborah’s trying to yank the cake away from him. “You don’t let me have anything that makes me happy! I might as well be dead. I’ve sacrificed so much. I let you have Beatrice, now you can let me have a piece of cake or so help me god I will jump off the roof of this house!”
She lets him have the cake.
“Who’s Beatrice?” I ask. This is the most bizarre dinner I’ve ever been to.
“A dog she had when I was growing up,” Nicholas murmurs in my ear.
“How can you bring up Beatrice?” Deborah wails, eyes welling with tears. “You know