My Big Fat Fake Wedding(101)

Dads laughs tersely. “You? Fix this? This whole thing is your mess, as always.”

I grit my teeth. “It’s never my mess! It’s you believing those parasites and the tales they make up over your own son. So what if I wasn’t ready to settle down and get married? It wasn’t your place to force me to do it, regardless of why you did it and whether your reasons were well-intentioned or not.” It’s the smallest give that I have, based on what Courtney told me about Dad’s thinking process and what he wants for my future.

“I didn’t force you to lie to everyone. You did that all on your own, didn’t you?” he booms.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to say that it was Abi’s idea, just to show him that I’m not the only one who thinks he’s gone too far. But I can’t. I won’t throw my sister under the bus that way.

But Dad heard the video and knows that conversation was between Violet and Abi. I can see the moment he remembers that.

“And you got your sister involved in this too!”

Fine, if that’s how we’re doing this, then so be it.

“You know as well as I do that no one mixes Abi up in anything she doesn’t want to get mixed up in. She’s as hard-headed as you are.” It’s not a compliment, but he smiles slightly as if it is. “She knew you were pressuring me, she knew Violet needed this, and she put one and one together.”

“Except she came up with three, and we’re all paying the price.”

“No one is paying the price more than Violet,” I remind him, which sobers us both from the war of words we’re engaging in.

It’s a dash of cold water on both of our tempers. “We are never going to see eye to eye on this, so what do you want me to do? How do we move forward from where we are now?”

He sits down in his chair, his face stoic as he returns to the all-business mode he’s known for. “The company is putting out a press release, you will write an apology letter, the lawyers will do what we pay them to do, and the company will ride this out.”

“And us?” I say.

He sighs, turning in his chair to look out the window, so similar to what I did to Courtney just moments ago. “You should go visit your mother.”

I know a dismissal when I hear one. I swallow thickly and turn on my heel, leaving Dad to deal with the company he loves, to repair the image he cares about. He wants me to settle down, have a family, be the two-dot-oh version of him, but right now, I feel like his family is the last thing Dad cares about.

A tiny voice in the back of my head tries to remind me of all the times Dad was there for me, teaching me about the company I begrudge him for loving, throwing spirals in the yard when I was just a pee-wee football player, and showing me how to love by treating Mom well. But I can’t, not now when we’ve been ripped apart at the seams that used to hold us together.

I do a quick check-in with Kaede and Courtney, who are working on the apology draft, to tell them where I’m headed. Courtney wishes me luck, saying that as mad as Dad is, Mom is more hurt.

“She really believed you and was so happy for you. She was already thinking about what she wanted your kids to call her. I think she’d settled on Lolly but was still talking Dad into going for Pop.”

Guilt blooms afresh.

I climb into my Camaro and drive out to the estate. There’s media both just outside the parking garage of the office and at the gate to the house, but a pair of sunglasses and a cranked-up radio help me ignore them.

Karl greets me at the front door, his face tense but professional. “You doing okay, Karl?”

“They are respecting the property lines, sir. I wish they’d respect a few more lines, but that’s beyond my powers,” he says. “Your mother is in her library.”

Mom’s library is the equivalent of Dad’s study. It’s her ‘cave’, the place she gets to do whatever she wants and express her tastes however she wants. You’d expect a library to be all dark woods and expensive tomes, but you’d be so very wrong. She’s turned it into the epitome of old-school femininity, with patterned lace wallpaper, pale rose-colored crown moldings, and a bunch of books with covers I’d rather not think about my mother reading. It’s safe to say this my least favorite room in the house.

I find Mom sitting on her white loveseat in loungewear, even though it’s late afternoon, which is unlike her. She’s staring out the window that faces the garden, a cup of tea on a saucer next to her. As I close the door, she turns around, and I stop, shocked.

Somehow, my mother’s aged ten years overnight. Normally, she looks a good decade younger than she actually is.

Now, though, the woman looking up at me is a wreck. She looks shattered, her face lined with wrinkles that weren’t there yesterday, her eyes puffy and red, and I have to blink to convince myself that the gray I see in her hair is sunlight and not gray.

“Why?”

Only one word, but it breaks me more than all of Dad’s ranting and Courtney’s browbeating. Her voice is a cracked, paper-thin parody of the soft voice that I grew up listening to, the cool balm to Dad’s bluster.

“I wish I had a good reason,” I finally admit, unable to hold up to Mom’s pleading eyes. “We never meant for it to happen like this. We didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

Mom’s soft smile says that even the consequences we don’t intend are ours to bear.