The Mother-in-Law(14)
“That . . . would be wonderful.”
Diana is tall, nearly a full head taller than me, and as she fastens the hat at my temple I can see her eyes. They are narrow with concentration as she fusses around, fixing the birdcage veil around my face and then smoothing the dress out behind me. Of course, I think of my mother. If she were here, she would have been the one fastening my necklace, smoothing my dress. A lump forms in my throat.
“Thank you,” I say turning and wrapping my arms around Diana. She stiffens slightly, neither returning my hug nor pulling away, but I hang on all the same. She is thin and knobby and it feels like I’m embracing a sack full of coat hangers.
After a moment or two, I untangle myself.
“Right,” Diana says, clearing her throat. “I’d better get back to Ollie.”
And that appears to be that. I try not to focus on the fact that the hug wasn’t really returned. After all, she showed up! She brought me a beautiful, meaningful piece of jewelry that she herself had worn on her wedding day. We’d made progress. And I was going to celebrate it.
Diana makes it to the door before she stops suddenly, pivots back. “Oh er, Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“That necklace is your something borrowed.”
“I know,” I say. I glance at it in the mirror again, marveling at how perfect it is. It actually hard to believe I almost didn’t wear it.
“Good,” she says, “because borrowed means you have to give it back.”
A long silence.
“I understand that,” I say slowly, and Diana gives a little nod and lets herself out of the room.
“The girls will want champagne,” Eamon tells the waitress in the black pants and crisp white shirt. “If there’s one thing I know about girls, it’s that they always want champagne.”
Eamon’s wife, Julia, nods enthusiastically. She calls over the waitress and points to a bottle of Dom Pérignon.
“Lovely choice,” the waitress says.
The blood drains from Ollie’s face. Even before we arrived, he was nervous about how much this meal is going to cost (meals Eamon were never cheap) but when we arrived at Arabella’s and saw the white table cloths and the menu with no prices . . . I could see he was panicking. Now, Dom Pérignon. It’s a choice made even more frustrating by the fact that I’m eight weeks pregnant . . . thus neither able to drink it, nor disclose that I’m not drinking it, which means leaving a very expensive glass of champagne undrunk at the end of the night.
“So how’s the house hunting going?” Julia asks us, once the waitress has disappeared. Her face creases with worry, as if she is asking about a rare disease with which one of us has been recently diagnosed. “You know, we used a great buyer’s advocate when we bought our place in South Yarra. Why don’t we give you his details?”
The fact that Ollie and I rent a home is an endlessly perplexing fact to all of Ollie’s friends. At some point it seems to have been universally accepted that we simply couldn’t find the right place, the assumption being that Ollie’s parents would foot the bill for the place of our choosing. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Instead, in the year since we married, Ollie and I have been saving hard for a down payment. Currently, with both of us working, we earn a good income but soon, fingers crossed, I’ll be at home with the baby. And sadly, no buyer’s advocate will be able to help us if we don’t have any money.
If it were up to me, I’d simply point out the fact that Ollie’s parents aren’t footing the bill, but Ollie can be oddly coy about these things. And so I say nothing, and play along.
“Why not?” Ollie says. “Can’t hurt, can it?”
Julia nods, delighted she can be of assistance, and Eamon fumbles with his phone, firing off the contact to Ollie. I really don’t understand the games Ollie’s friends sometimes play, spinning every failure or downturn as “a wonderful opportunity to go in a new direction.” I’d love to see Eamon’s and Julie’s faces if we were to say, “Actually we’re struggling to even pay rent right now, and I can guarantee your buyer’s advocate would not be advocating properties in the areas we’re looking at! Ha, ha, ha.”
“Anyway,” Eamon says, sliding his phone back into his jacket pocket. “S’meals!”
Eamon has been trying in vain to explain his new business to Ollie from the moment we arrived. Lord knows why! Every time I see him, Eamon appears to be cooking up a new business idea, claiming it was going to be the next big thing, talking about how people needed to get on board early. For a while he franchised mobile spray tan businesses, then he manufactured children’s fingerprinting kits. He’d had varied success, according to Ollie, and you couldn’t fault his tenacity. I just wished he’d stop discussing it all in painstaking detail over dinner, when anyone could see Ollie was entirely focused on figuring out how we could get out of the restaurant for less than five hundred bucks.
“They’re a smoothie for a meal. Chock full of superfoods. The fresh food is delivered to your door in ziplock bags, you just have to stick them in your NutriBullet and violà!”
I blink. “So . . . fruits and vegetables? In bags? That’s what it is?”
“Not fruits and vegetables.” There’s a note of triumph in Eamon’s voice. “Nutritionally balanced meals. You can drink it at your desk and call it lunch.”