You Deserve Each Other(73)

“When I was engaged,” she tells me, ignoring her son, “gluttony tempted me, too. My sister loves to bake and the house smelled like cookies and cakes every day. You can’t imagine!” Her smile is chilling because she means every word that’s coming out of her mouth. “But you must control yourself. Back in those days, girls had a way of taking care of the problem.”

“The problem being … hunger?”

She nods, not hearing the incredulity in my voice. “Exactly. Can’t be eating like a pig if you want to look trim in your wedding photos. Drink hot water with lemon and basil, and you’ll get so full you’d swear you’d been eating all day long! I can go have the woman fix you a cup if you’re still hungry.”

“She’s not drinking that crap,” Nicholas interjects. “Let her have a piece of cake.”

“I can’t let her eat cake!” she exclaims. Even the torso of the Marie Antoinette she so admires rolls in her grave, like, Girl, I wouldn’t. “I’m saying this out of love, Nicky. You have to believe that.”

He’s not backing down. “You’re not her doctor, and what she eats is none of your business. If you’re going to bring out dessert, you don’t get to decide who gets it and who doesn’t.”

“I agree!” Harold pipes up.

Her cheekbones flush with high color. “Shut up, Harold.”

“Don’t you ‘Shut up, Harold’ me. I pay the salary of the woman who made this cake. I get to eat it.” He reaches out. She slaps his hand, but he snatches the whole serving tray 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.