The Ex Talk(28)

9




My mother turns, glancing at her reflection in the three-way mirror.

“You look gorgeous,” I tell her from the cream leather couch. It’s been true of the past five dresses she’s tried on, confirming my theory: Leanna Goldstein is incapable of looking bad, even in twelve yards of chartreuse taffeta. Meanwhile, I have my dog made me sleep in the creepy guest room again circles under my eyes and darkened break room corners on the brain.

“It’s not a mistake, not doing white, is it?” She sweeps her auburn hair off her neck, exposing the dress’s plunging back. “I want to go nontraditional, but I don’t want anything too mature.”

She and my dad went nontraditional too, eloping in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The photos are breathtaking, the two of them pinned against teal mountains and Douglas firs. “All my friends said they spent so much money on food and never got to eat any of it,” she’d say when I used to ask why my parents didn’t have a wedding. Then she’d laugh her musical laugh. “And I couldn’t imagine anything more tragic.”

When she and I walked inside the bridal boutique, the saleswoman gushed over how exciting it is to shop for your daughter’s wedding. My mother had to correct her, and the saleswoman apologized profusely.

It isn’t the fact that we’re here for my mother and not for me that makes it feel strange, though. It’s that it’s her second time, and now she wants to have the wedding.

“More and more brides are opting for nontraditional gowns these days,” chirps the saleswoman, standing by with a pincushion and measuring tape. “I didn’t think that green would work with your hair, but you look stunning.”

Still, my mother frowns. “Something about it isn’t feeling quite right. Do you have anything that’s a little less”—she holds up the many layers of fluffy skirts—“well, a little less dress?”

“Absolutely. I’ll be right back with some shorter styles.” The saleswoman disappears, and I tip back the rest of my champagne.

I’m trying my best to focus, but my mind is back at the station. Thursday morning, Dominic strode in like nothing had happened between us, with the exception of one of those half smiles he shot my way when he picked up his Koosh ball to toss up and down. And . . . nothing had happened between us, right? That moment in the break room may have felt charged to me, but maybe he looms over women all the time, his pheromones and broad shoulders messing with their brains. It wasn’t like he pushed me up against the wall because he needed to have his way with me and couldn’t waste any time. I backed myself into the wall, and then he simply stood in front of me. Completely different.

We were drunk and exhausted and talking about sex. My mind ran wild with it, showing off the “overactive imagination” my elementary school teachers wrote about on my report cards. It doesn’t mean I’m attracted to him.

The saleswoman returns with an armful of blush and mint and powder-blue dresses, and my mother thanks her.

“First show in two weeks,” my mother says from the other side of the dressing room door. “How are you feeling?”

“Oddly okay,” I say. “It hasn’t hit me yet that I’m actually going to be on the air.” I could say it a hundred times, and I probably won’t believe it until I’m in that studio I’ve grown so used to being on the other side of.

“Your dad would have been telling absolutely everyone,” my mother says, and then I hear her musical laugh. “People would have found him so obnoxious.”

“Didn’t they anyway?” I say, because it’s true.

When someone dies, you don’t only remember their good parts. You remember the difficult parts, too, like how if you asked a question he didn’t know the answer to, my dad simply ignored it instead of responding. Or how he was in a perennial fight with our neighbors over the trees that drooped into our yard, and he passive-aggressively retaliated by mowing our lawn early every morning for months. The deceased don’t immediately become flawless human beings. And it wouldn’t be right to turn him into one. We loved him, faults and all.

“Sometimes,” my mother says, emerging from the dressing room in a pink tulip-hemmed dress. “I’ve made my fair share of enemies in my career, I’m sure. No, no, this one isn’t right.”

I claw a hand through my low ponytail, covering my mouth with it before letting it flop back onto my shoulder. “I thought, I don’t know, with Phil, and this wedding . . . that maybe you were finally doing it right this time.”

The door opens again, and my mother appears in a nude bra, a navy dress around her waist. She has freckles along her arms and across her stomach. When I was younger, her wrinkles might have frightened me, but now they make her look strong. “Shay. No. Not at all.” She hurries over to me, apparently not caring that she’s half-dressed. “I know this has to be weird for you.”

“A little,” I say, because a lot might worry her. I want to be the cool, open-minded daughter, but I’m not sure how. I’ve gotten so used to our tiny family.

But I also got used to Puget Sounds. My job is changing, and with the exception of whatever happened in the break room, I’ve been okay.

“Your dad and I had exactly the kind of wedding we wanted,” my mother continues, letting my hair out of its ponytail and running her fingers through it the way she used to do when I was a kid. “Our parents didn’t get along, and they had different ideas of what the wedding should be. Mine insisted on a traditional Jewish wedding, while Dan’s nonpracticing parents didn’t want it to be religious.” My paternal grandparents live in Arizona, but my mother’s parents passed away when I was little. “And now that I’m older, now that it’s just the two of us involved, we can do exactly what we want.”