“No?”
“Exactly. She hit it yesterday and it’s gone.”
Madison started to giggle, and that was enough to make me laugh, though whether from the strain of it all or from the lack of mailbox, I didn’t know.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“Oh, it’s my turn now?” my mother asked wryly when I walked into her bedroom. She was sitting in one of the club chairs in the sitting room area. I sank down wearily in the other and disloyally wished for a mother who would comfort me instead of needing comfort herself.
“To be fair, you’re further down the list, but I’m letting you line jump because Caryn isn’t answering my calls.”
“Everything is a joke to you, isn’t it?”
“Not everything.”
“You wouldn’t know it from the way you’re willing to treat people. This is why you’re still single, you know.”
I flinched. She wasn’t going to make this easy—but then again, when did she ever? “Mom, I’m struggling here. I could use some support, not a lecture about how it’s time for me to get married.”
“I have never lectured you to get married.”
“Fine—hinted, begged, implored, whatever terminology you want to use. But marrying just anyone isn’t going to make me happy. And I’m not going to have those grandkids you want if I’m not happy.”
“I obviously never meant for you to marry someone who didn’t make you happy. But maybe your standards are too high. You think your father is the perfect man? Don’t answer that. You probably do.” She crossed her arms. “It’s not easy for me, you know. You all act like he’s the second coming, and me? I’m just your shrew of a mother.”
I pressed a finger to my forehead between my eyebrows, struggling with what to say and what not to say. “Mom, how do you think all those little jabs about how at least one of your daughters was getting married felt? Or comparing my weight with Amy’s? Or telling me that I should be using these weddings as an opportunity to find a guy?”
She crossed her arms. “I never compared your weight with Amy’s.” Of course that was the one thing she heard.
I took a deep breath. “Mom, I feel like nothing I do is good enough if I’m not living your exact life. And I can’t do that.”
“What’s so wrong with my life?”
“Nothing. But it’s not mine.”
“Yours doesn’t sound so great when you spend your time saying horrible things about your mother on some blog.”
The blog wasn’t about you, Mom, rose up in my throat and tried to come out of my mouth, but I blocked it. Because that was the bigger problem here, wasn’t it? The weddings weren’t about me, but I made everything about me with the blog. And I didn’t grow to be that way in a vacuum.
“I painted a caricature in broad strokes,” I said finally. “You—and Grandma for that matter—worked best as humorous foils to my narrator—kind of like a Falstaff character—”
“English, please.” The irony was completely lost on her.
“I used the two of you for comic relief rather than creating an accurate portrayal.”
“And do you see how hurtful that is?”
I exhaled heavily. “I do.”
She seemed mildly satisfied with that, then moved down her mental checklist to the next of my sins. “And your poor sister, to even imply such a thing about her at her bachelorette party—”
“Amy and I talked before I came over here.”
“Well, she didn’t tell me that. When I talked to her this morning, she said she never wanted to speak to you again.” Amy didn’t come by her flair for the dramatic in a vacuum either.
“We had a heart-to-heart and I apologized. She accepted it.”
“Are you still in her wedding then?”
“Yes.”
She sniffed. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that the whole thing about that groomsman was a caricature too?”
I looked down. I was too tired to lie about any of it. “No. That happened.”
“Didn’t I raise you better than that? To have some self-respect?”
“Mom, I’m thirty-two, not sixteen. I made a decision—albeit a terrible one—but I’m not the first thirty-something to have sex. You had two of your three kids by my age.”
“I was married!”
“You used to love Sex and the City, so please spare me your outrage about sleeping with someone without a ring. I made a really bad decision, and I’m paying the price for it in spades.”
“Thank God you didn’t sleep with the other groomsman too. At least there’s that.”
I felt my face screwing up as I fought to keep from crying, but there was no stopping it. “Mom, you have to stop. You have to. You’re all over me all the time and it’s too much. I can’t be you. I can’t be Amy. All I can be is me. And I’m sorry me isn’t enough for you, but it’s all I am.”
She was stunned into silence and I hung my head. I don’t know what I expected her to say. It wasn’t like she was going to change. I didn’t think she was capable of it at that point. She was who she was, just like I had said about myself.
But the silence was more than I could bear and the truth started pouring out of me. “I wish I could be the person you want me to be and be married with kids already, but I don’t wish it for me at all. I wish it for you. Because even though I like who I am, I wish I could make you happy.”
She still hadn’t spoken, and I went back to the last thing she had said. “And no, I didn’t sleep with Alex. I—I love him. He’s—he’s my best friend. And he said I’m his. And I ruined it all. So please, Mom, please, please, please, don’t make this about what I did to you.”
I got up to try to leave, but she put a hand on my arm, stopping me, her face stricken. “You—love—him?”
My shoulders dropped and I nodded. I hadn’t even let myself think that word. But it came out on its own, and there was no way to shove it back into Pandora’s box.
Her entire countenance changed—this was right in her wheelhouse, after all. And I, unlike Amy, never allowed her to share in my romantic mishaps. She rose and wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Lily.”
It was the comfort that I wanted, but a heavy price to pay to get it. My aunt, siblings, and grandmother would all know the details of the Alex situation, probably heavily embellished with additional details that had never happened, by the time I was halfway down the street on my way home, no matter how she might swear never to tell a soul. But it wasn’t like Alex would be my date to Amy’s wedding anymore—if that had been the case, this would have been its own new disaster.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, when I was able to stop my eyes from overflowing. “It’s over now.”
“Who is this person talking to me? Not my daughter, who never gives up until she gets her way. No, he’ll come around.”
It was the first time in my memory that my mother had offered praise of my tenacity instead of bemoaning my stubbornness. If Jake and Amy were to be believed, she talked me up constantly when I wasn’t around. To my face, however, an interaction with her always left me feeling like I had been pecked at by a small but ferocious bird, who knew exactly where my weakest spots were. With love, of course, and the desire to make me better. But it still left me with the sensation that if I drank a glass of water after seeing her, it would come pouring out of the holes she had left like a sieve. So this—this was new territory. And a tiny ray of hope bolstered me.
But I shook my head. That was a pipe dream. Squaring your shoulders and vowing that you would get the guy back might work for Scarlett O’Hara, but real life didn’t work that way. “No. I messed up too much.”
“Nonsense. Even if he said that, he didn’t mean it.”
“He made it pretty clear he’s done with me.”
The corners of her mouth rose into a frighteningly determined grin, her eyes lighting at the challenge. “Isn’t he a groomsman in Megan’s wedding?” I nodded. “And aren’t you giving a speech at that wedding?”
I looked away. “I don’t know anymore.”
“What did Megan say?”
“I haven’t talked to her yet.”