“All right, I’ve got a one o’clock meeting to go over the pricing for the tent and table rentals. I’ll report back.” I grabbed my hot tea and made my way to my office.
I set my phone on my desk and noticed a familiar face at the top of my Instagram app. My sister Velveeta had posted. Obviously, her name wasn’t Velveeta, but I preferred it over her real name, which was Velveteen.
She’d always given me plastic cheese energy, while nothing about her gave me stuffed British rabbit vibes.
My stomach dipped as I picked up my phone and took in the family photo. My father and his second wife, Pissy Beaumont.
Fine.
Missy Beaumont.
But my nickname was much more fitting for her as well.
Surrounding them were their children, Velveteen, Paris, Huntington, and Brenton. They were celebrating their twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, and the caption read: “Sweet family memories celebrating twenty-eight years of love from Maui.”
They clearly forgot to drop an invitation to daughter number one, per usual.
The bastards.
Twenty-eight years of marriage.
Even the number pissed me off, because I was twenty-eight years old as well.Logically it appears the math is not mathing.
However, my father decided to leave my mother when she was pregnant with me for Missy, the stepmother from hell. She’d never made me feel like part of the family, and she’d act like I was a distantcousin whenever I’d visit. My siblings and I were actually fairly close, aside fromVelveeta, who was just a year younger than me because my father wasted no time remarrying and knocking up wife number two. Velveteen took on her mother’s disdain for me, while my other siblings were a bit more rebellious, and they’d always welcomed the black sheep of the family with open arms. But in the end, I blamed my father for not standing up for me. For making me feel like I didn’t belong and for giving me a lifetime of things to discuss in therapy.
My phone rang, and my sister Paris’s face lit up the screen.
“Hey, Par, how are you?” I asked, knowing that she was calling because our jackass sister had posted.
“Hey,” she groaned. “I’m sorry, Vi. I’m sure you saw the post from this morning.”
“I just saw it. It was a Beaumont celebration, huh?” I said sarcastically.
“I didn’t know if I should tell you. It was a super-last-minute trip, at least as far as including us kids, and Mom said they’d invited you and you were too busy to come. But then Dad had one too many Long Island iced teas, and he broke down to me one night at the beach bar and said that he was disappointed in himself for not insisting that you be invited.” She sighed.
Oh, William Beaumont, you poor excuse for a man.
It pissed me off that I had daddy issues over a man who didn’t deserve me and that I wasted my time analyzing the way he’d rejected me my entire life.
A man who was too weak to stand up for his own child.
I had zero respect for him at this point—yet, seeing them all together still felt like a punch to the gut sometimes.
“It’s all right. It’s not you that I have a problem with,” I said. “Tell me about Maui.”
Paris rambled on about the fact that my father and Missy had renewed their vows. It was the sixth time they’d renewed their vows since they’d married, which felt like a little overkill.
We get it. You’re sticking to your vows this time around, Daddy Dearest.
“Well, you would have enjoyed seeing Ralph in all his glory,” she said over her laughter.
Ralph was Velveteen’s fiancé, and they were set to marry here in Blushing in less than three months. They’d be married at the Blushing Inn, the farmhouse that Montana and I had invested in with her fiancé, Myles, and renovated and was now our most popular wedding venue. They did not choose to marry in Blushing because I owned a wedding business here; they’d chosen this quaint small town because Harry Simon, the most famous boy bander on the planet, had chosen to marry Bailey Clark, a famous supermodel, here in Blushing a while back, which had put this town on the map. So even though I was enemy number one, I was also wedding planner extraordinaire and planning my sister’s wedding. Ralph was what we called in the wedding business a “loose cannon.” The man literally never disappointed at family gatherings, as he’d always drink one too many shots of Jägermeister and do something outrageous. My sister was uptight and pretentious, and they were the most mismatched couple I’d ever met. Who knew what Ralph would pull on his big day.
Needless to say, I was not looking forward to this wedding at all.
He’d streaked down the street three years ago at Thanksgiving.
He’d gotten wasted at Velveteen’s holiday work event this year and knocked over the buffet table, and she’d considered breaking up with him.
