“Well, I didn’t mean it! Obviously I want flowers. What girl doesn’t? Can’t wait till I have an adult son so I’ll finally get some.”
I can feel his burning stare. “If I told you I didn’t want something, would you buy it for me anyway?”
I turn to him. “Why wouldyouwant flowers?”
His laugh is chilling. “Yeah, why would it ever occur to you to givemeanything? A token of affection? Of course you don’t think about that.”
Iamgiving him something. Patience. It is a gift. I’m giving him a miracle in that I don’t launch myself onto his seat and throttle him for insisting we hang out with his friends on my birthday and treat them to wings and cheese fries; for staying late at work on the Fourth of July when I wanted to go to a water park, but purchasing an enormous ball of fire for his mother—him, king of monologuing about the impracticality of gifts. If the galaxy imploded tomorrow, my last intelligible thought would beHa ha, there goes your fucking star, you bitch!
“How long have you been stewing in this?” he demands to know.
An eternity.
“I’m not stewing. I’m fine.”
“Sure.” Another humorless laugh. “Mad at me for not bringing you presents. Meanwhile you ignore me at home, staring at the TV. You sit there like a doll on the shelf. You pout when we go to these dinners at my parents’ house, but you don’t have any family who live nearby and I’m struggling to give us some kind of family foundation here. It’s amazing we still get invited over, frankly, because you exist inside your own head the whole time. No animation from you whatsoever from the second we get in the door.” He shakes his head. “I might as well be there alone.”
For a moment I’m stunned, because he’s not supposed to know I’m inwardly pouting at these dinners. From my point of view, I’ve put on a convincing presentation of being happy and content. If he’s known all along that I’ve been faking it, why hasn’t he called me out on it before?
I spend the rest of our journey to Sycamore Lane thinking about how my next fiancé is going to be Nicholas’s polar opposite. He’ll have long blond hippie hair and a beard, an artist who rubs Pop Rocks on his teeth. His name is Anthony but he writes it&thony. He’s indisputably an orphan.
Then we’re in the driveway, narrowing in on what is sure to be two awful hours. I can’t remember the last time Nicholas and I had fun in each other’s company. We practice our in-front-of-other-people smiles and he hurries around the side of the car, reminding me of his one redeeming trait: there’s something mesmerizingly fluid about the way he moves his body when he’s not busy stomping to make a point.
His eyes snap to mine through the window, and his hand reaches for my door.
Then he smirks and chooses to open the back seat instead, grabbing the roses. He walks alone up to the porch. I follow behind him like a stray dog and wish that I could bark and snarl like one.
A Shakespearean plaque is bolted to the brick siding:A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAMEWOULD STILL SMELL ASSWEET.There’s not supposed to be astillin that quote. I looked it up once to make sure it was a typo but never pointed it out to Mr. and Mrs. Rose because I don’t want them getting a new one with the correct quote. I derive vicious pleasure from knowing their plaque is wrong.
I think about the first time I stood on this doorstep, nervous and optimistic, hoping so hard that I’d fit seamlessly into their world and they’d treat me like part of the family. Nicholas had wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kissed my cheek, grinning from ear to ear.They’re going to love you, he’d said.
The door opens. Deborah bares all her teeth at me in a smile she doesn’t mean, and I want to stick my finger down my throat right in front of her.
Nicholas and I exchange one last look of mutual loathing before we grin and hold hands. He squeezes. I squeeze back harder, but end up hurting my ownfingers.
CHAPTER FIVE
Their lair smells like a postapocalyptic Bath & Body Works that has been stagnating in dust for ten years, with base notes of Aqua Net. The dusty odor has always confounded me, since I’ve never managed to find any actual dust. Each room is heavy and rich, trying hard to evoke French castles with Louis XV chairs while hoping you don’t notice the stained pink carpet. If you’re under twenty years old, you’re expected to take off your shoes. There’s one single television in the “salon”—a relic of the seventies that is never turned on and whose sole purpose is to reflect your shock that such a mammoth television set is still in someone’s house.
Absolute silence falls over you like a hood once you cross the threshold into an Agatha Christie murder set and makes you want to speak quietly, which is translated through Mrs. Rose’s human emotions processor as admiration.
It’s her ode to a gilded age gone by, when children suppressed all their thoughts and emotions to make life easier for their boozyparents. Cherry wood, thick fabrics, onyx-on-charcoal damasks. Thousand-dollar bourbon, cork undisturbed, and crystal candy dishes that have nothing in them. Ornate frames of gold rope and eighteenth-century ashtrays you can Look At But Not Touch, enshrined behind backlit glass. A museum of Rose history that no one cares about except for the withered old Roses who grow here, and maybe me, the unwelcome and unsightly weed, if I end up having to marry into this mess.
Nicholas’s honor roll ribbons from high school hang framed at the head of the dining room. Evidence that they have a daughter is scrubbed from everywhere except a tiny room they call “thepaaah-lah,” which contains one grand piano, a horde of porcelain cat figurines, and Heather’s senior portrait. There are laser beams in the background and she’s wearing braces with black rubber bands. Her mother sometimes talks about her like she’s dead. Nicholas has told me that she’s an EDM deejay, and just for that she’s my favorite member of this family.
“Naomi! My dear! So very good to see you,” Deborah cries, swinging forward to air-kiss one cheek, then the other. She learned from her own mother-in-law (a truly terrifying individual I got to meet only once before Satan called her home) how to be frigid and passive-aggressive. Honestly, this woman has no inkling where she is. We live in Morris, for crying out loud. Half our population has fur and nibbles on berries in the forest.
Meeting Deborah in person for the first time was jarring. She’s persistently written in to theBeaufort Gazettewith so many complaints about life in general that they gave her an advice column,Dear Deborah, where she doles out pearls of wisdom to loyal readers all over the county. I know Deborah’s pearls for the costume jewelry that they are, because she’s never comeup against a problem that she didn’t run to Nicholas to fix. The picture that accompanies her rants is at least fifteen years old. She’s still got the same feathered bob, now with more highlights, but the skin around her eyes is stretched tight even though the eyes themselves seem to have shrunk to half their original size. The earrings she wears are so weighty that the lobes are stretched to two inches long.
She clasps my face between her soft, cool palms. I’m not sure she has blood. Sometimes she gets a little red in the face but that’s only because she was left plugged in for too long and the outlet overheated.
“Goodness, Naomi, you cut your hair! And right before your wedding! What on earth were you thinking? Give me the name of your beautician and I’ll have her fired for what she’s done to you.”
I ruffle my woefully short bangs and Nicholas hides a smile, pleased that he’s got his mother insulting me for him. “It’s a style. Like Amélie.” Amélie’s going to be my go-to reference with this hack job. I’ll draw comparisons every chance I get.
She looks like she’s holding back a mouthful of bees. “It really doesn’t suit your face shape. Although I’m sure you already know that, and you’ve got an appointment booked to get hair extensions.” She doesn’t wait to hear a confirmation, eager to dive into her analysis of my appearance. It’s what she does every time she sees me. “You’re looking wretched all over, my dear. So washed-out and puffy. Are you ill?”
“Yes,” I reply gaily. I hug her, which I’ve never done before (look at me trying all these fun new things!), and her bones shift and crunch under her prim clothes. Her clavicle protrudes so far, it’s like someone buried her bones too shallow.
