"You are. And just to let you know, I won't tolerate shit-talking about this car. I worked hard and saved up and bought her outright. She's mine and I love her." Cecily shifts into Drive and pulls away from the curb. "Let me know if you'd like me to stop at a surgeon along the way? Get that stick surgically removed from your ass? It's quite large, but I'm sure we can find someone who can operate on you, Dominic."
My full name. She's doing it on purpose. "I'll be fine," I grumble. It's becoming more and more obvious that when it comes to verbal sparring, Cecily is superior to me.
"Let's just get on with this," I say, watching Cecily pull out into traffic. She has a lazy hold on the wheel, gripping at seven and five instead of ten and two. Hell, even nine and three wouldbe better than where her hands are placed now. How is she going to keep control of the vehicle in the event of an accident? She'll be ejected becauseit doesn't have doors.
"You know," I shout above the atrocious road noise, "if you were really my wife, I'd buy you a safer car."
"Good thing I'm not really your wife," she whips back, hair blowing around her face as she picks up speed.
We're quiet after that, not that we could really talk with the noise smashing around us. I want to ask her what happened nine months ago. I'm dying to know why she left me on that date, slinking away while I was on the phone with a client.
She slows the Jeep at a red light, and just as I open my mouth to ask her about that afternoon, she says, "We'll be there soon, and it might be a good idea for me to tell you what to expect from today. Or, what I expect to happen. Who really knows, though, because I've never brought a surprise husband home."
"No? Weird." A car pulls up beside us at the light. I can't get over how close the vehicle feels, how exposed we are.
"They all know about you thanks to my drunken over-sharing text." She taps her finger on the steering wheel. "I still don't know why I did that."
The answer seems clear to me. "Because they are your family, and you wanted them to know you got married."
Cecily shakes her head slowly back-and-forth, as if to say,absolutely not."You see, that's a normal answer for a normal family. The Hamptons are not normal."
"What are they?"
"Abnormal."
I snort. "Such a generic term. And highly subjective."
"Ok, Word Police. Between you and your wordy cousin, I swear..." she trails off, muttering under her breath.
I'm sure she had some kind of creative insult in those quiet words, but I'm curious about her family. "What about your grandma?"
A light smile tugs on Cecily's lips, brightening her face. "My grandma is a character. Her name is Ophelia, but we call her Savage Grandma, and?—"
I cough. "What? You call your grandmasavage?"
Cecily waves off my question. "You'll understand when you meet her."
This family is already shaping up to be infinitely more interesting than my own.
The light turns green. Cecily shouts above the air rushing around us. "My little sister Kerrigan is a character. She'll say the most unhinged, inappropriate stuff."
"Do you call her Unhinged Sister?"
"No, but we should." Cecily signals for a move into the right lane, glancing over her shoulder before completing it. The sun bounces off her dark hair, making it shine. Her sunglasses hide her eyes.
"My older brother, Duke, is"—Cecily pinches her lower lip between two fingers as she thinks—"aloof. He works closely with my dad, and I think he's created a shell around himself to survive."
"Your dad is someone to be survived?" My family might be vanilla, but I know a thing or two about surviving my parents' behavior.
"Yes, just ask my mom." Cecily takes a turn off the busy road, immediately delivering us onto a quieter street. Quainter. Ranch style homes bracket the roads, set back a good distance. A few are outdated, relics of the eighties before the city built up around them. Most have been remodeled, or torn down and rebuilt. The updated homes have brick-lined semicircular driveways, front yards with citrus trees, mature bushes, and flowering vines.
"What's your mom like?" I ask, inspecting the homes as we pass. The further we drive, the more the homes increase in size.
Cecily twirls a lock of hair around her finger, the other hand holding the steering wheel. "She's sort of this blank space of a human. She's the only person I've ever met who manages to be absent while present. If that makes sense."
My mother couldn't be more different, but I'm not going to tell her that right now. "And what about your dad?" I'm expecting her dad to be nothing short of irate with me. After all, I just married his daughter without asking him. Without knowing her. Genuine marriage or not, I'm expecting to do a little apologizing.
"My dad is cold. Unyielding." Cecily turns on her blinker.
