“I really love you,” I repeated. And I did.
That feeling intensified when the Duchess said, “My only regret is that I won’t get to be here to see these two walk down the aisle. As many of you know, I have been betrothed to a Saudi prince, and he insists that I come with him on business to the Greek isles immediately.”
“What?” Mark said.
“That can’t be true. She came back here for this.”
She raised her martini glass. “To my great love, my Mark. I hope this marriage is everything you’ve dreamed of for all these years and that you do it a little better than your dear old mum.”
Mum? Really? The woman was born and raised in south Georgia. She was no one’s “Mum.”
Mark shook his head and rolled his eyes. He was trying to act nonchalant, but I could tell he was rattled.
His mother walked out the door, and I followed her. “Connie!” I shouted.
She was drunk enough that she actually turned, even though “Duchess” was all she responded to these days.
“You have one son. You cannot leave him the week before his wedding.”
I felt Mark’s hand on my back. I knew he was trying to calm me, but I was way past calm.
“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s a monthlong cruise of the Greek isles on a two-hundred-fifty-foot yacht with its own helicopter pad. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“No!” I shouted at her. “No, it isn’t. Seeing your only son get married is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A cruise to the Greek isles is something you can do anytime. This is abandoning your child.”
She glared at me, teetering on her heels. “Don’t you talk to me about abandoning my son. It seems like that’s something you know plenty about.” She turned haughtily toward home. It would have felt more like the stomping out she wanted it to be if she hadn’t been so wobbly. Then she turned and shot back, “Plus, I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t his only wedding.”
Mark sat down on the sidewalk, head in his hands. I sat down beside him and rubbed his back, feeling like the world’s worst person. I was marrying Mark, yes, but I wasn’t giving him what he wanted. In some ways, in the back of my mind, I had been incensed this whole time that he wouldn’t drop everything and do what I wanted. But that wasn’t fair. He had a whole life that he had worked really hard for, just like I did. He had totally reinvented a company—a family company, at that—for a new millennium and had become massively successful in his own right, all from the comfort of the one-stoplight town where he wanted to live. He took care of his mother despite her clear lunacy, and he took care of me. He made me feel beautiful and wanted and safe and adored. And all I ever did was keep him at arm’s length.
“I don’t know why I did this to myself,” he said, “why I let myself get so far along in this fantasy.”
I took his hand in mine and kissed it. “What do you mean, sweetheart?”
“This,” he said, pointing to me and then to himself. “She’s a crazy drunk, but my mother isn’t wrong. I’m here again, trying to tether you to me and to this town, and you don’t want any of it, not really.”
There was so much hurt in his eyes. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to tell him I would stay, I would do anything. I felt so desperate in that moment.
“Why can’t I be enough?” he asked. He put his head in his hands. “Why can’t I be enough for someone to stay?”
I picked his head up and looked him straight in the eye. “Don’t ever say that again, Mark Becker. You are enough. You are more than enough. Your mother leaving isn’t about you, it’s about her.” God, I hated to put myself in the same category with that horrid, horrid woman. But I guess I was, when you got right down to it. “And Mark, I’m not leaving you, sweetheart. I’m not. I’m here. I’m yours. I’m going to go off and work, and sometimes you’ll come with me, and sometimes you won’t. But that’s not me leaving you. I swear it isn’t.”
He looked so pitiful and so forlorn that I wanted to tell him that I would stay forever, that I would give it all up. I felt in my heart that even though he hadn’t said it, he was offering me an ultimatum. And I wanted to pick him. I wanted more than anything to tell him that I would give it up, that I would be all his. But it wasn’t my truth. And I knew that. So I tried to level with him.
“I just don’t know if I can give it up, Mark. I love becoming absorbed by a totally different world of playing someone else...”
I trailed off. His eyes were so sad. I hated that I was hurting him, but I knew now that giving yourself up to please another person never works. You spend your entire life unhappy and resentful. I didn’t want to do that.
Mark sighed, and when he looked back up at me, he said, “So what’s so wrong with being here and being you?”
I took Mark’s hand, and instead of getting angry that he couldn’t understand me, I became drenched in an unmistakable sadness, drowning in his hurt. Because I knew, although I was the one sitting in front of him now, that was a question he actually wanted to ask his mother.
THIRTY-ONE
ansley: what mothers do
“Well,” Sloane was saying, as we sat around in our PJs. “That was a dramatic ending to an engagement party.”
“It has been a dramatic all-around day,” Caroline said. “I still can’t believe Jack gave Vivi that boat.”
