“You’ve been telling her no when she asked to meet me?”Now I’m surprised.“That doesn’t sound very much like the Jack who was telling me I had to talk to my friends.You said open communication’s the key, right?”
He grimaces.“Look, I’m not exactly young, and in my entire life, would you care to guess how many women I’ve liked that my mom has also liked?”
I shrug.
“Zero, Vanessa.You could be Mother Theresa, and she’d be upset that you were a nun.”
I laugh.“I mean, she’d have reason to be.”I shake my head.“I’d be a terrible nun, and I look awful in black.Plus, nuns can’t date.”
He laughs, too.“And you’re not even Catholic.”
“Oh, yeah.That’s true.I’m not Catholic, and you are.”My eyes widen.“She’s not going to like that.”
“I’m going to save you some time.She’s not going to hate you, but she’s also not going to like anything about you, so you should just let me tell her you can’t go, and I’ll tell her to lose your number.We can deal with my mother when we absolutely have to, and we can ignore her until then and after that again as well.”
“I have to see her,” I say.“Things like today will happen again, and that doesn’t seem like a great plan.”
He shrugs.“I’ve done the same thing my whole life.Look, she loves me, and she loves my children, and she helps out whenever I need it, but God made her different.She’s impossible to please, so you shouldn’t even try.”
“You should have a shirt made,” I say.“It should say, ‘I’m hot, but I have a horrible mother.’”
He laughs.“But I had that on, you’d have run the other way.”
I roll my eyes.“You run fast enough to catch me.”
“I do.And I always will, if you get any ideas.”He tugs me closer and kisses me then, and I forget all about his mom.
But once he’s gone for the night, I do the most un-Vanessa-like thing I’ve ever done, and I text her back.I like Jack enough that I shouldn’t be doing anything close to running away.
Sure, I’ll be there at three.
I may not have the bravery to tell Sam and Natalie that they’re being strange, but I can confront the total stranger who dislikes me without knowing me at all.Maybe it’ll be good practice.Maybe with Jack supporting me, I can change.Who knows?Weirder things have happened.
17
Samantha
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”Maya Angelou
I successfully avoid interactions with Richard’s father for almost a month.The weekend that he came into town to see my first horse show, he actually came into town to talk to Richard about some business stuff.They left my show a bit early to make it to a meeting, and he was occupied pretty much constantly from then on.He comes in one other time, but I fake a cold and hide in the barn.
Richard’s father’s afraid of getting sick, so that worked.
He was supposed to come for Thanksgiving, but that time he actually got sick.Apparently he suffers from a terrible case of The Man Cold when he gets one.Richard finds it pretty funny, as someone who works through illness.But now, as Christmas draws closer and closer, the day has finally come that I can’t come up with a reasonable excuse to avoid meeting him.
“I can’t believe you’re going to dinner with a real, live duke,” Natalie says.“It’sinsane.”
“No, it’s inconvenient,” I say.“You got your i words mixed up.”
“Well, that too.”Natalie wipes sweat off of her forehead and smears light blue paint across her eyebrow.
“Um.”I pull a face and toss my head at her forehead.
“I did it again, didn’t I?”
“She’s going to notice that, and we’re going to have to confess.There’s no blue paint in the tack room, so what would you tell her?”
“Like she’d know what color the tack room is,” Natalie says.
