Chapter Seven #2
Then she compliments my dress. She names the store it came from, not the brand but the store, the actual location on South Boulevard, and she does it with a generosity that’s indistinguishable from a blade. “I love that shop. They have such interesting things. Very accessible.”
The word accessible is a deliberate choice.
I pick up my fork and knife to cut a piece of lamb.
I chew it thoroughly and swallow before I trust myself to speak again.
I don’t give her the response she wants.
I eat my lamb, which is excellent, and I drink the wine, which is better than anything I’ve ever tasted.
I refuse to comment on that because commenting would reveal I understand its superior quality to what I can afford.
“Casey, do you cook?” Gretchen asks.
“Badly,” I say. “Sterling can confirm.”
“She’s being modest,” Sterling says, which is a lie. We both know it, and the fact that he’s lying for me at his mother’s dinner table makes me love him and pity him in equal measure.
“I’m sure you’ll learn,” Gretchen says. “The penthouse has that wonderful kitchen. It would be a shame to waste it.” She pauses, lifts her glass. “Sterling’s father was a terrible cook too, but we had staff.”
The sentence has three layers. First, I can’t cook. Second, real Hollingsford wives have staff. Third, she’s comparing me to Richard, the man who left. The comparison is a warning I’m meant to absorb without acknowledging.
I do. I’ve been absorbing things since the soup course.
I’m a nurse. I’ve spent twelve-hour shifts taking abuse from patients in withdrawal, family members who need someone to scream at, and attending physicians who treat the RN as a convenient target.
Gretchen Hollingsford is polished, surgical, and relentless, but she isn’t harder than a man in four-point restraints calling me things I won’t repeat.
She isn’t meaner than a daughter watching her mother die on a ventilator and blaming the closest uniform.
The difference is those people are in pain. Gretchen isn’t in pain. Gretchen is at work inflicting pain.
I eat my dinner. I answer questions. I ask about Tuscany with genuine curiosity because I’ve never been.
When I mention the Duomo, Gretchen tells a story about getting lost near it on her first trip and ending up at a bakery that made the best cornetto she’s ever had.
She laughs while she tells it. The laugh is real, and briefly, she’s just a woman talking about pastry in Florence. I almost like her.
Then it passes. Gretchen responds to every question as though I’m a tourist asking directions to a monument she’s already bored of. She describes Florence in a way that makes clear I’ll never see it the way she does. She describes the villa in a way that makes clear I don’t belong in one.
Sterling catches some of it. He corrects his mother once, mildly, when she asks about our “arrangement” instead of our marriage. “It’s a marriage, Mother. We signed a license.”
Gretchen absorbs the correction without a ripple. “Of course. I misspoke.” She picks up her wine. “Brittany, didn’t we see the most wonderful little church in Siena? I kept thinking what a beautiful wedding it would have made.”
She doesn’t look at me when she says it. She doesn’t have to. I’m sure I wasn’t the bride she envisioned standing beside him.
Brittany speaks three times during the meal.
She agrees with her mother about Emily Cormant.
She agrees with her mother about the wine.
Once, when I ask her what she studied at school, she starts to answer, something about art history, her face opening for the first time all evening, and Gretchen smoothly redirects the conversation to the university’s architecture program and a building she helped fund.
Brittany closes her mouth and picks up her wine.
She looks at me once more and away again.
I see a flicker in that look I wasn’t expecting that comes close to apology.
We leave at nine-thirty. I make it to the car without speaking. Sterling starts the engine, and I wait until we’re past the hedges before I trust myself to open my mouth, because I don’t want Gretchen to know her attack scored any hits.
“Your mother asked about Emily Cormant to remind you that you had options.”
“Casey—”
“She asked about my mother because she already knew my mother was dead. She wanted to watch me say it at her dinner table in front of your sister.”
“You don’t know that she—”
“She complimented my dress so she could name the store and make sure everyone at the table knew exactly what it cost. She called our marriage an arrangement. She described a church in Siena while looking at your sister and not at me.”
I name four things, and I don’t raise my voice. I don’t cry. I lay them out as evidence, because that’s what they are.
My jaw aches from clenching it through dessert. I won’t give Gretchen Hollingsford the satisfaction of rattling me, even when she isn’t in the car, and the only person who would see it’s the man driving.
Sterling grits his teeth, and I can’t tell if he’s irritated with her or me. He doesn’t look away from the road. “She doesn’t mean it that way. She needs time to adjust.”
I snort. “She doesn’t need time, Sterling. She needs me gone.”
He spares a glance at me, and the irritation is definitely for me this time. “My mother would never do what you’re describing.”
“Your mother just did for almost three hours, while you sat across from me at the same table.”
He doesn’t answer. The car moves through Myers Park, past houses with hedges older than me, and the streetlights make patterns on the dash that I watch because looking at the road is easier than looking at him.
I could push. I could list the things he missed and chose not to see because seeing them would mean acknowledging his mother hates everything about me without even knowing me.
He’s not ready to see that. I could force the conversation right here, right now, in this car, on this road, while the hedges slide past in the dark.
I decide not to. I decide somewhere between the third stoplight and the fourth.
The decision is quiet and final. Bringing this up costs me more than absorbing it does.
If I push, Sterling will defend Gretchen.
She’s his mother, he loves her, and he doesn’t recognize what she’s doing, or he recognizes it and can’t afford to name it.
Either way, the argument ends with me as the problem instead of Gretchen as the problem, and I won’t let that happen.
I look out the window. I make the decision. I don’t tell him I’ve made it. I can’t change how she acts. I can only control my own reactions. I decide not to let her get to me.
Sterling reaches across the console. I take his hand because I love him, I don’t know what else to do, and the alternative is saying something I can’t take back on the night I met his mother.
I hold his hand the rest of the way home. I don’t bring up Gretchen again that week or that month. I never bring her up voluntarily.