Chapter 7
“These dark circles, no good,” the woman doing makeup for Gabby’s bridal party said the next morning as Natalie plopped into her chair. “Were you up all night?”
It’s hard to fall asleep when you’re tossing about in a sea of self-doubt, Natalie considered saying back.
But Gabby, in the midst of getting her hair curled, turned to her. Her forehead wrinkled. Stress radiated out of all her pores. “Could you not sleep? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Her pitch grew successively higher with each question.
Under normal circumstances, Natalie would have told Gabby about the one-star review immediately. Well, screw them! Gabby would have said, or maybe, They were probably just jealous that they didn’t write your book themselves. She would’ve let Nat throw herself a pity party, then talked her out of it, and then Nat would have been able to shake this uncertainty off. But today wasn’t about Natalie.
“I was just so excited,” Nat said as the makeup woman liberally dabbed concealer under her eyes. “But I’ve got an extra-large coffee, and I am totally fine.”
“Ooh, coffee,” Angus’s mother said, over the Us Weekly she was reading. “I think I accidentally drank a decaf this morning. So distracted, thinking about my baby…” She teared up for a moment, then turned to Natalie. “Would you mind going to get me a cup? I don’t know how I’ll make it through the day without.”
“Um,” Nat said as the makeup artist poked an eyeliner pencil far too close to her cornea.
“Lisa,” Gabby began in a tight voice. “Maybe you could get your own since you’re already done with hair and makeup—”
Lisa thrust her magazine down. “But I don’t know where the coffee bar is—”
“It’s fine!” Nat said. “I’ll go after this is finished.”
“As long as you’re going,” Gabby said, “will you take a peek at the ceremony setup and let me know if everything looks okay?”
So, once she’d been appropriately primped, Natalie went to get a coffee from the clearly marked station in the lobby, by which Lisa had passed multiple times. Then she headed outside.
The bed-and-breakfast Gabby had chosen for the wedding had an absolutely charming garden area, bordered by a forest in the back. A pond stretched along one side of the property, its smooth cerulean surface dotted with lily pads. Gabby had designed many of the decorations herself, and the whole scene looked like one of her paintings come to life. White wooden chairs sat in rows over soft, green grass. The sky was clear, the only clouds dotting it so fluffy Natalie longed to reach out and run her fingers through them. It looked like the platonic ideal of a pastoral scene.
And it felt like being stuffed inside a furnace. Though it wasn’t even afternoon yet, the temperature had climbed to the nineties. Natalie cast around for the right word. The heat was stultifying. Not at all the adjective you’d like people to use when describing your wedding.
Sweat already beginning to bead at her brow, Natalie looked for the person in charge. One of Angus’s groomsmen was fiddling with a tree at the edge of the forest, putting up some sort of platform. Perhaps for the photographer to get a better angle?
Her eyes landed on the flowers being set up at the altar—hydrangeas, lush and blue. Her mother had those at her second wedding. That had been a much smaller affair than this—second weddings generally were. Natalie had walked her mother down the aisle to Greg, then stood off to the side as her mother recited her lines. Because that was what it had all felt like—a play, an unconvincing leading actress delivering a monologue about love and commitment with no feeling behind it.
Maybe the majority of the guests hadn’t picked up on the false sentiment in her mother’s words. But they hadn’t seen Nat’s mom the night before.
Ellen had asked Natalie if the two of them could spend her last unmarried night together. No bridesmaids (Ellen felt it undignified to have bridesmaids this time around), just a mother and daughter splurging on a fancy hotel suite, some quality time to harken back to the days when it had been the two of them against the world. Natalie was newly twenty-one, so they drank pretentious cocktails in the hotel bar and then opened a bottle of wine in their room to share.
Up until that point, Natalie hadn’t spent that much time with Greg. Just some dinners here and there, at which her mother had been almost frantically cheerful. Greg had an annoying habit of giving Natalie life advice that she had not requested. But whatever, her mother loved him. She deserved to be happy, especially since Natalie’s asshole father had moved on almost immediately after the divorce went through.
Tipsy in their hotel room, wrapped in a white bathrobe so plush and comfortable she would have liked to someday be buried in it, Natalie had held up her wineglass. “This might be unorthodox, but a toast to Dad.”
Her mother frowned, surprised, so Nat went on. “He’s a total asshole, but cheers to him for getting out of the way so you could find someone better for you.”
“Oh. Sure, to your father.” They clinked glasses. Then her mom looked down into her wine, face suddenly tired. “It’s funny. If you’d asked me what was going to happen the night before your father and I got married, I’d have told you we were going to end up like the couple in that Notebook movie. I never thought I’d be doing it all again with someone else.”
“Well, I think it’s nice,” Nat said, alcohol turning her sentimental. “That you can go through heartbreak, but things work out the way they’re supposed to, and the love of your life will be waiting on the other side.”
Her mother snorted.
“What?” Nat asked.
“Nothing.” Ellen took another long swallow of her wine.
“Am I getting too sloppy and sappy?”
“No. It’s just…” She let out a sigh. “You don’t need to romanticize. Sometimes you can call things what they are.”
Natalie sat up, suddenly alert. Ellen waved a hand through the air. Alcohol had turned Nat sentimental, but for her mother, it had done the opposite, removing her filter. “Oh, I know. You want a shiny love. Like me when I was young. But let me save you some time and heartbreak. Shiny men, like your father, they’ll get bored of you eventually.”
Natalie tried to smile. “As my mom, aren’t you required to think that I’m endlessly wonderful?”
“Well, of course I do.”
“Okay, because it sounded like you were saying that anyone interesting and worthwhile is going to eventually dump me for someone better.”
In the months after her father left, Natalie’s mom had assured a weeping Natalie over and over again that she was lovable. That her father’s abandonment had nothing to do with a lack in her, just a lack in him. That the sun shone out of Natalie’s freaking ass.
But now, drunk in a hotel suite, her mother was admitting the truth Natalie had always feared—that, maybe, Natalie wasn’t enough.
“I’m just saying that someone like you…” Ellen went on. “You want a Greg. A man who thinks you’re the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Someone like me?”
“Well, you’re trusting. You’re soft.”
“I’m not soft,” Nat said, scowling in her hotel bathrobe. “After all those guys you brought home, I hardened myself up a long time ago.”
Ellen frowned, her voice sharp. “I’m your mother. I know. You want to see the world as better than it is, people as better than they are. It’s all over your writing too. And that’s admirable, in a way. But don’t fall in love with a man whom you’ve put up on some pedestal.”
“Better to settle for a man who puts you on a pedestal instead?” Nat shot back, and her mother shrugged. She tried to calm her heart, her voice. “But…but you love Greg. Right?”
“Sure,” Ellen said in the least convincing tone Natalie had ever heard.
Natalie slammed her glass down on the nearby side table so sharply, she nearly broke it. “Oh my God, Mom. Don’t marry him if you feel this way!”
“Honey, you’re twenty-one. You don’t understand anything about this yet.”
“I hope I never understand these things the way you do. Because this is the most depressing shit I’ve ever heard.”
They glowered at each other, then retreated to separate corners of the suite. The next morning, Natalie gritted her teeth and got through that wedding. But things had never fully been the same with her mom since.
Now, anytime the two of them hung out, Ellen invited Greg along as if to underline how much she loved spending time with him, unable to admit that maybe she’d made a mistake. But Greg’s presence annoyed both her and Natalie, so they stopped hanging out as much, and the distance grew and grew.
Even now, sometimes, Natalie would hear her mother’s voice when she was with one of the many artists who enthralled and intimidated her, even when they were gazing into her eyes with total fascination: They’ll get bored of you eventually. They’d realize that she wasn’t enough and leave for someone who was.
Determined, Natalie put on a show for them, hiding any flaws or weaknesses until she didn’t recognize herself. But then she ran into a new problem. How could she love anyone who couldn’t see the real her?
At least she had her book. Apartment 2F proved that she had talent, things to say, even if Addison K—no, she was going to put all thoughts of Addison K aside for the rest of this wedding.
Right. The wedding. Natalie pulled herself back to the task at hand as she spotted a middle-aged woman in a severe black dress supervising the setup while chugging from a water bottle.
Nat hustled over as quickly as possible in the heat. “Hi,” she said, and pointed to herself. “Maid of honor here. This looks amazing. But I was just wondering, is there any way to get some shade to help cool things off?”
The woman sucked her teeth. “We do have a canopy we bring out sometimes for situations like this.”
“Oh, perfect!”
“But unfortunately, the bride and groom didn’t choose to rent our canopy package, so we lent it out to someone else.”
“Got it. Okay. That’s fine. We’ll just take a page out of your book and keep everyone hydrated.”
“Exactly. We have this water dispenser right here.” The woman indicated a beautiful canister on a nearby table, patterned glass catching the light, set on a wrought iron base. Natalie looked closer. The dispenser contained maybe twenty glasses of water. And Gabby and Angus had two hundred guests on their list.
“This…this is the only dispenser?”
“The bride and groom picked our smallest water package.”
“And you can’t add another?”
“No, because they didn’t pay for that option.” God, this place had the face of a sweet, family-run inn and the soul of Spirit Airlines.
“Okay, what if I pay you for it? How much to add, say, four more of these?”
“Three hundred and twenty dollars, plus tax.”
Buying anything for a wedding was like going to a foreign nation with a terrible exchange rate, where your dollar was suddenly worth far less than normal. “You know what? Thank you so much, and never mind.”
Natalie ducked back indoors, delivered Angus’s mom’s coffee, then returned to Gabby’s side.
“How does it feel out there?” Gabby asked, worrying at her bracelet as her hairstylist spritzed her dark curls.
“It’s…a bit toasty.”
“I don’t know why this is happening!” Gabby said. “It’s fourteen degrees higher than the average temperature for this time of year.” Weather.com had become her top visited website over the past month.
“Global warming,” Becks said. She was extremely pretty and extremely gloomy. “You think it’s bad now. Just wait until your children want to get married. They’ll have to do it in the dead of winter.” She fluffed her shining blond curls, regarding her reflection with woe. “If we even have winters anymore.”
Nat checked the clock. Still plenty of time before the ceremony. “I’m sure we’re not too far from a big-box store. I can run out and buy some umbrellas for people to use for shade, plus some extra bottled water.”
“Bottled water is part of the reason we’re running into this issue in the first place,” Becks continued. “Too many single-use plastics.” Shay nodded sympathetically. The rest of them ignored her.
“Yeah?” Gabby asked. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all.” This was great! A mission. Something she could easily complete in a five-star way.
Gabby nodded, pulling out her phone to tap a message. “I’ll have Rob meet you out front to drive you.”
“No!” After their rehearsal dinner interaction, the last thing Nat wanted to do was spend quality time with Rob. Gabby gave her a strange look. Natalie scrambled. “I just mean, you probably need him to help out here. I can borrow a car and drive myself.”
“I know how nervous you get on the highway. And the New Jersey Turnpike is no joke.” Technically, Natalie had her driver’s license. She had passed her test by one point, almost gotten into an accident her first week on the road, and then proceeded to live only in cities with excellent public transportation. Calling her “rusty” was an understatement. Gabby’s fingers flew over her phone, texting away as she continued, “I do not want you dying in a fiery wreck on my wedding day!” She heard herself and took a breath. “I’m sorry. Obviously, I would be devastated if you died in a fiery wreck on any day.”
“I get it, though. Today would be particularly bad.”
Gabby’s phone dinged and she looked down. “Great news, Rob is driving you.”