Chapter 13 #2
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nola give a slight, singular nod.
She’s unsure what my grandmother’s reaction to the proposal will be, but her nerves are unwarranted.
The excitement in my grandmother is brewing.
Stella claps her hands together and sways again to the song like she’d never stopped.
“I love it. It’s been too long since our family’s been involved in a good scandal. ”
“We’ve never been part of a scandal, Stella,” Violet smirks.
“What little you know, dear.” Her reply is blasé but there has to be a story there. “Tomorrow, then. What a great day for a fake wedding. Nola, will your family be there? Do they approve of what you’re doing?”
“It’s just me.” Nola eases up. “My sister is with her in-laws for the holidays but thinks it’s a risk worth taking. My parents are on a three-week cruise and will find out when they return. Emma’s out of town for the weekend.”
“That’s just as well.” Stella reaches for her glass and downs the remainder of her drink in one gulp. “What everybody is going to find before long are two people who have fallen in love despite their best efforts not to. Then we will have a real wedding!”
Nola and I get to her house well after eleven.
She kicks off her shoes by the front door and turns on the fireplace before sinking into a corner of the sofa, curling into a ball, quilt nestled around her.
“That . . . was memorable.” Her voice is thick and tired, but there’s no way either of us are going to go to bed.
The adrenaline rush of time spent with Stella courses through us. “I like your sisters.”
I take the other corner of the couch and stretch my body out, one leg down the middle of the sofa, one on the coffee table, hands clasped behind my head. “They like you too, which is saying a lot because those are two hard women to win over.”
This makes her lips curve up slowly and in the glow of the firelight, she’s nothing short of beautiful. I internally chide myself. She’s always beautiful.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“Stella was unfazed by this fake marriage and it is almost more unsettling than if she had fought it.”
My hand runs through my hair. “She loves to surprise us and be a wild card in her reactions. You get used to it after a while.”
Nola faces me and straightens with a serious expression on her face. “Look, I’ve already been married once. I’ve done the dream wedding, the unyielding commitment thing. All through dinner I thought about this. You shouldn’t have your first marriage be a sham—”
“I wouldn’t have come up with this if I cared about that.”
“I just want to give you an out.”
I study her a long second and see the internal struggle she’s having with taking away the specialness surrounding what a real wedding should be. At the same time, she isn’t spiraling the way I’d expect for somebody so organized and uptight. “You are weirdly chill about this.”
She grins. “I’ve recently promised myself I’d be more fun.”
“If you’re looking for fun, go to Disneyland. This . . . this is going to complicate things.”
“I’m a big girl, Max. You don’t have to take care of me.”
The response, on the tip of my tongue, is that I’m starting to think I want to.
I’m not sure because I’ve never actually felt that way about another human being outside of my family.
My life has revolved around me and that’s worked out well for me.
Saying as much in this setting feels way too intimate, so instead I stare too long, until the silence stretches into uncomfortable territory.
I clear my throat and change the subject. “When were you in Austria?”
She doesn’t seem to mind my avoidance and thinks about my question. “Mmm, three years ago? Doing the art for those chain hotels you think are beneath me pays off, remember? I did a collection for a well-known brand in Vienna, and as a thank you, Emma and I got to stay there for a week.”
“Which one?”
“Nope. I have to sign NDAs.” She winks.
Stella asked to see the contract we’d pieced together last night.
She largely laughed it off as something a toddler could have come up with and offered to have her lawyer draft something that was more appropriate in the morning.
I get her insistence we both protect the money we’ve worked hard for, but I definitely don’t care to take a single mom to court, and I don’t see Nola ever going after my earnings either.
To pacify her, we agreed and then asked the family and Patrick the dishwasher to sign NDAs in case media reached out to them for a comment.
Satisfied, Stella shuffled us off to dinner without further discussion.
By eight, we’d eaten, checked out the White Christmas float for the holiday parade, had pie, and cleaned up the pre-dinner celebration in Stella’s room.
She’d gotten tired and I could see signs of the beginnings of confusion starting, so I sent my sisters back to my house.
Nola grabbed the nurse and the three of us helped get Stella to bed.
I sat by her, “You Got It” on repeat, until she fell asleep.
The nurse said she’d stay with her. “If this keeps happening, I know the director will want to discuss moving your grandmother to the other side of the center to be with the memory care patients.”
Ideally, that would be a discussion to have with Madelyn and Violet present, but with both of them leaving tomorrow night, that’s a hard conversation to save for another holiday.
Next we went to my house and stayed for a couple of hours.
I love how Nola wasted no time befriending my sisters.
Madelyn’s celebrity status only lasted so long in Nola’s eyes before my sister turned mere mortal by tossing her hair up into a messy bun and putting on comfy pants and a sweatshirt.
The three of them swapped stories and downed a gallon of Tillamook Chocolate Brownie Batter before I could find a spoon.
We’d already planned to have me live with her but given the uptick of people standing outside my house with phones ready to catch a glimpse of us, that meant it was starting tonight.
My stuff’s at Nola’s, though I was desperate to have more time with my sisters before we’d go months without seeing each other, but in the end, we decided to keep up appearances of the happy, newly married couple.
Nola burrows her head into the back of the sofa and looks at me. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Can you expand a little on why you call Stella by her first name when things are good, but when she has a moment, you call her grandma? You gave me a little of the story at pizza, but now I’ve seen it more and if I’m going to be your wife, I’d like to know.”
“That’s fair.” We’re way past that first night at pizza and she can ask me anything. I readjust so I’m facing her and mirror my head on the sofa like hers. “We’ve always called her Stella. She never wanted to be called Grandma; it made her feel old.”
“Branding. The Hutchings are all about the branding.”
A smile escapes my lips and I nod. “Even when we were toddlers, it was Stella and Pops. Then the first time I witnessed her have confusion, it scared me a little, and I called her Grandma by accident. She calmed down pretty fast, and later she told me that was the way she wanted me to help her remember who she was. She said it helped her focus on who was really there for her. Her people.”
Nola’s face softens. “You’re not at all who I thought you were at the bar.”
“Yeah? Who did you think I was?”
“A typical bar jerk. Claiming your territory and not liking the fact a group of loud women encroached in your space. You had this whole narcissistic vibe going on and . . . if I’d known you were nothing but a big cinnamon roll, I never would’ve kissed you.”
“I’m sorry, a what?”
She looks at me like this is common knowledge and I’m an idiot. “Being a cinnamon roll is the opposite of toxic masculinity.”
I let out a laugh. “You thought I was toxic?”
“You were brooding and rude, peacocking and marking your territory all at the same time.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. You weren’t going to let Emma make up her mile and you act aloof about things in general but when you take care of Stella in her most vulnerable moments? It shows me you’ve got what it takes to win over the right woman someday.”
It’s not my favorite thing that she’s passing me off to an unknown future woman.
The announcement of my fake marriage is barely twenty-four hours old, and she’s already planning what happens down the line when we’ve gone our separate ways.
Steering us back into friendlier waters, I ask, “So you wouldn’t have kissed me if you’d known I was a cinnamon roll? ”
She pauses to think about my question as if she hasn’t thought about that moment in the bar since the night it happened. The blush that creeps up her neck lets me know she’s thought about it, more than once. “I don’t know.”
“Did it mean nothing to you? You don’t peg me as somebody who goes around kissing strangers.”
Nola fidgets with the corner of her quilt. Her eyes focused on a loose thread. “I’d never done anything like that in my life. It only happened because Belle was being a bossy bride and wanted to play a game. Everybody had to do a dare that she decided.”
“You’re thirty-five.” I point out the obvious, confused, because I was under the impression women stopped participating in childish games like this when they were thirteen. I don’t remember my sisters ever doing anything like this, or maybe they did and I’m clueless.
She grins. “I never said I’m proud of going along with it.”
“Fine. What was your dare?”
“Belle dared me to kiss . . .” The rest of her sentence is mumbled and even in the dim light I can see an attempt to hide her embarrassment.
“Nice try but I’m going to need you to repeat yourself.” I reach out with my foot and playfully tap her toes that peek out from under the quilt.
“No.” There is a hesitancy behind her single-word response.
In a deep voice, I tease her. “No? As your toxic husband, I command you to tell me.”
She smirks and shakes her head. “It’s so embarrassing.”
“Why? It’s already over. Besides, now I’m going to be up all night wondering if your dare was to kiss the ugliest man, the saddest, most lonely man—Nola!
Was I a pity kiss?” There isn’t a bone in my body that thinks I was a pity kiss.
Women have never made me feel I’m a sympathy pick, but I don’t know how else to get her to share what she’s thinking.
And she isn’t like the women I’ve usually associated with, so I’m at a total loss.
“Don’t be shy. It’s Thanksgiving—you can tell me,” I prod.
“If you really must know, I was ready to call it a night. And you were there.”
I wait a minute and she doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t blush, nothing. I help her out. “That’s it? I was there.”
“Yep.” Man, she is making it hard, but there’s more to it than she’s claiming. There were lots of guys in that bar that night who would’ve fit the requisite ‘there.’
“Try again, Adler. What’s the real story?”
“Fine.” She sighs in resignation. “Belle dared me to kiss the hottest guy of the night.”
Checkmate.