Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
KELSEY
Tyler has Bruno cornered. I go over and take Bruno’s arm in mine. “Were those kids amazing or what?”
Bruno smiles. “Truly a spectacle.”
I narrow my eyes. “As in, we made a spectacle of ourselves?”
“How do you know I didn’t mean spectacular?”
I give him a big smile. “Thank you! It was spectacular, wasn’t it?”
Tyler gets pulled away by a cousin, and just then, Mom appears. She’s put a cute jeweled barrette in her short gray hair.
“Talk later!” he calls.
“Kelsey.” Mom looks me up and down. “Wow.”
She’s visibly pleased. Which breaks my heart a little, because this is not my style. Not my man. Not my life.
But hey, they let me back into the family, so I’ll take it.
“Regarding the room,” Mom says. “We didn’t realize there were going to be two people in that room.”
So she knew about the room. “Yeah, it is a little...small.” I use quote fingers for small.
Small is a euphemism. “But it turned out they moved us to a different one, so we’re good.
” I pull out my phone, really wanting to change the subject before they find out we have the palace, a better room than the happy couple.
“Hey, has anybody seen the weather report lately? Last I looked it was going to be pure sun.”
Mom frowns. “I thought the place was sold out.”
I’m pulling up the weather with real commitment. “Twenty percent chance of showers,” I announce. “Not too bad.”
“I just don’t understand. You got a different room within the same hotel?” Mom asks.
“I had them move us to the Ocean Crown suite,” Bruno says unhelpfully.
I close my eyes for half a second.
Danielle’s head comes up. “We wanted the Ocean Crown suite. They told us it wasn’t available.”
“It wasn’t,” Bruno says.
I pocket my phone. “Somebody had it booked through Monday, but then that changed at the last minute.”
Mom purses her lips and my heart sinks. “The hotel still should have offered it to Danielle and Tyler first.”
“My people reached out to them,” Bruno says.
Danielle squints as she puts this together. “Oh.”
Mom makes a sound that manages to encompass both injury and outrage. My heart sinks even more.
“It’s not that amazing of a room,” I try.
“Oh, I believe you completely,” Danielle says. Then she hears herself. “Kidding.” She takes Mom by the elbow and steers them both away.
I watch them go. “Great. Now I’m the materialistic diva who shows up in Dior and demands the best suite.”
“I doubt they would think that about you. Considering your taste in wallpaper.”
“And yet.” I make a hand motion to encompass the whole disaster.
“They’re family. They should be happy you’re in a decent room.”
My face feels hot. “I’m sure they are on one level. It just feels a little weird to have the most glorious room. Like going to a wedding in a pretty white dress and outshining the bride.”
“Perhaps they should not have put you in a broom closet.”
“I was fine with it.”
Bruno makes a scoffing sound.
“I was! I’m resilient. I’m the kind of person who can roll with any situation. And the wallpaper really was lovely.”
Bruno gives me a hard look. His eyelashes are really lush. They set off the gray of his eyes.
“I’m flexible and resilient. It’s one of my superpowers.”
“If you say so.”
“You don’t think I’m resilient?”
“You call it resilience; I call it putting a happy face sticker on a dumpster.”
“That might be overstating things.” Even so, I appreciate it.
I was only included in one photograph before Bruno arrived, but now that he’s here, we’re getting our picture taken with everybody.
It’s fun to feel like I’m back in the thick of things, to walk down memory lane with people.
I remind Danielle of the wild weddings we’d put on with our dolls.
In another picture, I link arms with Dad and try to bond over the New England Patriots, a subject I brushed up on specifically for this purpose, but he doesn’t seem very responsive.
Like maybe he’s down on the Patriots now.
Every time somebody wanders up and talks to Bruno about watches, they ask for a photograph.
And every time, I insist that a photograph be taken with my camera as well, and I’m forwarding them all to Sadie.
Aunt Mae even comes up, and we do photos for her, and then I make her lend me her hat and shawl for a photo, and it looks like a different outfit.
“Did you see that? We can pretend that’s what I’m wearing tomorrow.”
“Lord help me,” he grumbles.
“I’m a fun girlfriend.” I grab a champagne off a passing tray, surveying the scene. “I can’t believe how much I missed over these past three years. Some of these kids graduated. An uncle died and I couldn’t be there. Three Christmases I missed.”
“You were estranged from your family for three years?” He sounds surprised.
“And now I’m back!” I say, putting on a big smile.
But it’s possible I’m not totally back. It’s not exactly the reunion I’d hoped for.
I’ve been trying not to admit it to myself, but people seem a little frosty.
I get Mom and Danielle being harried being that it’s a wedding, but some of my cousins have been mysteriously monosyllabic.
Do they feel like assholes for excommunicating me?
Or are they still suspicious? Do some people still think I did it?
Maybe it’s going to be a gradual thing. Maybe a few people are starting to realize how wrong they are about me, but I guess I can’t expect everybody to see the light at the same time.
It’s fine. The truth eventually wins out. That’s what I’m telling myself.
I can feel Bruno’s gaze on me. I don’t even want to know what he’s thinking.
I lift my glass to the light and watch the bubbles rise. “Champagne bubbles are one of my favorite visual things. I really feel like they’re underappreciated on an aesthetic level.”
Bruno makes a sound I can’t decipher, which is appropriate being that I can’t decipher his expression either.
Granny Ernie wanders up and I kiss her cheek. “Granny Ernie, this is Bruno. Bruno, my grandmother.”
“Look at you two! Who would’ve thought? A watchmaker!” She looks him up and down. “Kelsey’s last few boyfriends were all theater and artist types. What happened?”
Bruno pulls out a charming smile that melts my mind. Where did that come from? He says, “She’s had it with artists.”
I link my arm in his and tip my head against his surprisingly solid bicep. “Though you could argue that Bruno brings great artistry to his watchmaking.”
“There is no art to watchmaking,” Bruno says. “It’s engineering. Every component in its place, every interaction predictable.”
I snort. “You polish meteorites for your watch faces. But that’s not artistic.”
“Meteorite is stable. It’s been around for billions of years. An ideal watch face material.”
I say, “I think ‘ideal’ is a code word for beautiful and you won’t admit it.”
Bruno says, “Ideal isn’t a code word, it’s an objective assessment.”
“My objective assessment is that you have an entire artistic vision that you’ve disguised as engineering.”
“Now I see it.” Granny Ernie raises a glass and walks off.
I snort under my breath. I watch her make her way across the lawn.
Bruno sighs.
“Granny Ernie is usually a little sharper than that. But I guess it shows we are pulling it off.”
“Which is actually a miracle because the story you concocted? Where I go and stand at the alley door next to the theater, waiting for you to come out after the show? It would never happen. My people would’ve reached out to your people and arranged something.”
“Maybe this time was different.”
“Wouldn’t happen. I can’t believe my brother bought it.”
I turn to him. “I love how intense you are about that. You would never let yourself be so swept away by love that you would do something impulsive.”
“Your point?”
“Someday you’re going to meet somebody, and it will be all bets off, and you’ll do something just like that.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“That is my hope. My fervent hope for you. And she rebuffs you, and you realize too late that you’ve been such a jerk.”
“You have a lot of fervent hopes for me, none of which will ever materialize, sadly.” Bruno checks his watch. “My boat will be at the marina in an hour.”
“And I do think you’re an artist,” I say to him. “I think you doth protest too much that you aren’t.”
“I think you doth use the line that I doth protest too much too much.”
“Well, soon you won’t have to endure all the doth-ing and silly dancing and people calling you an artist. And I’ll take this dress off and be able to breathe again.”
He furrows his brow. “You mean to say you’ve been holding your breath this long?”
“Yeah. And my rib cage is being crushed, and I have to walk like a Barbie doll. I’m like...” I put my face into a mask of agony, all very Greek tragedy.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s my embodiment of agony.” I do it again.
He reaches into his pocket. Suddenly he has his phone up and there’s a click.
“Oh my God, did you just take a photo of me embodying agony? That is not a nice-boyfriend picture to take.”
“Maybe I want something to remember you by.”
“Hilarious,” I say. “And I thought you didn’t take pictures as a billionaire.”
“I don’t, generally.”
I look at the railing instead of him. A good boyfriend would want a picture of that, but not for the purposes of mockery. A good boyfriend would appreciate my embodiments. He’d say, wait, do betrayal again. He’d have favorites. He’d keep a whole album.
Unfortunately, every guy I’ve dated eventually arrives at the same conclusion: that I’m “a lot.”
Sometimes “too much.”
It’s honestly impressive how universal it is, like dudes across the Western Hemisphere have some root-based communication systems like mushrooms where they transmit concepts and preferences to each other.
Usually it doesn’t bother me.
But standing here in a borrowed Hamptons dress beside a fake boyfriend who somehow feels like my only ally in this entire place—a fake boyfriend who is clearly counting down the minutes until he can leave me behind—it’s just hard.
“And that’s what you take a picture of.”
Bruno gives one of his mysterious half shrugs.
“Here’s my embodiment of how much you suck.” I narrow my eyes at him.
“That’s not very expressive.”
“How much you suck doesn’t deserve to have an expressive embodiment.”
“Ouch.”
My cousin Meredith comes up. “The gift you brought is so big. Did you get Danielle and Tyler a trombone?”