Kitabı oku: «Love Your Neighbour: A laugh-out-loud love from the author of One Day in December», sayfa 2
CHAPTER TWO
Crap, crap and triple crap. Gabriel Ryan was divine. ‘Are you selling lucky heather?’
Marla knew she sounded surly, but come on. Really?
What else could he expect when he turned up on her doorstep uninvited, all rumpled with come-to-bed eyes? The man might hold the future of her business in the palm of his hand, but right at that very moment the only question on Marla’s mind was how on earth the sexiest man on the planet could possibly be an undertaker.
His gypsy-black hair would probably be given to curls if he let it grow, but as it was it had just reached that optimum run-your-fingers-through sexy length without veering too far into goth territory. Truth be told, there was something ever so slightly grungy about him. But cool, louche, stubbly grunge, rather than the patchouli-soaked rocker-in-need-of-a-bath kind.
He was smokin’ hot, and Marla didn’t have a fire extinguisher. Pity he was a funeral director. Eeew. Not to mention the fact that he was in danger of killing her business stone dead. The double reality check was enough to make his halo slip down to his throat, and Marla was only sad it wasn’t tight enough to pose a full-on choking hazard. Gabriel Ryan might be easy on the eye, but as far as she was concerned, he was trouble in all the wrong ways.
His face cracked open into a big, easy smile as he lounged against the doorframe and held out a chipped, empty mug.
‘Not heather, but any chance I could borrow a cup of sugar please?’
The ‘cup of sugar’ line again. He wasn’t even original. Marla leaned ever-so-slightly forward and gazed into the empty, chipped mug for a long moment before raising her eyes back up to his.
‘You must be Gabriel.’
He pushed his spare hand through his hair and assaulted her with that slow smile again.
Jeez, he had perfect teeth.
Marla was American.
Teeth mattered.
‘Guilty as charged. But please, it’s just Gabe.’
‘Gabe.’
His name felt treacherously good on her lips. A shiver ran down her backbone as he held her gaze for a second longer than strictly necessary. Invisible to the naked eye, a gossamer spider web of attraction spun around them, and undetectable to the human ear, Mother Nature’s wicked laugh tinkled off the chapel’s stained-glass windows.
Marla swallowed hard. It was her move, but somehow it didn’t feel safe to invite him over the threshold. He was like a vampire trying to glamour her into submission, and right at that moment he was doing a pretty good job of it. She gave herself a mental slap and swung the door wide. ‘Come on through.’
He stepped past her into the chapel, and as she closed the door she couldn’t help but take a sly sniff of him.
Not a whiff of patchouli or dead bodies.
Phew.
In fact, he smelled really rather delicious, all lemony-spice shower gel and fresh coffee. Marla loved coffee. And lemons.
She led him into the small back kitchen and gestured for him to take a seat at the buttercup-yellow formica table. As she flicked the kettle on, she turned to him sceptically. ‘Do you really need sugar?’
He grinned again. He needed to stop doing that. It was distracting.
‘Not especially. But I could murder a coffee.’
Marla made no move to take his bashed-up mug from him, but instead took down two pretty duck-egg blue cups from the cupboard and heaped coffee into them. They needed to talk. It might as well be civilised, over coffee. And at least here she had the advantage of being on home turf.
‘Sugar?’ She held the jar up.
He shook his head and laughed. ‘Never touch the stuff.’
Why oh why did he have to have a beautiful voice to match his beautiful face? His soft Irish lilt was full of gravel, as if the man had actually swallowed a bucket full of blarney stones. She placed the cups down on the table before dropping into the seat opposite him.
‘I’m Marla.’
‘Marla. That’s unusual.’
Oh God. Her name sounded bone-meltingly good with his Irish lilt. He rolled the R in the middle, as if he were playing with it in his mouth, and deciding whether or not to let it escape.
He raised his cup in salute. ‘To new neighbours.’
And there it was.
The perfect inroad into the most delicate of conversations. Marla sipped her coffee and eyed him over the rim, suddenly unsure how to begin now show time had arrived.
He lowered his cup and watched her steadily. ‘So … a little bird told me you wanted to see me.’
Marla coughed at the description of Guinness Guts as a ‘little bird’, but at least he appeared to have passed on her message. It was no good; she couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Look, this is awkward, so I’ll just come right out and say it. I’m afraid you can’t move in next door.’
She breathed out hard and registered the way his eyebrows inched upwards. He nodded and took a long, contemplative sip of his coffee. ‘I know my line of business sometimes makes people a bit squeamish, but honestly, there’s no need to worry. I’ll make sure we don’t cause you any bother.’
Did he really think that that was all there was to this? That she was simply being squeamish? Unfortunately for Marla, he chose that moment to smile at her again and temporarily robbed her of the ability to speak.
‘Look. I promise you won’t be suddenly seeing dead bodies all the time or anything. Scout’s honour.’
He was trying to make light of it. The need to clarify the situation burned in Marla’s gut until she finally regained power over her vocal cords.
‘Gabe, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. This,’ she spread her hands to encompass the building around them, ‘this is a wedding chapel. It’s a happy place.’
Trouble seeped slowly into his dark eyes, but he held his tongue and let her speak.
‘It’s a place where people come to celebrate love, and life, and to enjoy the best day of their lives, you understand?’
He nodded, and for a second he looked as if he really might. Maybe there was hope, after all. Marla crossed her fingers underneath the table and waited.
‘Okay.’
Okay? Even in her wildest dreams, Marla hadn’t expected him to give in that easily.
‘Okay. I can see that our businesses are very different, but I’m also pretty sure we can work something out. A little give and take, you know?’
Damn it. Either he hadn’t listened, or he was being deliberately evasive.
‘Give and take? Give and take?’ She couldn’t hold her voice steady as it helter-skeltered up several octaves. ‘Gabe, people won’t book to get married here if they see a dirty great hearse parked up in the street or a wailing family outside.’
His brows knitted together at her harsh words. Gabe, in turn, watched pink spots burn on Marla’s cheeks.
‘Look, that probably sounded heartless, and honestly, I’m really not, but I … I just won’t let this happen.’
His expression was unreadable as he stared at her across the table. She went for broke.
‘The bottom line, Gabe, is this. Your business will kill my business.’
Gabe steepled his fingers in front of him, and any trace of merriment died in his eyes when he looked up.
‘Then we have ourselves a problem.’
Marla’s stomach flipped over.
‘Because here’s the thing, Marla.’
His voice was soft enough for her to have to lean in close in order to hear him.
‘People come to me to celebrate love too, it’s just at the other end of life’s spectrum. It might not be happy, or frothy, but my services are just as important as yours. More so, probably.’
Distaste dripped from his every word, and pure steel underscored his deceptively soft tone.
‘You’ve made it very clear that I’m not your ideal neighbour, and trust me, I’ll make every effort to minimise the impact I have on you.’
He shook his head with a look of derision and scraped his chair back. He crossed the tiny kitchen in a couple of paces, before turning in the doorway to deliver his parting shot.
‘But make no mistake. Whether you like it or not, in a few weeks’ time I absolutely will be opening for business next door.’
Emily slid down the bathroom wall, slumping to the floor, her back pressed against the radiator to ease the all-too-familiar ache. She hurled the unopened pregnancy test across the room. At least the tell-tale scarlet streak on the loo roll had saved her the bother of wasting eight pounds this month – not that she’d expected much else, given that she and Tom had barely seen each other, let alone made love.
What had started out as a crazy, exciting plan to make a baby had steadily turned into a monthly cycle of failure and heartache, that, month on month, was ripping the heart right out of their marriage.
Seventeen months, to be precise. Eighteen, including this one.
They hadn’t expected to score a home run on their first month, of course not. Hoped maybe, but not expected. Nonetheless, Emily had passed that first month daydreaming of ways to tell Tom their happy news. Would she buy him a card? Spell out ‘daddy’ in alphabetti spaghetti? No, Tom hated tinned spaghetti. And anyway, he’d want them to do the test together, wouldn’t he?
In the end, they’d perched side by side on the edge of the bath and passed the upside-down stick between them as if it might singe the skin off their fingers.
‘You look. No, you! Please, you do it, I can’t …’
In their defence, they had every reason to feel hopeful. Hugh Hefner himself would have been impressed with the way they’d dedicated themselves to their task over the month, but all they wound up with for their trouble was numb bums from the old ceramic bath and a stubbornly empty window where there should have been a blue line. Month two followed pretty much the same pattern. Month three involved a little less sex and a decent bottle of Rioja to drown their sorrows. Month four … well, suffice to say it had been one long downhill slide from there to here, eighteen months later on the bathroom floor.
Emily was just glad Tom was away on business. Again. At least this way there was no one around to have to paint a brave face on for. She could quite easily spend the entire evening curled up against the radiator. In the end she cried herself to sleep, and only the lure of a very large glass of Shiraz held enough incentive to make her drag herself downstairs some time just before midnight.
Three hundred miles away, Tom dropped down onto the bullet-hard mattress in his drab Brussels hotel room and kicked off his shoes. It had been a long day of ball-ache meetings, and he was hot and hassled. He needed to relax.
Guilt gnawed through his gut as he glanced at his BlackBerry on the bedside table. His hand even hovered over it for a second before he bottled it and reached for the TV remote instead. Emily would’ve called if there was good news to report, and he just couldn’t muster up a long-distance supportive shoulder. This trying-to-conceive business, or the TTC club, as it was chattily called on the many message boards Em had signed up to, wasn’t at all like those rose-tinted rom-com movies she adored. Oh no. This was more like some fright night, bloodthirsty Halloween movie being shown on nightmarish monthly repeat, and Tom was sick to the back teeth of the lot of it. He’d had a bellyful of Emily’s brave attempts to raise a smile for his benefit with grey tear tracks on her cheeks, and he could practically recite his own predictable ‘maybe next month’ speech in his sleep.
How in hell had it got this bad?
God knows he loved her, and before all of this baby crap he’d known exactly how to show her, too.
‘Let’s make a baby.’
He wished he’d never uttered those immortal bloody words as he’d cradled her in his arms in bed, still buried deep inside her, knowing he wanted nothing else for the rest of his life.
Since then, somewhere along the way, sex had become less about impulsive lust, and more of an insert tab A into slot B, and then hope like hell that something sticks. And now, to make things worse, if things could possibly be any worse, Emily had started to mutter about going to the bloody doctor to get tests.
He sighed hard and dragged his weekend bag closer.
A fresh wave of guilt washed over him as he shoved his hand underneath the carefully folded shirts, feeling for the dog-eared porn mag beneath the baseboard. He tried to block out the thought of what Emily would think of him for wasting precious semen.
But then, she wasn’t in her fertile window anyway, so what did it matter?
The bleakness of being more familiar with his wife’s menstrual cycle than he was with the football fixtures wasn’t lost on him. He pushed the whole sorry mess to the back of his mind and unbuckled his belt. He flicked the magazine open to his favourite page. At least he could rely on Candy from Arizona not to take her temperature before spreading her legs.
CHAPTER THREE
Jonny clanged his fork against the side of his wine glass.
‘Order, mon chers, order!’
He looked from one face to another as they gathered around Marla’s kitchen table. It had been a little over a week since Gabriel Ryan had thundered into the village on his motorbike, and this was the first official meeting of the hastily cobbled-together committee to get him thrown out again just as fast.
Emily paused with her fork full of lasagne midway to her mouth, and Dora, the chapel’s octogenarian cleaning lady, fiddled with her hearing aid until it whistled furiously. As the self-proclaimed campaign leader, Jonny shot her a mutinous look. Dora’s husband, Ivan, smiled benignly at his wife.
‘You hum it, I’ll play it, dear,’ he muttered, and helped himself to a third glass of Merlot.
‘So,’ Jonny said with a theatrical flourish. He nodded pointedly at Ruth, village florist and gossip central, to start taking notes in the pad he’d thrust into her hands when she sat down. Taking a great slug of wine, she darted her eyes around the table, then picked up her pen and clicked the end a few times in a show of efficiency.
Satisfied that his every word would be recorded for posterity, Jonny cleared his throat and planted his hands on his snake hips.
‘Right, so. We all know why we’re here. The fucking Munsters are trying to set up shop next door to the chapel, and it’s our job to get shot of them. Like, pronto.’
He glanced around at the suddenly hushed group, who looked slightly shell-shocked by his rousing opening gambit.
Ruth raised a hesitant hand.
‘Er, Jonny? Do I have to write the “fucking” bit down?’
‘Christ almighty, Ruth!’ he exploded. ‘Just get the general gist down, this isn’t CSI fucking Shropshire!’
‘Why is he reciting the alphabet?’ shouted Dora, her hearing aid now whacked up to full.
‘He isn’t, Dora. It’s a cop show,’ Emily supplied.
‘Oh. Oooh, you wouldn’t half make a lovely Bergerac, Jonny.’
‘Drove a Jaguar, you know.’ Ivan nodded sagely.
‘“Bergerac”?’ Jonny seethed, askance. ‘Fucking “Bergerac”? Pure Captain Jack Harkness or no one, thank you very much Dora.’ If he could have donned a military overcoat and heavy boots to ram his point home, he would have.
‘Captain Hairnet? Never heard of him,’ Dora muttered, a gleam in her eye as she ran her hand over her freshly set hair.
‘What did he drive, Jonny?’ Ivan said, squinting at the wine bottle to see if there was any left. ‘Might jog my memory.’
‘A goddamn bloody space ship!’ Jonny all but shouted, sending Dora’s hand straight to her ear to adjust her hearing aid again.
Ivan nodded. ‘I know who you mean, now.’ He leaned across to stage whisper to Dora. ‘The one with the big ears, darling.’
Dora’s face cleared into a smile that displayed her neat rows of false teeth to perfection. She looked at Jonny and tapped the side of her nose. ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’
The mutinous expression on Jonny’s face as he felt for his cigarettes made Marla drop her head into her hands, and Bluey flop his massive head onto her knees under the table in silent solidarity. This was hopeless. Gabriel Ryan was going to open up his funeral parlour regardless, and there was precious little they, or anyone else, could do to stop him.
‘What we need is a plan of attack,’ Jonny said, recovering himself and flapping a hand at Ruth to put her wine glass back on the table.
‘Write that down. I’m thinking we should start with a petition. After all, lots of local businesses around here benefit from the chapel. Look at you, for instance, Ruth. You’ve never been so busy.’
Ruth looked up from her pad with a vigorous nod.
‘It’s true, Marla. The chapel’s brought in so much new work. I mean, I do almost as many weddings these days as I do, er … funerals …’ She tailed off, having inadvertently highlighted the fact that she could only benefit from Gabe’s arrival. She was dying to meet the man himself. The villagers had talked him up into a cross between Heathcliff and the devil incarnate, and if that beast of a motorbike she’d seen parked outside his place was anything to go by then they might not be too wide of the mark. Thoroughly overexcited, she knocked back the rest of her wine.
‘We could follow it up with a public meeting in the chapel,’ Emily suggested.
She tucked a stray strand of her neat, jet-black bob behind her ear and glanced up the table towards Marla. She desperately wanted to help, not just because Marla was her closest friend, but because the chapel was her lifeline. The idea of losing it horrified her. Tom was away so much that she’d be unbearably lonely without work, and truth be told, it was becoming her bolt-hole even when Tom was at home.
A fact that she wasn’t quite ready to dwell on.
‘Thank. You. Emily,’ Jonny said, banging his fist down on the table between each word in gratitude for a rational suggestion. ‘Stellar idea.’
Marla’s grateful smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. The locals could be a fickle bunch. It had taken them a good year to accept the chapel into their midst, especially since the majority of weddings they held were not for local couples. The chapel’s kitsch appeal and Jonny’s colourful style as a celebrant ensured that it attracted more than its fair share of the weird and wonderful, usually rolling into town with a wedding party of even more weird and wonderful guests. It was never dull, and Marla loved it.
She gave herself a stern telling off for being so defeatist and vowed to try harder.
Besides, Jonny was right. Local businesses did benefit. The chapel had given the local tourist trade a massive shot in the arm, but would it be enough for them to actively come out and support her now?
Ivan raised his hand.
‘Think you should know, old boy. That Irish chappie has asked my Dora to clean a couple of times a week. Seems a decent sort, actually. Ate Dora’s shortbread, and it’s bloody awful.’
He nodded knowingly around at the others, clearly not feeling a jot of disloyalty towards Marla, nor to his wife for the slight to her cooking skills.
Jonny shot daggers at Dora.
‘Well, I hope you’ve told him to stick his job where the sun doesn’t shine.’
‘She starts Monday week,’ Ivan supplied merrily as he drained his glass in one gulp.
‘I don’t friggin’ believe this!’ Jonny howled. ‘Is there anyone here who isn’t planning to jump ship?’ An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. Ivan scrubbed a hand over his tufty grey hair and twiddled with his bow tie.
‘He’s asked me to look after his garden. Bit of maintenance, like. Told him I might as well, seeing as I do yours and it’s only next door.’
Marla, who’d stayed quiet throughout the meeting, finally spoke up.
‘Look guys, it’s okay, really.’ She turned to Ruth. ‘Ruth, of course you should do their flowers.’
Ruth smiled gratefully and wrote it down in case anyone forgot Marla had said it.
‘Ivan, Dora, it’s absolutely fine about the cleaning, and the gardening. If you don’t do it, someone else will.’
‘We can be your moles,’ Dora offered, with a gleam in her eye.
‘Hallelujah. We’re saved,’ Jonny muttered sourly.
Marla admonished him with a gentle frown and patted the older woman’s hand.
‘Hey, we’ve made an encouraging start, haven’t we?’
She stood up and started to gather the plates. ‘A petition and a public meeting seems like a good way to get the ball rolling.’ She was tired suddenly and ready to have her home back to herself. ‘Let’s call it a night, okay?’
Emily carried the plates through as everyone else pulled on their coats and shuffled out in varying states of sobriety. Marla loitered on the doorstep whilst Bluey went for his constitutional evening stroll around the tiny garden. He was far too big a dog for Marla’s cottage, but he was inherently lazy and content to be the unlikely master of his mini-manor. When she came back into the kitchen a few minutes later, Marla found Emily bent double, rooting through the freezer. She emerged with a triumphant smile and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.
‘Still hungry?’ Marla asked.
‘Not really, but isn’t ice-cream essential for American girly chats around the kitchen table?’
‘You’ve watched too many re-runs of The Golden Girls,’ Marla laughed as she placed a bottle of wine next to the ice-cream on the table. Emily’s eyes moved from the wine to the ice-cream with a heavy sigh.
‘This is my staple dinner when Tom’s away.’
Marla found spoons and glasses and sat down. ‘Which seems to be quite a lot these days?’ She twisted the lid off the chilly Pinot Grigio.
‘You noticed.’
Marla nodded and filled their glasses.
‘He’s just busy with work. You know how it is.’
Emily peeled off the ice-cream lid and sighed.
‘Who am I kidding? He’s avoiding me, Marla.’
‘Surely not. Why would he do that?’
‘Because we’re trying to have a baby.’
Marla nodded, her face a study of sympathy. She’d been aware of Emily and Tom’s decision to add to their family from fleeting conversations and casual remarks, but looking at her friend’s miserable expression it was obvious she’d played it down, or else played it close to her chest. ‘Well … I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that avoiding you isn’t going to help make that happen.’
Emily’s shoulders slumped. ‘That’s the problem. It isn’t happening.’
Oh. Marla hated to see her friend so low, and cast around for something encouraging to say. ‘They say it can take a while to catch, Em.’
‘Yeah, I know. But it’s been over eighteen months now.’ Emily started poking her spoon gloomily into the ice-cream.
Marla couldn’t believe her friend had kept this secret so long. ‘Have you seen the doctor?’ she asked.
Emily shook her head with a cynical laugh. ‘Why do we, as women, know that it’s okay to ask for help, but men see it as an insult to their manhood? Well, Tom does, in any case.’
Marla reached over and squeezed Emily’s hand. ‘Give him time, Em. He loves you. He’ll come around.’
‘You reckon? Think, Marla. When was the last time you even laid eyes on Tom?’
Marla cast her mind back. Actually, she couldn’t remember. Tom used to visit the chapel almost daily, but now she came to think about it she hadn’t seen him more than a handful of times in recent months.
‘Exactly.’
‘I never realised, Em. What are you going to do?’
Emily looked helpless. ‘I’ve booked us in to start tests – or for Tom to give a sample, at least. I haven’t dared bring it up again since I told him, because it always ends up in a row.’
‘I’m sorry, honey,’ Marla soothed. ‘Bloody men. Mars must be a boring place with all of that testosterone swilling around making civilised conversation impossible.’
Emily rolled her eyes. ‘I bet they play a lot of darts and live on beer and pizza.’
‘Give me Venus anytime,’ Marla said. ‘Wine and ice-cream is much more fun.’
Emily clinked her glass against Marla’s. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ she agreed, pushing the ice-cream tub across the table. ‘So. Marla.’
Something about the sudden speculative gleam in Emily’s eyes put Marla on her guard. ‘Umm?’
‘Have you never met the one?’ Emily pressed.
‘The one?’ Marla fidgeted in her chair, uncomfortable with the turn the conversation was taking. ‘You’re such a hopeless romantic, Em.’
‘Is that a yes?’
Marla shrugged. ‘I’m just not looking for Mr Right.’
‘Everyone is, Marla.’
Marla sighed. ‘Not me. I’ve no desire to tie myself down to some man, only to see it all go wrong a few years later and end up as another divorce statistic. No thanks.’
She winced as a shadow passed over Emily’s face.
‘Oh God, Em, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you, obviously.’ She squeezed her friend’s hand. ‘It’s just a personal thing, that’s all. I’ve had more step-parents over the years than I have fingers to count them on. Us Jacobs just aren’t cut out for all of that forever and ever, amen stuff.’
Emily sighed. ‘I don’t think divorce is a genetic thing, honey,’ she said. ‘You can’t go through life avoiding commitment on the off chance that you’ll get your heart broken.’
‘I’m not saying I’m off men altogether,’ Marla said, scraping a curl of ice-cream onto her spoon. ‘I just don’t see the point to all the forever and ever drama.’
‘I’d keep that line out of the chapel’s press-pack if I were you,’ Emily laughed.
Marla lifted her shoulder with a smile, well aware that her own values flew in the face of her livelihood.
‘Well, that’s a shame, really,’ Emily wheedled. ‘Because if you were in the market for romance, I think I’ve caught our new neighbour making eyes over the coffins at you.’
Marla brandished her spoon across the table. ‘Enough, Em.’
‘But I have!’ Emily laughed. ‘Come on, admit it … he’s easy on the eye, isn’t he?’
Marla studied her fingernails. ‘I haven’t noticed.’
‘Rubbish! Let’s pretend for a second that he isn’t an undertaker, and he isn’t your arch enemy …’ Emily’s eyes danced. ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’
Marla looked her friend straight in the eye. ‘Honestly? No. No, I wouldn’t.’
And she meant it. The way her body reacted whenever Gabriel Ryan was around frightened the living daylights out of her. Even without all of the barriers Emily had listed, Marla’s biggest problem with Gabe was that he stole away her powers of self-control without even trying, and they were just about all she had to hold on to.
Half an hour later, Marla sloshed a measure of brandy into a tumbler and threw one last log on the fire. She’d finally managed to prise Emily away from the ice-cream and into a taxi, and had spent the last twenty minutes clearing and straightening the kitchen until the cottage was back to peaceful perfection again. Bluey loped in, well-fed and content to flop down onto the sofa he more than filled, and Marla curled herself into the armchair beside him. Companionable bookends, as always. This was all she wanted, all she needed. She reached out and stroked his gentle face as she sipped the nightcap in an attempt to settle her stomach. It seemed to be constantly jumbled up with nerves these days. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Gabriel Ryan had roared into the village. It had taken three years of hard work to carve out her place here in this community, and the sense of safety and peace it afforded her was precious beyond measure.
Gabriel. Even his name was a misnomer.
The man was no angel, that much was for sure. Hell’s angel, more like, with that filthy great motorbike and James Dean sex appeal. Strange really, for an undertaker. But then, as a marriage-phobic wedding coordinator, who was she to judge?
Her eyes wandered over the small collection of family photographs on the fireplace.
Her sex therapist mother, birdlike in a flower garland and jewel-bright sarong, on holiday somewhere with Robert, one of Marla’s varied collection of stepfathers. He’d been by far the best of the bunch, and for a while back there Marla had almost believed that her mother had finally settled. She’d been wrong of course, but by then Marla loved the gentle-giant English doctor she’d come to look on as almost as much of a father as her own dad. She’d felt the loss of him from her life like a bruise on her heart when her mother had declared herself unable to tolerate another English winter and decamped back to the States, and stayed in touch as much as their schedules allowed. But Marla had let contact slide when it became obvious that he seemed unable to stop himself from asking for news of Cecilia, even when hearing of her mother’s newest beau was clearly painful.
A picture of her father stood alone in the next frame alongside it. Another serial aisle-walker, she’d long since lost track of his numerous wives and, no doubt, offspring, scattered across the States. He’d been a benevolent figure in her childhood, and an absent one in her adulthood. It wasn’t that Marla wasn’t fond of him, more that she knew very little of him besides his predilection for upgrading his wife for a younger model every few years.
Between them, they’d painted a very clear picture to Marla on love and romance.
Don’t pin your hopes and dreams on one person, because soon enough you’ll want to pin them on someone else. Or worse, they’ll pin their hopes and dreams onto someone else and leave you behind to ask around for crumbs of news of them from mutual acquaintances.
Her mother would no doubt have a field day if she ever got to analyse the jarring juxtaposition between her daughter’s personal and professional opinion on the sanctity of marriage. A deep, hidden yearning for a husband would no doubt be her dramatic conclusion, and she couldn’t have been more wrong. For Marla, it was simple. She was playing to her strengths. Her American roots, her organisational skills, her ability to identify a niche market. It could have been any number of things; it just so happened to be weddings.
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