Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

“So… Brooke and Brock? I mean, the names alone would be reason enough not to get married,” I observed drily. She glared at me. “Which is entirely beside the point.”

Maya cleared her throat and started again. “They had the perfect, all-American courtship followed by a perfect, all-American engagement their senior year. Little did Brooke know that her prince was following that all-American tradition of banging a prettier, better-endowed girl who had no qualms about hooking up with her roommate’s fiancé.”

“Your roommate?!” I exclaimed. “So instead of stealing your Hot Pockets, she stole your future spouse? That bitch.”

“Oh, yeah, Joanie was my maid of honor.” She shrugged. “I should have known something was up when she said she didn’t care which bridesmaid dress I chose, she just wanted me to be happy.”

“That was definitely the guilt talking,” I agreed. “So I take it that when Princess Brooke figured out what was happening, she broke the spell and made one hell of a fuss?”

“I came back to the dorm earlier than expected from spring break to find them going at it on my bed. I tossed Brock’s clothes out the window and made him do the walk of shame buck naked down the hail. Joanie ran after him and refused to come back to our room without a campus police escort. She was always a bit of a drama queen. And Brock just didn’t get why I was upset. He told me he didn’t love Joanie. It was just that he was able to do things with her he couldn’t do with me.”

“Because he could only think of you as his future wife?” I asked. “I think Mike had the same problem.”

“No, because I refused to do those things with him,” Maya said primly. “Along with the ‘no fuss’ principle, Mama drilled the ‘men don’t buy the cow’ philosophy right into my brain stem. And Brock told me he respected that. Of course, he respected that because it meant I wouldn’t screw around on him while he was screwing around on me. Anyway, he informed me that I had no right to be angry. That it was really a compliment to me, that my skanky roommate was the girl you snuck around with, but I was the girl you brought home to Mom, the kind of girl you marry.”

“And I take it you didn’t see his philandering as the romantic gesture it was intended to be?” I asked.

“No, I told him to take his grandmother’s ring and choke on it,” she said. “This was about three months before the wedding. I’d just had my first shower, thrown by said skanky roommate. I had to return all of the gifts. I had to take my dress to a resale shop. I had to cancel the four-tier cake, the caterer, the hall. And he didn’t have to do any of it. He didn’t have to deal with people feeling sorry for him or making the ‘aww’ face.”

I sent her a questioning look. She tilted her head, made a sympathetic noise and crooned, “Awwww.”

I winced. “Yeah, that one sucks.”

“My mom sent me down to the printer’s to send out cards announcing the cancellation. I was standing there at the counter, in this shop where they hadn’t changed the stationery samples since 1983, and I couldn’t come up with the wording. I had to be so polite about it. I had to find a nice way to put it, to make sure that neither one of us came out looking bad. The poor engraver couldn’t help me. He’d never had to deal with something like that. He had this helpless look on his face and kept saying that most people just call everyone on the guest list and inform them personally. But I wasn’t up to that and neither were my parents.

“They didn’t want me to embarrass Brock or his family by telling people what a lowdown dirty snake he was. And I kept wondering why? Why protect him? Why sugarcoat it? So I wrote my first card. It was plain white card stock, nothing fancy. Lucida Handwriting font. On the inside, it said, ‘Our wedding has been called off because Brock ____’ and then it had a big blank. The next sentence was, ‘If you want to fill in the blank, call Brock at 555-236-8367 or my former maid of honor at 555-236-1924.’ The engraver got a big kick out of it. I think he thought I was kidding at first. And then I ordered about two hundred of them.”

“How did it make you feel?” I asked. “Because when I sent out the e-mail, I mostly wanted to throw up.”

“About the same,” she admitted. “But I went home that night and slept like a baby. My conscience was clear and I knew that Brock couldn’t say the same. His family was mortified, and once they figured out that it wasn’t a joke, so was my family. My grandma wrote me out of the will.”

I shrugged. “Well, I don’t see you as a sterling and china girl anyway.”

“Oh, I was,” she said, shaking her head. “For about five minutes, it was devastating. I didn’t know how to handle people being mad at me. Pre-engagement me would have done anything to keep people happy. But then, after Nana stopped crying, I felt sort of powerful. I was done being polite. Not having to worry about keeping people happy was like this huge weight being lifted from my chest. I told Nana I loved her, but I didn’t care whether I ever used her silver gravy boat on my very own table. I told Mama that I was moving out and I didn’t know where, and I would call her when I was ready. And I finally told Uncle Herb that if he used hugging as an excuse to touch my ass one more time, he would draw back a bloody stump where his hand used to be.”

I barked out a laugh. “That’s a variety of subjects in one rant. Uncle Herb was lucky you didn’t turn that one into a card.”

“I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that. It could be a whole new product line,” she exclaimed, taking out a notebook and scribbling while she muttered. “Creepy Uncle Cards. When you care enough to say, ‘Stop touching my chest.”

“Your ability to find the incredibly disturbing silver lining astounds me,” I said drily.

“Anyway, on the very long drive to my new hometown, which I hadn’t selected yet, I came up with the idea for Season’s Gratings, sketched ideas for cards on truck stop napkins. I chose a new name, Maya. I figured a Maya wouldn’t bother being polite. And I used the money Brock’s parents had given us for a honeymoon as investment capital.”

“They didn’t mind?”

“I think they were just glad to have the family diamond back. There was a rumor circulating that I planned on throwing it in a garbage disposal, I don’t know where they could have gotten that kind of crazy idea,” she said, making an ineffectively innocent face.

“And why do you carry around a pocket-sized Brock with you?” I asked, picking up her key chain.

“To remind me of how far I’ve come,” she said. “The girl in this picture worried way too much about what people thought. It’s no way to live 4 life, Lace.”

“What about your parents?” I asked. “Because my dad seems to think the silent treatment will make me fold like a cheap chair.”

“Well, they don’t have any pictures of me from the last five years in the house. And when ‘Brooke’ comes home for Christmas, they ask if I wouldn’t mind dyeing my hair a ‘natural’ color. I think they have as much of a relationship as they want with me, and vice versa.”

“But you’re happy now, right?” I asked. “You own your own business. You’re a productive member of society. You obviously have a unique fashion sense. You’re not still consumed by anger-slash-bitterness, right?”

“Well, not all of the time,” she conceded. “I still have twinges, every now and again. But for the most part, yeah, living my own life makes me very happy. You’re going to be okay, Lacey, I promise.”

I’m pretty sure my expression was somewhere along the lines of disbelieving, because Maya let me have the last egg roll out of pity.