All Dressed Up by Lilian Darcy Page B

semi-obscured, she had to gesture with
her chin toward the back view of Creep and Redhead, who were
heading up the stairs.
    “Unh… oh,
just…”
    “It was Luke,”
Billy said.
    “Oh, right,”
Mom said. Brightly, for Billy’s benefit. On the way out to the car
she nudged her box of centerpieces against Sarah’s arm and asked in
an undertone, “Are you okay?”
    “No.” Pause.
“But you could help if you offered me the kill-or-castrate deal
that you offered Emma. I was jealous of that.” Another pause. “I
wouldn’t necessarily accept, but I’d really like if you
offered.”
    “Oh, Sarah…”
Mom put the centerpieces down on the car hood, took Sarah’s box and
put that on the hood, also, then hugged her tight. Sarah couldn’t
soften her body enough, and Mom felt the stiffness. She read it
accurately, too. “Do we have a problem, here?” She pulled back,
leaving her hands on Sarah’s shoulders.
    “Sometimes I
wish I wasn’t your easy-care, rational, understanding
daughter.”
    “No, you
don’t.” She massaged the shoulders.
    “Oh, okay, I
don’t. I was wrong. I don’t wish it. I’m totally happy.”
    “Honey – ”
    “Three days
before the invitations went out,” Sarah said. “So there was that,
and about four hundred other urgent wedding details, even the most
trivial of which still trumped the state of my heart, and Dad kept
singing about Fifty Ways for my Lover to Leave me, and, see, I’m
really trying to be difficult and accusatory and emotionally
demanding but already I’m sounding like an idiot to myself, because
Dad’s singing is not something a sane person can feel wounded over,
so I’m going to stop. It wasn’t Emma’s fault that he and I broke up
then. You’re right. I don’t wish I wasn’t your easy daughter.”
    “Okay. Good,”
Mom said. She searched Sarah’s face. “I’m not sure whether to tell
you at this point that I never liked him.”
    “Did you?”
Sarah said, half-eager, half-shocked. “Never like him?”
    “No, I thought
he was wonderful. Until you broke up. Then I realized there was
something about his eyes. They were the exact color of pond scum.
Why had I never seen it before?”
    Sarah laughed.
“Seriously? Pond scum?”
    “In the right
light. I would castrate him, honey, in a heartbeat. Your choice of
weapon. Dad’s fish-gutting knife? Piano wire? The ornamental
samurai – ” She changed tack. Dad had an associative brain, Mom
leap-frogged her own sentences. “You don’t know how much I’d do for
you, Sarah, baby-girl, love of my heart. Do I not tell you that
stuff often enough?”
    “I guess it’s
a compliment to me that you don’t think you need to tell me. You
think I know it already. You think I’m actually grown up, or
something.”
    “Well, yeah,
and I know I’m not. Yet. Ever. You take after your father. The
grown up side of the family.”
    “Let me take
after you, sometimes?”
    “And be
irrational and over-wrought?”
    “Sounds
perfect. I pick the ornamental samurai sword, I think it’ll be nice
and blunt.”
    “Stop talking,
you guys, and open the trunk. My arms are dropping off,” Billy
said.
    So it sort of
ended up okay.
     
    “You know
what?” Lainie’s cousin Angie tilted her head and let her eyes dart
over Emma’s dress, her mouth pursed in assessment. “I actually
don’t like it.”
    Lainie was
shocked. “You can’t not like it!” She loved it. It was a strapless
dream of beading and feathers, a princess of a dress, the kind of
spoiled, high-maintenance movie star dress that you loved anyway,
despite its aura of entitlement, perfect for Emma’s model-thin
figure and cameo oval face.
    “You know
what, though?” Angie took another searching look, taking too long.
Lainie felt her usual uneasy prickle of mistrust in her cousin’s
company, and didn’t know what to do about it. “I just don’t. It’s
too...” She let her sentence trail off.
    Too what? It
wasn’t too anything! Or rather, the too-ness of