Single in Suburbia by Wendy Wax

Mench’s daughter’s bridal shower, so I decided not to go. You look like a bonbon in that dress.” She said it with none of the affection that had filled Dan’s voice.
    “Yes, I was telling her that earlier. It’s fabulous, isn’t it?” Dan wrapped an arm around Candace’s bare shoulder, clearly offering his support. “I’m tempted to start calling her Candy.”
    “Don’t.” Candace and her mother uttered the word in unison. Her mother’s tone was adamant, Candace’s automatic. At the age of three, when she was preparing to enter preschool, “Don’t call me Candy” was the phrase her mother had taught her to share with her classmates.
    Candace would have explained that to Dan now, but all of her mother’s formidable attention was focused on him. Candace’s goal now was to minimize casualties and get out alive.
    “And who is this?” Her mother asked Candace the question, though her gaze remained on Dan.
    “This is Dan Donovan, my date for the evening.” Candace felt Dan flinch as she relegated him to the level of paid escort. But she knew her mother too well to think that Dan Donovan was going to pass muster. The tall, dark, good-looking part might fly; the not-so-ambitious and definitely-not-Jewish part would not.
    “Oh?” Hannah Bloom’s tone was icily polite. Candace knew what was coming. As her mother liked to say, all she wanted was what she thought was best for her only daughter; the words “what she thought best” being the operative ones.
    Candace knew what sort of men her mother deemed best for her; she knew because she’d married—and divorced—three of them. Dan Donovan wasn’t one of those kind of men.
    She straightened her shoulders and battened down her mental hatches, wondering just how old she’d have to be before she stopped trying to win her mother’s approval. Then she threw Dan an apologetic look as Hannah Bloom, with the surgical precision of a trial attorney, commenced the third degree.
    “So, Daniel,” she said in a deceptively friendly voice. “You don’t mind if I call you Daniel, do you?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Where are your people from?”
    Dan smiled and Candace thought she saw a twinkle steal into his eyes, which told her he had no idea who he was dealing with. “Originally, County Cork. Ireland, ma’am. More recently, to be sure, we’re from Boston.”
    Candace turned slowly to consider Dan Donovan who, if she wasn’t mistaken, now had a distinctly Irish lilt in his voice.
    “How interesting,” the Grand Inquisitor said. “And what do you do, here in Atlanta?”
    “I’m an accountant.”
    Hannah brightened a little at that. “Oh. Are you with one of the large firms?”
    “I’m afraid not,” Dan replied. “’Twould be a fine thing of course. But I’m a sole practitioner. It allows me my freedom, don’t you know.”
    Candace had a bad feeling the next words out of his mouth were going to be “faith and begorra.”
    She nudged Dan gently, but his attention was focused on her mother. He didn’t look the least bit worried. Or apologetic.
    “Dan is very involved in charitable works, Mother,” Candace felt compelled to point out. “And he coaches his son’s Little League baseball team, the Mudhens.”
    “How nice that you have the time for that.” Her mother’s tone made it clear that she believed only the underemployed would have time for that sort of thing. “How many children do you have?” Here the assumption was that someone named Donovan would have a truckload.
    “Just the one,” Dan said easily, the smile and the lilt firmly in place, “which was a sore disappointment to me sainted mother. I was one of seven.” He winked. “I’d love to have more, meself. And I don’t think it’s ever too late.”
    Candace told herself Dan hadn’t really said “me sainted mother” or “meself,” except of course he had.
    She shot her mother an appraising glance, but saw no sign that she realized how thoroughly she was being had.