Mother of the Bride (5 page)

“I wouldn't put it that baldly, but yes, I suppose so.”

“Is Aldo aware of this?”

“I came to explain it to him. And to meet your niece.”

“Bebe isn't here. She's with Aldo.”

“They aren't at his apartment. I went there first. Aldo gave me your address on the phone, so I thought they might be here.”

“I have no idea where they are. Bebe's curfew is eleven-thirty. You're welcome to wait, if you'd like.”

Gus glanced at his watch—10:15. “I won't be keeping you up?”

“I always wait up for Bebe. I can give you a cup of coffee if you don't mind instant decaf.”

“Decaf would be fine, thanks.”

“After you.” She swept her arm toward the door.

Gus waited on the wooden landing while she turned off the lights and locked the door. He could hear the whine of traffic from Ward Parkway, a few blocks to the east, one of Kansas City's grander boulevards sweeping south in a wide and affluent arc from the Country Club Plaza. A dog barked a couple houses away. The still and damp night air smelled pleasantly of dying leaves and wood smoke.

Cydney Parrish, he noticed, as she ducked past him on the landing and led the way down the steps, smelled faintly of… lilacs? Or was it Windex? She stopped when they reached the blacktop driveway and she saw his car. The long, sleek British racing green hood gleamed black in the wash of the security lights.

“Is that a Jaguar?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What model?”

“An XJ8 coupe.”

“Very nice,” she said thoughtfully, looking the car over.

One of the fuzzy moths darting around the lights took a dive into her hair. Gus reached up to pluck it out, caught himself and lowered his hand. She brushed the moth away, led him through a gate in the chain-link fence and across the backyard.

“Watch out for wickets,” she said over her shoulder. “I was one short when I pulled them up yesterday.”

Cydney Parrish wrote in secret—the locked door and the way she'd snatched her manuscript out of his hand told him so—and played croquet. Gus hadn't played since he was a kid, growing up in a house very much like this one with its ivy-covered brown brick walls and half-beamed stucco gables.

It had been a long time since he'd sent his brother Artie's battered croquet ball hurtling into their mother's flower beds. They'd played badminton, too. Gus looked over his shoulder, saw a privacy fence on the back property line and a sagging net suspended between thin metal poles. He and Artie had played with their parents' tennis rackets, which had sent the shuttlecock whizzing over the net at light speed.

The memory gave Gus a sharp stab of nostalgia, loss and a twinge of unease. No matter how it looked, he wasn't behaving like a Victorian patriarch. He didn't give a damn about the money. He cared about Aldo. His tall, lanky, goofy nephew was all the family he had left, and Artie had trusted him—little Gus the geek, who'd used to pretend he was John McEnroe charging the net at Wimbledon—to take care of his son.

“I'll bet your missing wicket is buried in leaves,” Gus said, crunching through leaves the size of his hand shed by the maple tree soaring over the roof of the house.

“Probably. But I love to watch the leaves blow around.”

So did Gus. He liked birdbaths, too. Cydney Parrish had one on the front lawn and one here in back. Birdfeeders hung from the maple tree and sat on the brick wall lit by carriage lamps that enclosed the patio. Evening dew sparkled on the redwood furniture, chairs and a table with benches. No umbrella and no drapes on the French doors that led into the house, into the dining room. Cydney Parrish must like the sun.

“Have a seat.” She opened the right-hand door, stepped inside and gestured him toward an oval oak table. “I'll put the kettle on.”

Gus followed her, shut the door and took off his jacket. She turned left into the kitchen, through a doorway between half walls with spindles. He hung his jacket on the back of a ladder-back chair padded in mauve corduroy that faced the kitchen and creaked when he sat down. He smelled furniture polish and roses, looked behind him and saw a basket brimming with potpourri on a hutch with glass doors. An open doorway next to the hutch led into a sunporch with jalousie windows, an artist's drawing board and a banker's lamp burning on a desk.

Gus turned around and watched Cydney Parrish open a drawer for spoons, a cabinet for mugs and pluck a tea bag from a canister. He didn't know what to make of her. Until half an hour ago he'd thought she was a man. Until Aldo floored him with the news that he was marrying Fletcher Par-rish's granddaughter, he'd thought the old bounder had only one child, Gwen. The mother of the bride, soon to be a bride herself.

He'd seen the headline—
GLAMOROUS GWEN TO MARRY RUSSIAN PRINCE
—on the front page of a tabloid in the convenience store where he'd stopped for gas. He'd bought a copy and read the article. This was Gwen Parrish's fifth marriage, to an honest-to-God Romanov, a very distant cousin of Czar Nicholas. She'd been widowed the first time—Aldo told him
Bebe's father was dead—and divorced the rest. Her father was on wife number six. Gwen Parrish lived out of a suitcase, which was, Gus suspected, the reason her daughter lived in Kansas City with her aunt.

Cydney didn't fit in the same picture with Fletcher and Gwen Parrish. She didn't look anything like her sister—a Candice Bergen ringer with a Kathleen Turner voice he'd seen on
60 Minutes
—or her larger-than-life father. Except for talking to pictures of him cut out of magazines, she seemed perfectly normal.

“Help yourself.” She brought a tray into the dining room and put it down in the center of the table. “I'll be right back. I have something to show you.”

She cut through the kitchen and vanished down a dark hallway. Gus hoped she wouldn't reappear in a negligee.

Speak for yourself, Munroe,
his inner voice said, which surprised Gus. Cydney Parrish wasn't his type.

A plate of macaroons, homemade by their lopsided shapes, sat on the tray next to the coffee. They were good. Gus was midway through a second one when Cydney came back with a brown Kraft envelope. Uh-oh. Manuscript size. Gus swallowed and took a swig of coffee.

“I don't read manuscripts by aspiring writers, Miss Parrish. It's nothing personal. Just my rule.”

“Don't worry.” She nudged the tray aside, undid the clasp on the flap and upended the envelope. “This isn't a manuscript.”

Several smaller envelopes tumbled out onto the table, all labeled in magenta ink and a neat, boxy script. One said “IRAs,” another “Stock Portfolio” and a third “Trust Fund from Dad.” She opened this last one, unfolded a sheet that said “Quarterly Summary” at the top, laid it in front of him and pointed to a bottom line that made him gulp. Gus glanced up at Cydney Parrish, her hands spread on the table and fire in her eyes.

“My niece has a name, Mr. Munroe. It's Bebe. Short for Beatrice, which is Latin for 'she who makes others happy' She makes Aldo happy, he makes her happy, and that's all I care about. I love Bebe and I will not let you break her heart.
I have enough money to support her and Aldo and put them through college, so why don't you take this—” she pulled the faxed codicil out of her pocket and smoothed it flat on the table in front of him “—and Aldo's fifteen million dollars and shove them where the sun doesn't shine.”

“Uncle Gus!” The French doors banged open and Aldo burst into the dining room. “What are you doing here?”

His nephew raked back his shoulder-length hair—which Gus hated—and glared at him. His jaw twitched and two bright angry spots burned in his cheeks. Gus shifted in his chair to face him.

“I'm having coffee, Aldo, and being put in my place by—”

A goddess. A tall, lithe young goddess with a flaming braid, a face by Rubens and a body by
Playboy
stepped into the house behind Aldo. A diamond solitaire big enough to choke a horse flashed on her left hand. Bebe. Worth her weight in diamonds. She who makes others happy. Just by breathing.

She flicked Gus a nervous glance with the biggest, dewiest brown eyes he'd ever seen, then dropped her gaze to the table. She blinked and lifted a startled, worried frown to Cydney Parrish.

“What's going on, Uncle Cyd? This is your God-Save-Me-and-Bebe-from-Living-in-a-Refrigerator-Crate-and-Eating-Cat-Food Fund. Why are you showing it to Mr. Munroe?”

“Yeah, Uncle Gus.” Aldo flung himself hands first onto the table and into Gus' face. “What are you trying to pull?”

“Nothing. I just drove up to meet your fiancee and—”

The dazzling Bebe reached for the faxed codicil. Gus made a grab for it and so did Cydney. They both missed and ended up slapping hands in the middle of the table. Bebe raised the fax to her nose and read it, her lips moving, a frown puckering her flawless brow.

“What is it, Bebe?” Aldo peered over her shoulder.

“Read it.” She handed him the fax and turned her big, brown bedroom eyes on Gus. “I'm not very smart, Mr. Munroe, but I understand enough of what's on that paper and I know my Aunt Cydney well enough to figure out what it means.”

Aldo looked up from the codicil, bewildered. “You do?”

“It means your uncle doesn't like me and he's going to keep your money until you're twenty-five, but Uncle Cyd is going to cash in her God-Save-Me-and-Bebe Fund so we can get married.”

Her full, perfect lips trembled and tears formed on her incredibly long lashes. Gus felt like a heel, a jerk. A Victorian patriarch.

“That's what it says.” He got quickly to his feet and came around the table. “But that's not necessarily what I plan to do.”

“Isn't it?” Cydney snatched the fax from Aldo and threw it, a crumpled-up little ball of thermal paper, at Gus' chest. “Then why did you barge into my house and shove that under my nose?”

“Good question, Miss Parrish. Glad you asked it. The truth is—”

The truth was, he'd seen red when he'd heard the name Fletcher Parrish. It was also true that he'd felt old and alone and left out, but his pride wouldn't let him admit that.

“The truth is—” Gus drew a deep breath and let it go. “I feel like a horse's ass and I wish somebody would kick me.”

“How 'bout a punch in the nose?” Cydney asked darkly.

“Why not?” Gus smiled sheepishly. “I think I deserve it.”

“Okay,” the beautiful Bebe said, and then she slugged him.

chapter

six

Gus woke up surrounded by flowers, baskets and vases heaped with blooms in every color and variety known to horticulture. Panic shot through him and his heart seized. I'm dead, he thought. Dead and laid out in a funeral parlor. Then he blinked and his eyes focused on a plastic glass full of ice chips on the narrow, laminated table that was pushed up against his chest.

Hospital room, he realized. I'm in a hospital room. How in hell did I get here? He'd never been able to take a punch, but this was ridiculous.

Gus pushed himself up against a rock-hard pillow. The mattress beneath him rasped and felt like it was stuffed with corn husks. The hiss it made, like a tire losing air, brought Cydney Parrish to his bedside.

“How do you feel, Mr. Munroe?” She leaned toward him, peering anxiously into his face. “Can I get you anything?”

Now that he was semiupright, Gus felt the slow, sick thud in his head and a wash of dizziness. He raised his hand to cover his eyes until the room stopped spinning, just as Cydney Parrish raised hers to tug the cement pillow up behind him. Her hand smacked his nose. Gus howled.

“Oh I'm sorry!”
she cried. “Oh Mr. Munroe! Let me—” She reached for him again and Gus clapped his hands over his nose.

“No!” he said, only it sounded like “Dough!” He lay back against the pillow and closed his eyes. “I'm okay.” Gus swallowed the foul taste in his mouth and felt his stomach lurch. “I think.”

He heard a screech and cracked one eye. Cydney Parrish pulled a high-backed, lime-green chair close to his bed and sat down. The vertical blind on the window behind her was closed, but the thin line of sunlight that edged the slats— Sunlight? Jesus. He'd been out all night!—blazed like a klieg light. Gus winced and shut his eye.

“Why am I in the hospital?”

“Bebe hit you. Do you remember?”

You bet he remembered. The beautiful Bebe. She who makes others happy and packs a punch like Evander Holy-field. He remembered the crunch of her fist against his nose but he didn't remember hitting the floor. Or what happened after that. Like how in hell he'd ended up here.

“Is my nose broken?” It felt like it was, throbbing like a stubbed toe in the middle of his face.

“No. The cartilage is just cracked.”

“Then why do I feel like somebody dropped an anvil on my head?”

“Uh, well. I—um—I imagine it's the concussion.”

Gus opened his eyes. Slowly, avoiding the window, focusing on Cydney Parrish. She sat jiggling nervously in the chair, her knees crossed and her fingers clasped around them. He'd last seen her in jeans, a sweatshirt and a droopy navy blue cardigan. Now she wore tan trousers and a creamy turtleneck. A beige and brown and orange tartan shawl lay over the arm of the chair. She didn't look waifish and woebegone. She looked well tailored and well heeled. A very fetching nut, if you liked petite blondes with tiny noses and big brown eyes, which Gus didn't.