Shopping for a Billionaire's Wife (22 page)

“What is this?” I ask. A spectacularly huge Ferris wheel presents itself at the end of the long alley, its cars like a ski tram, little bubbles. The alley is lined with gift shops, bars, restaurants, specialty clothing stores, and—

Ice cream.

“I found it this morning when I was walking around. After I shook off the nice young lady who chatted me up. Friendly, but a bit persistent.” Dad’s face looks troubled. “I asked her for the nearest sweet shop and she kept saying she could give me a ‘strawberry shortcake’ for an extra fifty. Why would she want a little girl’s doll toy? Or did she mean the dessert? Do you know what that means?” 

“No.” I shudder. “And I don’t want to know.”

He laughs and points to a restaurant down the alley. “How about a hot dog first?”

My stomach grumbles. Aside from lunch and a latte made for humans without teeth, I haven’t had much to eat all day.

“A hot dog and ice cream? It’s like we’re at a Paw Sox game.”

The grin he gives me makes the bridge of my nose tingle with tenderness. “You girls loved going to minor league games.”

“I still do, Dad,” I say softly. “We need to do that again sometime.”

“Jeffrey and Tyler like it,” he says, not quite picking up on my emotional storm. “But not like you and Amy always did.”

“It’s a date. We’ll go to a game when we get home.”

“Would Declan enjoy going?”

I start to say that Declan would just take us to the Anterdec suite at Fenway Park to catch a major league Red Sox game, but I stop myself.

“I think he would.” A brewing conflict inside me pings, as if it’s all a mist inside, obscuring a beacon that delivers me to a place where I can find the answer. Declan’s world is so different from my family’s, as divergent as can be. For Dad, those minor league games were a fun treat, a place to bring us and share experiences he never even had as a kid.  

For Declan, going to a baseball game means something qualitatively different. The imprint of how you define that experience—go to a live baseball game—is a different socio-economic language. I can understand that language when it’s spoken to me, but ask me to speak back and my tongue ties itself in knots and I stare, mute and anxious, choosing inaction because action is too unbearably confusing.

Dad and I order hot dogs and sodas and have a seat, munching happily until we’re done.

“Only one?” I tease, knowing how much he loves them.

He pats his stomach. “Saving room for burnt caramel ice cream.”

I raise my eyebrows. “I thought you just found this place this morning?”

He shrugs. “Had to sample it to make sure it was good enough for Marie and you.”

“You’re such a sacrificer, Dad.”

His laughter is love in auditory form.

The ice cream shop is so trendy they have a schedule for which ice creams are offered on which days. When I order the chocolate mint I’m admonished that I must do a taste test because the flavor is so bold it will pull every hair out of my head by the follicle while blasting the 1812 Overture in my ear.

Or something like that.

The clerk is sweet and peppy, and gives me a description of the various flavors like a sommelier. She’s an ice cream steward, and in the end I pick a peanut butter concoction with a cupcake on top, while Dad gets his burnt caramel.

We go outside and find a quiet table under a large umbrella, the shade and ice cream making the mid-day heat bearable.

“How are you?” he asks, just after I’ve shoved a giant spoonful of gratitude in my mouth.

“Mmmup,” I answer.

He acts like he understood that. “No, honey. I mean really. How
are
you? That was quite a stunt you and Declan pulled two days ago.” I can’t read his eyes. He’s gone blank. Not the same way Declan turns into a statue, though. 

Daddy’s not judging. Just asking. And trying to decide how to respond along the way.

I finish my mouthful of ice cream and realize I’m in safe territory here. I can actually tell the truth.

“I’m a mess.”

“I figured.”

“I know Mom and I need to have it out,” I say with a sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“No. I mean—I’m
sorry
. I’m sorry for not stepping in sooner and reining her in. She can be...monomaniacal at times.”

“Ya think?”

“But she means well.”

“A thousand-person wedding with my nemesis as an invited guest and a cat as flower girl doesn’t exactly translate into ‘means well,’ Dad.”

He tilts his head and breathes slowly. In Declan, this is a form of control, a calculated gesture designed to make you think he’s unflappable. In Dad, it’s just how he is.

“Did we ever tell you the story of our wedding?”

“Mom said you guys eloped.” A prickly feeling makes my neck tingle. Or maybe it’s just sweat. Vegas in July is a miserable sheet of reflective heat.

“Sounds like you don’t know the whole story.”

“I guess not.” Why didn’t I pry? Mom’s so free with information. She overshares all the time, but as Dad looks like he’s fighting with himself to figure out how to say what he needs to say, I run through my memory. Mom’s never told a story about their wedding.

“You remember your grandma, Celeste?”

“Sure. We didn’t really see her much, but yeah.” She died a few years ago from a heart attack.  

“Ever wonder why?” He blinks a lot. Declan’s told me that’s a tell in people, a sign that they’re struggling to recall a negative memory, and their brain can’t process it fast enough to manage the emotional reaction.

That tingling in my neck spreads.

“Um, I guess?” Some part of this conversation makes me feel like an introverted twelve year old. 

“She and Marie had a strained relationship. Your mom spent most of her younger years trying desperately to please her. She was a hard woman.” Dad’s face goes tight. He stabs the spoon in his ice cream and pushes it away.

“Marie never stopped trying, though. When we met, your mother thought that becoming a famous artist would finally please Celeste. But Celeste only cared about herself. You know she kicked your mom out at seventeen when she remarried and the new husband hit on your mom?”

“What?”

“Like I said—Celeste was a hard woman. She divorced him about two years later. I can’t remember his name. Celeste called your mom out of the blue one day, pretending the previous two years had been nothing. Meanwhile, the kindness of friends was the only reason Marie graduated high school. She couch-surfed and finished her senior year a semester early. Then she turned bohemian and lived as a squatter off Congress Street, long before that neighborhood was trendy. That’s when we met.”

“I just know you were a vet tech and Mom brought some dog in that had been bit by a rat.”

“Yup.” He gets a faraway look in his eyes and stares over my shoulder. “You can thank James McCormick for that. Indirectly.” Rueful and dreamy, tense and pensive, Dad just sits with his feelings, leaving me to process all of this, knowing that if I interrupt too much the moment will dissolve.

“I knew. I knew the moment I met your mother that I was destined to spend the rest of my life with her. I think she knew, too, but it took a little longer for her to wise up.”

I laugh.

He grins. “We got married fast. Part of it was love. Part was necessity. Your mom was living a life that put her in danger, and I wanted her to move in with me. So she insisted I come and meet Celeste.”

His face turns to stone.

I jump. He looks so much like Declan.

“Shannon, I have never spent a more uncomfortable ninety minutes in my life than in the presence of that woman. For the next twenty-five years or so, until she died—God rest her black, shriveled soul—every time I saw her I gritted my teeth and tolerated her for Marie’s sake, but it took a lot of alcohol afterwards to help shake off the gloom.”

The tingling covers my entire body.

“What—what was it about her?”

“Do you ever pick up vibes from people? Not the way your mother talks about it, with crystals and energy auras.” He frowns. “More like a tuning fork. Someone whose frequency is off just enough that it begins to clash with normal frequency, until you realize something is very, very
off
.” 

“Yes,” I whisper, sitting up in amazement.

“I don’t know how your mother did it. How she came out of a family where she was raised by a woman who had no self.”

“No self?”

“The best description for Celeste that I’ve ever seen came to me a few years ago, in some pop culture magazine. ‘Emotional vampire.’” His sad eyes catch mine. “Do you know what that is?”

I nod.

“She couldn’t stand for anyone else to be happy. As long as she was happy, it was okay. As long as she was the center of attention, all was well. The moment attention was pulled from her, woe be unto you.” Kneading his hands, Dad makes a series of faces that indicate he’s caught in that fragile space between past and present, between old events that trigger current emotions.

“That first time I met her, I just wanted to crawl out of my skin. She fawned over me, Shannon. Acted like Marie and me getting together was the greatest thing since sliced bread. She ate up every detail I gave about myself and somehow paired it with some experience of hers. And her story was always just a little bit
more
.” 

I sigh. “I know the type.”

“When we told her Marie and I were engaged, her eyes lit up. Not with happiness. With a kind of frantic panic that I wish I’d understood back then. It would have saved poor Marie a lot of grief.”

The tingling pierces my heart.

“What happened?”

“Celeste pretended to be so happy for us. Promised to pay for a big wedding. Insisted we hold it at a grand estate just north of Boston. She and Marie’s father came from modest families, and Marie’s dad died when she was in third grade in a bad construction accident, but he was union. The union took care of them. Celeste had a good survivor’s pension. She volunteered around town and had enough connections to feel important.”

“Why do I have a bad feeling about this? Did she make a big scene at the wedding?”

He gets a wry smile on his face, a sickly look that makes the ice cream pool in my stomach like battery acid.

“I wish.”

“What did she
do
?” 

“She—ah, Jesus, honey, I still can’t believe it, more than thirty years later.” He lets out a long sigh, scoops out a spoonful of ice cream, and eats it, his mouth moving over the confection, his mind mulling over his next words. “She went all over town with Marie, lavishing her with attention. Marie ate it up. Like a dry sponge that needed water, she just absorbed it. Celeste paraded all over the place, booking this impressive old estate on the North Shore, right on the water. She was dating this guy named Kirby—that was his nickname. His real name was some old Boston family name. Wentworth something. I don’t remember. I think I blocked it.”

He eats more ice cream.

“She talked it up to all the volunteer organizations she was part of. Whipped herself into a frenzy, and took your poor, puppy-dog mother along for the ride. By the day before the wedding, she’d convinced Marie to let old Kirby walk her down the aisle as her father.”

“And then?” I’m dreading what’s next.

“Celeste assured us she’d pay for everything. Put down bare-bones deposits on the estate, the caterers, the cake, the dress, the rings—everything. She wanted
fancy
. Keep in mind, I was a vet tech. Your mom had been an artist’s assistant, stripping canvas. She quit that job and started working at some health food store when we married, making a few bucks an hour. We were poor.
Scratch
poor. I had about five buddies from the neighborhood and my mom who were planning to come to the wedding. We didn’t need all this pomp and circumstance, but Celeste made it sound like she was going to create the Wedding of the Year.” 

My ice cream sticks in my throat.

“Sound familiar?” His brown eyes, so much like mine, are filled with fury and sadness.

I nod. 

“She bailed on us. The night before the wedding, she had a ‘heart event.” Finger quotes again. “Told all her friends and everyone in her circle—called them all from her hospital bed.”

Dad goes quiet, looking at me straight on, holding the gaze until that tingling over my body turns to ice.

“Oh, no.”

“She didn’t call Marie.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“All the wedding guests she’d invited showed up to her hospital room, including this guy she’d been dating on and off. In front of all of them, he proposed.”

“Huh?”

“Right? So now she’s engaged.”

“I don’t understand.”

He holds up a palm. “You will.”

“The next morning, we showed up at the fancy estate knowing none of this. Me, Marie, my buddies, and my mom.”

“How awful Grandma had a heart attack the night before the wedding! Mom must have been so distraught!”

Dad just stares at me.

Layers of awareness wash over me, until all that’s left is abject horror. “She didn’t really have a heart attack?”

“A ‘heart event.’”

“Whatever—it didn’t happen?” I gasp.

“The weird part,” he says, ignoring my question, “is that when Marie went to pick up her dress that morning, it wasn’t there. They said her mother had come and gotten it for her.”

“Huh?”

“We didn’t have cell phones then, so we just figured Celeste was being nice. Remember—we didn’t know about the heart event, or that Kirby had proposed to her. We thought we were getting married that day.”

“Oh, Daddy.” My heart hurts.

“We get to the estate, and there’s Celeste and Kirby, at the altar with the minister she’d hand-selected. Surrounded by all these people Marie barely knew from Celeste’s volunteer work, a few union buddies of Marie’s father’s from back in the day—and she’s wearing—”

“Mom’s wedding dress,” I choke out.

He nods.

“Celeste comes over, happy as can be, a blushing bride if ever there was one. In front of all those people, she tells Marie how happy she is that Kirby stood by her through her ‘heart event’ the night before, and that he’s her one true love, and the only person she can depend on.”