Page 12 of One-Star Romance

“Ooh, coffee,” Angus’s mother said, over the Us Weekly she was reading. “I think I accidentally drank a decaf this morning. So distracted, thinking about my baby…” She teared up for a moment, then turned to Natalie. “Would you mind going to get me a cup? I don’t know how I’ll make it through the day without.”

“Um,” Nat said as the makeup artist poked an eyeliner pencil far too close to her cornea.

“Lisa,” Gabby began in a tight voice. “Maybe you could get your own since you’re already done with hair and makeup—”

Lisa thrust her magazine down. “But I don’t know where the coffee bar is—”

“It’s fine!” Nat said. “I’ll go after this is finished.”

“As long as you’re going,” Gabby said, “will you take a peek at the ceremony setup and let me know if everything looks okay?”

So, once she’d been appropriately primped, Natalie went to get a coffee from the clearly marked station in the lobby, by which Lisa had passed multiple times. Then she headed outside.

The bed-and-breakfast Gabby had chosen for the wedding had an absolutely charming garden area, bordered by a forest in the back. A pond stretched along one side of the property, its smooth cerulean surface dotted with lily pads. Gabby had designed many of the decorations herself, and the whole scene looked like one of her paintings come to life. White wooden chairs sat in rows over soft, green grass. The sky was clear, the only clouds dotting it so fluffy Natalie longed to reach out and run her fingers through them. It looked like the platonic ideal of a pastoral scene.

And it felt like being stuffed inside a furnace. Though it wasn’t even afternoon yet, the temperature had climbed to the nineties. Natalie cast around for the right word. The heat was stultifying. Not at all the adjective you’d like people to use when describing your wedding.

Sweat already beginning to bead at her brow, Natalie looked for the person in charge. One of Angus’s groomsmen was fiddling with a tree at the edge of the forest, putting up some sort of platform. Perhaps for the photographer to get a better angle?

Her eyes landed on the flowers being set up at the altar—hydrangeas, lush and blue. Her mother had those at her second wedding. That had been a much smaller affair than this—second weddings generally were. Natalie had walked her mother down the aisle to Greg, then stood off to the side as her mother recited her lines. Because that was what it had all felt like—a play, an unconvincing leading actress delivering a monologue about love and commitment with no feeling behind it.

Maybe the majority of the guests hadn’t picked up on the false sentiment in her mother’s words. But they hadn’t seen Nat’s mom the night before.

Ellen had asked Natalie if the two of them could spend her last unmarried night together. No bridesmaids (Ellen felt it undignified to have bridesmaids this time around), just a mother and daughter splurging on a fancy hotel suite, some quality time to harken back to the days when it had been the two of them against the world. Natalie was newly twenty-one, so they drank pretentious cocktails in the hotel bar and then opened a bottle of wine in their room to share.

Up until that point, Natalie hadn’t spent that much time with Greg. Just some dinners here and there, at which her mother had been almost frantically cheerful. Greg had an annoying habit of giving Natalie life advice that she had not requested. But whatever, her mother loved him. She deserved to be happy, especially since Natalie’s asshole father had moved on almost immediately after the divorce went through.

Tipsy in their hotel room, wrapped in a white bathrobe so plush and comfortable she would have liked to someday be buried in it, Natalie had held up her wineglass. “This might be unorthodox, but a toast to Dad.”

Her mother frowned, surprised, so Nat went on. “He’s a total asshole, but cheers to him for getting out of the way so you could find someone better for you.”

“Oh. Sure, to your father.” They clinked glasses. Then her mom looked down into her wine, face suddenly tired. “It’s funny. If you’d asked me what was going to happen the night before your father and I got married, I’d have told you we were going to end up like the couple in that Notebook movie. I never thought I’d be doing it all again with someone else.”

“Well, I think it’s nice,” Nat said, alcohol turning her sentimental. “That you can go through heartbreak, but things work out the way they’re supposed to, and the love of your life will be waiting on the other side.”

Her mother snorted.

“What?” Nat asked.

“Nothing.” Ellen took another long swallow of her wine.

“Am I getting too sloppy and sappy?”

“No. It’s just…” She let out a sigh. “You don’t need to romanticize. Sometimes you can call things what they are.”

Natalie sat up, suddenly alert. Ellen waved a hand through the air. Alcohol had turned Nat sentimental, but for her mother, it had done the opposite, removing her filter. “Oh, I know. You want a shiny love. Like me when I was young. But let me save you some time and heartbreak. Shiny men, like your father, they’ll get bored of you eventually.”

Natalie tried to smile. “As my mom, aren’t you required to think that I’m endlessly wonderful?”

“Well, of course I do.”

“Okay, because it sounded like you were saying that anyone interesting and worthwhile is going to eventually dump me for someone better.”

In the months after her father left, Natalie’s mom had assured a weeping Natalie over and over again that she was lovable. That her father’s abandonment had nothing to do with a lack in her, just a lack in him. That the sun shone out of Natalie’s freaking ass.

But now, drunk in a hotel suite, her mother was admitting the truth Natalie had always feared—that, maybe, Natalie wasn’t enough.

“I’m just saying that someone like you…” Ellen went on. “You want a Greg. A man who thinks you’re the best thing that ever happened to him.”

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