Page 80 of The Seemingly Impossible Love Life of Amanda Dean

“It’s zipped. Stop messing with it.” Mandy swatted Mom’s hands away. She had been tugging and twisting and fixing Mandy since she got in the car.

“This wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t have to get dressed alone. I knew it was a bad idea,” Mom said.

“It’s over, and I’m dressed now, so can we drop it, please?”

“There’s still the issue of your shoes,” Mom said.

“Honey,” Dad cautioned, but Mom was not listening.

“I’m not wearing any shoes but the ones I have on, and that’s final.” Why couldn’t Mom ever listen to Mandy?

“I’m just thinking about the future. When you look back at your pictures, I don’t want you to be regretful.”

“What pictures?” Mandy huffed. It was a low blow and not her mother’s fault that they hadn’t been able to take any, and poking the bear was never a good idea, but Mandy was already stressed enough. She didn’t need to be thinking about how she would feel about her footwear choices on some hypothetical future date. At this rate, the entire day was doomed, and she wouldn’t want any pictures to remember it at all.

“Don’t get snippy with me.Iwasn’t late,” Mom said.

Mandy bit her tongue. Arguing wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t fix anything either, so Mandy let it go.

“I think it’s Amanda’s day, and we need to respect her choices,” Dad, always the voice of reason, chimed in.

“What’s wrong with wanting it to be perfect?” Mom asked. “I’m not the bad guy.”

“No one said you were,” Dad said.

Mom wasn’t the bad guy, but Mandy wanted someone to blame for everything that had gone wrong—because if not her mother, then who? Mandy had wanted this day to be perfect, because then it would mean her marriage would be perfect—or it would, at least, set her out on the right foot. If Mandy tried hard enough, maybe this time things would work out, unlike every other time in her life. Unlike the last time she was supposed to get married.

Mandy glanced down at her empty ring finger. It felt so strange taking it off to be soldered together with her new wedding band. She had gotten into such a habit of fiddling with it when she was anxious, and now, she had nothing to fiddle with. She didn’t want to think it was the universe’s way of saying toget used to it, but those intrusive thoughts were once again in her head.

“I spy, with my little eye, something blue,” Dad said. It was a game they’d played in the car when she was little. The drive to Disneyland always seemed excruciatingly long, so Dad would come up with little games to occupy the time.

Mandy looked out the tinted window of the limo.

“Not that side,” Dad said, then tipped his head forward to the windows opposite him—since he was sitting basically sideways along the length of the car.

Mandy leaned over Mom, and there it was. “The sky.” While on one side of the limo it was still cloudy and gray, there on the other, it was all cloudless skies—a shade of cerulean that eased Mandy’s racing heart.

“Clear skies ahead,” Roger confirmed.

Maybe the venue had been spared. Mandy could text Candy and get an update—hell, Candy probably had already texted her twelve times by now—but instead, she decided to take a breath, lay her head in her mother’s lap, breathing in the floral scent of Mom’s signature perfume, and stare out the window.

Mom gently stroked Mandy’s arm like she had done since Mandy was little. Was this the message the universe was sending her? That after darkness there was always light. That without rain there’d be no flowers. The world was full of opposites that balanced everything out. There were no absolutes.Alwaysandneverdidn’t actually exist; they were just words that people gave way too much power to.

Mandy glanced back to the gray side of the limo.

Nothing lasted forever.

Or was that the message?

If nothing lasted forever, was Mandy just fooling herself for believing it could?

By the time the limo pulled to the front of the venue, Mandy’s nerves were all over the place, swinging from one extreme to the other. There would be moments she would convince herself it would all be okay, and then in another, worried her presence alone would burn everything to the ground. If she didn’t find stability soon, she would likely get motion sickness. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Roger opened the limo door, and Mom was the first to get out.

“Mrs. Dean, you look fantastic,” Candy gushed.

Roger’s hand was there, and Mandy took it to help her out of the car—because at that moment she needed all the help she could get. Candy stood next to Mom, looking fantastic as always in a crisp pale-peach pantsuit, cell phone at the ready and her Bluetooth headset peeking out from her perfectly poofed Afro. Her always radiant dark brown skin somehow seemed even more radiant.

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