Page 25 of Give In

The door opens.

I know before I turn around. I don’t know how I know. Some shift in the room’s atmosphere, a subtle change in pressure, the way Lizzie’s mimosa hand pauses almost imperceptibly on its way to someone’s glass. I turn around and there she is.

Kiki. Leo’s mom.

Juniper had given me the lowdown on things last night

She is, I will give her this, extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of beauty that is crafted and manufactured. It’s hard to tell what she’d look like without all the artifice.

She’s wearing something ivory. It’s not white, but it’s definitely in the white family which rankles me. What kind of woman tries to upstage her future daughter-in-law? Juniper glances at the woman, then looks back at the mirrow witout missing a beat.

KiKi’s blonde hair is perfect. Her smile is the kind that makes you feel, for just a moment, like you are the exact person she was hoping to see.

“Juniper, darling.” She crosses to my sister with her arms out, but Pilar blocks the onslaught.

“Do not touch her yet, I am still working,” Pilar says.

KiKi look taken aback, but quickly hides it. “You look absolutely stunning.”

“Thank you, Kiki,” Juniper says, warmly and without inflection.

Kiki steps back and does a slow survey of the room. She acknowledges Lizzie and Emma and Rebecca with polite nods, but she obviously knows she’ll find no warm welcome with those three.

Then her eyes find me.

“And you must be Clover.”

“That’s me,” I say.

She looks at me, assessing, measuring and ultimately I feel I must come up lacking in her eyes. But the smile doesn’t waver, and her voice when she speaks is warm as anything.

“What a fun name,” she says.

Fun. Not unusual or distinctive or even pretty. Fun.

“Thank you,” I say, because I am a person who has been called worse and also because Juniper is sitting three feet away in her wedding dress and I am not doing anything that makes this morning harder than it needs to be. “Your dress is beautiful.”

“This old thing.” She smooths a hand over it in a way that suggests she has not been thinking about this dress for weeks. “I almost didn’t come today, you know. A wedding is such an intimate thing. But Leo insisted.” She sighs with the light resignation of a woman who is very accustomed to being insisted upon. “I couldn’t say no.”

She drifts closer to me. The other women watch her closely, without inviting her into their midst. I hold my mimosa and smile. Today is my sister’s day and I will not allow anyone to ruin it for her.

“I hear you and Heath had quite the adventure getting here,” she says. Conversational. Light. Like we’re talking about delayed luggage.

“Bit of a travel day,” I agree.

“Heath does love to play the hero,” she says, with a small fond laugh that contains within it an entire revisionist history of a marriage. “He can’t help himself. It’s almost sweet.” She tilts her head. “He can be very charming when he wants to be. Very attentive.” A pause. “At first.”

There it is. There’s the shape of what this is.

I look at her pleasantly. “He’s been very kind,” I say, which is true and also tells her nothing.

She seems to recalibrate slightly. I watch her do it behind the smile. “Of course he has. Heath is kind.” She says it the way you say of course the weather was nice, as if it is a small thing and not the whole point. “He’s just—well, you seem like a perceptive girl. I’m sure you’ve already noticed that he’s very married to his work. Very absent.” She lowers her voice slightly, the register of shared confidence, of one woman leveling with another. “It’s not a criticism. It’s just who he is. I would have hated to see you invest in something without the full picture.”

I consider this.

I consider Kiki, who left her son and his father and has spent twenty years being called by her first name by the child she didn’t raise, offering me the full picture.

I consider Heath on the plane, listening to every ridiculous word I said with his complete and unhurried attention. Heath ordering food in the middle of the night because he noticed I hadn’t eaten. Heath who arranged my room and upgraded it before I even knew he owned the building, not because it was easy but because it was the thing to do.