Emmaline Waters, This Is Your Life Read online

  An abrupt squeal cuts through the air, bringing the singing to a halt. A crashing sound is punctuated by a feral yowl. My head snaps around, searching for the source of the noise.

  No fucking way. This is not happening.

  Unfortunately, though, it is—the “it” being my boyfriend’s (yes, I’m referring to Mark as my better half now) ex-fiancée, who has, if my eyes do not deceive me, donned a wedding gown and crashed my daughter’s birthday party on a bright pink Vespa.

  The scooter is crumpled in a heap on the sidewalk, The Olive Branch’s front door splintered—but somehow still locked—Dominique screeching like a macaw, her blotchy, mascara-streaked face peeking out from under a disheveled veil as she pounds her forearms on the restaurant’s front window.

  I shoot a desperate glance at Mark. “What do we do?”

  Without bothering to ask why a psychotic supermodel-type has splattered herself at an innocent little girl’s birthday party, Dex, whom I haven’t spoken to since he stole my room in Dr. Jacobs’s garage, says, “I’ll talk to her. You guys keep”—his hands tumble encouragingly through the air—“going.”

  Angie glances up at me, her eyes filling with tears. I pat her head and restart the singing, watching Dex from the corner of my eye as he slips outside and into Dominique’s warpath.

  We manage to finish the song, and Angie puffs her cheeks full of air, extinguishing the candles with a single breath. A number of guests hoot and holler, drowning out the yelling—and distracting from the crazed gesticulating—that is continuing to spout from Dominique.

  Remind me to award Dex a gold star for superior ass-saving ability.

  “All right, everyone,” Mark says, waving toward the dining room. “If you’ll have a seat, I’ll get the cake ready and bring it over.” He grins at Angie. “You’ll want the slice with the most frosting, right?”

  She bites her lip. “Yes, please.”

  The partygoers amble back to their tables, and Mom pulls me aside. “What’s going on?” she asks, her head jerking at the door.

  Mark’s beautiful but deranged ex has decided to unleash her neuroses at the most inopportune time, I could explain. Instead, I go with: “She used to work here.”

  “And?”

  “She’s upset.”

  “Was she fired?”

  “I’m not sure,” I respond truthfully. “But she doesn’t look too happy.”

  Mom’s eyes narrow. “Do you think she needs medical attention?”

  “Maybe. That’s why Dex is out there,” I say. “He’s in his next-to-last year of medical school, I think.”

  Mom gets an impressed look she usually reserves for buttering up clients. “Is he?”’

  “Yup.”

  “He’s very attractive,” she says out of nowhere. “I’ve always thought that.”

  Always? As in the two times she’s met the guy? “Oh, yeah?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “He’s with Jung,” I say, hoping to put her dreams of a doctor son-in-law out of commission.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yup. True love,” I add, my response having the desired effect of making Mom speechless.

  I shoot a final glance outside and am relieved to find that Dex has calmed Dominique, who is now swaying gently in his arms, her makeup smearing across the shoulder of his otherwise pristine white dress shirt.

  Satisfied, Mom and I turn for the dining room. But we get only a couple of steps beyond the hostess stand before Mark hijacks us for cake delivery. As Mom teeters off with her arms loaded to the elbows, I ask, “What’s she”—meaning Dominique—“doing here?”

  “Isn’t it self-explanatory?” says Mark.

  I may regret asking this, but . . . “Is that the dress she was going to marry you in?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. He licks a gob of frosting off his finger. “She wouldn’t let me see it. Bad luck and all that.”

  I joke, “She’s gotten over that particular suspicion, huh?”

  He fills my arms with cake. “I wish she’d leave. This is getting embarrassing. I don’t want Angie being upset.”

  “Dex seems to have things under control,” I say confidently. “I’m sure that by the time we—”

  Oh, shit.

  The attack doesn’t register in my peripheral vision until it’s too late, but a flash of dread on Mark’s face suggests he had a moment of advance warning, not nearly enough time to escape the flailing—and shrieking, let’s not forget that—cyclone of Bridezilla spinning our way.

  I freeze.

  Mark freezes.

  Dex lunges after Dominique as if she’s a crazed Pit Bull whose leash he’s lost control of. In the distance, the dining room percolates with curiosity.

  For a second, I imagine I’m the object of Dominique’s hysterical wrath, but she just barrels past me, knocking a couple of pieces of cake from my arms and smashing the rest into my blouse.

  “Whajja fuggin do ah,” she spews in Mark’s face, her voice as gin soaked (years of bartending experience tell me that she’s hopped up on Lime Rickeys) as the drunken stink following her around like Pig-Pen’s dust cloud, “mah ressarah!” She beats her chest, which, I can’t help noticing, is shoved up to her neck and popping out of the gown. (I mean, where was she planning on getting married? The Bunny Ranch?)

  “Calm down,” Mark says in a soothing tone. He reaches for her arm, but she socks him in the mouth.

  Maybe she’s not as drunk as I think she is, her accuracy leaps and bounds better than any barroom-brawling guy’s—or gal’s—I’ve ever seen. I brush the cake off my shirt and risk saying, “Cut it out.”

  She ignores me.

  Mark drags a thumb across his lip, whisking away a trickle of blood; meanwhile, a number of partygoers appear on the periphery of the scene wearing concerned looks.

  Dominique lets fly another unintelligible tirade, hocks a loogie in Mark’s face, stomps on his foot, and dashes for the dining room. By the time Dex and I (Mark’s too busy hopping around and cursing to be of any help) catch up with her, she’s tipped over the crafting table, flattened all of the Barbie tents, and hurled a few of Angie’s gifts into the fire. And now she’s honing in on my daughter’s confused little face.

  I am overcome by the urge to claw her (Dominique’s, not Angie’s) eyes out, but I restrain myself, lest I encourage her to escalate. Slowly, I weave my way to Angie’s side. From the opposite direction, Dominique matches my movements step for step.

  “C’mon, sweetie,” I say, keeping my voice upbeat—and definitely not alarmist—as I nudge Angie from her seat. “There’s a surprise for you in the kitchen.”

  Angie and I back away from the table, Mark materializing beside us as Protector-in-Chief, despite his swollen lip and obvious limp. He cradles me in one arm and Angie in the other.

  This, apparently, is the last straw for Dominique. As an anxious posse of do-gooders—including Dad, GiGi’s veterinarian friend, and a couple of the Red Light, Green Light moms—closes in on her, she bolts sideways between two tables, snagging her dress but not slowing down. With her hands outstretched—does she plan on strangling us?—she begins another mumbling rant, this time two words clearly audible: mommy and daddy. As in me and Mark. With the haughty sneer of a Salem witch accuser, she points from Mark to me to Angie, making it as clear as any drunken goddess could that we are a family, a fact to which she vehemently objects.

  The assault keeps coming—loud, sarcastic, comically animated: mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy, mommy, daddy! But all I hear is witch, witch, witch!

  I check Angie’s face—I mean, there’s a chance she won’t grasp what’s happening—but am gutted to find a look of sudden comprehension.

  As Mark, Angie, and I are poised to slip through the kitchen door and barricade ourselves inside with fifty-pound bags of potatoes, Dad lands a grip on Dominique’s arm, stopping her midstep. Behind him, Jung punches away at a cell phone, presumably dialing 911.

  The image of a rabid dog melds wit
h Dominique’s face in my mind.

  Angie starts to cry.

  Mark bends down and kisses her gently on the forehead. “Shh,” he says, drawing her in for a hug. She buries her face in his chest, and he strokes her hair. “It’s all right.” He shoots me an inside glance. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  Epilogue

  The police took Dominique to the drunk tank for the afternoon, and once the guests dispersed, Mark and I—and Mom and Dad, though they mostly hung back and let us handle things—sat Angie down and told her everything.

  She took the news well, all things considered, which made me wonder if maybe, in some subconscious way, she’d known the truth all along.

  That same day, the four of us adults agreed that Angie would be in charge (yes, I know, dangerous power to give a four-year-old!) of deciding with whom to spend her time: Mom and Dad? Me and Mark? One of us? None of us? It was all okay.

  For a while, she kept things as they’d always been: seven days a week with Mom and Dad (though she transitioned quickly to calling them Nana and Papa). I stayed on at the brownstone too, to give her the chance to know me as a mother, a process she seemed to relish as she tested me with all sorts of naughty—and some nice—behavior, just to watch me squirm.

  Six weeks later, after a particularly enjoyable outing to the skating rink (Mark, Angie, and I have made this our regular thing, at least for the winter months), Angie had an emotional breakthrough—or a Freudian slip, depending on your point of view—and told Mark, “I love you, Daddy.” Only days earlier, I had been the lucky recipient of the mommy version of this heart-rending statement, so I knew exactly why his eyes pooled with tears.

  By the time spring came, most of the drama with The Olive Branch had been sorted out. (In exchange for not pressing charges against Dominique—and she was facing a slew of them, including assault and battery on Mark—her family agreed to hold the note on the restaurant and, more importantly, keep Dominique in check back in France.) As a result, Mark transformed into an even more relaxed guy than he’d already been, opening the door for a bona fide relationship (not just sex this time, but trust and respect and serious feelings!) to bloom between us in a way I’d never thought possible, no matter what I’d secretly dreamed.

  Moving in together was Mark’s idea, around eight months post-Dominique. Even though the Trent catastrophe should’ve made me balk, I felt absolutely zero hesitation. I knew he would be good to me—and to Angie.

  So I left the brownstone.

  Angie visited us first for an afternoon, then for a weekend. Eventually, she brought Snowball along and never took her home. (The cat was a canary in the coal mine, I realized; if we could prove ourselves with her, maybe we could take care of Angie too.)

  The canary survived, and soon Mark and I were sharing parenting duties fifty-fifty with Mom and Dad. (Medical appointments? Me and Mark. Anything school related? Mom’s sovereign territory. Dad was the fun-and-games guy in this New World Order.)

  I didn’t want to push any harder, because things were about as close to perfect as I could imagine. But as the summer drew to a close, Dad’s heart developed another hiccup, landing him in the hospital for a week and putting Angie in the sunny yellow bedroom we’d been busily redecorating.

  During this time, preschool started back up again, and Angie slipped into an easy routine of checkered skirts, peanut butter sandwiches, and afternoon carpool. Mark and I talked—passionately and frequently—about her moving in with us for good; it just seemed right, like the sun rising and setting and rising again.

  But we didn’t want to step on Mom or Dad’s toes.

  So Snowball got bigger—and fatter.

  Angie lost a tooth.

  The Olive Branch began serving lunch.

  Thanksgiving came and went, and no one made a peep about Angie returning to the brownstone. It was encouraging. And terrifying.

  At Christmas, I held my breath. Mark did a lot of nervous talking. Angie was happier than I’d ever seen her before.

  I sensed that Mom and Dad had made peace with the way things were, though they weren’t ready to put that acceptance into words, let alone draft the legal paperwork required to officially transfer Angie into Mark’s and my custody.

  Then came the new year and, with it, a new willingness to move on. Mom and I had a teary-eyed heart-to-heart—I couldn’t thank her enough for what she and Dad had done—and Dad took the subtle (but profound) step of boxing up all but a few of Angie’s possessions and carting them over to our apartment.

  The papers were filed, and life fell into a predictable rhythm. Mom expanded her business; Dad expanded his gardening skills; Mitch Heywood expanded my column space; and love expanded my heart.

  A NOTE TO READERS:

  If you enjoyed this book, please take a moment to write a review and/or share with a friend. Reviews and word-of-mouth are the lifeblood of authors and are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

  ALSO BY MAGGIE BLOOM

  Any Red-Blooded Girl

  Film at Eleven

  Good Luck, Fatty?!

  Love Over Matter

  MAGGIE BLOOM grew up in the ‘80s, under the influence of acid-washed jeans, hair bands, leg warmers, and John Hughes films. She resides in coastal Maine with her family (and the world’s smartest cat, Twinkle).

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue