The Bride Wore Size 12 (9 page)

“No hotels,” she says in a hard voice that sounds more like the one I remember from my childhood and teen years than the pseudo-sophisticated one she’s using in front of my friends.

I raise my eyebrows.
My
mother doesn’t want to stay in a hotel? Mom always loved hotel living when we were on tour, the room service, the maid service, the bright lights in the lobby, the bar . . .

Especially the bar, since that’s where she could have her assignations with Ricardo.

Things have really changed if Mom’s turning down an offer to stay in a hotel.

“If I can’t stay with Heather, I’d rather stay with my ex-husband,” she says, with a sniff. “Alan invited me, but I would have preferred—well, never mind that now.”

Circumstances might have changed for Mom, but that doesn’t mean she has.

“Fine,” I say. “You go stay with Dad. He’ll be delighted to have you. See you later, Mom.”

Then I go to the screen door and hold it open for her so that she can go inside the house, into the kitchen, down the hall, and out the front door, down the stoop, across the sidewalk, and into Frank and Patty’s car, away from me, hopefully for another ten years or longer.

Before she goes, my mother looks at me with an expression I don’t recognize, because I’ve never seen it on her face before. Disappointment, maybe. It couldn’t possibly be guilt or remorse. My mother isn’t capable of feelings like those, or she’d never have done the terrible things she did to me in the first place.

“Good-bye, Heather,” Mom says, still wearing the odd expression.

And then she leaves.

10

I
’m in the Fischer Hall cafeteria the next morning preparing my traditional
a.m.
pick-me-up of hot chocolate mixed with coffee and a generous dollop of whipped cream when Magda approaches me.

“Heather,” she says. “
Amiga
. I heard. The dead girl. Your mother. You are not having a very good week, are you?”

“It could be worse,” I say. “At least I still have my ravishing good looks.”

Magda grins and gives me a mock punch in the arm. “You’ll always have those.”

Magda’s wearing the dining system’s mandatory new uniform, a light green lab coat with the words “Made Fresh Daily!” stitched over the left breast. The uniforms used to be pink, which flattered Magda’s bleached-blond hair and dark eyebrows. The green isn’t doing anyone on the dining staff any favors, but it goes with the health and wellness program the food service company is trying to convince the students it’s offering—though to be honest, the food hasn’t really changed, only the presentation.

Fortunately Magda’s boss, Gerald, can’t dictate what she does with the rest of her appearance, so Magda’s pinned a towering cascade of artificial blond ringlets to the top of her head, painted her long nails metallic gold (encrusted with glitter), and thrust her feet into a pair of matching metallic-gold kitten heels.

“Come,” she says, opening her arms. “Time for a hug.”

I set down my morning pick-me-up and let Magda hug me, even though I’m not really a hugger, unless of course the hug is from Cooper.

Magda’s hugs are pretty special, though. She’s soft, like butter, and smells of something exotically fruity. I was reading a magazine once while getting a pedicure and happened upon an ad featuring a sample of a celebrity fragrance, and realized I was smelling Magda. Magda smells exactly like Beyoncé.

“Thanks, Magda,” I say as she squeezes me tight. “But everything’s going to be all right.”

“I know it is,” Magda says, releasing me. “I wanted to make sure you know it is too. Jimmy!” She screams the name of one of the guys behind the hot serving line, startling him. It’s virtually empty in the dining hall before ten during orientation week. “Heather’s here. Where is that bagel I asked you to save her?”

“Oh, Magda,” I say, embarrassed. “I can get one myself.”

“No, you can’t,” she says, patting my shoulder. “There was a rush on bagels earlier, see?” She points at the bagel basket over by the breakfast buffet, next to the cutting board where the butter, jams, and cream cheeses are kept on ice. “Some group of orientation kids, going to the Cloisters for the day. But I made sure Jimmy saved you one. He’s got it.
Jimmy!
”

Jimmy, who was in the middle of a text conversation on his cell phone, puts the device away and snaps to it, slicing a bagel he’s been hiding for me and putting it into the conveyer-belt toaster. Magda is only in charge of the ID scanner at the door, but she’s ruled the dining hall like a queen for years.

“Thanks, Mags,” I say to her, truly thankful as I eye what had formerly been the waffle bar but is now the Fischer Hall “fresh fruit spa water bar” (today’s options are watermelon or orange). “But hold the bacon, will you, Jimmy? I’ve got my final dress fitting on Friday,” I explain apologetically. “I’m trying to stay relatively the same size I was when they measured me for it. If I burst the seams due to all the stress eating I’ve been doing lately, they’ll have to start over, and they’ll never finish by next month.”

“Hold the bacon, Jimmy,” Magda yells at Jimmy, who shoots her an annoyed look because he heard me the first time and has already gone back to his texting.

“Thanks, Jimmy,” I say, watching as my bagel is carried along the toaster’s fiery red bars. “Maybe I’ll have something healthy along with my carbs,” I say to Magda. “Some grapes or something.”

Magda raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Grapes are nice, I guess.”

We stroll toward the salad bar, which, in the updated cafeteria, is featured front and center. The menu now offers more vegan and gluten-free options, which is lovely for those students who enjoy eating vegan and gluten-free, but horrible for people like me, who enjoy meat and gluten, preferably together in sandwich form with mayonnaise.

“I heard the girl died from asthma,” Magda says.

“That’s what the medical investigator thinks it could have been,” I say. “She won’t know until after she gets the tox screens.”

“Poor little movie star,” Magda says, shaking her head.

Magda refers to all Fischer Hall residents as movie stars, because once, long before I started working there, a scene from one of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle
movies was shot in the building’s penthouse, and many of the residents were cast as extras, gazing up from Washington Square Park in amazement as either Donatello or Raphael performed amazing feats of turtle daring high above their heads.

Magda was a teenager herself at the time, newly emigrated from the Dominican Republic, but it left an indelible impression on her . . . that in America, anything can happen. A scene from a movie could even be shot at your place of work, and you could become a movie star . . . or at least a tiny blob in a crowd scene in a movie about teenage mutant turtles who are also ninjas.

Maybe that’s why every day since she’s dressed for work as if a film director might come walking in and cast her in his next picture. You just never knew.

“How’d you hear about my mom?” I ask Magda as I steal a couple of grapes from the artfully arranged bunches by the “Fruitopia.”

“Patty texted me last night,” Magda says, fishing her smartphone from the pocket of her uniform and waving it at me. Her phone, like the rest of her, is covered in metallic-gold spangles. “She texted all the bridesmaids. She was so angry with that little sister of Cooper’s—Nicole—for what she did, inviting your mother like that. I told her when I found out she was doing it, sending those extra invitations, I said, ‘Don’t do it. Heather won’t like it.’ But she kept saying, ‘Oh, no, she will. Heather has so few people coming to the wedding, and my brother has so many. It will be a nice surprise. My dad will pay for it.’ I thought, well, maybe she
will
like it. But inviting your mother like that? I couldn’t imagine that would be a nice surprise.”

“No,” I say, chewing a grape. “It really wasn’t.”

“You know, Nicole is lucky we live here in the United States, because back where I come from, if a woman did something like that to another woman—especially the bride of her brother—”

Magda makes a slashing motion beneath her chin, accompanied by a sound like oxygen being sucked from a windpipe. A nearby student, preparing a healthy fruit salad for herself, looks a little frightened.

“That’s it,” Magda goes on. “That woman is dead. Because someone will have killed her. I can find someone to do it for you, if you want. Don’t tell Pete”—Pete is Magda’s boyfriend, an ex-cop who is now one of Fischer Hall’s best security officers—“but I have a lot of friends who will do that kind of thing. For Heather Wells, they’d do it for free. You know how popular your records were in my country. Still are,” she adds, loyally.

“Well,” I say, after taking a quick sip of my breakfast beverage, which I feel I need after Magda’s somewhat dramatic performance as well as her offer. “I’m flattered. Thanks, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Cooper’s handling it on his own.”

I’d come out of the bathroom the night before after using my rotating facial brush—I’d been told if I used it every night, by my wedding day my skin would be glowing—to find Cooper on his cell phone with his little sister.

“That’s it, Nicole,” he was saying, appearing to be finishing up a volatile conversation. “This whole thing is your fault. You had no right. No, I don’t care why you did it. No, an apology won’t help. Didn’t you hear what I said?
You made her cry
. So you are dead to me. Stop calling. Corpses can’t dial phones.”

Then he hung up.

I raised my eyebrows.

“I didn’t cry,” I’d said.

Cooper had swung around, startled to see me in my fuzzy pink robe and slippers, with my face glowing from the bristles of the rotating facial brush.

“Christ,” he said. “I didn’t know you were there.”

“I can see that,” I said. “But I didn’t cry. And you don’t have to be so mean to Nicole. She thought she was doing a good thing. A mother-and-child reunion, like in the Paul Simon song.”

“Yeah, well, I just gave her a new song,” Cooper growled. “Since she loves writing them so much, now she can write about a big brother who’s going to bury his sister if she doesn’t correct her egregious mistake.”

I hadn’t been able to keep from smiling. Cooper’s family may not have had any felons in it, like mine, but it did have its own drama, like his twin sisters, whose conception came as something of a late-in-life surprise to his mother. Jessica and Nicole were sent off to boarding school at an early age to get them off their parents’ hands, but now, newly graduated from college, they were back home and as incorrigible as prepubescents.

I preferred them over my mother, however.

“You can’t bury her,” I said, sinking down onto the side of the bed. “She isn’t dead. That’s a terrible thing to say at a time when a girl really is gone. Think how Jasmine’s parents must be feeling. They really are going to have to bury their daughter.”

“All I care about is how
you
feel,” Cooper said, sitting beside me and wrapping a strong arm around my shoulders. “What happened tonight never should have happened. I’m sorrier than I can say that it did. Let me make it up to you.”

“Okay. Stop being so mean to your sister.” I leaned into him. His warmth was reassuring, as was the steady thump of his heart against my arm.

“That isn’t quite what I meant by ‘let me make it up to you.’ ”

“Why? It’s what I want. And why did you tell Nicole that I cried? I didn’t cry.”

“Yes, you did,” he said. “You had the water running so you thought I couldn’t hear you, but I did.”

“Oh.” I stared down at my toes, embarrassed. I’d gotten a new pedicure for check-in, That’s Hot pink. It looked good.

Jasmine had had a pedicure too. Powder blue, like her walls.

“I figured you wanted to be alone,” Cooper said, “or you wouldn’t have sat crying in your bathtub, you’d have come out and cried dainty tears on my strong manly chest.”

“I didn’t expect to start crying,” I said. “My mother just makes me so mad.”

What she really made me was sad—sad that I didn’t have a mother who loved me the way Kaileigh Harris’s mother loved her, so much that she couldn’t let her go, not even to have lunch without her, which wasn’t exactly healthy, but at least it showed she cared.

But I was afraid I might start crying again if I admitted this out loud, and I didn’t want to start crying again, especially after I’d finally gotten control of myself.

“I know she does. Your mother makes me mad too,” Cooper admitted. “So does my sister. I don’t want anyone interfering with what’s supposed to be our day, and I don’t want anyone making you unhappy.” He took a deep breath, then added, all in a rush, “That’s why I’m going to tail your mother while she’s here in town.”

“What?” I stared at him. “Cooper,
have you lost your mind?
”

“Probably. But it’s the only way I can think of to make sure she’s here for the reason she says she is, to see you, and not to run some kind of scam that might end up hurting you—”

“Cooper, no.” I shook my head. “You already have a case. A
paying
case. The best way to deal with people like my mom is to ignore them.”

“I didn’t say I was going to
talk
to her. I’m only going to tail her. Just a little.” He held his thumb and index finger an inch apart. “Heather, come on, you have to admit it’s a little odd. Why is she here now, a month before the wedding? And what’s the deal with her not wanting to stay in a hotel?”

I sighed. I had to admit he was right. These were both questions I’d wondered myself. “And honestly, look at it from my perspective,” he went on. “I’m a detective. What kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn’t detect the person who’s making the girl I love most in the world so unhappy?”

This went straight to my heart.

“My mother doesn’t have the power to make me unhappy anymore,” I said. “Not unless I let her. And I’m not going to let her this time, Cooper. I’m
not
.”

But even as I said it, tears filled my eyes again.

Cooper’s arm tightened around my shoulders, and he placed his other arm around me as well.

“I know you aren’t,” he said. “But in the meantime, whether you like it or not, I’m going to do what I can to make sure that she doesn’t have another opportunity to make you unhappy. Tonight was unfortunate—I should never have let her inside the house, but—”

“I know,” I said, lifting my hand to stroke his cheek. “She caught you off guard. She had all those bags, and she’d sent the cab away, and she pulled her defenseless, poor-little-me act. That’s what she was always good at, you know: manipulating people. That’s the real reason I couldn’t make it in the music business without her. I was never very good at manipulating.”

Cooper lifted one of my hands and kissed it tenderly. “But you’re good at something more useful: being able to tell when someone’s trying to manipulate you. And, of course, being incredibly, irresistibly gorgeous.”