Chapter 4: The Mother Who Wasn't on the Guest List
I looked at Patricia.
"Are you certain?"
"I helped Rachel address the invitations." Patricia kept her voice low.
"Diane was not on the list.
Rachel was very specific about that.
She said they hadn't spoken in over two years."
Across the room, Diane Marsh stood with her untouched champagne and watched her daughter dance with her new husband.
There was something in her posture — not warm, not proud.
Controlled.
Like a person who had rehearsed being here.
"Does David know?" I asked.
"I don't know what David knows."
I looked toward Rachel.
She had her back to the exit now, but her shoulders were slightly higher than they'd been ten minutes ago.
The laugh she'd given David's friend had faded.
She knew her mother was still in the room.
"Someone should tell the venue staff," I said.
Patricia shook her head slowly.
"And cause a scene at her own wedding?
Rachel's already managing enough today."
She meant me.
She didn't say it, but she meant me.
I sat with that for a moment.
Then I stood up.
"Where are you going?" Patricia asked.
"To get another glass of water," I said.
"From the bar near the back."
Patricia looked at me.
"Carol."
"I'm getting water, Patricia."
I crossed the room slowly, the way you do when you don't want to appear to be crossing the room with purpose.
The band had shifted to something slower.
Couples moved onto the floor.
I reached the bar, asked for water, and turned just enough to see Diane Marsh clearly for the first time.
She was perhaps sixty.
Well-dressed — a deep green wrap dress, hair set carefully.
She might have been any other guest.
But her eyes were fixed on Rachel with an intensity that made the back of my neck prickle.
She noticed me looking.
Our eyes met.
She smiled.
It didn't reach anything.
I turned back to the bar.
My water arrived.
I picked it up and stood there for a moment, thinking.
Then Diane spoke.
"You're the mother of the groom."
It wasn't a question.
I turned.
She was closer than I expected, one step away, her champagne still in her hand.
"I am," I said.
"Carol."
"Diane." She didn't offer her hand.
"Rachel's mother."
"I know," I said.
Something shifted behind her eyes.
"She told you about me."
"I only just learned who you were."
Diane looked out at the dance floor.
"She looks beautiful.
She always did clean up well when she wanted something."
The words landed wrong.
Not cruel enough to be obviously cruel, but angled.
The kind of sentence designed to sound like a compliment while doing something else entirely.
"She's a bride," I said.
"She looks like a bride."
Diane smiled again.
"Of course." She sipped her champagne.
"Your son seems lovely.
Very devoted.
Rachel always needed someone devoted." A pause.
"She has a way of making people feel responsible for her."
I looked at this woman.
I thought about Rachel going pale at the altar.
I thought about two years of silence.
I thought about Rachel crying for two days over a dress and still walking down that aisle with a smile.
"How did you get in?" I asked.
Diane raised an eyebrow.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You weren't on the guest list."
The smile didn't waver.
"A mother doesn't need an invitation to her daughter's wedding."
"Rachel seems to disagree."
Diane set her champagne glass on the bar.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
"Rachel has always been dramatic about these things.
We had a small falling out.
Families do." She smoothed the front of her wrap dress.
"I came to make peace.
Today seemed like the right day."
"Or the hardest day for her to say no."
Diane looked at me for a long moment.
"You're very protective of a woman you've known for — what, two years?"
"Long enough," I said.
She picked up her champagne again.
"You should go back to your table, Carol.
This is between Rachel and me.
It always has been."
She turned toward the dance floor, and I saw what she was doing — she was waiting.
Waiting for Rachel to turn around.
Waiting to be seen.
May you like
Waiting for the moment when Rachel would have to decide, in front of two hundred guests, what to do with her uninvited mother.
I set my water down on the bar and went to find David.
