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“Mmmm…” She pulls the morning bun out of the bag. “Still warm! Love!”
So much for that diet.
As she munches away, my mind reels. What kinds of things will Gram say to me? Worse, what will shedoto me?
“Mm, so –” Caroline says with a mouth half full. “You just need to thicken up that skin a little bit. Gram says what’s on her mind and, if you fight back, you need to be ready to accept her wrath. She doesn’t apologize. And we respect her for that, but…”
“What kinds of things will she say?”
Caroline gulps some more latte. “Well, she might comment on your weight. Pretty standard stuff for her generation. Don’t let it upset you.”
Says the woman perpetually on a diet.
“And once y’all have kids, you’re never going to do anything right in her eyes,” Caroline chuckles.
More like if…
“Basically, Gram says what she’s thinking and she won’t back down. Since you’ve been on the periphery of it all, you’re kind of like a little angel. But once you’re a Gladstone… it’s Gram’s world.”
I feel myself shrinking by the second. “You’re making it sound like torture.”
“It is!” Caroline says. Why is she smiling like that? “Well, kind of. But it’s out of love. Just remember that. It’s out of love.”
“How do I… deal with all of that, then? You know how sensitive I can be.”
“Right, that’s why I’m warning you, honey.” Caroline has a perfect Southern drawl that teeters on condescending from time to time. “Listen, all you have to do is say, ‘Yes’m’ and ‘No’m’ and talk shit about her behind her back. With me, of course.”
I try to laugh, but it comes out like a puff from a dragon with emphysema.
“You just have to remember to be a good girl, Jude. That’s what Gram really wants.”
I frown. For a woman who has been running her family’s business for the past twenty years and takes no prisoners, I’m saddened to hear she wants everyone around her to kowtow to her every need.
Caroline notices my despondency and leans forward, offering me another piece of morning bun. “You’re going to fit right in, Jude. I promise.”
I take the piece of morning bun and eat it, though I don’t taste the cinnamon or the sugar.
All I taste are tinges of regret for getting myself into this mess in the first place.
Chapter 6
Chase
“Now,thisis a suit,” Gram remarks, running her hands over my shoulder blades as I look into the mirror.
“It’s… something,” I say. The seersucker suit looks more clownish than conventional to me. Even though they’re commonplace around here in the summer, the white and blue striped suit makes me feel like I’m about to do a vaudeville routine rather than propose to my fake girlfriend.
I guess that’s a vaudeville routine in and of itself.
“She’s going to be just taken with you, Chase.” Gram circles me and gives me a smile. “How do you feel?”
“Nervous.” Not for the reasons she thinks I am, though.
“Well, you have no need to be. She practically gave you a yes already, didn’t she?” Gram scoffs and then crosses the big master bedroom toward her dresser.
I step away from the mirror and go to the window. The sprawling yard (if you can call the acres of property a yard) is all dressed and ready to go for the proposal. An archway of fresh roses and hydrangea stands at the end of a light pink runner. Almost looks like a wedding aisle.
Not quite time for that. Yet.
