The Boyfriend (The Boss 7)

“That’s like, totally not like you at all, Becky!” Holli exclaimed, and I was glad she did because I wouldn’t have mentioned it on pain of death.

“Rude!” Deja scolded her wife. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I was expecting leopard print or something short and trashy,” Holli defended herself. “That’s not mean, Becky. You know it’s true.”

“It is true,” Mom admitted without a hint of shame. “That would absolutely have been my style. But I wanted something classy for the church.”

“What about the reception?” I asked, hoping the answer wasn’t, “We’re not having a reception because my daughter’s freaky sex life has put me off partying at her house forever.”

We already had the food ordered. Neil and El-Mudad would not be into eating canapés for three hundred people. Well, El-Mudad might have been. The guy could put away food like a teenager. But the point was, I still wanted my mom to have her wedding reception at our house. I wanted to be involved somehow, mostly because I feared it would be the last time Mom actually came to our house at all.

“Oh, the reception is a totally different story,” Mom said. She got up and slowly circled the dress on the form. “I am going to need full-body Spanx to pull this off.”

“You’re going to look beautiful,” Deja reassured her.

“Why don’t we try it on,” the saleslady suggested, getting to work on the row of impossibly tiny buttons down the back.

Mom finally made eye contact with me for the third time of the day. “What do you think, Soph?”

“I think it’s gorgeous. Really, gorgeous.” I dared to make a little joke. “I mean, it’s not black, but it’s still gorgeous.”

“Maybe I could have walked down the aisle in leopard print, after all,” she cracked back. “You didn’t wear white.”

“We didn’t, either,” Deja said. “My wife desperately wanted hot pink.”

“‘My colors are blush and bashful,’” Holli quoted Steel Magnolias.

“Becky, shall we?” the saleswoman asked. She led my mom back into a dressing room, wheeling the dress form along with them, and I sat down heavily on the single chair.

“So…” Holli said, uncharacteristically quiet. “Things are going like that, huh?”

Deja looked between us, confused. “What do you mean?”

“I know Sophie better than anyone on the planet,” Holli began, and when I raised my hand to object, she revised, “I know Sophie better than anyone on the planet who hasn’t touched her vagina. There was tension there.”

“We haven’t been talking very much.” I wasn’t as sad as I was defeated and resigned to it. “I don’t think this is something we’re going to recover from.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Holli said, like it was no big deal at all for me to not be communicating with my mother. “The timing isn’t great. She’s moving away, there’s the wedding, it’s just like...this is one transition right on top of two others. It’s a hat trick of stress. That doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever.”

“Parents freak out about this stuff,” Deja added. “It’s not fair and it’s not right. But it’s what happens and there’s really no way of controlling how other people are going to react. My parents are of a different generation than yours and Holli’s. It took my folks a long time to be okay with me being a lesbian, and then when I got married, it brought up a lot of conflict between us again. That’s not fair or right, but I’m lucky. They’re my parents, and they love me, and they didn’t react the way some people do. The fact that your mom didn’t disown you on the spot, that she’s here with you today, that’s an indication that she’s not totally discarding you.”

“She’s not totally discarding me, but she packed up and moved out real fast, didn’t she?” I said with a laugh that came out more sarcastic than I’d intended. I couldn’t figure out why I suddenly, desperately wanted my friends to think I was okay with everything going on. Maybe because I spent so much time mentally running in circles around the issue that I didn’t feel like verbally running in circles around it with my friends.

Deja’s sympathetic expression only made it worse. “She wants you in her life. She just wants you there on her terms. It might take her a while to figure out that it’s not possible.”

“And they were planning to move, anyway,” Holli reminded me.

I shook my head. “Whatever. Let’s not talk about it right now. Maybe sometime when she’s not like, thirty feet away.”

Not that she would have heard me over all the muffled chatter she was engaged in with the saleswoman, or the sound of a sewing machine churning away somewhere down the hall. That was such a relaxing, soothing sound. It did wonders for my nerves.

The sales woman returned with an enthusiastic smile. “Here comes the bride, ladies!”