The Bride-In-Law

The newlyweds glanced at the bucket of chicken and the bottle of champagne on the table. Bernie looked helplessly at the two glasses she’d just retrieved from the bathroom, and Tucker followed her gaze, seeing bright orange nail polish on liver-spotted hands, a gleaming gold band on the third finger, left hand.

“Okay, so maybe we could just go somewhere where there’s more than two chairs and have ourselves a nice, quiet discussion.”

Harold cleared his throat. “Son, I don’t think you understand. This is my honeymoon. I’ve already made plans for the evening.”

Tucker opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it and shut it again. There was nothing to be gained at this point by hurting his father’s feelings and insulting the female who’d tricked him into marrying her. However, if the old bat thought for one minute that she was going to latch on to his father’s social security, his annuity and his life insurance, she could damn well think again.

“Okay, so why don’t we just sleep on it,” he said, and groaned inwardly as he heard his own words.

Annie said, “I’ll call you first thing tomorrow, Bernie.”

“But not too early.” Bernie looked at her bridegroom and winked, scattering a few flecks of mascara on her unnaturally rosy cheeks. “And, honey—fresh salmon, remember? Canned will do in a pinch if you can’t get fresh, but remember about the milk—four percent, none of that skimmed stuff.”

Tucker didn’t even try to figure that one out. He ushered the beige stick figure outside, feeling as if he’d been trapped on the twelfth floor of a ten-story building.

Without an elevator.

Two

“A thick-necked Neanderthal?” Tucker confronted Annie the minute the door closed behind them.

“Don’t take it so personally, I was upset.”

“With a steroid-inflated ego? What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Sure, he’d gone to college on a football scholarship, but he’d never taken steroids. “Lady, you don’t know the first thing about me. How would you like it if I called you a meddling old maid with all the finesse of a front-end loader?”

She blinked owlishly behind the thick lenses. Something dark and dangerous sparked inside him. “What’s the matter, don’t you recognize the description? Didn’t your mama teach you not to pick flaws in a man’s grammar?” That still rankled.

“I didn’t... Oh, shoot, I guess I did, didn’t I? I’m sorry. It’s probably an occupational hazard.”

Her shoulders drooped. Rain had soaked through in several places. She looked so forlorn he almost relented, but dammit, a man had his pride. “Yeah, well, just don’t push your luck, Annie Summers,” he growled. They had finally gotten around to introductions. “My week started out in the pits and it’s been downhill ever since.”

“Yes, well—” He watched her throat move as she swallowed hard. “That’s hardly my fault.”

“You think I give a damn whose fault it is? In case it escaped your notice, that’s my father—my father in there with that brass-haired, purple-upholstered man trap. She might think she’s got it made in the shade, but take it from me, she’s not going to get away with it.”

“Get away with what? Taking on the care and feeding of some doddering old fool for the sheer joy of nursing him through his second childhood?” She removed her glasses, the better to glare at him. It gave her a vulnerable look, that oddly naked look of people who habitually wore glasses when seen without them.

And then the words sunk in. “His second what?” Muscles clenched from his jaw all the way down to his fists.

“You heard me. You can tell him for me, it won’t do him a bit of good. Bernice doesn’t like taking care of things. I’m the one who has to take care of her cat. She even lets plants die. As for money, all she has is her social security, and he’s not going to get his hands on it.”

“You think that’s the reason he married her? For her money?” Tucker watched her open her mouth and then close it again as she picked her way through a minefield of possible answers. He gave her another dose. “Or maybe she’s smart, like you. Is that it? She’s some kind of a brain? Oh, no, I’ve got it. Pop was blinded by her beauty.” That was hitting below the belt, but dammit, if he didn’t stand up for the old man, who would?

“Bernice is—well, she’s—she has a variety of interests. For one thing, she likes music, and she’s really an attractive woman in her own way.”

“In her own way?”

“She’s, uh—colorful. Bright colors are cheerful to be around.”

His gaze moved over her damp tan raincoat, her clumsy brown shoes and the few wisps of drab brown hair that straggled out from under the wet scarf tied under her chin. He didn’t say a word, but when her defiant gaze fell away, he felt as if he’d just kicked the family pup off the front porch into the rain.

“Yes, well... evidently, your father sees something in her that you don’t.”

“Such as? Name one thing. Besides that godawful purple dress.”

She rammed the glasses back on her face, but he’d caught her out. She couldn’t hide behind them any longer. “You’re being extremely childish,” she snapped.

She had spirit, Tucker would hand her that. “Yeah, it’s part of my boyish charm,” he said with a nasty grin. They were both getting soaked to the skin, neither of them willing to back down an inch.

As he watched her struggle to come up with an annihilating retort, it occurred to him that between the two of them, Annie and her cousin Bernice had managed to punch a few buttons that hadn’t been punched in a long time. Tucker prided himself on being a even-tempered man, both at work and in his personal life. Except for a few outbursts born of sheer frustration, he’d even managed to maintain a civilized front with Shelly. He’d done it for Jay’s sake, but the truth was, picking a fight with his ex-wife had been like trying to light a wet fuse. Shelly hadn’t even cared enough to fight for their marriage. The only thing she cared about was Shelly.

“Yes, well...” She had a quiet voice, but there was nothing weak about it.

“You said that before.”

“You can give your father a message for me. My—that is, Bernie’s lawyer will be in touch tomorrow. Tell him—tell him he’d better not try to leave town.”

“Are you by any chance threatening my father?”

Long, straight nose in the air, she dived into her car, slammed the door and ground the starter a few times until the engine turned over. Torn between frustrated anger and reluctant admiration, he watched as she scratched out of the parking lot and headed south.

“Lawyer, my sweet ass,” he growled as he caught up with her and roared past, a few minutes later. He’d been taken to the cleaners by the flock of buzzards Shelly had hired to pick his bones. Damned if he was going to stand by and see the same thing happen to his father.

Annie pressed the heels of her hands against her aching eyes the next morning and wondered what the downside of retiring at age thirty-six would be, aside from a severe lack of funds. Terminal boredom, probably. After spending hours last night alternately worrying about personnel problems at school and worrying about Bernice, she’d fallen asleep just as the sky was turning gray and woken up with one of those headaches that was impervious to feverfew and even acetominophen.

Yesterday had been endless. Three teachers on maternity leave, an outbreak of head lice, plus the latest mandate to come down from Washington, to be translated from bureaucratese into something even her boss, with his limited vocabulary, could understand. And of course, there had been Bernie’s surprise elopement yesterday.

Annie had promised herself she’d try again to get in touch with Eddie and see if they couldn’t meet somewhere. Asia. Africa. The moon. As engagements went, hers was extremely unsatisfactory. Sometimes she wondered why she even bothered to hang on to the pretense.

In the beginning she’d done it because it was all she had, or was ever likely to have, but that was before Bernice. Before she’d spent one more in a long line of restless nights, trying to peel back the layers of Annie Summers in case there was something underneath it all—heaven only knew what—that would explain why a lifetime of doing the right thing had brought her to a point where she couldn’t think of a single good reason for continuing to do it.

Except for the year she’d broken her leg in two places and the year she’d come down with a bad case of food poisoning, she’d earned perfect attendance records at school and Sunday School, simply because it was expected of her.

Outstanding grades? She’d worked hard to earn them because it was expected of her. Graduated with honors from an all-girl college for the same reason. Camp counselor, scout leader—she’d done the whole bit.

“It’s up to you to give back to your community, because of who you are,” her father had drilled into her from the age of pigtails, pinafores and piano lessons. Dutifully, she had obeyed, without ever wondering until it was too late just who Annie Summers was supposed to be. She’d done, and she’d been, and she’d given the very best she could do and give and be, sacrificing—

Well, not sacrificing a whole lot, if you didn’t count not being able to stay out late or date the boy she’d been dying to date in high school. Not that he’d ever asked her, but he might have if she’d had the courage to give the right signals.

As if she’d even know how to send a signal. At the age of thirty-six, she was engaged to a political activist who was determined to go out and save the world from hunger and decadent capitalism before he came home and settled down to carve out his own slice of the pie. She hadn’t heard from him in almost six months. But then, Eddie had never been a very good correspondent.

Some love life. So where did she get off, trying to manage Bernie’s love affair? Telling her she shouldn’t run off and marry a man because he might try to take advantage of her? Maybe they were taking advantage of each other. Taking advantage of whatever time they had left for whatever mutual pleasure it provided. If she was still waiting for Eddie by the time she was Bernie’s age, she might even start looking around for a lonely widower herself.

“Get off my feet, you noisy old tomcat.” She kicked aside the covers, dislodging the cat who had taken up residence on the foot of her bed sometime during the night, purring his fool head off and scratching his various itches.

Bleary-eyed, she made it to the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea. Glancing outside, she saw that the rain had stopped, but the clouds still hung dark and heavy and sullen. “Story of my life,” she muttered to the cat, who had decided to wrap his tail around her ankles to see if he couldn’t trip her into falling headfirst into the refrigerator. Unthinkingly she reached down and scratched him behind his ears.

By focusing on the morning paper while she ate her standard breakfast of fruit, tea and whole-grain cereal, she almost managed to avoid thinking about her immediate problems. To put things into perspective, there was always Washington, China and the Middle East.