Was he going to propose to someone? Is he planning to propose to me?
She hadn’t fully wrapped her mind around his plans for the ring she was sure was inside the box, and already the panic ensued. If he asked her, what would she say? Did he know her ring size? Mostly, did he believe she’d say yes?
He must have seen the hysteria likely etched across her face because he grabbed the box and recoiled. “Don’t freak out. It’s a small gift I’ve been meaning to give to you.” He stood up, towering over Julie. “I know you’ve been working hard at the gym. This is just a little something I thought might keep you motivated.”
Cautiously, Julie retrieved the box. She looked up at him and bit her bottom lip as she slid the top off. Inside, a small green teardrop-shaped electronic device sat in the foam impression.
“It’s a Fitbit,” he announced.
Julie’s eyes lit up. “Oh my gosh. I freaking didn’t know what to think,” she sighed with relief. “Thank you.”
“I figure with this, you can take baby steps before you run. You know, make yourself some step goals.” Nico slipped his arms into the sleeves of his jacket and zipped it just above his collarbone. “Plus, I didn’t think you could handle CrossFit just yet,” he teased.
Julie rolled her eyes and reached out to playfully slap his arm, but Nico caught her hand and pulled her into him.
“Nico?” she breathed his name.
One more time, he kissed her lips softly and lingered for the faintest moment.
She inhaled his earthy scent and clung to his jacket. “I…”
“Goodnight, Julie.” Nico turned back toward the door and took two steps at a time down the stairs to his truck.
The next day, a few scattered clouds still hung in the sky, but the air was warm with the thick tangy smell of barbecue smoke and the celebratory excitement of the Memorial Day holiday. By nine a.m., Julie had already gotten in six thousand steps at the gym, argued with her mother, and picked up the “couple of things” her mother asked her to get from the grocery store.
As it turned out her mother’s “couple” was a little off. It equated to quite a few more than two items on her list. She ended up picking up the ingredients for the salad, a couple of fruit and vegetable trays, and enough meat for a party of twenty. Which was fine, except for the minor detail that it would only be few people coming to this “get-together.”
“Mom, I’ll be pulling up to the house in like two minutes, so get off the phone, open up the door and come help me,” Julie said, accelerating at a green light.
As the bluetooth disconnected, the playlist Julie had been listening to before the call resumed. A mellow beachy song filled the car and she leaned back against the headrest, hoping to calm her nerves.
Apparently, Aunt Helen thought it would be in bad taste for her sister to invite anyone outside the family. Since Austin wouldn’t be able to attend with Sophia, due to work-related travel. “It just didn’t look right,” her aunt had said. The debate whether it would be proper for even the Aunt Helen and Sophia to come was even a thing. Until she conceded based solely on her sister’s ability to cue the waterworks and pour on the guilt trip.
“Good grief.” Julie sighed as she brought the car to a stop. She popped the trunk and meticulously hoisted up the bags.
Now, Julie would be stuck spending the last day of her three-day weekend with her mother, Aunt Helen, and Sophia—about as cheery a bunch as a room full of depression patients.
This ought to be fun.
Still, she strung all ten or so plastic bags up her arms, used her head to nudge the trunk shut, and did a run-walk to make it to the front door in one trip before her arms could fall off.
With only her feet free, she kicked the bottom of the door a couple of times, in lieu of ringing the bell. “Mom!” she yelled. “Open the door. I’m here.”
She waited a few more seconds before kicking again, finally deciding to use her elbow to poke the doorbell. By then, her wrists were beginning to burn and the crease of her elbow felt like it might snap.
“Mom!” she shouted, bordering on hysteria.
As footsteps neared, Julie clamped her hands together to hold the bags steady. Already some of the plastic bags looked like they might give way. It would really piss her off to have to sit all the bags down, dig in her purse for the key, and have to try again to get them all back up her arms without breaking or bursting anything.
Just as she stomped her foot and grunted, the door creaked open.
“What took you so long—”
“Don’t you have a key?” Sophia materialized in the doorframe, big basketball belly in tow. As ever, her hair was perfectly coifed into a flawless flipped bob with a headband to match her pastel cruise wear, despite her being geographically out of reach of any real body of water.
“Honey, I would help you, but my doctor frowns upon me lifting just about anything these days.” Her cousin laughed in a sneaky, impish sort of way and turned on her ballet flats. She kept moving toward the kitchen without offering to carry so much as the napkins or a platter, while Julie wedged herself through the door and kicked it closed.
When Julie made it into the kitchen, the women were all seated around the wooden dining room table with their eyes centrally focused on her.
“Wow. Don’t hurt yourselves trying to help or anything. I’ve got this. No big deal,” Julie said sarcastically. When she looked up, they hadn’t moved an inch. “Everything…all right?” she asked, slow and cautious, but they remained quiet.
“Is the door closed?” her mother probed lightly as she stepped into the kitchen doorway and inspected the living room toward the foyer.
The lines of confusion strewn across Julie’s face twisted into a big question mark. “Yes? Should I have left it open for someone?”
“Oh, it’s just you?” Disappointment laced her mother’s words at Julie’s nod. “I thought you might invite your new fella,” she said as she walked the few steps back to the table and plopped down. All traces of her best behavior were gone.
Instantly, the noise level in the room rose a few decibels. One or two of them was bad enough, but the three of them together was like siccing a rabid dog on an infant. By default, poor Nico had dodged the worst kind of bullet. Anyone would be hard-pressed to find a worse combination than the introduction of a handsome, virile man to a room full of hormonal and borderline-menopausal women, itching for attention.
Julie’s failure to subject him to their claws was akin to dashing their hopes of having any fun at all. There would be no polite conversation or purposefully interjected tales of embarrassment from Julie’s childhood. No inappropriate sexual innuendos.
And the biggest letdown of all—no reenactment of the Spanish Inquisition.
Heaven forbid they would have to wait to meet him until Julie decided what he meant to her.
“I’m going to try not to be offended by the fact that my own family is disappointed to see just me.” An annoyed laugh slipped from her lips as she searched through the drawers for the lighter to get the grill started. “You know, Mom, after you told me it was going to be just us, I figured it might not be the best idea. After all, we wouldn’t want Miss Sophia to be surrounded by anything other than polite company now, would we? I don’t think it would be right to have another man around a married woman. Who knows what the people would say?” Julie mocked Sophia’s badly imitated twang.
“Oh hush, now. For heaven’s sake, Jules. You sound silly. We won’t bite, now go on and invite your young man over. I’m dying to meet this new guy of yours,” Aunt Helen said.
And though Julie had no doubts that she did want to meet Nico, she questioned her motives. Had it been anyone outside of the family, Aunt Helen would talk Julie up like a princess. Bottom line—it all stemmed back to Aunt Helen. She had a great niece, and the best daughter.
Behind closed doors—her sister’s doors, in particular—Julie could be the princess, so long as Sophia got to be the queen. She did tit-for-tat better than anyone Julie had ever known.
Payback, Julie supposed. For her mother taking away Aunt Helen’s spotlight a little over half a century ago.
The only child to a pair of adoring parents ready to spoil her on a whim, Helen reveled in her solo glory. Then, she had had a sister, Marian, a cheery cherub-cheeked cutie who came along and stole her spotlight. A younger, attention-grabbing, grubby-handed little sister who wrapped their parents around her bite-sized fingers.
The way her mother had told it, Aunt Helen had never lived it down. So, basically, having daughters close in age meant a long-awaited do-over.
On that note, Julie and Sophia slipped into the back yard, plopping down on a pair of poolside loungers.
“What do you think we have? Fifteen, twenty more minutes before they realize we’re gone?” Julie asked her cousin.
Sophia laughed. “I’ll be gone before they pick up on it.”
Julie peeked over the side of the chair at the patio door where she could see their mothers going at it. Their sibling rivalry and now battle of the daughters was getting oddly specific and old.
By their standards, Aunt Helen was finally far out front. In the categories of relationship, work, wealth, and now the ability to provide grandchildren as fast as socially acceptable, Sophia was a head above Julie.
Julie pulled out her phone and began scrolling through her Instagram. “So what’s on the to-do list today? A pressing fundraiser? A mandatory tea party?” Julie asked without looking at her cousin.
Julie could feel the steam coming off of her.
“Jealous much?”
They had been practically neck and neck in work, depending on which side of the debate you fell. If you considered self-employment versus gainfully employed, either one of them could take the category. Wealth was another one that came in with narrow margins. If only individual self-obtained streams of income were included, it could be too hard to call it.
“Of what? The piece of paper that says a man has to put up with you? No, that’s not it. I must be envious of all the money and the baby. That’s what you and Aunt Helen think, right?”
At the end of the day, the determining factors always came down to finding a man who could add value of some sort, and the ability to spawn golden children. In the past year, Sophia had secured her position as the leader in both, with a swanky Southern wedding and a questionably-timed pregnancy.
“It might do you some good to quit playing around with all these young boys and find someone who can afford to pay for his dinner and yours.”
“Oh, okay, Soph because you know so much about the guy I’m seeing. Is that the conclusion Aunt Helen came to after talking to Mom for like five minutes. FYI she hasn’t met him yet either.” Julie rolled her eyes and peeked over at their mothers again.
To her cousin and her aunt, any hint that Julie might have found a man as good as or better than Austin sent the antennas up and the sirens wailing. They’d be happy if Julie settled for an unfortunate-looking, slightly overweight oaf with poor financial sense. If they caught wind that Nico had brains, brawn, and wit, they’d be forced to do something drastic to up the ante for fear of the scales tipping in Julie’s favor. Given the propensity for Laurich women to birth nothing but girls, there could be a third generation of warrior women vying for an unworthy title.
Sophia, swung her legs over the edge of the lounger to face Julie. “Well, if he’s so great. Why don’t you bring him around? Like Mom said, we don’t bite.”
At one point, Julie had considered backing down and inviting Nico over to get the inevitable said and done. But she’d reconsidered just as quickly. “As awesome as that sounds, Soph—with the whole not biting bit and everything—I’m going to spare him the torture.”
In a single fluid movement, she was up off her chair, headed back into the house. Dealing with the mothers was definitely the lesser evil.
A little over an hour later, Julie finally convinced her family that the world would not end as they knew it if Nico didn’t join them. Still, they remained tried and true to their nosy ways, fishing for information on Patrick. That, and what the “new guy” thought about their broken engagement.
The older women, especially, harped on Julie’s intentions for settling down sooner rather than later. Aunt Helen treaded lightly, asking what Julie thought her and the “new guy’s” children might look like. Obviously, she was hoping to get an idea about Nico’s looks from Julie’s description of his physical features. Nice try.
As much as they seemed to be enjoyed the whole inquisition bit, Julie couldn’t get passed the subject fast enough. There was only one topic more inviting to her nosy aunt and cousin. In fact, Sophia’s favorite subject.
“So, how’s everything going with the baby shower?”
Thankfully, Sophia bit the bait. “Oh. My. Gosh. You are not going to believe.” She whipped out her tablet-sized phone. Swiping and tapping, the screen illuminated with multiple boards she’d created on Pinterest. At the top of the list, of course, shower games.