Mother of the Bride Read Online Free

wondering what she was supposed to do with the empty room in her house and the hole in her life. Get a cat?
    She waited to make sure Bebe remembered to push the remote to shut the garage door, then turned into the kitchen and sighed. So did the kettle as her mother took it off the burner and made her coffee.
    Cydney drank tea, but she kept instant decaf for Georgette. In a silver caddy with a spoon clipped to the side that her mother had given her to put on the Lazy Susan in the middle of the kitchen table because the coffee jar sitting there looked s-o-o-o tacky. Cydney didn't think so, but Cydney hadn't said so. She'd said thank you and polished the damn thing every month or so, so it wouldn't tarnish.
    “You were a little heavy-handed with Bebe, don't you think?” Georgette stirred Sweet 'N Low into her coffee and glanced at Cydney. “She's nineteen years old and engaged to be married.”
    “So I should suspend the rules?”
    “A girl only gets engaged once.”
    Oh really? Cydney wanted to snap. This is your second engagement and Gwen's fifth. Which had nothing to do with the fact that Cydney had never even been asked to go steady. Nothing at all.
    “Even more reason,” she said, shuddering at the memory of Bebe and Aldo tangled in the bedsheets, “to enforce the rules.”
    “I can see my face in the countertop.” Georgette turned away from the gleaming butcher block. “Would you like me to don my white glove? Or would you rather tell me what's bothering you?”
    “Truthfully,” Cydney said bluntly, “I don't believe for two seconds that you actually intend to marry Herb Baker.”
    “But of course I do.” Georgette carried her cup and saucer and cloth napkin—she broke out in hives at the mere thought of paper ones—to the table and sat down. “In a candlelight ceremony on December twenty-fourth at eight P.M. Just as I wrote in the engagement announcement I'm going to fax to your father as soon as I get home.”
    “I rest my case.” Cydney gave a triumphant smile and sat down across the table from her mother. “You're still trying to make Dad jealous.”
    Georgette's eyebrow arched again. “I also plan to fax it to the society editor at the Star for inclusion in this Sunday's column.”
    “Considering the time difference between Kansas City and Cannes,” Cydney went on, unconvinced, “your fax will be the first thing Dad sees when he walks into his office tomorrow.”
    “Of course it will be. I planned it that way.”
    “Hoping, of course, to ruin his day.”
    “On the contrary. I'm sure it will make his day.” Georgette sipped her coffee and smiled. “No more alimony.”
    “So that's your story and you're sticking to it?”
    “It's the way things are, Cydney.” Georgette reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I know the divorce was difficult for you, but you're a grown woman now. It's time you realize your father isn't coming home to us.”
    “I know that, Mother.” Cydney jerked her hand away. “You're the one who's been saying for the last eighteen years that someday Fletch will get tired of all those voluptuous young bodies and come crawling back to you. You're the one who cross-stitched it on a sampler.”
    “It's not a sampler, it was a pillowcase. It was part of my Coping with Divorce therapy and I threw it away ages ago.”
    “I should hope so, Mother. I'm sure it was threadbare.”
    “So is my patience, Cydney. That's why I said yes on Sunday when Herb asked me again to marry him. I'm not getting any younger.”
    “You're only fifty-eight,” Cydney said, trying to be encouraging. “I'll bet you don't even have spider veins.”
    “Of course I don't. I exercise to keep my metabolism up and my circulation going.”
    Cydney belonged to a gym but rarely had time to go. She hadn't had time for much of anything since Bebe had moved in with her five years ago, when Georgette's book, Etiquette for All Occasions, came out and her column really started to take