By the Numbers Read Online Free Page A

lifeguard once I was old enough.
    A tuxedo-clad staff begins deploying Centennial’s signature salads with great efficiency, serving all thirty guests in a flash. Kelsey and Milo are sitting with his family, and they’re both as excited about their salads as they are about each other. They’re mooning over each other between bites, so I guess she must have forgotten her abject mortification at my introduction. Kelsey’s even reaching for a second sunflower-seed roll, buttering it with gusto. Funny, but I lost my appetite right before my wedding, to the point that the seamstress had to add a couple of darts to compensate for my weight loss at my final fitting.
    Milo’s family seems somewhat uncomfortable in the country club setting. I’m not sure they’re used to dining in a place with a strict dress code. Milo’s dad’s suit is ill fitting and his older brother’s shirt still has creases in it from the store. His little brother wasforced to wear one of the club’s jackets, as he didn’t have his own sports coat.
    Kelsey doesn’t tell me much, but from what I’ve pieced together, his family owns some kind of restaurant in conjunction with their small farm in Ohio, which is why Milo started a food truck instead of going to college. I suspect his people are more on the blue-collar side, not that there’s anything dishonorable about working with your hands for a living. Rather, this is exactly why I told Marjorie the idea of an extended-family dinner at the club might be too much. I suggested we do something more casual to bring the families together initially, perhaps a barbecue or a picnic, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
    Still, Kelsey and Milo seem so happy together, and they do make a gorgeous couple, in an old-school, hippie-Coke-commercial kind of way, both of them with their flowing dirty blond locks and layers of ironic hemp-based clothing. Milo has a cherubic face, even with the scruffy beard. He looks like he’d be as comfortable playing a flute in a 1970s yacht rock band with Michael McDonald as he would be palling around with Jesus back in the day. As for Kelsey, she takes my breath away with her mineral-blue eyes and that fringe of black lashes . . . that are far too often narrowed at me for some unspeakable offense. She’ll be a beautiful bride, though, resembling a wood nymph in her flower crown instead of a traditional veil, as it is her plan to look as natural and earthy as possible.
    But not
too
earthy; I paid the price for that.
    I promised myself I wouldn’t interfere. The last thing I want is to turn into Marjorie, given how she railroaded my entire wedding day. I wanted a quick ceremony with a justice of the peace; I got three hundred people on the lawn here at Centennial Hillswith a formal reception to follow in the grand ballroom. There was and is no middle ground or compromise with Marjorie.
    Still, I’d be damned if Kelsey were to walk down that aisle in a strapless dress with tufts of fur under her arms. Not for me, because honestly I don’t care. She’s an adult and it’s not my day. I just didn’t want her to regret the decision later and then blame me for not having been more vocal.
    Fine.
    That’s not the entire truth.
    Maybe I made the deal a little bit for me, if you factor in having to listen to Marjorie for the rest of
her
life, all, “Why didn’t you
force
her to shave?”
    Oh,
Marjorie
.
    As though
forcing
my daughters to do anything has been an option for at least a decade. Chris used to say that I spoiled the girls, but I didn’t spoil them so much as I bent to their will because to do otherwise would have been like crossing the path of a speeding train.
    The difference is subtle, but crucial.
    The negotiation cost me honeymoon tickets to Portofino, the foolishness scheduled for tomorrow, and a portion of my sanity, but I got the job done, like I always do, and