the last thing she wanted to do tonight…or ever.
Marie bit the inside of her cheek. She’d finally moved into her own apartment a week ago after living with her family for ten months upon her return from L.A. Since the move, every morning like clockwork her mother called to invite her to dinner. Marie had made the mistake of going last Sunday, thinking there was only so much her mother could do during a family meal. She’d been sorely mistaken. There, seated to her right, had been Benito Benini, a guy she’d gone to kindergarten with and twenty years was not enough time to erase the memory of him launching green Play-Doh out of his nose. A nose that had grown considerably since then.
“No,” Marie said. “Absolutely not.” She hesitated as she negotiated a right-hand turn into the Bernalillo County Courthouse parking lot. “I…I already have plans.”
She resisted the urge to bang her forehead against the steering wheel as she said the words. What was she thinking?
“Plans? With whom? What’s his name? Do we know him?”
“We,” of course, referred to the entire Bertelli family. Her father, Frank Sr. Her mother. And her three older brothers, Frankie Jr., Anthony and Mario, all married and either with or starting families of their own. And each with their own reason for butting into every aspect of Marie’s private life.
“Never mind, Mama,” Marie said as she zoomed into a parking space in front of another car. She ignored the blast of the other driver’s horn and gave a friendly wave. She moved the wireless phone to her other ear then shut off the car engine. “Look, I’ve got to go. I’m at the courthouse and I’m already late meeting my client.”
“Late? See, you should have stayed home. You wouldn’t be late if you were home.”
“I was late because there was an accident, Mama. The highway was backed up for miles.”
“Accident? You got into an accident?”
“No. I said there was an accident. One that, I am happy to say, I was not involved in.” But with five minutes more of this conversation she might wish otherwise. “Goodbye, Mama. I’ll call you later.”
“This is how you would leave your mother? Worrying about what ax murderer you’re meeting tonight?”
Marie leaned her head on the rest behind her. “I’m not going out with an ax murderer. I’m meeting Dulcy and Jena for dinner.”
“Oh.”
Was that a note of disappointment in her mother’s voice? Yes, it definitely was. The realization made even her little white lie easier to swallow.
Marie smiled. Interesting. Was her mother to the point where she’d welcome even a potential ax murderer into the family just so long as he was a possible husband?
“You could bring them to dinner. It’s been so long since we’ve seen your friends.”
That was because on the few occasions that her best friends had met up with her family the police had almost needed to be brought in. Mostly because Jena had a hard time believing the family really did think they had a right to meddle in Marie’s life and had challenged them on the point. And the Bertellis had a habit of referring to Jena as “the loose one” who would tarnish their only daughter’s reputation.
If only that were the case. Marie couldn’t even pay for a reputation, good, bad or otherwise.
“I don’t think so, Ma. Gotta go. Love you, bye.”
She clicked her wireless closed on her mother’s automatic protest then quickly switched the phone off altogether, routing any incoming calls to her voice mail.
How she’d survived twenty-six years in the Bertelli family was anyone’s guess. And the phone conversation she’d just had with her mother was nothing compared to what it was like to actually grow up in the Bertelli house. Directions on how she should do this, wear that, fix this. Oh, she adored her family. Loved them to death. Unfortunately, she also feared they would be the death of her.
She put her keys in her purse and gathered her things together from the passenger seat. Whatever had possessed her to pick up her phone without looking at the display so early in the morning? She should have known it would be her mother trying to railroad her into another blind date with another old classmate that used to do something disgusting with play materials. Last week it had been third grade and Johnny Russo who had tried to paste her to her desk chair. The week before that she’d been hopeful that her family was running out of prospects when they’d actually invited a third cousin to dinner. A cousin was family, no matter how many times removed, and she’d easily sidestepped that matchmaking attempt by casually bringing up the increase in risk of birth defects all throughout dinner. “Why just the other day I heard that someone who had married her cousin four times removed on her mother’s side had a baby with two noses. Two.” She’d held up two fingers to emphasize her point.
Marie hoisted her bulging briefcase from the passenger’s seat, wondering if coming up with inventive stories to shock her parents was going to be the state of her life forever or if eventually her family would wake up and realize that what they had in mind for her, and how she saw her life, were two completely different things. She didn’t want to be matched up with a guy to whom marriage was synonymous with slavery. Didn’t want a loveless marriage to a man who was acceptable by the sole criteria that he was either full-blooded Italian or Italian-American and knew the difference between pinzimonio and agliata.
You would have thought they’d have learned after she ran away to L.A. nearly three years ago.
Marie stared at her reflection in the rearview mirror, scrunching a couple of runaway red curls, then smoothing the liner under her right eye. No, she supposed her family wasn’t very quick on the uptake. When they’d virtually gone ahead and planned a wedding without her being aware of it, sent out invitations and the whole nine yards, then told her a week before the event that she was marrying a man coming in from Italy, she’d finally blown her stack and pointed her vintage ’67 Mustang in the direction of L.A. and hadn’t stopped until she got there. Not even her best friends, Dulcy and Jena, had known where she was until she’d landed a job in the L.A. district attorney’s office and had sublet an apartment from a B-movie actress going off on a two-month film shoot in South America. She’d passed onto them the responsibility of telling her family she was okay. She hadn’t been surprised to find out they’d filed a missing person’s report on her. She’d spent two hours on the phone with the Albuquerque sheriff’s office assuring them she was fine and wasn’t rotting away in a Dumpster somewhere.
She hadn’t directly contacted her parents until three weeks after that. She’d called and told them she was okay, that she hoped the wedding went well without her, and that she would be in touch. Nothing more. Because she knew if she had told them where she was, her brothers would have promptly been sent to drag her back home.
No, she hadn’t shared her apartment address until she was sure her parents had gotten the picture. Either butt out of her personal life or she was going to butt out of their lives…permanently.
Of course, that really hadn’t been her first real revolt. The first one had involved sexy neighbor Ian Kilborn, a lifetime of suppressed hormones, and a boatload of rebellion aimed toward her controlling family. But only she, Ian and the pantry walls knew about that one incident—a steamy, heat-filled white-hot flash in time when she was eighteen and had unleashed the wild woman that lurked just below her good-girl surface. And, oh, what a time she and naughty Ian had had. And if now, eight years later, she thought about reliving the event every now and again, it was only because, instead of living down the street from each other, she and Ian now spent most of their time in the same courthouse as attorneys.
Marie self-consciously cleared her throat as she climbed from the car, then closed the door after her. January in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was a world away from the weather L.A. was experiencing right now. And she’d still be there enjoying the sun and her freedom if Dulcy and Jena hadn’t contacted her nearly a year ago and held her to the promise they’d made when they were young. They’d convinced her