was all. Certainly, given they were trying to mend fences first, they’d want to keep up appearances in front of her. Although neither of them had been trying too awfully hard. She just needed to be better prepared to witness it, that was all. Once she’d had the chance to sit down with her mother and get this fiasco all out into the open, all the charade playing could finally come to an end. Which made her wonder…were both her mother and Arlen playing charades? Had Arlen also come to realize the depth of the mismatch?
That set Lauren off on an entirely new tangent of internal questioning. Lovely.
She’d just have to watch a bit more intently, then see if she could figure out the lay of the land. Her mother had smiled at his little joke, but then they both had gone back to their menus. Charlene had never once, to Lauren’s knowledge, had any patience for men with practiced, well-rehearsed viewpoints. Pompous poseurs, she’d called them. Her mother responded to passionate defense of beliefs and a person knowing his or herself well enough to stand behind them and defend them well if called upon to do so.
Somehow, after listening to Arlen’s chamber of commerce speech a few minutes ago, Lauren couldn’t really fathom him giving an impassioned, original defense of…anything. He might be a practiced orator, but Lauren would bet money the words he delivered the best were generally written by somebody else.
Lauren glanced at her mother again and found her thoughts going back to how they’d ever become a match in the first place. Under what set of conditions would her mother have ever fallen for this guy? Lauren couldn’t come up with any. Which led her to wonder again if, perhaps, there really was something wrong with her. She seemed perfectly fine, sharp, gracious, and on point as she’d always been, but perhaps there was something else going on beneath the surface. Not that Lauren wished her mother ill health over simple poor judgment, but there had to be something that would explain this…aberration. Something that Lauren was obviously missing.
She stared sightlessly at her menu and tried very hard to be objective. Daphne, one of her former coworkers, and the only one she considered a close friend, had said in response to Lauren’s venting about all of it that perhaps her feelings about Arlen were just totally off base and skewed by her dissatisfaction with her own life. And that maybe she should trust her mother, who’d always shown good judgment, the same way Lauren expected that of her mother when Lauren had dated various men on the Hill.
Except Lauren hadn’t eloped and moved across the country with any of them.
And she’d fixed her dissatisfaction with her life. Well, she’d taken the first step, anyway. And that hadn’t changed her feelings about the elopement. She really didn’t think that had anything to do with this.
The wine steward came in just then, followed by Stephan, their waiter, giving a much-needed break to the growing silence in the small room.
After Arlen pronounced the pinot noir palatable, everyone placed their orders, or should she say that she placed her order, and Arlen placed the order for both him and her mother. Even though Lauren hadn’t seen him consult with her at all on any part of their order. Her mother was a connoisseur of good food and was known for her very discerning palate. Her menus were always discussed after any event and considered both classic and adventurous, mostly in terms of the combinations she would so cleverly decide upon. So…it was just odd to see her hand over the choice of what she was going to eat to someone else. But then, as Lauren had noted earlier, perhaps they came here all the time and their choices were already well established.
She looked to Stephan, the waiter, to see if there was any acknowledgment on his part of the First Couple being regulars of the establishment. But he didn’t seem to treat them any differently than he treated her.
And Lauren knew her mother’s expressions about as well as Charlene could read her daughter’s, and Lauren didn’t spy any dissatisfaction with the direction the evening was taking, overtly or subtly.
It was all so confusing, really. Possibly she was just over-thinking all of it, examining the details too closely, analyzing aspects that simply didn’t require such close scrutiny. Okay, probably. But that still left her with more questions than answers.
They all handed their menus to Stephan, who slipped out as silently as he’d slipped in, taking her one remaining shield away with him.
Forced to make direct eye contact, Lauren chose her mother. “So, how did the charity luncheon go today?” Small talk. She hadn’t seen her mother in six months, and she was making small talk. It was pathetic, and made her more than a little sad, but she felt really out to sea here, so, like her mother, she clung to societal convention like the life raft it was. At least until she felt she had a better handle on the real situation between her mother and Arlen.
“It went well, but ran quite long.” Her mother smiled, clearly using the life raft, as well.
“What was the charity?” Lauren asked, fiddling with her napkin, smoothing the wrinkles flat.
And so the conversation went, stilted and staggered and so incredibly not how she thought it might go after that initial hug. She blamed it all on Arlen, or perhaps her mother’s discomfort in knowing how to act around him. She still felt certain that she and her mother were on the right track, but she’d have paid large sums to have an emergency announced in the kitchen right around then that would force the restaurant to close early. A little dramatic, perhaps, but that’s how she was feeling at the moment. Finally, Stephan—bless his heart—returned with their food. Which was probably delicious, but she couldn’t remember a single bite of it. Mostly it had given her something to do. And do it, she did. She carefully cut and consumed that lasagna like it was her damn job. She listened as Arlen talked on about the town’s accomplishments and future hopes, and her mother chimed in to talk about this person or that, trying to personalize Arlen’s monologue, as if Lauren would be interested in minor details of the lives of complete strangers. But then, it struck her that the irony was, the people sitting across from her were complete strangers, so what difference did it make?
Dinner finally dwindled to an end, their meals finished, leaving Lauren to desperately wish she could claim some other engagement and take off. But she’d just arrived in town. Expressly to see her mother and meet Arlen. So, what else could she possibly have to do?
Jake’s sexy, smiling face floated through her mind.
She floated it right back out again as Stephan returned to clear dishes and ask after coffee and dessert. Lauren had the strongest urge to wrap her arms around his waist and beg him to stay. Or take her with him. Thankfully, dessert was unanimously declined and coffee was ordered. How long could it take to sip a cup of coffee, then beg off with claims of an altitude headache or jet lag? Neither of which were true, but neither her mother nor Arlen, who were both searching for topics of discussion themselves, seemed all that intent on prolonging the agony, either.
The other irony was that there was so much she wanted to say, wanted to ask. But, instead they were stuck in some kind of horrific provincial play, acting out parts none of them felt comfortable playing, rather than just putting it all out there on the table. It was on the tip of her tongue to simply say it, dive in, but something held her back. Maybe it was the way she’d continued to catch Arlen kind of staring at her during dinner. Nothing overtly creepy or anything, just that…staring thing he did. He’d smile when she caught him, or look away and pretend he hadn’t been staring at all. She supposed it wasn’t weird, him wanting to get a look at the one person who possibly stood between him and a potentially happy marriage. Or! A satisfactory divorce. Ooh, maybe that was it! It made more sense than anything else. Her mother had probably let it slip that Lauren was also an attorney, though not a practicing one, but still…perhaps it wasn’t her political contacts he wanted, but her legal expertise that he was trying to avoid.
