Page 31 of RomeAntically Challenged
Lynn snorted. “Exactly.”
Lynn was a pediatric oncology nurse—making her a real-life superhero—who completed their Ride or Pie posse. She was petite, patient, and as fierce as a lioness when it came to her patients’ recovery. She was also the mother hen of the group, who was never without her Mary Poppins of take-out bags.
“Then these are in order?” Beckett opened the bakery box, and Lynn sucked in a breath.
“Limoncello pie,” she said, sighing. “Ken called earlier to say he had a late meeting, so I get his mother all to myself.” Lynn pulled out three forks from her bag and passed them around. “I told him, while he’s cleaning the house this weekend, I’ll be getting pampered at the spa. Anyone want to join?”
“For a girl’s day? I so need one of those,” Beckett said with a sigh.
Annie sighed right alongside her friend. A day of pampering sounded heavenly. A day to not think about anything except herself would be a dream. The sudden silence said her friends were thinking the same thing. Annie had come into the lunchroom feeling as if life was picking on her. She needed this reminder that everyone’s life was hard. Some more than others. And while she was, by no means, the one struggling with the biggest issues, her friends didn’t have to go home and face them alone.
Crazy families or not, her friends both had people waiting for them after the workday finished. Annie had her pizza, her wine, and Stephen Colbert, but she didn’t have anyone to share them with. Normally that didn’t bother her, but for some reason, today it did.
“So when is this girls’ day?” she asked. “Because I’m in.”
“Not until you set things straight with this whole wedding BS,” Beckett said. “No guilty piers allowed to ruin girl time.”
“Wait, why are we still talking about Clark?” Lynn asked. “I thought we kicked him to the curb.”
“We did,” Beckett said. “But he’s like that supergerm everyone is terrified of—once you catch him, he just won’t go away.”
Both of her friends knew the story of her breakup. Had heard it several times. But as Annie launched into the events of the last twenty-four hours, her friends sat speechless. The deeper Annie got into the retelling, the more doormat-like she sounded. By the time she reached the wedding blackmail part of the story, her girls looked ready to fly to Connecticut on Annie’s behalf and do some pieing of their own—only Annie imagined they were leaning more toward the steaming kind of pie that one lit on fire and chucked at ex’s front doors.
She hadn’t had many girlfriends like them back in Connecticut, friends who didn’t need to know all the sides and details in order to have Annie’s back. They were squarely in her corner simply because they were friends.
It was refreshing to have that kind of person in her life.
“I should call his new fiancée,” Beckett said, rubbing her hands together like an evil genius. “Warn her Clark is a habitual runaway groom.”
“One time doesn’t make it a habit,” Annie said.
“If they run once, they’ll run again,” Lynn disagreed, placing a pie on a plate and handing it to Annie. “And girl code states that someone has to at least give the woman the facts. What she does with them is up to her.”
Annie forked off a bite of pie and passed the plate around. “This meeting of the Ride or Pie club has officially begun.”
Annie held up her fork and, after tinking with the others, slid it in her mouth. The mix of tart and sweet teased her tongue, and her eyes slid shut while she sighed in ecstasy.
“As for inviting your parents, that was a dick move,” Beckett said around her second bite. “I haven’t even met your mom and yet I know that she’d take one look at the invitation and be swayed by the card stock paper and embossed white doves.”
“You need to call your mom before the invitation arrives and set her straight,” Lynn said sternly. “They need to support you, no matter how badly your mom may want to go to the wedding.”
“My mom loves to be the one to share news. If she went, it would be so she could tell the neighbors how much better the wedding would have been if she were still the mother of the bride,” Annie said, feeling the need to defend her mom.
Even though her mom was nosy and opinionated, Annie never doubted how much her mother loved her. But where Annie was soft-spoken, her mother was like a freight train, and in emotional situations where Annie’s instinct was to roll over, her mother often forgot to avoid Annie’s tender spots.
Misunderstood? Absolutely.
Unloved? Never a day in her adopted life.
“I mean it’s not a huge deal if she goes—”
“No,” her friends said in unison.
“It is absolutely, categorically wrong on so many different levels,” Lynn said. “You shouldn’t even need to have this conversation. But from what you’ve said about your mom, even I know that this conversation is a must. And soon.”
“You needed to be up-front with your mom from the moment the engagement ended,” Beckett clarified. “Actually, you needed to be up-front the moment the engagement ended and your mom told Clark he was still welcome at Sunday brunches.”
“And after that call, you need to do a wash and repeat with Dickless Wonder.” Lynn covered her mouth. “Whoops, I meant Clark. Repeat after me, Anh, ‘I am not a pushover.’”
