She was not making a joke. She was looking at me with these cool, expectant eyes, waiting for an
answer.
“She’s seven, Barbara,” I said.
“I’m thinking long term.” She folded her napkin into a neat, precise square. “Brandon will have
children of his own someday, you know. And there’s only so much to go around.”
Children of his own.
That phrase lodged itself in me like a splinter and stayed there. Children of his own. As if Lisa were
a placeholder. As if the real children, the ones that counted, were still coming.
I didn’t know it then, but Barbara had no intention of waiting until the wedding to start deciding
where Lisa belonged. And where she didn’t.
I told Brandon about some of it. Not all, because I didn’t want to be the girlfriend who was always complaining about his mother, but
some. He’d sigh and rub the back of his neck and say
she was old-fashioned. Overprotective. Set in her ways.
“She’ll come around,” he said. “Once we’re married, once things settle, she’ll adjust. She just needs time.”
I wanted so badly to believe him.
