Recipes for a Perfect Marriage Read Free

relationship. It was good news or bad news, depending on how you looked at it. In the short term, Dan patched me up and made me feel better. But my feelings for him were always sullied by the bad guy before him. Even if the chef was a jerk there had been some chemistry between us, albeit the poisonous kind. Dan didn’t have that power over me. Although I knew he would never do anything to hurt me, sometimes I wished he would. Because surely it is better to feel hurt than to feel nothing at all.
    Perhaps I am making things sounds worse than they were. I did have feelings for Dan—of course I did. When I married him, I thought I loved him.
    Dan made me feel good. He was great in bed; I had confidence in my body around him. He thought I was gorgeous. He desired me and, I’ll be honest, that was something different for me. I love to cook and I love to eat, so I am on the heavy side. Not in a bad way—at least I don’t think so. But Dan was the first guy who I felt I didn’t have to hide from. He was always telling me how sexy, how smart I was; what a great cook I was, what a hot body I had. Right from the start, from that first afternoon, Dan Mullins was stone-mad crazy in love with me. He was so sure about marrying me, so clear and certain that he could make me happy, that I believed him.
    After just three months he said, “Marry me.”
    Not “Will you?” or “I think it would be a good idea if we got married.”
    Just “Marry me. I know I can make you happy.”
    No one had ever asked me before and part of me knew that no one would again. I was thirty-eight and I wanted to believe in something: in happy ever after, in him. So I said “yes.”
    I allowed myself to get caught up in the arrangements even though I knew that they were not the point. The dress, the cake, the venue, the canapés: Getting married was the biggest, most glamorous photographic shoot I was ever going to organize. If I was using details as distractions, at least I had that in common with every other bride-to-be. It was such a big deal. Such an event. Everyone wanted a piece of me.
    Doreen, my best friend the fashion editor, had her whole fashion team on me and they went into meltdown.
    “A European bride—I mean, it’ll be so this season.”
    “She’s Irish. It doesn’t count.”
    “Why? Ireland’s in Europe? Isn’t it?”
    “Physically, yes. Style-wise? It’s Canada.”
    “Oh.”
    “Get on to Swarovski; I’m thinking crystal choker to distract from that size ten ass.”
    “And the rest!”
    “We’ll have to get her down to an eight if she wants to wear white...”
    I enjoyed playing the princess, all the fuss and frivolity. And it turned out to be just like in the magazines: the happiest day of my life.
    Part of that was due to the bonding I experienced that day with my mother. Niamh flew into J.F.K. from London to be there. I had always wanted a conventional cookie-baking mother and she had always wanted a friend rather than a daughter. We didn’t clash; we just inhabited parallel worlds. Niamh and I had little in common. I was pragmatic and conventional, an inverted rebellion against her chaotic, promiscuous nature. She had followed her lecturer boyfriend to London five years earlier, where he took up a position at Oxford University and she played the part of his eccentric partner: all hippy clothes and dyed-purple hair, hoping to shock the unshockable English. I was hurt she had left me behind so easily—that there seemed to be no place in her life for a single, soon-to-be-middle-age daughter, and there was a minor estrangement. We spoke every couple of months on the phone, but I never had the urge to go and visit her and she always had an excuse not to come home on vacation. Five years had managed to pass without us having seen each other.
    I had almost considered not inviting her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Niamh there; it was just that I guess, underneath the bravado of seeming not to care about her, I was afraid