Somewhere In-Between Read Online Free PDF

standing beside Ian. Now she sees that she looked like nothing more than an over-made-up child playing dress-up.

4
    Oh, Mom, it’s not so bad. Okay, yeah, well maybe it is. All those puffs and ruffles look kinda cheesy now. But even with all that silly frou-frou, I’ve always loved Mom and Dad’s wedding photograph. When I was a little girl I would imagine myself wearing her dress when I was grown up and getting married. But that little girl is gone now. And me, walking down the aisle wearing a white gown? Not gonna happen.
    Still, I wish Mom would not be so hard on herself—and Dad. I wish she could find a way back to the place they were on the day that photograph was taken; back to the place where all that matters is love.
    A person would have to be blind not to see the electricity between my parents in that picture. Daddy looks like a movie star—no really he does, kind of like a young Tom Hanks—in his black tuxedo, standing beside a princess in a frilly satin gown.
    Maybe all daughters believe their fathers are handsome and their mothers are beautiful. I don’t know, but I truly believe mine are. Inside and out. Sappy, I know. But I think I’m allowed that, after all.
    When I was growing up, I never got tired of hearing Mom tell the story of how she and Dad met. She repeated it so many times, embellishing the details as I got older, that I believe I can tell it even better than her. Yeah. No doubt from my point of view now, I can.
    She was only nineteen when he plunked down in the seat beside her during her first Statistics class at UBC in Vancouver. Glancing up from her notebook, her first thought was, “What a hunk.” The next was, “Tilt!” when he pushed back a lock of coal black hair from his eyes, and she saw the gold band. With a polite smile she turned back to the lecture. She wasn’t on the prowl for anyone, anyway. She was determined to stay uninvolved while she studied for her commerce degree. During grade school and high school, numbers had always intrigued her, she said, had always come comically easy to her. Becoming a chartered accountant appeared to be the natural choice.
    Dad was older than most of the other students. “Changing careers mid-stream,” he told her after they became friends. Study-buddies, Mom swore, was all they were. Yeah, right! Still there must have been some truth to that because his then wife didn’t seem to mind the arrangement. In fact, when exams where looming they took turns studying together late into the nights at his Kitsilano condo, while his wife, a practising orthodontist, slept down the hall. The few times Mom met her, she was surprised that the solemn- looking woman was someone Dad, who could find humour even in numbers, would choose to marry. I saw her in an old photograph of Dad’s, and I have to admit she looked like a pretty unhappy camper.
    At any rate, after a year of sort of hanging together, Dad called Mom one night, sounding really upset, asking if they could meet. Her parents were away in Europe, so she invited him to her home in Point Grey. Hard to imagine her doing that, but, hey, she was old enough to make her own decisions, and like I said, he was, and still is, pretty much a hunk.
    At her parents’ place he had sat on the living room couch with his head in his hands and wept—Mom’s word not mine—because his wife was leaving him. I never could imagine my dad crying. Now, after all that’s happened, no problem picturing that.
    I’m guessing that they ended up in bed that night, although Mom—who believe it or not, hoped I would buy into the old-school stuff about saving myself for marriage—would never ‘fess up’ on that one. She did admit, though, that they started dating afterward. Whatever.
    Gram, of course, went ballistic. I can just see her, pulling her shoulders up, all huffy and ready for battle, when Mom announced they would be getting married