“So you kind of fell into it?” she asked. “It’s not what you went to college for?”
“No, I started out in finance.” I realized a moment too late what I had done. From the way Camden’s eyebrows lifted, it was obvious that I’d set off his internal spy alarms. He opened his mouth, ready to ask me about it.
Irene accidentally intervened. “Do you do a lot of weddings, then?”
“It’s what my business focuses on.”
“What’s the worst thing that’s happened at a wedding? Just so we can be prepared,” she said with a little laugh, but there was something behind it. Something she was concerned about.
“I don’t want to freak anyone out, but things always go wrong at weddings. Usually they’re little things, like a bridesmaid’s bouquet going missing or people flubbing their vows. But I think I’ve seen everything. From medical emergencies, to brides and grooms running away, to actual fires and floods. There was the one where the bride and her sister were both in love with the groom and the sister showed up drunk and the bride had her in a headlock and we had to pry them apart. Lots of drunk people messing things up. Animals who were part of the ceremony peeing and pooping in the aisle. Mothers of the groom wearing white to the wedding. We had a best man once who was so drunk and so sick that he passed gas during the ceremony and made one of the bridesmaids throw up. Oh! There was the wedding where the bride, who ran a pet shop, insisted on having bowls with fish on each table, and her mother wanted to put floating lit candles on the top.”
Irene’s eyes went wide. “No.”
“Oh yes. All those poor fish died and one of the flower girls wouldn’t stop screaming when she saw it and had to be taken out of the reception. It was pretty awful.”
She reached over to rap on the wooden table next to her. “Knock on wood, none of that happens with this wedding.”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t,” I told her.
“You’re a very good friend,” she responded.
Camden’s phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket to look at it. “Excuse me a second.”
He went out into the hallway and I could hear his muffled voice just beyond the door.
“I told him he works too much,” Irene said, putting another flower onto her lei. “He doesn’t listen, though.”
“Children are funny that way,” I said. “Especially when they’re adults.” And could make their own life decisions and didn’t need a mother telling them how to live. “I feel like parents forget that part.”
“We don’t forget. We’re just, unfortunately, very human. We wish we could be perfect for you, but we’ve got our own strengths and shortcomings, just like anyone else. We make a lot of mistakes, even when we don’t mean to. But Camden does need to slow down. He’s been obsessed with his company going public.”
I wondered if he would have shushed her if he were still in the room. But she kept going. “He’s especially concerned about the money he’s going to get.”
That surprised me. When I’d talked to him earlier, he’d made it sound like he was more concerned with his employees than himself. I found this disappointing. “He wants to be rich, huh?”
“Oh no, I’m afraid it’s on my account. I’m the only parent they have left. Dan’s father suffered a heart attack a few years ago and now this.” She waved up to the scarf on her head. “There’s an experimental trial that’s not covered by insurance and it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and Camden says they’re going to pay for it after the company goes public.”
I immediately felt ashamed for having rushed to the wrong conclusion about him. It might have been due in part to rich men in my life doing their best to destroy me, and I could have used that disdain to keep Camden at arm’s length. Instead he had to go and be all noble.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled. About her husband dying, what she was going through, and the bad things I’d thought about Camden.
“They wanted to wait a few years until after their first CPU hit the market, but decided to speed things up and do it now. With Dan getting married, there’s all of these huge life changes happening at once. All I have to do is get Camden settled and happy.” She told me this information like a concerned parent, not as someone who was trying to make me into that person in Camden’s life. It was rather refreshing.
But I was still a bit confused. “Why do you talk about him like you’re his mom?” I asked. It was a relationship I still hadn’t quite figured out.