Free The Sleeping Beauty Proposal by Sarah Strohmeyer

Todd.

Chapter Five
    I don’t want to pretend that I’m engaged anymore.
    This has absolutely nothing to do with Nick and how he looked leaning against the doorjamb. It might seem as if my desire not to be engaged might have something to do with Nick and my curiosity about how he looks with those jeans off, but, really, nothing could be further from the truth.
    Nor do I want to sleep around as a free woman—Patty’s theory. It is just like Patty to distill the most noble of human actions, whether rocketing to the moon or unraveling our DNA, into two basic drives: greed and sex.
    Sex is fine for some women, women who excel at the physical gymnastics of love. But as I’ve been disqualified from the sex kitten club (thanks to Hugh), I will have to hope that eventually some kind and decent man will appreciate me for my mind. I will take up knitting and he will wear slippers and together we will watch PBS before retiring to our separate beds.
    I’m sure we’ll be very happy. In a way.
    Honestly, there is one simple, fundamental, and honorable reason why I want to stop this charade and that is this: If Nick overheard Patty call my engagement a crock of shit, then it is just a matter of time before Nick lets my secret slip to Todd. I would much rather tell Todd the truth myself than have him hear it from his carpenter over a beer at the Cambridge Grill.
    But first, I need to come clean to my parents. Starting tonight.
    The weekly Sunday dinner with my parents is my mother’s single-handed attempt to delay the unraveling of her matrilineal dominance over our family.
    For years she reigned supreme, withholding allowances or the family car from those of her children who misbehaved, bestowing her mad money on and extending curfew for those who bent to her will. (Notice I did not say “behaved.”)
    Then we drifted off like dandelion seeds in a summer breeze. First, Todd left to go to school, and when he refused to come home—though he lived right down the road in Cambridge—my mother saw the writing on the wall.
    She was not happy about her waning power. She threw fits. She threatened. She cajoled, and, at her most evil, she baked sour cream apple pie and deposited it outside Todd’s dorm room with a note: “See what you missed?”The plate was empty, aside from a puny sliver, just enough to fan the flames of apple-pie addiction.
    Don’t even ask about her late-night calls to him about Leroy, Todd’s beloved Jack Russell terrier, whom she hysterically claimed was wasting away from “Boy Abandonment Syndrome.” Thank God Todd was smart enough to call the vet, who—after collapsing on the floor in a fit of laughter—confirmed there was, in fact, no such disease, though Leroy’s diarrhea might disappear if our mother quit feeding him leftover sour cream apple pie.
    I was the next to fly the nest and, warned in advance by Todd, would not acquiesce to her absurd demand that I return every weekend “to rest”—no matter how enticing her offers of clean bedding, washed laundry, a quiet house, free meals, HBO, and endless hot showers might be. Lucy, the youngest, was smarter. She fled to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia. With her my mother didn’t try so hard. By then, I think, she was exhausted anyway. Plus, she had run out of tricks. Lucy didn’t even have a dog.
    All was going fine until we made our fatal mistake: Todd returned home after traveling the world for two years, Lucy married Jason and moved to nearby Concord, New Hampshire, to run Jason’s family business, and I, well, I never went anywhere. I just stayed. For the first time in years, all of us were within my mother’s reach. And that’s when she bared her claws.
    We didn’t stand a chance. Before we knew what was happening, Mom’s Sunday dinners were required attendance. Only Hugh managed to weasel out of them and that was largely due to