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The Monday Book: KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND WEAR BEIGE by Kathleen Seidel

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I am a sucker for character-driven plots. This one was fun because it set up a problem not so often discussed in latte lit. And also not universal. I myself have never been the mother of the groom, but Seidel’s subtle humor and wicked insights made me feel empathy for her narrator’s plight.

This book has a cast of thousands: two families, a new girlfriend, even a snarky nasty prima donna writer. And they’re all fun. Some are omnipresent, some are thrown in as plot devices, but each makes their appearance in ways that elicit sympathy or condescension.

The basic plot is, of course, the wedding. But the wedding is complicated by one family being wealthy and the new girlfriend being a social climber. And the wealthy family has a special needs kid. And the narrator is having a hard time with her ex-husband’s social climber taking over wedding plans. The narrator (Darcy) has a streak of do-gooder to her that keeps her from being too perfect as she tangles with emotions and attitudes and tries to maintain her son’s needs, her own sanity, and the mental well-being of other children who surround the wedding and maybe get a little less attention during this time. Darcy can’t stand not being needed.

It was a fun read, the kind of relationship-driven character novel that makes you smile when you recognize a personality and laugh when your least favorite gets a comeuppance. Which they all do at one point or another. Read it at the beach or on a plane, before a big family wedding–or maybe, if you have a wicked sense of humor, just before you vacation in the Hamptons. There’s a lot of “poor little rich people” observations in the book.

Two bouquets up for Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige.

Tom, Tom, the Tiler’s Son

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Jack gets over the line again – –

We are having our main bathroom re-modeled and the guy in charge is called Tom – hence the title of this post.

Wendy had a recent disappointment and as a consolation prize we agreed to get her the nearest thing to the bathroom of her dreams as possible. We did some searching around for potential folk to undertake the work and settled on ‘Tom’.

The trouble is that we quickly discovered that he’s a ‘bletherskite’ – an excellent Scots word for someone who just won’t stop talking. But he mostly talks about anything except the job in hand.

On the odd occasion when he randomly inserts something into the conversation about the job it’s mostly incomprehensible to me. That’s because despite my background in construction, my technical language is from Scotland and it’s very different. For instance, I talked about the stoppers and he talked about the drain and we went about ten minutes waiting for each other to get to the point.

So – a fair bit of mess-communication ensued! Part of that was when he planned to start demolishing the existing stuff. He messaged me mentioning ‘demo’ – well, to a child of the 1960s a demo is when you sit in the road to protest something! When we discovered on Monday that he planned to start the next day we went into a panic because all the bathroom cupboards and closets were still stuffed full. Wendy had just held a yard sale and we had some empty boxes…..

So most of Monday we were desperately removing lots of stuff including things we didn’t know we had or hadn’t seen for years. Then finding where on earth to stash it for the next two weeks. At least we hope it is two weeks. Tom said “15 days” and we can’t translate if that is 15 working days, meaning three weeks????

But Tom and his helper are, right now as I write this, bashing away at the ‘demo’ and I’m hopeful that everything will turn out to be as we want in the end. More correctly, as Wendy wants it.

I’ll keep you posted of course over the next couple of weeks, and yes, we are taking offers of places to shower. Tom has just come in and I asked him about taps.

He cocked his head and said, “You play the trumpet? I came in here to talk to you about faucets.”

But where will we get a bath or a shower in the meantime – – –