Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

Chapter 1 The Call

Chapter1 The Call

The Mother of the Bride

“Mom! It’s me. It’s us. Sorry to call so early there. I have some news.”

News! Despite the early hour in Montecito, California, Alexa Diamandis was all ears. Could Penny be pregnant? Please, let it be that. “Give me two minutes. I need my coffee,” she said to her only daughter while positioning the tablet on a stand in the kitchen,

as she did every morning to take video calls from all over the world. Her family lived in Greece. Her friends lived in England.

And her business was travel. She was used to early-morning conversations in her small but airy California kitchen. It was

why she rose at five most mornings and put on her face first thing, at least a modified version of her face. Moisturizer,

a light coat of foundation, a swipe of mascara and lip gloss. She even had a rotating collection of velour tracksuits that

worked well on camera, like the soft pink one she was wearing now. But first, coffee.

Alexa worked the magic of the espresso maker, grinding, pounding, pulling, and steaming until the dark elixir dripped into her tiny cup. Her morning routine started with a quick shot, followed by a more leisurely cappuccino. She loved this gleaming machine as much as she’d ever loved any object and most people. Except Penny, her daughter, the light of her life despite being her complete opposite in personality and preferences. A grandchild would be a tiebreaker of sorts, Alexa thought. “Hold on, I’m almost done.”

Alexa’s back was turned to the camera, but she heard her daughter laugh and then explain. “She’s a fiend about the coffee.

She’s Greek; she doesn’t function without it. Give her a minute.” A man’s voice answered back, something about how they should

have waited to call.

Alexa didn’t turn, but she knew it must be the boyfriend. Chris? Chess? Ah, Chase! Yes, he was a charming guy, the type you

do bring home to Mother. She scrolled through her mental files to conjure up an impression of him. She’d only met him once,

on layover in New York City, and Penny had brought him to dinner unannounced, disrupting Alexa’s plans for a serious mother-daughter

talk about Penny leaving her corporate public relations job and coming back to work for the family business. Instead, it was

an evening of first impressions and impressing, everyone at the table aware of the stakes. From the moment she met him, Alexa

knew he was a serious contender for Penny’s heart.

Chase looked to be every bit a Chase, Alexa supposed. Dark hair, normal build, good suit. In politics. As she recalled, he

grew up outside the city in suburban Connecticut and now worked for the Mayor of the City of New York, as he said multiple

times. He talked about the city like it was a small town and, of course, he worked for the mayor because who else would he

work for? Alexa liked him, liked his confidence, liked the way he held the door for her daughter but also let her tell a story

without interrupting. This new generation of men had qualities that Alexa admired. They could share the spotlight in a way

the men of her generation disdained. Still, did Penny really need him to live a satisfying life?

Funny, when she and Penny talked most afternoons on Penny’s walk home from work, Chase was rarely a topic of conversation. The Diamandis women talked about work, friends and family, the latest celebrities whom Alexa had seen at Bettina, the star-studded pizza place of choice in Montecito, but almost never about men.

But that was fitting, because men had never been a part of their daily life as mother and daughter. One thing she knew for

sure: Chase and Penny would make handsome babies. She swallowed down the single shot of espresso and went to work on the cappuccino.

“Steaming milk now,” Alexa called over her shoulder to the couple in her pan-Euro accent, an asset in a town like Montecito,

a Pacific Coast gem with European aspirations. The Positano of California. Over her decades as a resident of the hamlet, she’d

used her background as part of her brand, working with clients to plan their dream vacations in the Greek isles or the Amalfi

Coast. Her gentle Mediterranean lilt informed by a British university education had served her well in this sophisticated

beach town. So had her hustle. It’s why she needed her coffee. Steam, press, pour, foam, layer. Perfect.

Turning with cup in hand, Alexa positioned herself at the marble-topped island, a spot she knew had great morning lighting

that blew out her wrinkles on camera. “Now I’m human. Tell me your news!”

Penny, lovely Penny, who with her olive skin and green eyes didn’t need good lighting to look stunning. She’d been blessed

with favorable genetics and a strong sense of self that shaped her style. Even on a Sunday morning, she looked pulled together,

polished, in a white linen shirt, small gold earrings and necklace, and her hair swept up in a messy bun. A swipe of color

popped her smile. No filter needed. The couple appeared to be huddled together on Penny’s couch in her Upper East Side apartment.

Alexa recognized the art on the wall, the work of a painter on Patmos, her own birthplace and the island where Penny spent

most of her summers. The slashes of blue and pink in the painting brought a little bit of the Dodecanese to Manhattan. It

soothed Alexa.

“Are you sitting down?” Penny asked dramatically as she held up her left hand. “We’re engaged! Isn’t it gorgeous?” She thrust her ring into the camera. It was a stunning light-blue square-cut gem surrounded by baguettes of a light-pink stone. Sparkly and special, like her daughter. Like the painting. But Alexa refused to get weepy. Or swept away. She stayed as pragmatic as ever. “Is that an aquamarine?”

“Yes, three carats with tourmaline baguettes. No blood diamonds for us,” Chase said, looking satisfied and proud of both the

rock and his newly acquired vocabulary. “The mayor knows a guy.”

“Chase picked it out all by himself!” Penny said, as if this act alone made him marriage worthy. But did it? He had failed,

Alexa noted to herself, to inform her of the proposal. It wasn’t as if she expected him to ask for Penny’s hand in marriage

like it was the Middle Ages. And she didn’t want to react like her own Greek father might have at the slight, with a torrent

of patriarchal language and a curse on Chase’s family. But some sort of advance notice would have been appreciated. She would

cope with that slight later.

Penny continued because that was the purpose of the call: to tell the story. “He got down on one knee at the top of the Empire

State Building. The lights of the city were amazing. Nobody else was there. It was so romantic, Mom.”

Alexa knew she needed to react in exactly the right way, or her daughter would never let her forget it. She had one chance

to get this right. That was the tricky part about being an only parent: Her reaction was the only reaction. There was no backup,

nobody to smooth out the rough spots, to fill in when she failed. She willed herself to smile and raised her voice half an

octave. “How thrilling. Wonderful for you both. Do we need to talk about your plans now?”

She hoped not.

This was so unexpected, and she had so much on her schedule for the rest of the year. A long engagement would be ideal, twelve or maybe even eighteen months. And maybe Penny would want to get married on Patmos at her family’s hotel. It would be practically free. And then the happy couple could have a long honeymoon some where she could use her connections to get them a good deal, like Croatia, even though the service was terrible there. “Do you have a date yet? Or a place?”

“We can follow up on that next week, Mom,” Penny answered like a pro. Alexa knew her daughter worked the calendar months in

advance, planning five steps out while everybody else was still on square one. It was what made them both so good at their

jobs, and, Alexa thought, at their lives. “We want to enjoy the engagement for a bit.”

“A lot of it will depend on our work schedules,” Chase added, to Alexa’s satisfaction.

“Whatever you two decide will be the right thing, I’m sure,” Alexa said, a line she had heard one of her friends use with

her adult children. She didn’t believe it, but she was committed to selling the sentiment. She lifted her coffee mug in a

toast. “Welcome to our family, Chase.” She even choked up a bit as she said that last part.

Of course she did. Because what Alexa Diamandis was really thinking was, why on earth would anyone ever get married at all?