Chapter Seven
Seven
“Are you okay?” the girl at the front desk asks, and I nod, too breathless to form a sentence.
I scan the shop for a redheaded bride and startle back when I spot my own reflection instead.
My sweaty pink face is embarrassing enough without the bed head or the crusty white ring of dried toothpaste around my lips, but maybe no one will notice my busted face thanks to my completely inappropriate attire: terry cloth pajama shorts, Nike slides, and a sweatshirt that has never before left the house.
On it, a cartoon beaver balances a tower of martinis on his head above the words BEAVER LIQUORS.
“I’m…with them,” I pant, gesturing vaguely with one hand and cleaning up my toothpaste mustache with the other. “The group that just came in. Gin? Virginia?”
Once the clerk has verified the bride’s name and my sanity, she directs me past the racks of tulle toward our designated shopping station.
There are rows of them, little shopping cubicles, each with its own changing room and three-way mirror.
Around a raised wooden platform, four high-backed pink velvet chairs—practically thrones—are arranged in a crescent shape, and I finger comb my hair before slinking into the last available seat.
“Look who’s here!” Chrissy reaches over to squeeze my forearm by way of hello.
Beside her, Gin’s smile doesn’t quite stick, but there’s still excitement in her “Yay!”
On the opposite end of the crescent moon, Renee’s upper lip curls like a fish snagged on a hook, and I swear I feel the ground tremble beneath me.
She folds one long, tan leg over the other, glances down at her watch, then back up at me.
Not with her usual icy stare but with a blank, flat expression—the face of a woman who was expecting the worst and got exactly that.
Shame sinks like a lead weight into my stomach, and I begin a much-needed apology tour.
“Gin, I’m so sorry. And Renee—”
“Is this everyone?” a saleswoman interrupts, taking the platform like it’s a stage.
“Yes, sorry about that,” Gin says.
Sorry about me, I think.
Our saleswoman claps her hands and holds them clasped at her chest. It lands somewhere between a cult leader calling a meeting to order and the head cheerleader ready to kick off a routine.
Either way, we’re at attention. “Hi. I’m Rose.
This, of course, is Kilpatrick’s. Which one of us is the bride? ”
Gin lifts a sheepish hand, but the light bouncing off her ring is less quiet about it.
“And who’s the lucky guy?”
Or girl, I think. Gin just smiles and says, “Rishi.”
Any unease in Gin’s voice dissipates when she says her fiancé’s name, like it’s the password we’ve been trying to guess, the secret ingredient we couldn’t quite identify.
My heart stalls in my chest, and I miss the rest of what Rose has to say.
I can only hear Gin’s voice; those two little syllables of her fiancé’s name and her whole demeanor changed.
It’s magic. It’s love, and it makes my heart ache.
I want that. Someone who makes everything better.
I want to make everything better for someone else, too.
It feels like all I ever do is make things worse.
Gin and Rose chat dress styles and price points, and I try to pick out scraps of vocab. Mermaid. Trumpet. Tulle. When Rose steps away to pull some options, I pounce back on the conversation.
“I am so, so sorry I was late, Gin. And that I look like…” I gesture to my whole messy self. “And Renee, I can’t apologize enough. I swear I set a bunch of alarms, but I picked up a shift at the studio last night, and I usually don’t get up until—”
“Hey.” Gin holds up a hand like a crossing guard, but her voice is gentle, and there’s a twinkle in her eye. “Slow down. Okay? You’re fine. You made it. Renee made it, too. We’re okay.”
“Okay,” I sigh, and Gin’s lopsided smile gives me a little hope.
Renee’s dagger eyes do exactly the opposite.
She fixes her face, though, when Rose wheels in today’s main event: a silver rolling rack holding six white dresses, each a little poofier than the one behind it.
Rose leads our bride into her changing room and into the first choice, a dress that seems to match Gin’s original vision: It’s fitted from the beaded straps to the bottom of the lacy bodice.
Maybe a little too fitted, though, considering the way her boobs spill out the top like biscuits from a tube.
Gin takes a few hesitant steps toward us, and when she turns to face the mirror, we get a view of all the industrial-looking clips and clamps fitting the dress to her frame.
Business in the front, mechanic’s shop in the back.
I watch her eyes in the mirror as they follow the lines of her silhouette, her soft smile not clueing me in on what’s happening inside her head.
“I really like this style.” Gin swivels her hips, shifting the waterfall of fabric.
With the first word of approval, Renee snaps a picture. “For reference,” she explains. “So we can keep track and refer to the photos later when the dresses blur together.” She stands and untucks the tag, snapping a photo of that, too.
“That’s so smart,” Gin marvels. “Thank God for you.”
A frustrated knot pulls tight in my belly.
Why does it feel like Renee is competing with the rest of us, gunning for the title of Best and Most Beautiful Bridesmaid?
Did she interpret Gin’s lack of a maid of honor as a challenge for us to vie for the role?
A second thought rustles in the bushes of my mind, one I don’t want to look in the eye: Maybe it only feels like Renee is doing the most because I’m not doing nearly enough.
I straighten up in my plush pink throne. I can step it up.
“How do we feel about the boob situation?” Gin studies her cleavage in the mirror. “I’m going for on display but put away.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call them put away,” I offer thoughtfully. Chrissy giggles, but Renee shushes me, and my head snaps toward her with a look that asks What the hell did I do wrong? Her stare intensifies, underlining its message. Everything, Alice. You’re doing everything wrong.
As the appointment goes on, every dress further establishes the pattern: Gin waddles out, silently assesses herself in the mirror, and makes a ruling on the dress that we’re all supposed to agree with, actual opinions be damned.
I mostly keep quiet, nodding and smiling whenever it feels appropriate, although I do blurt out a few comments I can’t quite squash, feeling increasingly stupid each time I can’t keep a thought inside.
“How many more do I have?” Gin whines from her changing room. After a resounding no on three dresses in a row, our bride’s morale is dangerously low.
“Just one more,” Rose says. “But it could be the one! It’s the one with the sleeves.”
“I love the one with the sleeves,” I say to Chrissy, perhaps a bit louder than the whisper I intended.
Renee shushes me again, and not quickly either. She hangs on to the hiss for at least a count of three.
I cast a pleading look in Chrissy’s direction, but she looks straight down at her lap, both hands up as if to say Leave me out of this.
“No opinions until the bride has already expressed her own,” Renee scolds. “That’s the first rule of wedding dress shopping.”
“Sorry.” Under my breath, I mutter, “How many rules are there? Forty-eight?”
“It’s common sense,” Renee whisper-shouts. “Kind of like showing up on time and dressing appropriately?”
“You know what else is common sense?” I hiss. “Not being a complete c—”
The rattle of the changing room curtain cuts me off, and Renee and I zip ourselves up, silent and attentive. Guilt hits my chest like a wrecking ball. What’s wrong with me? I think. Why can’t I keep my stupid mouth shut?
But when Virginia steps out in the last dress of the day, every thought evaporates from my brain except for one: Wow.
She takes one cautious step forward, then another, and it’s like I can see the aisle forming around her.
Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” plays faintly through the speakers, a violin over a heartbeat, and it occurs to me that, if Gin and Rishi’s love had a soundtrack, it wouldn’t be stacked with these emotional, romantic power ballads.
It would sound like karaoke bars and dating-app notifications.
Same goes for most of the couples I know.
But seeing Gin in this dress, something clicks into place.
I get it. She looks the way this song sounds—grand and dramatic and beautiful—and I wonder if that’s what weddings are for.
Are we trying to create something—an event, a party—that feels the way being in love does?
Big, special, indulgent…there’s something to be said about turning that feeling into an external reality.
Dad’s funeral was the same. The memorial concert will be, too.
Maybe grief is just a long, lonely marriage to a person who no longer exists.
“Alice?”
I jolt in my seat and resettle into reality.
Right. The bridal shop. Where Virginia Bennett has been transformed, veil and all, into a proper bride.
And I’ve been…what? Staring into space and dissecting the role of ceremony in major life milestones?
I’m genuinely afraid I’m going to open my mouth and what will come out is Actually, Gin, when I saw you in this dress, I started thinking about my dad’s funeral!
“What do you think?” Gin’s voice is dipped in hope.
She’s a vision. She’s a bride. “You look like a love song,” I tell her softly.
Gin’s hands fly up to her face, steepling over her nose as the sniffles begin, and my heart pinches.
Renee digs a pack of tissues from her purse, but it’s soon obvious that they’ll be as much help as a single bucket bailing out the Titanic.
Gin’s shoulders begin to shake, and her crying evolves into full-body sobbing.