Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-one
I’ve kept my fingers busy since Renee walked out.
For the past thirty-six hours, I’ve been sequestered in the dark of my home studio, my favorite bass in my lap.
All the time I’ve spent on the wedding—on Renee—has resulted in an accidental summer-long sabbatical from practicing.
My calluses aren’t gone by any means, but the thick armor of skin on my fingertips has gotten soft.
The skin is healing, technically, but that’s not what I want.
I need those calluses. Without them, the metal strings bite at my fingertips as I play, leaving behind a sharp, hot ache.
Like most things at the moment, I try not to feel it.
My emotions, like my phone, are tucked away and set on silent, so when I hear the buzz of an incoming call from the depths of my desk drawer, I lunge for it.
Because there’s only one person it could be.
Only one contact I’ve programmed to bypass Do Not Disturb: the bride herself, Miss Virginia Bennett.
Except it’s not just Gin. She’s calling the whole group chat, and just the sight of Renee’s contact photo has my heart tucking its tail. But this isn’t about me or Renee or us. It’s about Gin and the agonized siren of a cry that floods through the line the moment I pick up.
There’s a screech of feedback that only I react to, so it could be the sound of my own brain short-circuiting. Gin alternates between sobbing and sucking in snot, wedging in a word or two in between. “I.” Sniff. “Can’t.” Gasp. “Handle.” Sniff. Gasp. Sob.
Renee jumps right in, no hesitation, like an emotional lifeguard who’s been training for this.
“Okay. It’s okay. Can we breathe together?
” Renee’s voice is sweet and level, striking a chord on every one of my heartstrings.
I breathe along to her cues, following the ins and outs of Gin’s stuttering inhales and wobbly, miserable out breaths.
When we’ve evened out enough, Renee asks, “What’s going on? ”
“Is it Rishi?” Chrissy guesses.
“No…”
“Your parents? Rishi’s parents?” Chrissy tries again.
“It was…the rain.” Gin shudders another sob, but relief runs like coolant through my veins. Okay. We’re okay. Everyone is alive.
I hang my bass back on its wall mount, then swivel my desk chair to face the singular window in my home studio. “The rain?” It’s stopped and started like a finicky faucet all summer, but today isn’t so bad. Mostly sunny, a comfortable seventy something. Not that I’ve left this room since yesterday.
“Yeah,” Gin whimpers. “Thursday’s storm, plus all the rain this summer…
and all our hard yard work…” Her voice breaks like a dam, flooding the line just as Gin flips on her camera to show us a real flood.
We’re looking at the Bhats’ backyard, once Gin and Rishi’s ceremony site, now entirely underwater.
The marsh has spilled over, stretching to the bottom of the frame, claiming the lower third of the butterfly bushes and every limestone paver.
All I can say is “Fuck.”
“We. Can’t. Get. Married. There!” Gin sobs.
“Not unless you want to get married in hip waders.”
My joke doesn’t land. Of course it doesn’t. The wedding is in seven days.
“It’s okay, Gin,” Renee says. She’s breathy but confident. “We can fix this.”
“We can’t fix this!” Gin fires back. “We have a week!”
For a minute, we just let her cry. Sometimes, that’s all anyone can do.
And then Rishi steps in. He helps his fiancée shut off her camera, and I can’t quite hear what he’s saying, but I hear how he says it, and every gentle, soothing murmur spaces out Gin’s sobs a little more.
Rishi, as always, makes everything better.
When we start to brainstorm solutions and his parents weigh in with some unhelpful commentary about how this wouldn’t have happened if they’d rented a hall for the wedding like they’d wanted, he handles it with grace and patience.
I begin to wonder if he was specially engineered for Gin in some sort of lab. This man says all the right things.
And then, for once, so do I.
“Galena,” I say with the same breath I’ve heard others say “Amen.” It’s so obvious.
The perfect solution. “The backyard in Galena. You could get married there.” It comes out quickly and with such authority that even I momentarily forget that the house is still not really mine to offer.
But I can’t stop myself. Not when Gin’s sniffles subside.
I can hear the smile in Chrissy’s voice when she says. “That’s…low-key brilliant, Ali Pal.”
“Do you think…could we?” Gin squeaks out.
“Absolutely,” I say.
Given the circumstances, I can’t imagine the band would say no.
And then it hits. A sharp ache like a split board in my chest. The band includes Kurt, and where there’s Kurt, there’s Mom.
“Okay.” Gin sighs. “Okay, okay, okay. Wow.” It’s the steadiest her voice has been this entire call, and I refuse to say anything that could change that. I’ll figure something out with the Outpost. I have to, because the crying has stopped and Gin has already begun to strategize.
“I guess it…it is on a hill, right? So there’s probably no flooding? Could we still have a dance floor?”
We try for a while to have Gin share her screen so we can all look at the wedding spreadsheet together, but Chrissy’s audio keeps cutting in and out, and the lag has us all talking over each other.
There are too many details and moving pieces to reconfigure for any of us to keep it all straight over the phone, so it shouldn’t surprise me when Chrissy says, “That’s it.
I’m clearing off the whiteboard. Who needs me to call them an Uber? ”
“Me,” Renee chirps, and dread drops into my chest, my gut, my shaky fingers that nearly drop my phone. I knew I’d have to see Renee again before too long, but I thought I had more time.
“I’m at the Bhats’ house,” Gin reminds us. “So it’ll take me a little over an hour to—”
“No, no. Stay put, girlina,” Chrissy cuts her off. “I’m having a bottle of chardonnay and some very powerful gummies delivered. We’ll FaceTime you in. Your bridesmaids have got this.”
Thus begins this summer’s second Bridesmaid Summit.
As my complete lack of luck would have it, Renee and I arrive at Chrissy’s place at the same time.
Just the sight of her splits me down the middle, half joy, half heartache.
Like two songs—one major and one minor—playing at the same time, both at full blast. To the world, she looks put together in a red tank top, denim shorts, and all her usual jewelry, but I know her.
Renee would never wear her glasses outside the apartment, but there they are, perched on her nose.
When she tucks her hair back, I notice she’s missing some of her rings.
Anyone else might mistake her for okay, but I know better.
“Hi,” I squeak out, but Renee won’t even give me that. She faces ahead, jaw tense, with her chin lifted as she punches in the gate code. In her other hand, she grips a brown grease-stained takeout bag, and the smell of something deep fried makes my stomach audibly rumble.
“Sorry,” I mutter. “Haven’t eaten much the last two days.”
There’s a pause. Then a barely audible “Me neither,” just as the gate buzzes open.
We set up our war room in Chrissy’s “office”—laptops, pens, notebooks, sticky notes; a clean slate of a whiteboard, a fresh pot of coffee; and the three largest mugs I’ve ever seen.
Renee packed a printed-out stack of every text or email Gin has sent about the wedding for the last three months, a copy of the completed shopping list, and the crinkly brown takeout bag, revealed to contain three orders of cheese fries.
“It’s giving college cram session.” Chrissy giggles as she fills and distributes the enormous mugs of coffee. Even in a crisis, she’s like this—bubbly and eager—but when Renee steps up to the whiteboard, Chrissy’s tone turns shockingly serious. “Shouldn’t Alice take the lead on this?”
I whip my head around so fast, my neck spasms. “What?”
“It’s your house, Ali Pal. Or…your dad’s band’s house or whatever,” Chrissy says.
“But I’m the event planner,” Renee reminds us, voice stern.
“But you don’t know Galena and the Outpost like Alice does,” Chrissy points out. “So I think Alice should be the one to write on the whiteboard.”
Renee’s jaw grinds and ticks, and her eyes flash to mine for one burning second.
I sizzle like a helpless ant beneath her magnifying stare.
“Alice,” Renee hisses, “is unreliable.” She yanks her gaze away, pinning it on Chrissy.
“Alice is hot and cold. She’ll act like she’s going to write on the whiteboard, like she really, really wants to write on the whiteboard, but then once she does, she’ll shut us out and make us feel stupid for trusting her with the marker. ”
“You can trust me with the marker!” I blurt out. “I can write on the whiteboard! I just—” And that’s when my voice fails me. Again.
“We know you can write on the whiteboard,” Chrissy says in full sincerity, talking only about the whiteboard.
Nothing else. Regardless of what this is really about, Chrissy’s bright, expectant smile wears on Renee.
She begrudgingly sets down the dry-erase marker and, without so much as looking at me, deflates into what used to be my seat.
I take Renee’s place as Chrissy slots her phone into one of her many tripods and announces, “Please hold, everyone! I’m getting Gin and Rishi on FaceTime. ”
It goes better than I expect, although I’m no Renee Roberts when it comes to making a plan.
I have no survey to reference, no existing wedding plan from last year we might recycle for efficiency’s sake.
But I know the spreadsheet. I know the Outpost. And I know Gin.
The rest I make up as I go. We’re at it well into the night—planning, replanning, pivoting every single detail while slowly dropping like flies.
Gin falls asleep first, cheek pressed directly into her in-laws’ kitchen table while Rishi stays with us on FaceTime.
Chrissy’s snoring starts up around midnight, but she’s in and out of sleep until about two o’clock.
“Stay as late as you want,” she says, talking through a yawn before finally shuffling off to bed, and Rishi calls it a night shortly thereafter.
He thanks us profusely, and when he ends the call, I decide not to notice that Renee and I are alone.
I’m not feeling it, because that’s not what’s happening, so far as I’m concerned.
I face the whiteboard with intense focus.
There is no one behind me. Certainly no one I’ve been harboring a crush on all summer.
Certainly no one I had mind-blowing, reality-bending sex with.
Whatever I might feel in that situation—the way my heart might press against my spine, trying to work its way back to her—I’m not feeling it.
Because as far as the whiteboard and I are concerned, there is nothing other than the wedding.
“So we’ll cancel the tent rental but keep an eye on the weather,” I mumble to myself. “We can find a rental place closer to Galena and see if they have anything available, just in case…”
The takeout bag crumples behind me, and it feels like my blood is flowing in Renee’s direction, begging me to turn around. The writing on the whiteboard blurs and drips the longer I stare at it, but I brace my core and reset my focus. The wedding. Only the wedding right now.
“The Mediterranean restaurant won’t deliver outside of a twenty-five-mile radius, so we’ll need to find another catering option.”
I don’t want to find another catering option, my thoughts butt in.
I want Renee. I have this urge to spill my heart like a jar of loose change, but I’m afraid of what all will come out.
I need time to sort through it all first. If I say something now, it’ll surely be the wrong thing, and I’ll make things worse than they already are.
With the wedding in crisis and only a week away, now is not the time, even if I did know what to say.
I review the remainder of my chicken scratch notes, checking the last few mental boxes of our brand-new plan. “I think all we’re missing is…”
“Permission to use the Outpost,” Renee finishes behind me in a cold, unfeeling voice.
My heart rams full force into the brick wall of my chest. Right.
The single most integral piece of this puzzle, the piece everything else depends on, is a bit of logistics only I can do.
I need to talk to my mother. I need to talk to Renee.
But the wedding relies on only one of those conversations. I’m not ready for either.
I scratch my thumbnail over the stiff skin on my fingertips. This is what it takes, I think. It has to hurt at first. That’s how you build up the callus.
“I’ll talk to Mom tomorrow,” I say.