Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-nine
In all the commotion of getting ready, I don’t see the backyard in its final form until I’m floating down the aisle to Pachelbel’s Canon.
Sunlight refracts through the pale-green tulle softening the corners of the mandap.
Lush green garlands frame the top like a halo hovering over the lawn.
Beneath it, Rishi looks cool and collected until the moment Gin steps into view.
She’s a flame lighting the aisle—her auburn hair almost glows in the sun beneath her sheer red veil, perfectly matched to the same cherry-colored bridal lehenga Asha wore on her wedding day.
Thirty years haven’t dulled its shine in the slightest. The gold details on the full skirt match the copper swirls of henna vining up Gin’s hands and forearms, although her mehndi barely shows beneath the bouquet of ferns and dahlias in her grip.
She walks alone. No parents or stand-ins to usher her down the aisle.
Just Gin, stepping boldly into the life and the family she is creating for herself.
It feels a little like crossing a finish line when they’re pronounced man and wife, but it’s only their beginning.
After the ceremony, we take endless pictures—one round in our traditional North Indian attire before we change into our Western looks and go again. I’m the first out of my sari and ready in my bridesmaid dress, and given the frustrated grumbles coming from Gin’s room, I suspect she needs a hand.
“Knock knock?” I nudge the door open an inch. “Need some help?”
Gin tugs the door open the rest of the way. Sweat beads on the tip of her nose, and her eyeliner has smudged a teeny bit at the corners, but she still looks like she’s wearing a filter in real life.
It takes some finessing to free the vintage zippers on the lehenga, but her wedding dress zips up like a dream.
Gin is a vision. The long, sparkly straps hold up the weight of a full, flowy skirt, and the detailing on the bodice looks remarkably similar to the gold patterns on the lehenga, a cohesion that feels meant to be.
Gin twirls like a ballerina in a music box, her dress billowing around her ankles like the edges of a wave.
In my mind’s eye, every version of her twirls right beside her.
She’s eighteen, with all her summer freckles, in the freshman dorms. There she is, twenty-one and pale as a Midwest March, shutting down the karaoke bars with “You Oughta Know.” She’s dressed in black in the back of Dad’s funeral or all in white beneath the neon lights of a Palm Springs bar.
What a privilege to have known and loved so many iterations of Virginia Bennett, exactly the same but entirely different.
“All right, bitches!” Chrissy kicks open the door. She hoists high her makeup bag in one hand and a fifth of tequila in the other. “Who needs a touch-up, and who needs a shot?”
Just behind her, Renee steps into view, and the head rush is a higher proof than I’ve ever known.
She is all contrast. A thin gold chain rests over her collarbone, with silver hoops climbing the cartilage of her ears.
Bright fuchsia fabric flows over one of her shoulders beneath hair so blond it’s almost white.
Her expression is sharp and serious, then full of wide-eyed wonder when her eyes find mine.
Renee bites down on an impossibly adorable smile, and the breath leaves my lungs.
“You’re stunning,” I tell her.
“Not as stunning as you.”
Chrissy rolls not just her eyes but her entire head. “Finally. I was so over you guys pretending that wasn’t happening.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Gin says, then takes a swig of tequila straight from the bottle, but perhaps not as large of a pull as she might have taken at the start of the summer. “I’m cutting back.” She twists the cap back on. “You know. Since I’ve been burned before.”
When Gin laughs, it’s permission for us all to laugh along.
“All right!” The bride claps her hands once. “Are we ready? Just one more round of pictures, then it’s dinner, drinks, and speeches!” She flashes me a smile, and I smile back like there isn’t an avalanche happening inside me, everything crumbling down to pure, jagged panic.
The speech. How the hell did I forget about the speech?
I’m in my head for the rest of photos and cocktail hour, cutting and splicing scraps of speeches I drafted this summer, but none of them feel right.
I’m still scrambling when we’re directed to our tables, and Rishi’s brother kicks things off with a best man speech cataloging their most memorable trips to Taco Bell.
Brilliant. Hilarious. Absolutely impossible to follow, and considering how things went the last time I took the mic around Gin and her friends, running away sounds like a viable option.
Still, when I’m announced as up next, I step up and take the mic, holding on with both hands for dear life.
“Hi, I’m Alice.” So far so good. “If you don’t know me, maybe you know my house!”
I fling an arm toward the Outpost, and soft laughter hums through the crowd.
“Thank you so much for making the trip out to Galena. We decided it was a better option than putting the bride and groom in scuba gear.”
This time, a rumble of laughter. I straighten, relaxing my white-knuckle grip.
“This house has been important to my family for a long time, and it’s been important to my friends, too.
Gin and I met in college, and we came here every year for spring break.
We lived in the same building our freshman year and went on to share an apartment, and…
I guess this is where people might say We’ve been inseparable ever since, but that’s not true.
Gin and I didn’t speak for a number of years, and it was my fault.
” I look right at Gin; she’s smiling at me, steady. “But we found each other again.
“Anyway. I wrote so many versions of this speech this summer, but none of them felt good enough. Because…it’s Gin.
She deserves the best of everything, and I’m notoriously pretty bad with words.
And I…I really shouldn’t say this, but with the chaos of essentially replanning this wedding in seven days, I never did finish a final draft of this speech.
I was doing this.” I gesture left, right, all around. “And I forgot. I’m sorry.”
Despite my confession, Gin’s smile hasn’t budged an inch.
“I’m not proud of that,” I admit. “I can be forgetful, and I say the wrong thing sometimes. Gin knows that. She knows me better than…almost anyone. Recently, Gin said something that really stuck with me. She said there’s usually no one right thing to say, and sometimes, the best thing to do is just be honest. So let me be honest and say that this past week has been…
really hard. Moving the wedding out here was a lot of work—plus I lost my dad last year, and the anniversary was just two days ago.
So I…oh God, I’m making this about me, sorry. ”
“You’re fine!” Gin shouts through cupped hands. “Keep going!”
“What I mean to say is that Gin has never been afraid of doing hard things. She shows up for people when they need it and loves them exactly how they are. I bet a lot of us have benefitted from Gin going the extra mile once or twice.”
The crowd nods like a life-size bobblehead collection.
“So you get it then, right? You understand why I wanted to give the best possible speech today? I wanted to say the exact right thing to explain how I feel, and I was so in my head and terrified of screwing it up…”
A lump the size of a clementine forms in my throat.
I chance a look at Renee—her eyes are like blue silk, almost liquid in the sunlight, and when her lips lift, it’s undeniable.
That’s the look. It’s how Gin looks at Rishi.
How Kurt looks at Mom. It’s how I want to look at Renee for the rest of time, as long as she’ll let me.
“It’s hard.” I clear my throat. “To be honest sometimes, but the things most worth doing usually aren’t the easiest. They take a lot of work.
A little planning. A little improvising.
Like this wedding. Like…love.” I lift my water glass high.
“So cheers to love, even when it’s hard.
And to Gin and Rishi, who make it look easy. ”
A tide of champagne flutes rises, and I find Gin’s glassy, golden-green eyes again. She mouths a single word: Perfect.
It really is perfect. Every detail. I can barely believe this wasn’t the plan all along.
We spin beneath strands of fairy lights to a playlist perfectly curated by our bride—Pitbull songs that turn Chrissy into a human pogo stick and Indian pop hits that pull Rishi’s parents onto the dance floor.
The song from Dirty Dancing plays, and Chris demonstrates that he can do the signature lift.
Not with Chrissy, though—with Rishi’s brother, who soars like an angel in the steady arms of a man once known only as Waiter Boy.
Gin doesn’t touch her Palm Springs level of drunk, but when she’s tipsy enough to put on “Defying Gravity,” I rip a sheet of green tulle from the mandap and tie it around her neck like a cape.
“Classic Alice!” Chrissy shouts over the music, and my cheeks will ache from smiling until Gin and Rishi’s first anniversary.
The bride’s lips get looser with every song and every seltzer; we’re nearing the end of the night when she corners me by the cooler of water bottles, a look of fierce determination in her eyes.
“Hello? Why aren’t you making out with Renee yet?”
I cough out a laugh, but Gin doesn’t look like she’s kidding.
“I…here? In the middle of…” I gesture broadly. “It’s your wedding, Gin.”
“It sure is.” Her eyes glint with mischief. “And you wouldn’t want to let down the bride.”
Whether it’s the order of Gin’s playlist or just an act of fate, the final chorus of “Pink Pony Club” fades into the bright, open twang of a guitar. My heart forms a fist around the melody I know so well, the one that’s existed in me since the day I was born.
“Willin’ ” by Little Feat.
I step cautiously into the firefly darkness, scanning the yard for Renee, and when our eyes lock, the divot between her brows smooths, and I’m certain she was searching for me, too. I think I’ve been searching for her all my life.
Slow, certain strides bring us together beneath the glow of twinkle lights. Renee’s full lips tick up; then her brow lifts. A question. An offer. I accept.
As the first verse comes in, Renee guides me close to her by the small of my back. Through the fabric of our matching dresses, my hips brush the tops of her thighs. I rest my chin in the curve of her neck, breathing her in. Cotton and eucalyptus and…something else. Is that…cherry blossom?
I pull back just an inch. “Are you wearing…?”
“It’s Chrissy’s perfume.” She doesn’t roll her eyes so much as bounce them off the stars. “It’s called—”
“Love Spell,” we say in perfect unison, and Renee’s nose scrunches when she laughs.
If it were possible to tattoo a sound on my body, I’d cover every inch of my skin with that laugh.
The sound of knowing and being known. Our gazes hold until the joy in my chest feels so enormous it might burst through and fill the entire sky.
I could stay in her eyes forever, but when she lifts my chin and seals her soft mouth to mine, forever doesn’t feel like long enough.
My heart is on fire. My hands are in her hair.
If anyone is watching, they’ll know what I know: I am in love with Renee Roberts.