Chapter 9
Any other day, Natalie would’ve told Gabby about Rob’s review immediately upon seeing her again. That fucker, Gabby would’ve said, drawing up a ten-point plan for how to ruin his life. Gabby held her grudges as tightly as a dog’s leash at a busy intersection.
But instead, Nat plastered on what she hoped was an everything’s great here smile as she walked back into the bridal suite. “Okay, bottled water, umbrellas, and fans acquired! People will make it through the ceremony fine and then come inside for the reception—” Dimly, she registered that the room had become even warmer than the outdoors. Then, less dimly, she registered Gabby’s face, a mask of despair.
“What happened to the air-conditioning?” she asked slowly.
“Broken,” Gabby whispered. She seemed frozen, etched in marble, a classical sculpture of a tragic goddess in a silky pink bathrobe. Then, all at once, she came to life and grabbed Natalie’s hand. “Please accompany me to the bathroom!”
Gabby dragged Natalie down the hallway, shut the door, then turned on the water in the sink. “Everything is going wrong,” she said. “And you know I don’t believe in signs.” She paused. “But is this a sign?”
“Of what?”
“That…we rushed things! That we’re too young, we’re not ready.”
Nat kept her face carefully neutral. But in some ways, this was everything she had been wanting to hear. She still didn’t understand this relationship. And, more than that, her favorite person was going to stand up in front of everyone and declare that her favorite person was somebody else. It felt selfish to grieve. That was just the way life was. Your friends were the most important people to you until you found your partner. (But why? she wondered. Why did everyone accept that it had to be that way?)
Over the past months, as Gabby had been consumed by wedding planning, a new depth of feeling had begun to separate the two of them. For so long, they’d experienced life together. Now, Gabby was embarking on an adventure that still seemed fuzzy to Nat.
“Adventure.” That was the word that people kept throwing around in the lead-up to this wedding. (Since Nat had signed up for online dating, it was also the word she’d seen most frequently in profiles, except for maybe “cocktails” or “tacos.” Every man in New York City wanted to “go on adventures with you” or find their “adventure partner.”) “Adventure” conjured excitement, thrills, an expansion of opportunity. But when Nat imagined tying her life to any of the men she’d dated so far so that she could get some nice matching towels, she felt her throat constrict. Rather than opening new doors, marriage seemed to shut them. You always had to consider another person’s wants and needs right alongside your own. If you were offered your dream job in a new state, would your partner be willing to move there too? What if you needed total silence to sleep, but your partner snored? Would you just never get a good night’s sleep again? So many people talked about weddings with excitement (“The best day of your life!”) but then spoke about marriage itself as a slog. Weren’t sitcoms always making jokes about nagging wives or how boring it got to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life? To jump into something like that seemed inconceivable, and Natalie had never met anyone who’d made her reconsider.
So even now, on the day of Gabby’s wedding, Natalie couldn’t quite stop herself from believing that Gabby was exaggerating her feelings in service of checking off an achievement. Because the alternative—that Gabby had accessed a level of love Natalie could not imagine or ascended to a level of maturity still far beyond Nat’s reach—indicated a terrifying gulf between them. Like they’d been looking at one of those optical illusion pictures together for years, agreeing that it was a vase. And then Gabby had blinked one day and said, Wait, it’s also a couple, kissing. Nat could not make herself see the second image no matter how hard she focused, and now it was the first thing Gabby saw.
“Well,” Natalie said as Gabby paced back and forth, “do you feel like you rushed into this?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t before today, but now I’m freaking out!” Gabby said. “And I am trying really hard not to cry because it’s going to mess up my makeup, and that’ll be one more thing going wrong.”
“If this is just about the heat, it’s not that bad!”
“It’s not just the heat. Everyone has so many opinions—the mothers are driving me up a wall, and it’s impossible to please them both, and I know you’re supposed to just say, ‘Screw it!’ at a certain point and accept that whatever happens is outside of your control. Literally. I read it in this wedding prep book. You find a moment where you say, ‘Screw it, things will go wrong but they’re not my problem anymore,’ and then you focus on enjoying your special day. But I’m so in my head that I can’t! I just can’t!”
“What if we said it right now, together? Ready? Screw it!”
Gabby blinked. “Screw it,” she said half-heartedly, then shook her head. “That didn’t work.” She rubbed her temples, her voice going all high and tremulous. “And I haven’t even told you…Angus wanted it to be a surprise for everyone…”
Natalie steeled herself. The way Gabby was talking, it sounded like Angus was planning to pick one wedding guest to be a human sacrifice.
Instead, Gabby whispered in horror, “He’s going to zip-line into the ceremony.”
Nat blinked. “I’m sorry. What?” Gabby bit her lip. “I think I misheard you. Did you say ‘zip-line’? Like, the thing where you hang on to handles and glide around?”
“His friend Teddy is starting a new extreme sports business, and I guess last week he mentioned that it would be fun if Angus zip-lined in, and it would also help him get some content for his website. And you know how openhearted Angus is. He was like, ‘Sure thing, buddy!’?”
“So, he’s going to steal all your thunder.”
“No, he’s not…I don’t love when people look at me anyway, so I don’t care about that. But it’s turned into this whole complicated thing about where his friend is going to run the zip line and how they need to arrange the chairs, and it’s just one more stressful variable, and also, is it ridiculous? Zip-lining into a wedding ceremony? Am I marrying a ridiculous human?”
Yes, Natalie thought. Instead, she took Gabby by the shoulders. “Look. If you think you’ve made a mistake and this is more than the normal cold feet, we can leave. I’ll drive the getaway car.”
Gabby let out a watery laugh. “No, I’ll drive the getaway car.”
“Fair. I’ll handle music and navigation. We can get new identities and move to a farming town in Iowa so you never have to face the embarrassment of people you know asking why you didn’t show up to the ceremony.”
Gabby sniffed. “What would our new identities be?”
“Half sisters who own a lot of cats.”
“Oh, owning cats with you would be so nice.” She had a faraway look on her face, and for a moment, Nat thought she was actually considering it. Then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I’m just scared that everything will change.”
“With you and Angus?”
“That. And with you and me.”
“Well,” Nat said, a lump in her throat, “it will change. That’s true. But I’ll still be here for you. That won’t change. We can still have movie nights and call each other up to talk for hours.” Gabby nodded, her eyes locked on Nat’s. “And, hey, if you decide you really hate this life…there’s always divorce.”
Gabby smacked her arm. “How dare you mention that word today!”
“I’m just saying! Nothing in life is a permanent commitment except having kids. And I don’t think you’ve taken that step yet, unless there’s something you need to tell me?”
“No,” Gabby said. Then she leaned forward, urgent. “Wait, how about this? When I get pregnant, I promise you’ll be the first to know.”
In this moment, with their hands clasped together, Natalie wished that friends could stand up in front of a crowd and make vows to each other too. Vows to love each other even when things got hard, vows to be there in sickness and in health, vows to not let the little complications of life tear them apart. She held Gabby’s hand tighter. This would have to do. “Really? But Angus…”
“I’ll tell him immediately afterward. But that way, you’ll be a big part of it too. I want you to be part of it.” Gabby shook her head. “Why am I talking about future babies? I should focus on my actual wedding.”
Natalie folded her into a hug. “You keep looking for that ‘screw it’ moment, okay? I’ll make sure everything else is under control.”
After changing into her dress—a flattering pale blue silk sheath with a slit up the skirt, Gabby had been kind—Natalie power walked to the groomsmen’s suite. The door was open a crack, so she peered in, not wanting to disturb any rituals or add to Angus’s stress.
But the atmosphere in the groom’s room was worlds away from that of the bridal suite. A wedding photographer snapped pictures of Angus putting on his cuff links. He looked the nicest that Nat had ever seen him—handsome, for those who went for his whole vibe, with a neat suit and a small white blossom pinned in its buttonhole. Most of all, though, he wore the bright, anticipatory look of a boy on Christmas morning.
This was only the third wedding she’d attended as an adult, but already she’d gotten a good whiff of some patriarchal double standards bullshit. Brides were expected to show up at seven a.m. to begin their beautification. The groom combed his hair and shrugged on a jacket. Everyone asked the bride about napkins and the schedule as if the groom had no stake in the day at all. Let brides be lazy! she wanted to shout.
Despite the heat, Angus’s groomsmen sipped from beer bottles and cracked jokes, suit jackets slung on the couch behind them. All except Rob, who sat in a chair, spine straight, peering at a video of some sort on his phone, headphones in and brow furrowed in concentration like he was watching a documentary. Infuriating! Here she was, running around in three-inch heels, and he was futzing on YouTube? Maybe if he didn’t expend his energy giving one-star reviews to people he knew, he’d be able to make himself useful.
“Robert,” she spat from the doorway. He didn’t hear, too wrapped up in his screen. A nearby groomsman took pity on her and tapped Rob on the shoulder. He pulled his headphones out, an eyebrow cocked, then swiveled his head to where the groomsman pointed. For a moment, as he registered her appearance, he seemed startled. Thrown off-balance, his eyes traveling over her dress. She looked down—did she have a stain or something? No, everything seemed fine.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A word.”
Reluctantly, he put his phone down and followed her out into the hallway.
“I’m a little busy—” he began.
“What is with this ridiculous zip-line idea? Gabby is stressing out. Just get Angus to walk down the aisle like a normal human.”
“Oh,” he said, the tension in his shoulders releasing like he’d also been harboring doubts. “Gabby doesn’t want him to do it?”
“Clearly not.”
“Okay. I can try talking to him.”
“Good, I think that will make Gabby feel better.”
He paused. “Wait. Did she ask you to stop him?”
“Well, not exactly.”
He gave her a sharp look. “So, it’s merely your personal opinion that my friend shouldn’t be allowed to do what he wants at his own wedding?”
“Come on. I hardly think I’m the only person here who knows that this is a terrible idea.”
“Last I checked, the maid of honor does not get to overrule the groom.”
“Oh, is that in the official wedding bylaws?”
“It’s common sense.”
She threw her hands up in the air, her patience running out. “Fine! Obviously, there’s no reasoning with you. But let the record show that if this all blows up and Gabby has no choice but to become a runaway bride, I tried to stop it.”
She turned on her heel and went back to the bridal suite. And then it was a stress-filled whirl: Final touch-ups. Zipping Gabby into her dress. Taking photographs where they got down on the ground and fluffed Gabby’s enormous skirt while looking up at her like ladies-in-waiting. Natalie and Gabby running to the bathroom, where Natalie held up said enormous skirt so that Gabby could pee. Walking over to the entryway where the bridal party was assembling for the procession. (They’d walk outside and into the garden, then Angus would do his horrible zip line from a different location, and finally Gabby’s father would escort her to the altar.)
Gabby had tucked Kleenex under her armpits to catch the sweat—a combination of anxiety and heat. She was taking deep breaths in through her nose, out through her mouth, as if following some instructional meditation video only she could see. She paused in the middle of a breath. “Shit, my bouquet!”
“Back inside?” Nat asked. Gabby gave a frantic nod. “On it.”
Natalie took off, nearly colliding with Rob as he exited the dining room. Running late to the processional lineup, adding even more stress to Gabby’s heavy load!
She spotted the bouquet on a nearby table and grabbed it, registering as her hand closed around the stems that for the first time in a long while, she felt pleasantly cool. “Hallelujah,” she said, turning to one of the inn’s staff. “You guys got the AC working again? Thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” the woman said. “Thank the tall guy in the bridal party. You know, the one who’s handsome in a sort of scowling way?”
“He found a repairman?”
“No, I guess he watched a video about common problems with this particular unit and figured it out. The hero of the day, huh?”
Nat stood there with her mouth open. Her mind was blank. A stretch of barren sand. One tumbleweed blowing across the great expanse, carried by wind that whistled, Rob saved the day.
Then she remembered that a wedding was waiting on her to begin, and she ran back, bouquet clutched tightly in hand.
Nat pressed the flowers into Gabby’s hands, then found her own spot in line next to Rob. Was that a small smirk at the corner of his mouth?
“Link arms, everyone!” the wedding planner called.
Reluctantly, Nat lifted her arm up to thread it through Rob’s right as he lifted his own, and the strange angle caused their hands to momentarily collide. His hand was hot. Their bare skin touching was a shock to her system. She snatched her hand away, unable to stop herself from looking at him. A flash of something crossed his face, then he turned his head straight ahead, his jaw set. He cleared his throat, glued his arm to his side, and crooked his elbow an inch. “Here.”
They stood still, arms entangled, for an uncomfortably long time as the pairs ahead of them slowly processed. Nat cursed the event planner who had told them to link up so early. The pressure of his arm on hers made her feel slightly off-balance. Her attraction to him was an inconvenient fact. But as of this moment, she was no longer interested in trying to impress men who thought she was beneath them. Her own worth did not depend on whether she could make an asshole like her. There were far better ways to use her time.
“I hear you saved the day with the air-conditioning,” she said, her sweet tone turning acidic despite her best efforts.
“Just wanted to make myself useful,” he said stiffly. She detested him.
Finally, the coordinator gave them the nod to go ahead. Natalie plastered a smile onto her face and began to walk.
Immediately, the problem presented itself: Rob’s legs were much longer than hers, meaning that each stride he took required her to take two. So while he walked at a normal pace for himself, she had to practically skip down the aisle. She jabbed her elbow into his side. “Slow down,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, her smile still wide. His arm tightened, an involuntary flex, as he slowed. His bicep was rangy, not ostentatious but firm. She wasn’t trying to feel it. Her hand just fell naturally on that part of his arm.
Now, Nat walked at a normal speed. But next to her, Rob was stuck in a strange sort of slow motion, taking his normal-sized step, then pausing a beat before moving again. “Can’t you speed up?” he whispered, voice tight.
She gritted her teeth. “Just take smaller steps!”
After some more halting, herky-jerky motions, they finally found their stride and walked like normal people for the remaining three feet of aisle. At the altar, she withdrew her arm from his with a breath of relief, the two of them separating to their allotted sides of the officiant.
The string quartet in the corner paused their rendition of “God Only Knows” and switched to a new theme for Angus’s entrance: the music from Indiana Jones. People in the chairs craned their heads, awareness sweeping over them as Angus appeared on the platform in the trees. He waved to everyone, then grabbed on to the contraption.
Nat had never zip-lined before. Not because she was opposed to it in its proper time and place. But so far in her adult life, she’d never had the disposable income to take the kind of vacation where one might do it. She didn’t know much about the mechanics, but weren’t you supposed to wear a harness?
Angus simply clung on to the handles. His friend had strung the cable from a particularly tall oak tree on the edges of the forest and over the property’s small pond, ending at another tree behind the altar where Angus would apparently let go.
He kicked off from the platform with a smile on his face. The crowd turned, murmuring. And though Natalie had thought that everyone would cover their faces in secondhand embarrassment, people seemed amused, poking one another in appreciation or indulgence. The kids in attendance oohed and aahed as Angus began to glide.
And as he flew through the air, Nat had to admit that…she did not hate this. She still thought he was bonkers for doing it. But this whole day had been so serious, so stressful. Weddings were supposed to be about two people expressing themselves and their love, right? Instead, Gabby had gotten swept up in concern about Will the guests be too hot? Will everything go as it is supposed to? Will other people have a good time? By doing this ridiculous entrance, Angus had chosen to inject some fun into the proceedings, to say, Look, love makes us into fools, so here I am showing you just how much of a fool I am, and maybe that was admirable in its own misguided way. It certainly wasn’t anything like her mother’s sad second wedding. Nat smiled, in spite of herself, as Angus achieved both liftoff and a strange kind of beauty.
Then, with Angus halfway across the pond, the slider jammed, caught on some sort of knot. Angus juddered to a halt and dangled. His nice dress shoes nearly skimmed the pond’s surface. The smile drained from his face, replaced by a look of terror.
Natalie’s side of the altar was closer to the pond, and Rob had stepped forward, without her noticing, standing to her right. The two of them stared in shock as the crowd gasped.
One of Angus’s hands began to slide down the handle, then grasped for purchase. And seemingly without thinking, Rob shot his own hand out and grabbed on to Natalie’s. She was so caught up in watching Angus that she didn’t register anything besides Warm, comforting, strong.
“Hold tight, buddy!” his friend Teddy called as the string quartet stopped playing in confusion. He gave the line a tug, as if to dislodge the jam. But instead, he dislodged Angus.
And letting out a strangled cry, Angus plummeted straight into the water below.
Nat squeezed Rob’s hand tighter, but he wrenched it from her grasp. Tearing off his jacket, he ran to the edge of the pond and waded in. Did he think he was a lifeguard? This pond was maybe five feet deep in the center. Already, Angus had come up for air, paddling and sputtering, wiping water out of his eyes as he found footing on the murky bottom. Rob dove under the water and, with steady strokes, made his way to Angus’s side. Coming up, hair plastered to the side of his face, he said something to Angus in a low voice, but Natalie couldn’t make it out among the whispering of the guests, all craning their necks, holding back laughter or dismay, a mix of concern and embarrassment for him and, in a few cases (the children), wild entertainment.
Angus nodded, and together the two of them paddled toward shore, Rob matching Angus’s slower pace. (So he could go at someone else’s speed! Just apparently not hers!) They scrambled up the bank, mud and algae on their pants. Waterlogged. Rob’s white dress shirt had gone see-through, clinging to his chest underneath. She could see practically everything: a whorl of chest hair; abs that, like his biceps, were firm without being ostentatious. Annoying, for a chest like that to be wasted on an asshole. He caught her staring and narrowed his eyes in confusion, then looked down to follow her gaze. Realizing how exposed he was, his eyes flitted to the rest of the gathered crowd, his jaw working. He picked up his jacket from the bank, awkwardly held it in front of himself for a moment, then proceeded to put it on over his wet shirt, which could not have been comfortable.
Then he turned his attention to Angus, who was wringing out the sleeves of his own jacket. Natalie hadn’t known if it was possible for Angus to get embarrassed—he seemed to move through life with so little awareness—but now, his mortification was clear. Rob gave Angus a fortifying pat on the back, then picked a trail of green algae off Angus’s shoulder. “You okay?” he asked in a low voice. Angus nodded. “Let’s get you married, then.”
Angus turned to the crowd and gave a little wave and a bow, an attempt to break the tension. It half worked: his extended family clapped, a couple of older uncles whistled. But plenty of other people shifted in their seats.
Natalie stepped aside to let Angus pass her and take his place next to the minister, whose face was frozen in shock. This man was old. He’d performed many a wedding in his day, so if this had discomfited him this much, Natalie could only imagine how Gabby—
Oh God, Gabby. Secreted in the entryway, out of sight. What had been conveyed to her? Did she know the scene that she was about to walk into? Surely the wedding coordinator in charge of cueing her had told her something, but what? Natalie picked up her skirt, ready to run back and talk Gabby through exactly what to expect out here, but Angus had already given a shaky nod to the string quartet, and they’d begun to eke out Pachelbel’s Canon.
So Gabby emerged from the door on her father’s arm and began to walk down the aisle. She’d affixed a beatific smile to her face and seemed to shimmer: the sun gleaming off her full dark curls, the skirt of her dress swishing around her feet.
Then she took in the scene, and it was clear that the wedding coordinator had not told her the full extent of what had gone down. Her expression changed in slow motion. The beatific smile wilted (though now that Gabby was closer, Nat could see the strain and stress in it). Her mouth began to drop in incredulity, her eyes going deer-in-headlights as they landed on her waterlogged fiancé.
And now, as she walked, she was veering.
She.
Was.
Veering.
Extricating her arm from her father’s. Turning from her path down the aisle toward a break in the chairs. Starting to cut a circular route that would take her back up to the double doors she’d emerged from.
Oh God. She was going to pull a runaway bride after all.
Natalie readied herself to run after her—to be a comfort, an accomplice, whatever Gabby needed—and though she was freaking out over the messiness and heartbreak of it all, a little part of her also thought, She is coming back to me.
Nat and Rob locked eyes for a moment, the horror written on his face. She’d warned him. He’d done nothing.
Everyone watched, frozen, as Gabby kept walking, almost as if her feet were taking her somewhere beyond her control. She headed to the path by the pond, where she’d turn back to the house.
Except she didn’t turn. Natalie kept waiting for the moment when the path would change, but somehow, Gabby just kept going down the bank, toward the water’s edge. In her poofy white gown, the most expensive thing she owned, she walked straight into the pond up to her thighs, her expression stoic. Then she turned and locked eyes with Angus. Natalie held her breath.
“Screw it,” Gabby said, and plopped down into the water.
And in that moment, as the guests gasped, as Gabby resurfaced with her mouth open in laughter, as Angus ran down to the pond, whooping, to help Gabby out, Natalie knew: her best friend was not rushing into marriage simply to check a box. Strange and inconceivable as it seemed, Gabriella Alvarez wanted to marry Angus Stoat the Third.
And in a gown bejeweled with algae, she did.