Chapter 6
Charlotte
“Do you know of any local bands that identify as indie folk?” I ask, pushing my glasses back up the bridge of my nose.
“Is that like Noah Kahan?” Josie asks, looking over at me from the driver’s seat of my Toyota RAV.
We are driving up to the ski resort in the town of Pineville, about two hours from Denver, and the city traffic is terrible.
It works for me because I’m working on wedding details, with notebooks and tablets and my laptop all over the front seat.
I do feel bad for Josie, though. She’s not a fan of city driving.
“We should have taken a bus,” she says, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Do people still do that?” I ask, my fingers buzzing away on the keyboard as I search indie folk. “Also, I think it’s more of a Bob Dylan vibe. That makes sense.”
“Does anyone do what?” she asks nervously.
“Take the bus,” I answer.
“I don’t know,” she says as we crawl forward at a literal two miles per hour. “Does anyone listen to Bob Dylan anymore?”
“The budget-less bride, apparently. Oh, and Ben loved Bob Dylan, too.” I say.
“I wonder if it’s too late to take a train,” she says, her eyes as big as saucers.
“Thanks for driving,” I say, offering her a grimace of thanks.
“No problem,” she says with the fear of God in her eyes as two semi-trucks pass us on either side, boxing us into a much too narrow middle lane.
“This wedding is going to be seriously wild,” I go on. “She wants a five-tier cake. Five!”
“Jesus, how many people are on the guest list?” she asks as she hastily switches lanes and then lets out a sigh of relief as the traffic finally starts to move.
I-70 going west is always a nightmare on Fridays, but I think once we take our exit and head into the mountains it will be much better.
Maybe. That is if there’s not nine hundred people wanting to go skiing.
“Three hundred,” I answer, checking the number again.
“Holy shit! I don’t even know three hundred people!”
“Yeah. Well, it sounds like her and her fiancée are both extroverts. Luckily, most of those people won’t be there until the actual wedding day. Prior to that, it will just be a modest forty.”
“Oh to be rich and popular,” Josie shakes her head.
“I think I’ll pass,” I say as I switch to my tablet to go through my list of recommended caterers.
Despite the fact that the bride basically handed me the keys, I still like to give my clients a list of at least three options for each category.
Even people who are ‘okay with whatever’ still have stylistic preferences.
Indecisive brides often need some direction, a narrowing down to reduce the overwhelming number of options.
“So how are you feeling?” Josie asks. It’s been a week since I found out I was pregnant. This is probably the fourth time she’s done a conversational U-turn back to the subject. And while I love her, it’s not my favorite thing to talk about. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around all of it.
“I’m fine,” I answer calmly. Meanwhile, I channel all of my nervousness into my hands, writing things down as I think of them.
“Any pregnancy symptoms yet?” she asks, and I really wish she wouldn’t use the P word.
“Not unless you count the absence of Shark Week as a symptom,” I answer.
“God, I am so jealous,” she sighs and then punctuates her reaction with an apologetic look. “I didn’t mean that. But it would be nice not having to spend $20 on tampons every month.”
“It’s weird,” I tell her. “So far, I don’t feel anything. Half the time I forget that I even am…” I make a point of avoiding the word. “But then I think about that night and how unrealistically good it was, and everything comes pouring back into my memory.”
“So it really was that epic,” she says, and I sigh, looking up from everything. “It’s going to be very hard to forget.”
“Have you tried to contact him?” she asks.
“Oh god no. Can you imagine? Hi, it’s Charlotte! The super awkward girl in the sweater dress, remember me? Yeah, I’ll pass,” I say.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…” she mutters.
“I know, I know. It’s bad,” I say as I pack my things back into my bag for now.
“No, I mean, look! It’s started to snow,” Josie says nervously.
“Eh… it’s just flurries, and the weather app says it’ll be fine,” I say in an attempt to calm her down.
But let’s face it. I’ve never been a glass half full kind of girl, and I should have known better than to start now.
Because within less time than it took for the Broncos luck to change last season, the weather shifts from harmless icy swirls to a full-blown snow squall.
“This is bad, Charlotte,” she says as we snake our way up the winding road that is too skinny for two lanes. With the snow building up in the banks, it’s almost too small for one car. We are more or less just riding in the middle, hoping a semi-truck doesn’t whip around the corner and take us out.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I can drive if you want to pull over.”
As much as I don’t love driving in snow, I was born and raised in Leadville. I know how to do it when necessary.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere to pull over,” she answers, turning the windshield wipers on high, but the snowflakes are coming at us in sheets so it’s not doing much.
The only way to tell where we are on the road is by the dimly lit taillights in front of us.
“I’m worried if I stop, we’ll slide back down the mountain. ”
A couple minutes later, the road finally opens up, at least enough that we don’t feel like we are going to fall off a cliff.
It’s flattening out a bit, which means that if we were driving in normal weather, we’d be about ten minutes from our turnoff into Pineville.
Of course, in this weather, it’s going to be another thirty, easy.
“I really can drive if you want,” I tell her. “There’s a sidebar you can pull off into.”
“I’m okay,” Josie insists. But just as she says it, a truck zooms past us, kicking so much snow and slush on our windshield that we are literally blind.
“Crap!” I shout. Instinctively, Josie hits the brakes, but we don’t stop. It’s too slick and our wheels go spinning, veering us off into a shallow embankment.
Josie opens the window, blasting the inside of the car with snow and wind. “Dickwad!” she yells. Even though he’s long gone. I always find it funny that Josie is this sweet, put together girl who looks like a kindergarten teacher, but she uses words like dickwad and cock-blower.
She rolls the window back up and turns to me with a small smile and snowflakes stuck in her hair. “Alright. You can drive if you really want to,” she says, and we both laugh nervously.
“Good lord,” I sigh. We switch spots. Both of us are now shivering and frosted in snowflakes, I put the car in drive and tap the gas. But we go nowhere.
“Come on,” I mutter, and Josie’s ice-blue eyes widen.
“Uh oh. Are we stuck?”
“No,” I shake my head. I refuse to be stuck. I have too much to do to be stuck. It is not on my itinerary to be stuck.
I try every trick in the book: turning the steering wheel to straighten the tires, shifting between drive and reverse to rock the car loose, accelerating slowly, and it’s doing nothing.
“We’re stuck, aren’t we?” she asks.
“We’re not stuck…” I insist, but it’s more like I’m trying to will it into being true. But as the wheels squeal, I sit back in the seat with a heavy sigh. “We’re stuck.”
“Fuck,” she says. “Now what?”
We freeze to death, my inner pessimist says. No. No, we aren’t going to talk like that. We have too much to do to be stuck. Too much money to make. Money, we need.
I spoon-feed positivity to my inner voice of doubt. This job is a dream come true, and I refuse to let a freak storm change my luck.
Oy. Listen to me, believing in luck right now. Considering my current life circumstances, I’d believe in aliens if you told me they’d get us out of this bind.
“I suppose we could wave someone down,” she says when I don’t answer. “Who knows? Maybe a snowplow will pass us at some point.”
A snowplow. A spaceship. Anything would be good.
Unfortunately, there’s almost no one on the road.
Five grueling minutes go by without a single car passing us.
I check my phone for service, but of course, we have none.
I am on the verge of a little mental breakdown, but suddenly, headlights shine in the rearview. Big ones. Bright ones. Truck ones.
Thank God.
I am about to get out and wave the person down, but I don’t even have to. The truck pulls over in front of us, and a large, masculine figure emerges from the driver’s side. We are either about to be rescued or murdered. I guess either way is better than hypothermia.
Glass half full, right?