Chapter 22 Desperate Times, Desperate Vegetables
I RACE BACK TO MY apartment, hoping I’m not too late.
In my room, I throw my laptop open on the bed and shimmy out of my sticky top and bra.
I pull out my duffel bag and riffle through the immaculately folded clothes in my drawers, searching for dark-hued dresswear that would be formal enough to meet the Roachster’s standards.
No luck. I snag a black pantsuit from Jane’s closet.
It’s not like she’ll miss it over the weekend.
While hastily brushing knots out of my hair, I review the folder in My Documents titled Spüktacular Weddings’ Proposed Large-Scale Event for Rochester’s Allegedly Influential and Rich Power Couple Who Still Aren’t Disclosing Any Information That’d Be Helpful.
If Mandy is following the wedding prep timeline we quoted Rochester, the rehearsal dinner should already be in full swing. Barring a meeting with a future time-traveling Sabby, I doubt I’ll arrive before midnight. But there’s no reason I can’t try.
The closest Home Depot is only a few blocks north of here, at Fifty-Eighth and Third.
Walking at a New Yorker’s pace—largely to stay warm, since wearing a pantsuit with no coat in November is an unpleasant consequence of drinking too much alcohol and forgetting to chase it with food—I arrive in a quick twenty minutes.
The storefront’s closed up, obviously. Since I haven’t come to buy a hammer or return a crate of plywood, I whip around the side of the building in search of an employee entrance.
At the building’s rear, I find a private, brick-laid circle-drive cutting through the center of the city block.
It leads to a gourmet Japanese restaurant, the lobby of a luxury condo complex, and a largely unnoteworthy—and unlabeled—pair of white double doors.
“Here goes nothing,” I mutter. Then, with a surging, dramatic impulse, I knock on them. “Abra-cada-bra-lo-hamora Special Services.”
The right-side door cracks open.
“Hold up. That was seriously the password?” I ask. The doors don’t answer except to shimmer with annoyance, revealing shiny glass windows for a split second. Sensing my entrance may be in peril, I try the door handle and enter a fluorescent-lit back room.
The room is utterly sterile. Also, it’s familiar. As in, potentially the same place I’ve already been. How else does one explain how it’s staffed by the same lady I met back in Salem?
Like before, she has her nose deep in a book, dark eyes enraptured by the words. This time, it’s a chocolate-themed romance set in Bulgaria.
“Hello,” I call out, hoping I sound at least half as winsome as a Bulgarian chocolatier. “I’d like to request service.”
She turns a page in her book, ignoring me. What was it Hanry did to get her help last time?
“SOCKS!” I shout, remembering. “SOCKS.”
At last she deigns to offer me her notice. “You again. The gnomes not working out?”
“No, they’ve been great,” I say, tapping the counter. “Although I probably need to call them off. Maybe tomorrow. Higher priority: I want to pick up additional services.”
“There’ll be a late-night surcharge, I’m afraid.”
As if that matters.
“I can work with that,” I say. “I mean to say—my client can.”
Thirty minutes later, I’m at the corner of Tramway Plaza, my toes sticking out a few inches past the edge of the curb.
I’ve just set up the most unlikely group text ever, including Dave the deadbeat vampire who still hasn’t paid me and other spooky folks I met while running Spüktacular Weddings.
As I wait for them to confirm that they’re prepared to render last-minute, epic-scale wedding assistance, I do my best to look like the person in need of a paranormal pickup while also remaining inconspicuous to the rest of NYC.
That said, my usual desire to be unnoticed is losing out to bouncing.
It’s a light bounce, granted, but it’s definitely happening.
What’s also happening: a bright-yellow smear making its way across the gray-paved horizon. It’s the color of a taxi.
But it is not a taxi.
It’s longer, taller, and technically some kind of oblong sphere with cutout windows. Also, it’s being led by a team of unnecessarily regal white horses. When it stops in front of me, my senses confirm:
It’s a pumpkin.
A giant, horse-powered pumpkin.
“Technically, a gourd,” says the coachman, settled on a platform abutting the winter squash.
He has absurdly long and spindly legs, so his knees reach his chin.
Reins to the horses rest somewhere in his lap.
He’s wearing a vest that looks like it was stolen from a Victorian-era traffic guard.
Affixed to it is a lapel with a pin that reads, to my delight, SPECIAL SERVICES.
“And you?” I ask. “You’re… a person?”
I probably shouldn’t question him so publicly, but I think the ship of normalcy has sailed tonight.
“Of course,” the coachman huffs unconvincingly. Also, his eyes are bugging out. “Do come in. And keep the curtains closed.”
I ascend the steps into the hollowed-out carriage, well aware I’m catching the attention of passersby.
“What?” I call out. “You’ve never seen an art car before? Art. Car.”
When this fails to make an impact, I follow the coachman’s advice to slide the curtains across the pumpkin’s pulpy windows.
The carriage smells like Trader Joe’s in October.
Having made a jack-o’-lantern with Hanry on one of our many impromptu dates, I can appreciate the carving of the vehicle’s vegetably interior.
Precision cutting. The seats aren’t the least bit stringy.
Though pumpkin juice is seeping through my pantsuit and into my fresh pair of underwear. Oh well, better this than beer.
We bump and rattle our way across the Queensboro Bridge.
I close my eyes, resting until the horses whinny with a touch of harmonic drama.
When they bring us to a stop, I crack open the thick-fleshed pumpkin coach door to catch a glimpse of our progress.
By which I mean I brace myself to witness—inevitably—the land of Fairy.
We’re in a forest. Mostly conifers. There’s an old Wegman’s bag on the side of the road.
“Hey, Jiminy Cricket,” I call to the driver, opening the door farther. “Where are we?”
“Hello, Miss Samantha! We’re outside of Albany.”
“What, like Albany, New York?”
The driver nods so hard, I feel sympathy whiplash. “Yes! Our destination is but a few dozen miles from here.”
Damn. I always heard Upstate New York was weird.
“I should’ve guessed”—I laugh in spite of myself—“that Fairy wasn’t far at all.”
“Indeed! Now, please step out, for the party we’re meant to intercept should be right—aha! Right along!”
We’re intercepting a whole party? Well, I guess that explains the glowing orange light I’m just able to make out, advancing toward us on this country highway.
Surprise, surprise: it is another giant vegetable.
To my pleasure, though? This pumpkin rolls up beside mine, and a small, pretty hand throws back its ornate, gauzy curtains.
“SABBY!” cries the hand’s owner, who is no other than Mandy. “You’re here! You’re coming to the wedding! I’m so HAPPY!”
My pixie assistant, and the interim lead planner for Spüktacular Weddings, is dressed in a frilly black ensemble with a gathered skirt and a giant ruffled trim. I love it. And I love her. My heart absolutely gushes with affection, and it’s kind of gross.
“Of course I’m here,” I say, rolling my eyes to emphasize how chill I am about seeing her. “We have a job to do, don’t we? Now, make room for me in your pumpkin.”
“I would, but it’s a spaghetti squash,” says Mandy. “The sugars caramelize differently. Anyway, get in!”
“Will do,” I say. I wave in thanks to my own personal Jiminy Cricket and glance at the second, taller of the two coachmen guiding Mandy’s contraption. He meets my eye, his familiar brow poised in arched disdain.
“Rochester!” I exclaim. “Hey, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
He continues to disdain me with such great power that I feel it’s best to dip into the squash, lest I become a roasted vegetable myself.
“What’s he doing here?” I ask as I slip around into my seat.
“Rochester is a fairy godmother,” Mandy informs me, toweling off her hands with a dainty kerchief. “All fairy godmothers have to study carriagecraft.”
“A fairy, I get, but a godmother? Why… a mother… Rochester is a… You know what, no. I’m not asking. Where’s Bulan?”
Mandy’s expression swiftly shifts from giddy and lovestruck to slightly panicked. “I thought he was with you!”
My stomach sinks. If Bulan didn’t go back to Salem, what did his crows do with him? Maybe they’ve made him a full member of the gang now, and he’s sporting a new raven tattoo on his nose or something.
“I’m sure he’s fine, wherever he is,” I say uneasily. I bang on the squash’s fleshy wall.
“All right, Roachster,” I call out. “Time to take us to the ball. Chop-chop!”
Mandy pouts. “It’s not a ball, remember? Tonight’s the rehearsal dinner.”
“Oh, Mandy,” I say. “It was a joke. You have so much left to learn.”
“I do!” she cries, and tackles me with such a hard hug, I nearly fall back through the carriage door and onto the earth of Mid-Nonsense, New York.
But thankfully, these squash vehicles are made of strong, if stringier, stuffing, and soon we’re just another giant plant flying down the road.
In fact, as far as I can tell, the only thing going faster than us is Mandy’s mouth.
She has a month’s worth of hijinks to catch me up on, and only a short time to do so.
“… and after that, Rochester brought me the deposit and signed the contract for us, you see? And I was too googly-eyed to say no and on top of that, there were all these Community folks calling and checking in about their weddings and new weddings and talking about their invitations and the fonts and the printers and consultations, and I just had to keep it going. And it was so hard, but through it all, I knew you’d come back! ”
I ignore the last comment, interjecting with effort: “When Bulan told me you were doing this, I thought about stopping you.”
“You should’ve!” Mandy cries. “I’m able to hold almost anyone’s attention! And I can hold SO MUCH candy at the same time! But I can’t hold together much else.”
“I’m sure you’ve done your best.” I pat her shoulder.
“Getting things organized is your superpower.” She hiccups. “I want to be serious, Sabby, but I don’t know if I can. What if my only superpower is seduction?”
“I don’t think you get to call something a superpower if it’s your species’ innate ability.”
Mandy dabs at her eyes with a lacy sleeve.
“In any case,” she says, “your instructions were so clear, all the scheduling you did for this wedding and the other weddings, I just kept following them as if you were there, and if I fell behind on anything, I imagined you were really angry!”
“Glad that helped,” I say. My phone pings, and immediately I scramble to remove it from the bag on my chest. Are we back in cell area? Did Hanry finally reply to me? But no. My phone is just announcing that my battery’s about to die. And I left my charger in the apartment. Shit.
“I had no idea what else to do,” Mandy continues. “I still needed to pay rent.”
I return my useless phone back into my chest bag and refocus on Mandy. She seems genuinely upset.
“Mandy. You’ve done a lot these last few weeks. You deserve more from me. And better.”
“It’s okay!”
“Wage theft isn’t.”
She cocks her head to the side. “What is that?”
“Something I learned about in college. But seriously, why didn’t you try to find a new job when you ran out of money?”
“Oh, umm. I didn’t want to leave Salem, and, well… Remember how happy Fi was? And Sidney? If I could make that happen again, I knew I would. No matter how hard it was.” After a moment’s pause, she bursts out, “Wow, didn’t that sound weighty?”
“It did,” I agree. Reaching into my duffel, searching for my laptop case, I say, “Let’s lean into that energy. I’ve heard that faking it till you make it works. So from now on, your new name is Serious Mandy.”
“Yay!”
“But I’m going to keep calling you Mandy.”
“Okay!”
“That’s probably all the time we have to catch up,” I say.
Pulling out my laptop and opening it, I ask, “What do we need to do to make this wedding happen tomorrow? Where are we on details? I remember the couple originally wanted to use a local vendor for the flowers, but have you been able to follow up with them to talk about responsibilities for setup?”
Mandy passes me a folder of her own, and together, we enter a familiar discussion. Which feels nice, until I realize none of the answers to my questions are precise enough to offer peace of mind. Each one forces me to write, inevitably, Discuss on arrival. Worst of all?
“The bride and groom didn’t fill out their family background surveys. In fact, Mandy, there’s no information in here about them at all.”
“It’s probably because the mother of the bride is another Becuille mac Nuadat type. You know, what’s that word you used?”
“Momzilla,” I say.
“Yeah! She probably wanted to make sure you didn’t talk to the REAL bride and groom to find out what THEY wanted. I bet she thinks she’s being sneaky. Oh, what chaos!”
No kidding. If we have this right, then the cunning and callousness I’ve experienced so far bodes poorly for tomorrow’s wedding.
And it explains why I’m struck by a moment of terror as Rochester calls on the horses to halt, and Mandy crawls across the seat to the curtains, pulling the fabric back to reveal our final destination.
A goddamned fairy castle.