Chapter 31
JESS
Amonth after Christmas, Anne made a spreadsheet.
Of course she did. She’d booked six bridal salons across the greater St. Louis area, ranked them by designer and price point and proximity to a decent lunch spot, and color-coded the whole thing, and when she sent it to me I called her immediately.
“We cannot do six in a day, Anne.”
“I know that.”
“Do you, though? Because this spreadsheet suggests a woman who thinks she can do six in a day.”
“It’s aspirational.” A pause. “The lady at the first place said two appointments is the sane maximum. So I built it as two a day. We just have to find three days we’re both off before June, which—” I heard her pull up a calendar, “—given our jobs, is going to be the actual hard part.”
She wasn’t wrong. That was the part nobody warned you about. Not the dress. The scheduling.
Because here was the thing about Anne and me: we had met six years ago as two single mothers who were each, privately, drowning.
Justin and Finn had been in the same daycare room, both of us doing the pickup-line shuffle at 6:05 every evening — the specific frazzled sprint of a working woman who’d left a meeting early and hit every red light and was going to owe the late fee again.
We’d started talking because our sons had claimed each other. We’d stayed friends because we recognized something in each other: two single mothers holding an entire life together with both hands and no one to spot them.
We had traded so many favors over those years I’d lost count. Sick days covered. Emergency pickups. The 11 p.m. phone calls — is this a fever-fever or a normal fever, do I take him in. She was the person I called when I didn’t have anyone else to call, which, for a long time, was most of the time.
And now she was getting married. And I was going to stand next to her while she did it.
She’d gone from “yes” to project-managing a June wedding with the ruthless efficiency of a woman who did not intend to be a long engagement.
Which was how I found myself out in the teeth of a gray St. Louis January, driving from salon to salon between our shifts, watching my best friend try to find the dress.
So we found the days. It took a coordinated act of two-career logistics that would have impressed the Pentagon — I moved a shift, she rearranged two clinic days, we begged Rosa’s replacement and Carol and Barbara Ewing into a rotating childcare relay — but we found three days, and we went dress shopping.
The first four dresses were educational, mostly in the sense of teaching us what Anne didn’t want.
Shop one, dress one, was an enormous ballgown with enough tulle to wrap a parade float, and Anne came out of the fitting room looking like she was being slowly consumed by a cloud.
“I look like a hostage,” she said.
“You look like a beautiful hostage.”
“Get me out of this.”
Shop one, dress two was better — sleek, modern, a little severe — and she liked it, but she didn’t love it, and the consultant, a sharp woman named Denise who’d clearly done this ten thousand times, watched Anne’s face and quietly made a note.
“That’s a ‘nice,’” Denise said. “We’re not looking for ‘nice.’”
“We’re not?”
“Honey, you’ll know. Everybody thinks they won’t, and everybody does.”
Shop two was a bust — the appointment ran late, the samples ran small, and Anne stood in a dress that wouldn’t zip and got quiet in a way I recognized, the way she got when the day felt bigger than she’d budgeted for. I caught her eye in the mirror.
“You okay?”
“I keep thinking about how I raised a child alone,” she said, low, so the consultant wouldn’t hear.
“Every bit of it. The pregnancy, the delivery, six years of it. By myself. And now there’s this whole —” she gestured at the dress, the shop, the enormity of it, “—and Liam, and I keep waiting to feel like I don’t deserve to have it be easy. ”
I stepped up behind her and met her eyes in the glass.
“You did the hard part alone,” I said. “That’s exactly why you get to have the rest of it be good. That’s not luck. That’s the math finally working out in your favor.”
She reached back and squeezed my hand.
“When did you get wise?”
“I’ve always been wise. You were too tired to notice.”
She found it at the fourth shop.
We almost didn’t go — we were tired, footsore, three dresses and one wardrobe malfunction into a long day, and shop four was the last appointment before we’d have to find another impossible free afternoon.
But we went. And the consultant, a young guy named Marcus with an unerring eye, took one look at Anne, listened to about ninety seconds of what she’d hated so far, and disappeared into the back.
He came out with one dress.
“Just this one,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”
It was strapless. A-line — fitted through the bodice, then falling clean and simple to the floor, no tulle avalanche, nothing fighting for attention.
Ivory. And lace — a lace overlay so fine it looked like frost, running the length of it, with a long lace train that pooled behind her when she turned.
Anne came out of the fitting room, and I stopped breathing for a second.
She didn’t say anything. She walked to the little pedestal in front of the three-way mirror and stepped up and looked at herself, and I watched my best friend — the woman I’d met in a daycare pickup line when we were both too exhausted to imagine a day like this one — go completely still.
“Oh,” she said.
Just that. Oh.
“Anne.”
“Don’t.” Her eyes were already filling. “Don’t, or I’ll go, and then you’ll go, and Marcus will have to deal with both of us.”
“Too late,” said Marcus, who was also misting up.
She turned to see the train move behind her, and the lace caught the light, and she pressed her hand to her mouth, and I felt all of it rise up in my throat at once — every pickup line, every fever call, every night one of us had talked the other one off a ledge over lukewarm wine.
The two of us, holding it together alone.
And now here she was, on a pedestal, in the dress, about to not be alone anymore.
“It bustles,” Marcus said gently, showing her how the train would gather up for the reception. “So you can dance.”
“I can dance,” Anne repeated, like it was the most astonishing sentence she’d ever heard.
“You can dance,” I said.
She looked at me in the mirror, both of us wrecked, and said, “This is the one.”
“I know.”
“Say it’s the one.”
“It’s the one, Anne. It was the one the second you went still.”
She said yes to the dress in the most literal possible way — Marcus went to get the measurements, there was a deposit, there was a flurry of talk about the alterations timeline because a lace gown with a train needs months and we were cutting it closer than the salon strictly loved.
We canceled the last two appointments in the car, gleefully, deleting them off Anne’s beloved spreadsheet one at a time.
“We didn’t even need all six,” she said.
“You never need all six. You needed the right four and the stamina to get through them.”
There was, still, an absurd amount left to do.
We spent the following weekend at a bridal expo at one of the convention halls downtown — a fluorescent-lit wonderland of cake samples and DJ demos and a man aggressively promoting doves, actual live doves, as a ceremony feature.
We came for the practical things: invitations, which Anne agonized over for forty-five minutes before choosing something clean and classic; ideas for the wedding party gifts; a florist whose Forest Park portfolio made Anne tear up again, because she and Liam had decided on the Jewel Box and the florist got it immediately, the glass and the greenery and the light.
I collected a truly staggering amount of free candy and a tote bag’s worth of brochures I would never read.
“You’re enjoying this,” Anne accused me, somewhere around the third cake sample.
“I’m enjoying you enjoying this. It’s different.”
“You’ll do it someday, you know.” She said it lightly, watching me sideways over her tiny paper plate of buttercream. “This whole circus. I fully intend to make a spreadsheet for your six shops and hold you to all six.”
I didn’t answer that. I looked down at my little plate of cake and let myself feel it — the quiet, warm, entirely unfamiliar thought that she might be right.
That someday could include me. I had spent a very long time being certain it couldn’t, and I had been wrong, and I was still getting used to how good it felt to be wrong about that.
Because there was a version of that sentence — you’ll do it someday — that I would have laughed off a year ago. Deflected. Reminded her I had a very settled stance on all of this. And I couldn’t, anymore. That was the thing I kept running into lately. The old lines didn’t fit in my mouth.
“Maybe,” I said.
Anne heard everything I didn’t say, the way she always does, and had the grace not to push. She just bumped her shoulder against mine and stole the rest of my cake, and we went to go look at centerpieces.
But I thought about it in the car on the way home. Two single mothers in a daycare pickup line. One of them was about to walk down an aisle in a lace gown that bustled so she could dance.
And the other one had just let herself think the word someday — and, for the first time in her life, hadn’t gone looking for a reason it couldn’t happen.
The thing nobody warns you about hockey is how fast it gets its hooks in you.
Six months ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between a first-round series and a conference final, or why a building full of grown adults would lose their minds over a defensive-zone faceoff.
But I’ve never been able to do anything halfway, and I’d found myself in the middle of this sport, so I dug in and learned it — the lines, the matchups, the little battles along the boards that decide games nobody remembers the score of. And the deeper I got, the more I loved it.
Now here I was, on my feet in a sold-out arena, screaming myself hoarse because Carter Michaels had just won a defensive-zone faceoff.