7. Chapter 7
Chapter 7
I t was Tuesday, Jane’s last day of work before she was off for the wedding. She was at her desk, kind of, sort of working, but also kind of, sort of making herself a to-do list.
Pick up dress from cleaners.
Do overnight mask TONIGHT! and Friday night.
Get eyebrows done?
Get extra phone charger out of the car.
PACK!!!
Next to her keyboard, her phone started buzzing. Haley. Jane picked up the phone and ducked around the corner, to somewhere quieter, before picking up. “Hello?”
“Okay,” Haley said. “I need to tell you something but please don’t panic.”
“Too late,” Jane said, going into a conference room and shutting the door. “Just you saying that makes me panic.”
“I said don’t panic!”
“Do you not know how this works? You tell me not to panic, and that’s basically like hitting the red panic button.”
“Ugh.”
“What is it?”
Haley drew in a big breath. “Tommy’s bringing a date to the wedding.”
Jane didn’t know what the feeling was now coursing through her veins, but panic wasn’t quite it. Confusion, incredulousness, complete and total mortification … that was a start. “ Who ?”
“Date is probably too strong of a word, Jane,” Haley said, backpedaling. “It’s definitely too strong of a word. It’s Bree. It’s definitely a friend situation.”
Bree was a longtime friend of Blake and Tommy’s family. She’d grown up down the street from Tommy, in the white house on the corner, and they’d all gone to grade school together and then middle school and then driven to high school together in Tommy’s hand-me-down blue Honda Accord. Jane knew her, liked her. Bree was always invited to the big extended family events, along with her sister Bethany and her parents and sometimes even her grandma who lived in the over-55 community on the other side of town.
“I’m sure he felt like he needed backup. Or a wing woman, or whatever,” Haley said. “She was obviously already invited to the wedding. But now she’s coming to everything, like the thing Thursday and the rehearsal and the wedding, so—”
Jane leaned against the wall. “She’s getting there Thursday?”
“We told everyone else they could bring their dates,” Haley said helplessly.
They had. It was in the email they’d sent to everyone, the one that Jane had proofread ahead of time. She thought at the time that it would be a good thing—the more the merrier. More buffers + more distractions = more merriment. She did not factor into that equation that Tommy would be bringing a date of his own.
“I know,” Jane said, resigned. Inside, she felt a warped sense of vindication. This is why , she thought. This is why I get worked up about things sometimes. BECAUSE I’M USUALLY RIGHT.
It helped that it was Bree, though. Jane was sure someone, somewhere, had coined the term “girl next door” after Bree, only because “girl in the white house on the corner” was too specific. The point was, Bree was what someone pictured when they heard the term: an awesome girl, sweet, a friend to everyone—Bree was great. “Okay,” she said, exhaling. “Okay. It’s fine. Ashley and I will just kind of stick together when it’s everyone all together. Right?”
“That’s what I said to Blake, and …”
Jane’s tone went flat, a verbal collision into the wall. “What.”
Haley drew a breath. “Apparently she’s bringing someone after all.”
“ What ?”
“I know.”
“It’s Tuesday. The wedding is literally on Saturday.”
“I know .”
“When did she decide this?”
“I don’t know,” Haley said. “That’s what I said to Blake. I was like, are we going to be taking RSVPs right up until the vows? Just curious.”
“What did he say?”
“First, to stop yelling at him,” Haley said. “Sorry, to please stop yelling at him. Then, he was like, well, that’s what happens when we schedule a wedding two weeks out, we have to be flexible.”
“Ugh,” Jane said, sinking into a chair.
“Yeah, probably not the best way to get me to stop throwing a fit at him,” Haley said. “I was like—flexible? Sure. I’ll remember that the next time we find out your New York Jets are back in the Super Bowl. That’ll be two weeks’ notice. I’m sure we’ll be emphasizing the need to be flexible then, too.” Jane leaned forward, her forehead gently thudding against the table. “He said he didn’t understand the analogy,” Haley went on. “Literally, Jane, if I didn’t need my phone like really, really bad right now, I would have thrown it across—what are you doing? What is that noise?”
Jane rubbed her forehead with her free hand. “Nothing.” She got up and started pacing around the room, the panic part starting to set in. “So I’m going to be the only person there without a date.”
“Not at the whole thing, obviously …”
“Just at the parts that matter.”
Haley let it slide. “Just think. Think. Who can you invite to come with you?”
“I mean, I haven’t even talked to another guy in like eleven months,” Jane said.
“Not true,” Haley interjected. “Definitely not true.”
“And even if I had,” Jane continued, building steam as she went, “I am not going to ask someone to come with me TO A WEDDING on a HOLIDAY WEEKEND that, for all intents and purposes, starts the day after tomorrow, because, oh, by the way, I’m the MAID OF HONOR at said wedding. There’s no way. Who would I ask to do that?”
“Okay,” Haley said. “Okay. Just take a breath. What about Tanner?”
Tanner had been her neighbor for two years. He lived downstairs from her, across the hall, and was her go-to guy when it came to bringing up heavy packages from the mailboxes. “He usually goes to the Jersey shore over the Fourth.”
“Is he going this year?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not going to ask,” Jane said. “It would be too weird.”
“Too weird?” Haley exclaimed. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s like a line,” Jane said. “It’s like, once you cross that line, you can’t uncross it.”
“A line ?” Haley said. “Which line is this exactly?”
“Like … buddy line to date line.”
“Do buddies not help each other out in a time of crisis?”
“Yeah, but not usually while wearing floor-length chiffon at a celebration of love.”
“Well, technically you’ll be the one wearing the floor-length chiffon,” Haley said. “He just has to wear the suit.”
“It goes against neighbor code,” Jane said.
“Neighbor code ?”
“Where you know personal things about someone due to proximity but you pretend not to notice because they do the same thing for you,” Jane said. “It’s not an option. He lives downstairs. It’s too weird.”
“What’s weirder?” Haley said. “Going to a wedding with Tanner or sitting in between Tommy and Bree and Ashley and what’s-his-name?”
Jane jumped on that. “Yeah, back to that. Who is Ashley even taking?”
“Some guy named Cody,” Haley said. “Apparently they’ve been dating for a couple months. I don’t know.”
“No one knows anything about him and she’s bringing him to a family wedding ?”
“Let’s just say I wasn’t the only one yelling about it,” Haley said. “But one thing at a time.”
Jane sighed. “I have to get back to work.”
“Okay, think about it,” Haley said. “I’ll think about it too. We’ll figure this out.”
“How about telling everyone we made a mistake and the wedding is actually next July?”
Haley exhaled. “I promise,” she said. “I will figure this out.”
***
Jane had probably only dozed off for a minute or two when she felt the buzz next to her ear, waking her up. She’d gone over to Haley’s after work, then came home and texted Haley some more, then crashed on the couch while Googling wedding etiquette on her phone. She’d fallen asleep somewhere between a maid of honor checklist and the comments section under an article headlined “I Do Drama: Saying No to Wedding Stress Once You Say Yes to the Dress.”
She reached for her phone, still groggy, and flipped it over so she could see the screen. Tommy. The fact that she had just fallen asleep combined with the sight of his name jolted her awake in that disorienting, disconnected way that made her feel like she was falling a hundred feet into the earth. She rubbed her eyes and opened the text. “How’s it going?” it said.
How’s it GOING ? Jane thought. He’s texting me in the middle of the night to ask me how’s it GOING ? She sat up and blinked a bunch of times, then clicked off the text. 10:03 p.m. Okay, not the middle of the night. It just felt like the middle of the night.
Another text popped in and Jane opened it. “I just wanted to let you know Bree’s coming with me on Thursday and Friday.”
And Saturday, Jane finished. And also, in two hours, Thursday is tomorrow. So, basically, she’s coming with you tomorrow.
“I do not even want to deal with this right now,” she said out loud to herself. She tossed the phone into the pillows next to her, so she didn’t have to look at it, and went into the kitchen and got a piece of chocolate, as though it would give her strength. She came back to the couch and crumpled the wrapper into a tiny little foil ball, then popped the chocolate back in her mouth, picked up her phone and typed back her response: “I heard.”
His response came back in almost immediately. He was probably watching me type , she thought, wrinkling her nose. “I hope that’s cool,” he said.
And what if it’s not? She realized it was kind of a no-win situation for him—don’t say anything, he’s a jerk; say something, he’s a jerk. But really, what if it wasn’t? Was he going to call Bree and say, hey, you know what, never mind? No, of course not. He wasn’t asking her permission. He was just trying to make it more subjective. If she reacted in a bad way, then she could be the jerk. She knew how this worked.
“I mean, whatever,” she typed back. A non-answer.
“Cool,” he responded.
“Cool,” she echoed out loud, in a way that meant definitely not .
His turn for a non-answer. A minute later, she got another text from him, a real one. “Let’s try to have a good week, all right?”
A million different snarky responses came to mind, fighting each other for space on the tip of her tongue. But she didn’t say any of them. Because just like a piece of Haley’s wedding belonged to her, a piece of Blake’s wedding belonged to him, and they both deserved to have their little pieces, even if she wanted to take his and rip it up and stomp on it with the heel of the dreamy but impractical shoe she would be wearing to the wedding.
She didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, she just sighed. “All right,” she replied, and then got up to get herself another piece of chocolate.