Once and for All

  And I knew my mom, and only my mom. Not only did I look just like her—same features, dark hair, and olive skin—but I sometimes felt like we were the same person. Mostly because she’d been disowned by her own wealthy, elderly parents around the time of the mud pit marriage, so it was always just us. After my dad bailed, she sold the cabin and moved us into Lakeview, where, after bouncing around a few restaurant jobs, she got a position working at the registry department of Linens, Etc., the housewares chain. On the surface, it seemed like a weird fit, as it was hard to find a convention more commerce-driven than weddings. But she had a kid to feed, and in her previous life my mom had been a debutante and taken etiquette classes at the country club. This world might have disgusted her, but she knew it well. Before long, brides were requesting her when they came in to pick out china patterns or silverware.

  By the time William was hired a year later, my mom had a huge following. As she trained him, teaching him all she knew, they became best friends. There in the back of the store, they spent many hours with brides, listening to them talk—and often complain—about their wedding planning. As they learned which vendors were good and which weren’t, they began keeping lists of numbers for local florists, caterers, and DJs to recommend. This expanded to advising more and more on specific events, and then planning a few weddings entirely. Meanwhile, over lunch hours and after-work drinks or dinner, they started to talk about going out on their own. A partnership on paper and a loan from William’s mother later, they were in business.

  My mom had a fifty-one share, William forty-nine, and she got her name on the door. But the legalese basically ended there. Whatever foxhole a particular wedding was, they were in it together. They made dreams come true, they liked to tell each other and anyone else who would listen, and they weren’t wrong. This ability never did cross over to their own love lives, however. My mom had barely dated since splitting with my dad, and when she did, she made a point of picking people she knew wouldn’t stick around—“to take the guesswork out of it,” in her words. Meanwhile William, who had been out since about age eight, had yet to meet any man who could come close to meeting his exacting standards. He dealt with this by also leaning toward less than ideal choices with no chance of long-term relationship potential. Real love didn’t exist, they maintained, despite building an entire livelihood based on that very illusion. So why waste time looking for it? And besides, they had each other.

  Even as a kid, I knew this was dysfunctional. But unfortunately, I’d been indoctrinated from a young age with my mom and William’s strong, oft-repeated cynical views on romance, forever, love, and other keywords. It was confusing, to say the least. On the one hand, I lived and breathed the wedding dream, dragged along to ceremonies and venues, privy to meetings on every excruciating detail from Save the Date cards to cake toppers. But away from the clients and the work, there was a constant, repetitive commentary about how it was a sham, no good men really existed, and we were all better off alone. It was no wonder that a few years earlier, when my best friend Jilly had suddenly gone completely boy-crazy, I’d been reluctant to join her. I was a fourteen-year-old girl with the world-weariness of a bitter midlife divorcée, repeating all the things I’d heard over and over, like a mantra. “Well, he’ll only disappoint you, so you should just expect it,” I’d say, shaking my head as she texted with some thick-necked soccer player. Or I’d warn: “Don’t give what you’re not ready to lose,” when she considered, with great drama, whether to confess to a boy that she “liked” him. My peers might have been flirting either in pairs or big groups, but I stood apart, figuratively and literally, the buzzkill at the end of every rom-com movie or final chorus of a love song. After all, I’d learned from the best. It wasn’t my fault, which did not make it any less annoying.

  But then, the previous summer, on a hot August night, all of that had changed. Suddenly, I did believe, at least for a little while. The result was the most broken of hearts, made even worse by the knowledge that I had no one to blame for it but myself. If I’d only walked away, said no twice instead of only once, gone home to my bed and left that wide stretch of stars behind when I had the chance. Oh, well.

  Now my mother downed the rest of her drink and put her glass aside. “Past midnight,” she observed, taking a glance at her watch. “Are we ready to go?”

  “One last sweep and we will be,” William replied, standing up and brushing off his suit. As a rule, we all dressed for events as if we were guests, but modest ones. The goal was to blend in, but not too much. Like everything in this business, a delicate balance. “Louna, you take the lobby and outside. I’ll check here and the bathrooms.”

  I nodded, then headed across the ballroom, now empty except for a few servers stacking chairs and clearing glasses. The lights were bright overhead, and as I walked I could see flower petals and crumpled napkins here and there on the floor, along with a few stray glasses and beer cans. Outside, the lobby was deserted, except for some guy leaning out a half-open door with a cigar, under a NO SMOKING sign.

  I continued out the front doors, where the night felt cool. The parking lot was quiet as well, no one around. Or so I thought, until I started back in and glimpsed one of Deborah’s bridesmaids, a tall black girl with braids and a nose ring—Malika? Malina?—standing by a nearby planter. She had a tissue in her hand and was dabbing at her eyes, and I wondered, not for the first time, what it was about weddings that made everything so emotional. It was like tears were contagious.

  She looked up suddenly, seeing me. I raised my eyebrows, and she gave me a sad smile, shaking her head: she didn’t need my help. There are times when you intervene and times when you don’t, and I’d long ago learned the difference. Some people like their sadness out in the open, but the vast majority prefer to cry alone. Unless it was my job to do otherwise, I’d let them.

  CHAPTER

  2

  “YOU KNOW,” Jilly said, from inside my closet, “this job of yours is really putting a damper on my love life.”

  “You always say that,” I told her.

  “And I always mean it.” There was a thump, followed by the sound of something falling. “Wow. Is this pink one really strapless? How unlike you. I’m trying it on. Crawford, about face.”

  I looked over at her ten-year-old little brother, who was standing by my desk, studying my math textbook. He pushed up his glasses, sighed, then turned around. Meanwhile, I shifted her baby sister, Bean, to my other hip, trying to extract my hair from her tight grip. As I did, she gummed my shoulder, leaving a streak of spittle across my shirtsleeve. Since she had two working parents juggling their empire of food trucks, a visit from Jilly was always a family affair.

  “Okay,” she announced after a moment, emerging in a watermelon-colored sundress that was too small for her. Also, not strapless last I checked. But Jilly liked things tight and short, all the better to accentuate her ample curves. As much as it was not my personal style—by a long shot—I had to admire her body confidence. Most girls at our school were constantly talking diets and thigh gaps, but my best friend had always been one to zig where others zagged. It was but one of about a million things I loved about her. “What do you think?”

  “That there are straps,” I pointed out, coming over and wriggling one loose. “See?”

  She glanced over a freckled shoulder. “Oh. Well, they’re slim at least. Pop that other one up for me?”

  I did as I was told as Bean tried to reach for her, chubby fingers grabbing. Jilly always came to my house in one outfit and left in another. I had an entire rack in the closet of her clothes, as organized as my own, which she ignored every time she went in there.

  “So, about tonight,” she said, wriggling an arm under the strap and adjusting her ample chest into the bodice. I was a hopeful C cup at best, and she was a legit D, so she always added to my clothes a va-va-voom factor I couldn’t even hope for. “The guys are meeting us late night at Bendo, after th
e last band plays. It’s that Catastrophe one.”

  “Brilliant or Catastrophic,” I corrected her.

  “Right.” She turned around, presenting her back to me to do the zipper. “You can come after the event. You said you’d be done early, right?”

  “No. I said it was a six o’clock wedding. It’ll be ten or after.”

  “That dress is too tight,” Crawford said in his signature flat monotone. It was the way he’d talked since he was a baby and the family had moved in behind us, just over the slim creek that separated our two houses. At the time, Jilly and I were ten, he was two, and the twins and Bean not even around yet. Jilly’s parents were busy when it came to everything, including procreating.

  “Don’t worry about me. Just read your book,” she told him in reply, pushing up her boobs a bit.

  “It’s Louna’s book,” he grumbled, and flipped a page. “Also Bean needs changing.”

  So that was what I smelled. Crawford, wicked smart and socially awkward, was always a step ahead of the rest of us. Without comment, Jilly took Bean from me, plopped her on the floor, handed her one of her bracelets to gum on, and continued.

  “Enough with the excuses, okay?” she said to me. “It’s been almost a year. Time to get back out there. You can’t hide behind work forever.”

  “And ‘out there’ is a dirty, sticky club?”

  “In this particular case, yes.”

  “Germs cause viruses,” Crawford opined. “And viruses make you sick.”

  “Just come, listen to some music, we’ll hit a party or two,” Jilly said to me, as Bean began crawling under my bed. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”

  “Wait a second. You didn’t say anything about a party. Or parties, plural.”

  She exhaled loudly, this time without the benefit of a breath beforehand. “Louna,” she said, reaching out and taking me by my arms, “I’m your best friend. I know what you’ve been through, and I know you’re scared. But we are still young. Life is ahead of us. What a privilege, right? Don’t squander it.”

  This was the thing about Jilly. In so many ways, she was over the top, a big, loud, spirited girl who cared not one bit what anyone thought about her. She always had at least two of her siblings in tow, co-opted my clothes, and was hell-bent on finding me another boyfriend, even if—and especially when—I didn’t want one. And yet for all these frustrations, and our absolute polar opposite personalities, every once in a while she could say something like this, heartfelt and direct and, damn it, true. Her heart, as misguided as it could be on other levels, always managed to zero out everything else. What a privilege, indeed.

  “I’ll try to get there,” I told her.

  “That’s all I ask.” She leaned forward, giving me a sloppy kiss on my cheek just as her phone beeped. Pulling it from her bodice—her preferred storage space—she glanced at the screen. “Twinnies need to go to gymnastics. I totally forgot.”

  “I hate gymnastics,” Crawford said. “The whole place smells like mats and feet.”

  “He’s not wrong,” Jilly told me, checking herself in the mirror again. Then she looked into my closet, raising her eyebrows. “Wait, are those new sandals I see back there? Hold the phone! I just got a pedicure.”

  With this, she ducked around me, past the rows of my everyday shoes and into a back corner of the closet, reaching out to grab a pair of thin black sandals with a gold ring closure I’d worn only once. Just seeing them dangling from her hand, straps hooked over her thumb, made my heart sink. “No,” I said, my voice sounding harsher, more abrupt than I meant. “Not those.”

  She looked down at them, then at the place they’d been, away from the others. A beat, and she got it. Quietly, she set them back down on the floor. “Oh, right,” she said. “Sorry.”

  I didn’t say anything, just tried to collect myself—why was this still so hard?—as she bent down to retrieve Bean. When she lifted her up, I felt Crawford watching me, his face somber as usual, and even though I knew he was just a kid and knew nothing, I had to turn away.

  They left a few minutes later with the usual noise involved in any scene change, Bean shrieking while Jilly and Crawford bickered down the stairs. Once out in the backyard, she looked up at my window, waggling her fingers, and I waved back, then watched as they made their way across the grass. Jilly jumped the creek, light on her feet even with the baby in tow, but Crawford stopped, bending down to closely examine something by the water’s edge. A moment later, she yelled at him to hurry up, and he moved on.

  In my room, things were quiet in that special way they only were when the Bakers left the building. As a family they were a lot to handle, for sure, but I couldn’t imagine what my life would have been like had they never moved in. My own house was so clean and still, just my mom and me, everything in order. Knowing their brand of dependable chaos was always nearby was a comfort from day one. We all need to lose ourselves in a crowd once in a while.

  But I was alone now as I went back into the closet. There in that small, dark space, I picked up one black sandal, then another, and placed them back where they’d been, in the corner under a black dress, also worn only one time. They no longer felt like mine, as much as another girl’s from another time. And yet, I still couldn’t get rid of them. Not yet.

  “I love a third wedding,” William said happily, as we stood by the country club pool, watching guests take their seats. “Everyone is so relaxed. I feel like we should just specialize in them, corner that niche market.”

  “Not enough business in it,” my mother, always the realist, told him. “Plus you’d miss the neuroses of young brides. It would be a waste of your gift.”

  “True,” he agreed, as his eyes followed an older man in a tight-fitting suit who was about to sit in one of the front rows of chairs reserved for family. William was the most hyper-aware person I knew, like a cat always ready to pounce. I realized I was holding my own breath until the man’s wife took his elbow, pulling him back to a farther row. “Speaking of young brides, I spoke to Bee and she’s confirmed for first thing Monday morning for her preliminary.”

  My mother sighed. “You know I hate a rush job, William.”

  “The wedding is in August. It’s April.”

  “Late April,” my mother countered. “Which would be fine, if it was a third wedding. But it’s not. It’s high society, and high maintenance, which means we should have started planning a year ago.”

  “You’re leaving out high budget,” William pointed out.

  “Money isn’t everything.” I waited a beat for what I knew was coming next. Sure enough: “You can’t put on a price on your sanity.”

  “But if you could, they’d pay it.”

  They both fell silent as another guest started for the front row. It would be only a matter of minutes before William pulled out the pre-printed RESERVED cards (in his almost calligraphy-like handwriting, aka the official font of a Natalie Barrett Wedding) and put them on the seats. He usually tried to resist, eschewing any extra clutter in a venue, even nicely printed cards. But you could never underestimate the Moron Factor. That was another one of my mother’s mantras.

  “Twenty minutes,” she said now, flicking her wrist to check her watch. “Put down a few cards, just so we don’t have to police. Louna, can you take BRR?”

  I nodded, pulling out my phone to double-check it was on silent. Back Row Right was often my spot at events like this one, when there was a walking factor involved. It was a variation of our three-pronged approach: she launched the wedding party, I kept tabs as they were moving, and William was positioned up front. There, he’d be ready to spring into action in case of someone fainting, rings being dropped or forgotten altogether, or flower girls and ring bearers going rogue mid-ceremony. (Which often happened, although only one time all at once, at an event we now referred to simply as The Disaster.)

  Now we broke, each taking our posit
ions. This event, the Eve Little Wedding, had been in the works for the last nine months, and William was right: it had pretty much been a breeze. The bride was in her fifties, the groom his seventies. They had plenty of money and few specific requests, other than wanting the nuptials to be at the Lakeview Country Club, where they’d met on the tennis court. The club was handling the food, they’d hired our preferred DJ, and the whole thing was expected to wrap up by ten p.m. sharp.

  The only wrinkle had come from the bride’s daughter, Beatrice. When she’d gotten engaged a couple of weeks ago, she decided she, too, had to have a Natalie Barrett Wedding. Complicating things was the fact that she and her fiancé were getting married in mid-August before moving across the country at the end of the summer for a medical residency, so everything had to happen ASAP. Normally, with the waitlist and my mother’s obsession with organization, we didn’t take on anything that came close to last minute. But Eve Little had been so easy, and they were spending so much money, that William, at least, had capitulated. Which was, well, forty percent of the battle.