Caryn laughed. “Let’s see if you still say that after you meet the other bridesmaids.”
I rolled my eyes. I hadn’t met her high school friends, but I had heard the stories.
“I was in all of their weddings,” she said with a small shrug. Which was totally ridiculous as reasons went, and she knew that too. Caryn’s fiancé was the brother of the worst of them. Their family had more money than they knew what to do with, which explained the enormity of the rock on Caryn’s finger. I never understood why Caryn was so desperate to impress this one particular group of girls, especially because Caryn herself came from money. But as a peasant, I didn’t understand the ways of the extravagantly wealthy. And I knew that the fear of not living up to these other women’s standards was the primary source of anxiety in her life.
“Bring it on. Just tell me I don’t have to wear anything floral.”
“In the wedding?” Caryn asked, horrified. “Oh no. Solids only for bridesmaid dresses!”
“What was I thinking?” I smiled. “I’m honored, really.”
“Thank you.” She hugged me. “I’m going to need you for this.”
The next to fall was my college roommate, Sharon. Her engagement was no big surprise—in fact, she probably would have freaked out and not given him an answer if Josh had surprised her. Sharon didn’t like being put on the spot. She and Josh had been living together for two years already and she knew he had the ring before he asked. “We’re just going to do city hall,” she confided when she called me. “I’ve never wanted a real wedding. I mean, you can come and all, but I don’t want to do a bridal party or anything like that. You don’t mind, do you?”
I assured her, quite honestly, that I did not. I would go anywhere for her, but at my age, I was past feeling that being a bridesmaid was a necessity. I was happy to do it, but would my feelings be hurt if I didn’t have to wear a puffy dress and bride-selected shoes? No.
City hall was also not much of a surprise. Through the dozen-plus years of our friendship, she had been adamant that if she ever got married, her dream wedding was Rabbi Elvis in Vegas, with random witnesses off the street. Which made sense, if you knew Sharon. Not that she was the Vegas type at all, but her mother was so domineering and overbearing that if she knew a wedding was happening, Sharon would have zero input into any part of it.
But once there was a ring on her finger, Sharon couldn’t not tell her mom, who apparently had strong opinions other than city hall.
Sharon called me in hysterics three days after the engagement phone call. “She said she’ll disown me if I don’t have a real wedding,” she wailed. “She said I’ll be dead to her. She’s going to sit shiva.”
“She wouldn’t do that. She’s bluffing.”
“Have you met my mother? She’s serious.”
I sighed, having lived through many soap-operatic dramas between Sharon and her mother. Would she go through with sitting shiva? Possibly. Would she also recant as soon as the first grandchild was born? Of course. But it was a moot point because if Mrs. Meyer pushed hard enough, Sharon always caved.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“She already booked her rabbi to marry us.”
“Will he wear an Elvis costume for you at least?”
Sharon laughed and then hiccupped. “Probably not. He’s like a hundred and fifty years old.” She paused. “I hate to ask. I know I said you wouldn’t have to be in it—”
“I’m happy to, Shar.”
“You mean it?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you,” she sighed in relief. “I don’t know how I could get through this if you said no.”
When I met my best friend, Megan, for happy hour a few weeks later, she kept her left hand deliberately hidden when I showed up.
“I love you,” I declared, sinking into the seat opposite her where a martini sat waiting for me, dirty, with extra olives, just the way I liked it. I took a long swig, needing it after the phone call I had just had with the astrophysicist who didn’t think that I had accurately explained the significance of the gamma-ray burst he had been researching. “Seriously. Marry me.”
“Funny you should say that.” Megan’s eyes twinkled as she raised her hand. “I already told Tim I would marry him.”
Despite my two prior commitments, I swear that I felt nothing but joy for the girl who had been my best friend since second grade, when Amber Donovan announced the name of my crush to an entire busload of kids and Megan “accidentally” clocked her with her Snoopy lunch box. Nothing cements a friendship like hitting another kid in the face with a Charles Shultz–approved hunk of plastic complete with matching thermos.
I squealed over the ring and demanded all of the appropriate details, grinning broadly at the happiness radiating from her pores.
“I have a question for you,” she said when she finished the story, pulling an exquisitely wrapped package out of a bag on the floor next to her.
“What’s this?”
“Open it.”
I tore into the wrapping paper and Megan laughed again, calling me vicious. Under the paper was a wooden box painted Tiffany blue with a white ribbon stripe affixed to it. I can’t say ‘I do’ without you, it said in calligraphy on a card in the corner. I opened the latch and lifted the lid of the box. It contained a ring pop, a tiny bottle of champagne, Hershey’s Kisses, and a pack of Essie bridal nail polishes in pale pinks. Will you be my maid of honor? was written in the same calligraphy inside the box’s lid.
My eyes welled up. “Of course I will! How long did this take you?”
“I saw it on Pinterest forever ago—don’t you ever look at my wedding board?”
What on earth is a wedding board? I asked myself, shaking my head. I was going to have to figure that out.
It wasn’t until I was back at home that night, showing my maid of honor box to Becca, that I realized I might be a bit overextended.
“Have any of them set dates yet?” she asked.
“Megan and Caryn both did.”
“Of course Megan already did.” Becca wasn’t a huge fan of Megan, and the feeling was mutual. They tolerated each other because of me, but Becca thought Megan was bossy and controlling, and Megan thought Becca was judgmental and snarky. I knew they were both right, but loved them for those same qualities.
“June 27.”
“A June wedding, shocking.”
I laughed. “Three weeks after Caryn’s. And Sharon hasn’t set a date yet.”
“I hope it’s not the same weekend as Megan’s or Caryn’s.” The thought hadn’t occurred to me yet, and I must have looked worried because Becca immediately assured me it probably wouldn’t be.
“You couldn’t pay me to be in three weddings in the same year,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re a better person than I am.”
The combination that pushed me over the edge into a blackout-drunk night of groomsmanic debauchery came a month later. My twenty-seven-year-old brother, Jake, proposed to his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend the weekend before Megan’s engagement party.
“She said yes!” he yelled into the phone as a greeting.
Jake and I weren’t the closest of siblings, and I’d had no previous indication that he and his girlfriend were that serious. Granted, he lived out of state, so I had met her on exactly three occasions. And on those three occasions, I believe she said a grand combined total of nine words to me.
But Jake had pulled this particular gag before, with his college girlfriend. So I wasn’t buying it this time.
“Congratulations,” I said, pretending to play along. “When’s the big day?”
“Probably May. We want to do a destination wedding and everything in June will be booked already.”
A tiny inkling of dread began to bubble up in me—he knew too much about June weddings. But I swallowed it back down because this was how Jake operated. He had probably heard how many weddings I was already committed to from our parents and was th
erefore trying to build some anxiety before saying “gotcha.”
“Well it’s a good thing Madison doesn’t like me, because I don’t have the time or energy to be in another wedding.”
There was a pause.
“Of course Mads likes you. We want you to be a bridesmaid.”
“Ha. Is she going to be able to handle vows? I mean, she might have to say ‘I do’ in front of other people!”
A longer pause this time.
“Lily, you’re on speaker.” Jake cleared his throat. “With me and Madison.”
“Hi, Lily,” a quietly wounded voice said through the phone.
My stomach dropped.
“I’m a jerk,” I said quickly. “Jake, I thought you were teasing me because—well—never mind! Congratulations! I’m so happy for you both! Send me a picture of the ring! I want to hear all the details!” I went into autopilot engagement-babble mode, my cheeks burning from the embarrassment of somehow getting it wrong when Jake was being serious.
When we hung up, I let out a colorful stream of expletives only somewhat related to the faux pas I had just made in insulting my future sister-in-law while she was on the line.
Was I a bad person for feeling jealous? Probably. But I doubt there’s an older sister in the world who wouldn’t turn a little green, be it with envy or nausea, at the realization that she was going to be in four weddings, including that of her younger brother, all without so much as the prospect of a date. They were still in their midtwenties. They could date another couple of years and be fine. What was the rush?
Jake’s engagement festered in me all week. I love my little brother. I do. And it wasn’t like I was ready to get married. Or like anyone had ever proposed to me. Or like I had ever been in the kind of relationship where I wanted the person to propose. I had started talking about marriage when David and I were twenty-four, but we broke up not long after that, and I hadn’t been in a serious enough relationship to think about it since. The emerging details of Jake’s engagement, however, combined with my mother’s proud Facebook posts and completely un-self-aware comments about how happy she was to finally be planning a wedding made me begin to wish the entire institution had been left in the dark ages where it belonged.
The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, however, came with Amy’s phone call during Megan’s engagement party. I felt my bag vibrate while I stood chatting with Megan’s mother, but I ignored it. We were in the party room of a posh hotel, and it would have been rude to even open my bag to see who was calling. When the vibrations began again ten seconds after ceasing, I started trying to figure out how to extricate myself from the conversation, and by the fourth call, I assumed someone must have died, so I excused myself and walked onto the terrace to take the call.
“Amy? What’s wrong? What happened?”
“I’m getting married!” she shrieked so loudly that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“Not funny, Ames,” I said. This time I was confident it was a joke. In one of the marathon phone sessions I’d had that week with my mother, Amy had been on the line and she swore up and down that Jake was too young to get married, that Madison, at twenty-five—just one year older than Amy herself—was definitely too young to get married, and that even if Tyler proposed tomorrow, she would make him wait at least four more years. This seemed logical—while a year out of college now, Amy was still living with my parents, working a part-time job until she found something she actually wanted to do, and generally did not have her life together. Tyler, her boyfriend, was two years older and in law school, so while he was more centered than she was, he still seemed light-years away from being ready to tie the knot.
“That’s because it’s real! Check your text messages! I sent you a picture of the ring!”
My stomach leapt into my throat as I looked down at my phone’s screen. Sure enough, there was Amy’s hand, complete with chipped remnants of blue glitter nail polish, topped with an inordinately large diamond. She should have done her nails, I thought, unkindly.
“Isn’t it gorgeous? It was his grandmother’s! It doesn’t fit—I have to get it sized.”
I let Amy go on for a while, but I wasn’t listening anymore. She was twenty-four, for God’s sake! Panic began to grow in my chest as I looked back in the lighted windows of Megan’s party.
“So it’ll be in June,” Amy was saying, “after Tyler graduates from law school. And you’ll be a bridesmaid, of course.”
“What?”
“Well, you’re my sister! Madison will have to be in it too, I guess, right? Mom will make me include her. And we’re both in hers, so I guess I have to. Jake will be one of Tyler’s groomsmen. And Tyler’s sister—she’s twenty-seven, that’s almost your age, so you’ll have someone to hang out with. Oh, and Ashlee, she’ll be my maid of honor. You don’t mind, do you? I already asked her. I mean, I guess I can have two maids of honor if you really want to be one, even though that means Tyler will have to have two best men. It’s too bad you’re not married, because then it’d be so easy, I’d just make you my matron of honor—ugh, I don’t have to make Madison that, do I? They’ll only be married like a month when we get married, that’s hardly a matron. No, she’ll just be a bridesmaid. Right? Oh my God, Lily! I can’t believe he proposed!”
My head was reeling, but I think I made a vaguely appropriate response of congratulations before reminding Amy that I was at Megan’s engagement party and couldn’t stay on the phone.
“Ooh, okay! I have to go call Jake anyway! And Grandma and Aunt Anna and so many other people! I’ll call you tomorrow with all the details, okay? Bye-ee!”
I dropped my phone back in my purse and poured the remains of the drink I had been holding down my throat, then walked straight to the bar, where I ordered another. I drank that one the same way, ordered another, and remembered nothing further until waking up the following morning in a strange hotel room with an even stranger groomsman.
CHAPTER THREE
It was time to do some quick damage control. First, there was the issue of the mystery groomsman. I thought about it while I showered the morning after the party and decided it truly was best to not know which groomsman I had slept with. Curiosity killing the cat and all. And that cat probably actually died of shame from having to repeatedly face the guy she hooked up with while blind drunk. No thanks. If I didn’t know who it was, I couldn’t be awkward about it, nor could I develop a posthookup rebound crush on the guy in order to justify having slept with him. Having been down that road before, I felt qualified to postulate that those relationships have an expiration date on par with that of a container of yogurt, which is far less time than a typical engagement takes, and I had zero desire to walk down the aisle at Megan’s wedding with someone whom I had not only slept with, but also horrifically dated and broken up with. The only solution? Tell Megan I didn’t want to know who it was and move on. I could ask after the wedding if I was still curious.
With that settled, there was the issue of keeping the details of five weddings straight. I, to put it mildly, lack major organizational skills. Caryn’s and Megan’s weddings would be a piece of cake on that front at least. Caryn was the most organized and highest functioning person I knew, and Megan had been planning her dream wedding for so many years that she would need almost nothing from me. Sharon’s would be harder, as her disdain for all things wedding meant she would need a little hand-holding. But, I rationalized, her mother would take over the planning, and with Sharon not wanting a wedding at all, she would be pretty laid-back about the whole process. Then again, Mrs. Meyer was the opposite of laid-back, and she would be running the show. But she also probably wouldn’t allow any feedback from me, so there wouldn’t be much I would be expected to do anyway.
Jake’s and Amy’s weddings were going to cause the biggest headaches. I was definitely off on the wrong foot with Madison after the engagement phone call, and I needed to fix that. She and Jake lived in Chicago, so taking her to lunch wasn’t an opt
ion, but a gift with an apology note was. And Amy—well—she was twenty-four. I figured that the odds of her and Tyler actually reaching the aisle in June were only slightly higher than the odds of me getting married to the random groomsman I had slept with. It was possible, but pretty freaking unlikely. My baby sister didn’t exactly have a reputation for following through with things, and Tyler was her longest relationship, at just over a year—a year that she had spent still living with my parents. In grown-up relationship time, that took it down to maybe three months. I decided if I took her out of the equation entirely, everything else seemed far more manageable.
I can do this, I thought as I stepped out of the shower. Just one step at a time.
I had a missed call and voicemail from Megan by the time Becca and I finished breakfast. I deleted the voicemail without listening, then called her back.
“Before you say a single word,” I said, cutting her greeting off, “I don’t want to know who it was!”
Megan hesitated, processing. “Explain.”
“Promise you won’t tell me first.”
“I promise nothing.”
“MEGAN!”
“Ugh, fine, I won’t tell you. But I want to know what happened.”
I sighed. “Amy is getting married.”
“Amy who?”
“My sister.”
“Your sister is twelve. She’s not getting married.”
“Twenty-four,” I said. “I agree, she probably isn’t actually getting married, but she’s engaged nonetheless.”
“Gross. When did that happen?”
“Last night.”
“Ahhh. That explains why you started mainlining chardonnay at the party.”
“And that explains my hangover,” I groaned. “Really? Chardonnay?”
“You drank more of it than my cousin Gina. And then you were flirting pretty hard with—”
For the Love of Friends Page 2