2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series)

by Heather Muzik

  “This is it?” she blurted, shocked in a good way. This she could do. An evening with the girls in suburban Pennsylvania where the worst that could await her was maybe a bad stripper.

  Tara got out and went around to the trunk, handing her an overnight bag and a garment bag, and then grabbing several grocery bags for herself.

  “What are these for?” Catherine asked, bewildered.

  “You’re staying here.”

  “What do you mean I’m staying here?”

  “I brought your stuff so you could stay here. We’re having a slumber party and getting ready together in the morning—manis, pedis, hair, makeup. The whole ball of wax—which you can also do, by the way. A gift from my Cousin Vinnie for any ‘misunderstanding’.”

  “Seriously?” Catherine felt her eyes well up.

  “Yup. I told you he has a heart of gold. Now skedaddle,” Tara said, pushing her toward the house. “We have some work to do before the fun begins.”

  “Shouldn’t I call Fynn and let him know I’m not coming back?”

  “He knows. The guys are taking him out. Bachelor party.”

  “But what about Cara?”

  “Your parents are watching all the girls—Cara, Niki, and Nell.”

  “So you took care of everything?”

  “It’s all good.”

  As soon as they reached the front step, the door opened and Georgia enveloped her in a hug. “I can’t believe you’re getting married tomorrow! How does it feel?”

  “Like it’s about time,” Catherine admitted with relief.

  “The gang’s all here!” Tara hollered, barging in.

  “I’ll open the wine,” Lacey said, heading for the kitchen.

  “Not so fast. First we have some work to do.”

  Everyone looked to Tara who had never proffered work over wine before in her life.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Georgia asked.

  “I’m great. I just don’t want us baking under the influence—that’s how burns happen.”

  “Baking?” Georgia’s expression was bemused.

  “If you want munchies, I bought all kinds of treats at the store. No need to make anything,” Lacey noted tightly.

  “Well, unless you bought cake we have some work to do.” Tara dumped the grocery bags out onto the coffee table—boxes of cake mix and canisters of frosting.

  “You didn’t,” Georgia growled.

  “I don’t understand.” Lacey looked confused.

  “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is,” Georgia demanded.

  “That depends. What do you think it is?” Tara asked plainly.

  “Tell me we aren’t about to make a wedding cake.”

  “I can’t do that,” Tara admitted.

  “You promised you had the cake covered,” Georgia said sternly.

  Catherine felt her lips begin to tremble as everything that had seemed right about her life and the wedding for the past week suddenly started to crumble before her eyes under the unmistakable Betty Crocker banner.

  “I do have it covered.”

  “This is called covered?” Georgia raged.

  “This is called using a little ingenuity to get what we want.”

  They all stared at Tara, trying not to freak out, trying to follow her before killing her. But if it came down to it, at least it would only be second degree murder—a crime of passion. That wasn’t death penalty stuff, right?

  Tara sighed with exasperation. “Listen, I couldn’t get the cake. It was locked up tight in another wedding. But I nabbed a look at Vinnie’s files and I found it. It isn’t even very far from here. It was delivered today. I figure we can make a decoy and then pull a switcheroo. Bam—everyone’s happy.” She smacked her hands together.

  “Oh no, I’m not stealing a cake from someone else’s wedding,” Catherine said, having just made a deal with herself last week that her stealing days were over.

  “But it’s your cake. The one Fynn picked out,” Tara reminded her.

  “But it will destroy another bride’s dream.”

  “What about your dream?” Tara asked—the devil on Catherine’s shoulder. “You deserve it as much—even more than she does. You had it first.”

  Catherine felt herself wavering on the cusp of integrity.

  “I can’t sanction or support this endeavor,” Georgia stated righteously, trying to put a swift end to the whole crazy idea.

  “Not even if this bride is Rachel Craig herself?” Tara asked. “Turns out she is literally having a shotgun wedding.”

  “That bitch from the store the other day?” Lacey asked in shock.

  “The one and only.”

  “I’m in,” Lacey said.

  “Oh, I’m in,” Catherine agreed, her voice guttural and determined.

  They all looked to Georgia….

  “You know, if we were truly capable of making a good enough replacement cake, we wouldn’t actually need to steal it,” she said, pointing out the chink in the plan.

  *****

  “Okay, so it isn’t as perfect a plan as it seemed on paper,” Tara admitted lowly.

  “Not as perfect?” Catherine’s voice was just below a screech, her eyes taking in the crumbling cakes before them.

  “They’re too moist; that’s the problem,” Lacey noted.

  “I thought moist was a good thing. It says it right on the box.” Tara showed the front with a flourish.

  “It’s fine for a sheet cake or a simple 2-layer cake, but for tiers… they crumble under their own weight,” Lacey observed. “I guess that’s why real bakery cakes are drier; it helps them hold up to the pressure.”

  “Makes them taste like crap too,” Tara pointed out.

  “It’s more about the display.”

  “Well, sue me for trying to make a delicious decoy.”

  “The wedding cake Fynn picked out tastes delicious,” Catherine smarted, not that anyone was concerned with such a trivial statement of fact.

  “So now what?” Georgia asked, having joined them because she couldn’t beat them—not without an entire lecture series on morality and ethics.

  “Why don’t we just buy ready-made cakes to tier?” Lacey offered. “I’m not going to say they’ll be perfect, but I did take a cake decorating class a few years ago.”

  “And why did you take a cake decorating class?” Tara asked pointedly, pretty much saying she was a dork for that decision.

  “Because I thought it might come in handy someday… I don’t know… like now,” Lacey said darkly, holding her own.

  “Touché,” Tara said, bowing slightly. “But unfortunately this weekend must be some kind of obscure cake holiday or something because the bakeries are slap out. Grocery stores too. This was the best I could do.” She presented the cake mess before them like it was a childish piece of modern art—layers of cake in various stages of total breakdown.

  They all stood somberly around the island, a cake funeral.

  “I got it!” Tara exclaimed suddenly.

  All eyes looked to their leader in this venture, waiting for brilliance to shine down upon them.

  “We just need something that looks like cake,” she said excitedly.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Georgia said, putting her misgivings on the island with the mangled cake, just in case there was any question in the future when the authorities came knocking on the door—she most certainly did not agree with what was about to go down here tonight.

  Catherine, on the other hand, had no choice—no matter how crazy the idea. It was this or be cake-less on her wedding day….

  -65-

  “I feel like I should be wearing a chef hat or a white coat or some kind of disguise,” Catherine whispered as she tiptoed her end of the hatbox cake tower into the reception hall. Actually I feel like I should be the one safely squirreled away at Lacey’s instead of risking arrest—the whole but-we’re-mothers-with-infant-daughters argument was getting old.

  “I thought we learned something
from the last time,” Tara hissed. “If you get caught it looks a lot more incriminating when you’re wearing a disguise.”

  Catherine thought back to their black shoe-polished faces in the dark of a Nekoyah night and a giggle escaped her lips. At that moment when Fynn found them on his property she would never have imagined that she would end up here now, planning another robbery, or even better, marrying him in less than twenty-four more hours.

  “This way we could literally be a couple chicks who wandered off the street and stumbled into the hall looking for a phone or a bathroom or something else completely innocent,” she reasoned.

  “A couple of chicks who just so happen to be carrying a wedding cake through the streets in the middle of the night?” Catherine asked dubiously. A stunning wedding cake at that, the hatboxes made perfect yet wholly inedible tiers… but this was Rachel Craig they were talking about—all appearances with nothing sweet on the inside.

  “Every plan has its downside,” Tara admitted.

  “Some more than others.”

  “And another thing: don’t tiptoe, it makes you look guilty.”

  Catherine tried to stand up, walk tall (or as tall as possible for the height-challenged) and fight her natural inclination to sneak.

  “Dammit, it isn’t out on the cake table,” Tara noted, scanning the room full of perfectly appointed tables.

  “What do you know about cake tables?” She was the one getting married and she didn’t think she even had a cake table. But they had to put the cake somewhere surely—

  “It’s got to be in the back. Probably the kitchen. Come on.”

  Catherine dutifully followed, pulled along by the pressure from the other side of the cake tray which Lacey had fashioned from a piece of plywood covered in fabric.

  “So where is it?” she whispered, eyes darting around the empty kitchen.

  “It has to be here,” Tara almost whined, showing the first crack in her certainty that they could pull this off.

  “May I help you?” A man’s voice from behind.

  Tara immediately spoke up. “Yes, actually…. We were wondering where we should put this cake. We’re late delivering it and—”

  “The cake was delivered hours ago,” the gentleman noted. It seemed Rachel had sprung for a wedding guard—not so much a picture of brawn with hands that were lethal weapons, but he looked like he could handle a phone and dial 911.

  “Oh, that was the wedding cake,” Tara stressed, and Catherine was certain she had burst a blood vessel and was stroking out. What the hell are we carrying then?

  “Yes,” the man said warily, like perhaps he too thought Tara was batty.

  “This here… it’s the groom’s cake,” she said simply.

  “The groom’s cake? I heard nothing about—”

  “The groom didn’t even order it. His mother did. She’s southern through and through and couldn’t let her baby boy get married without a groom’s cake.”

  Catherine eyed Tara in awe—the girl never ceased to amaze her how she came up with this stuff. Probably got it from watching Steel Magnolias—useful life lessons from meaningless entertainment.

  “It looks an awful lot like a wedding cake to me,” the wedding guard pointed out.

  “I know, usually the groom’s cake is less… formal,” Tara admitted, appraising the white basket-weave frosting and florets that Lacey had done expertly in record time. “But this particular groom likes vanilla everything and so his mother insisted.”

  “I’ll have to check—”

  “No!” Tara said quickly. “Please don’t. It’s a surprise—although not necessarily a happy one considering the couple isn’t even married yet and this is classic mother-in-law meddling.”

  The gentleman bowed his head just slightly in a show of understanding, probably thinking of his own in-law woes.

  “So, could you point us in the right direction so we can drop this off before we’re fired? We have a long trip back.”

  “I’ll just take you there myself,” he said, intent on chaperoning. Obviously this guy took his position as man-in-chief of the reception hall too seriously—who was going to tamper with a wedding?

  Catherine’s heart was in her throat as they were led to a room down the hall from the reception space. What were they going to do, put the fake cake next to the real one and leave empty-handed after everything they’d gone through to get here? Or kick the guy where it hurts, grab the real one, and take off? She hoped Tara had thought to pack her pepper spray or nunchucks or something.

  They placed the cake on the table, eyeing the real one. The final piece of her wedding puzzle. They were so close she could almost taste it—victory that is, seeing as how she’d given up cake until tomorrow.

  “Do you need me to sign anything?” the gestapo asked. But before they could answer he held up a finger. “Hold on one second; I need to take this call.” He put his phone to his ear, turned and left the room; like they were making too much noise just standing there.

  “That’s our cue.” Tara motioned toward the cake.

  “How did you do that?” Catherine asked, bewildered that the phone would ring at that exact moment.

  “I didn’t do that. We were absolutely cooked. But I know not to let an opportunity go to waste. Let’s get out of here.”

  *****

  “Floor it!” Tara shrieked from the back, scoping out the window like they were being pursued. But Catherine saw only a dim light from the door of the reception hall reflected in the rearview mirror. No one was following them. They were home free.

  “Turn left… wait, right!” Tara hollered.

  “Which is it?” Catherine snapped back.

  “It’s…um… left.”

  Catherine took the turn too sharply, having almost missed it by the time Tara made up her mind, and in response she heard the distinct sound of something sliding across the backseat.

  “Tara, please tell me that was you.”

  “I would but that wouldn’t be the truth.”

  “Is the cake all right?” she screeched.

  “For now.”

  “Didn’t you secure it?”

  “What was I supposed to do, buckle it in?”

  If it were only that easy. “Just keep it on the seat and upright.” Catherine tried to keep her mind on the road and trust Tara with the cake.

  “Wait, turn right,” she blurted suddenly. “Right there!” Tara’s finger emerged from between the front seats, pointing at the fast-approaching next corner.

  Catherine cut across two lanes with no blinker, thankful there was no traffic at this hour. “A little warning next time would be helpful,” she admonished. “What next?”

  “How should I know?” Tara grumbled.

  “You got us here in the first place.”

  “Everything looks different from back here.”

  “Great. How do you suppose we find our way out of this damn town?”

  “We could ask someone.”

  “It’s the dead of the night. Do you see anyone to ask?”

  “How about that car behind us,” Tara pointed out.

  Catherine’s eyes flashed to the rearview mirror again. “Shit!” she shrieked, watching the blue lights approaching quickly.

  She pulled over to the side of the road, stopping short before a fire hydrant, trying not to amass any more violations on top of whatever they had already seen her do. She glanced at the clock on the dash—two minutes to midnight. She felt like Cinderella—time against her. “I can’t get hauled in on my wedding day,” she whined. “What will people think?”

  “Caught cake-handed,” Tara said with a giggle.

  Catherine wasn’t amused. “Just tell me the cake is okay,” she said, trying to breathe, afraid it was smashed to smithereens behind her.

  “Cake’s fine bee-atch. I know how to cushion a turn or a rough stop—years of copiloting pizzas. You got to go with the flow to keep the cheese in place. Same-same cakes,” she said, snapping her fingers.


  “Good evening ma’am,” a ridiculously handsome officer said, leaning down to look in the car.

  “Evening,” Catherine eked out, hating that damn word that kept rearing its ugly head in the most inconvenient places and times, mocking her.

  “Where are you rushing off to at this hour?” he asked, a loaded question if she ever heard one. He perused the interior of the car with a professional eye, taking an inordinately long time on the backseat.

  He knows about the cake. Someone must have filed a report that it was stolen. They’d spent enough time talking to that guy at the hall that he could probably describe every pore on their faces. And maybe there were security cameras too….

  “Just trying to get home and get a good night’s sleep,” she said honestly.

  “You know even when the streets are empty we still have to follow the rules of the road.”

  “I know officer. I apologize for that. I didn’t see my turn until the last minute and I didn’t want to miss it. Next time I’ll—”

  Tara started giggling uncontrollably from the back, her laughter garbled but still undeniable.

  “You girls don’t happen to have been drinking,” he prodded.

  “Of course not!” Catherine said quickly, irately—perhaps too much so.

  “Could I see your license and registration please?”

  She dug through the pell-mell offerings in what was now Tara’s glove box—a space that had birthed a big mess in a week’s time. Thankfully though, the paperwork was in there. Shit—shit—shit—ran like a broken record through her mind as she reached in her purse and slid out her license to add to the offering before handing it over.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “Um….” She didn’t know what he was looking for. Here you are your highness? Thank you for your service? Did he want her to slip him a Lincoln, a Jackson, or some other presidential “paperwork”?

  “Did you just swear at a police officer?” he challenged.

  “What? No.” She shook like some kind of demented bobblehead.

  “It’s not you,” Tara assured him from the back. “She has Stress Tourette’s. Can’t stop herself.”