June Bride

by Billings, Hildred

  “I think I would know if she suddenly went with a space or an aquarium theme,” Sunny muttered. Not that Brandelyn would ever do that. It went totally against her traditional mindset. I’m the one who would suggest an under the sea theme. Ahem. More like flowers for days, but whatever. “Well, there might be one thing that’s been bugging me.”

  “Hm?”

  Anita was filled with rapt attention as soon as her friend announced something may be up. Unsurprising, wasn’t it? She lived for this kind of drama. She really was an English teacher!

  “She’s so convinced that I want to wear a tux that she’s focused so much of our planning on it. She’s picking out a cake topper right now, and I know she’s going to choose one that has me represented by a guy in a suit.” Sighing, Sunny continued, “It fits into her vision, you know? She wants to be the beautiful bride on the arm of a handsome person in a tux.”

  “Do you not want to do that?”

  See? Even Anita was surprised that Sunny might not want to be confined to a suit for her wedding. I really project the whole butch thing better than I thought. Which was funny, since she never personally called herself butch. Not out loud, anyway. She was simply… Sunny. A woman who liked jeans, short hair, and a no-nonsense life. That described half the women, gay or straight, in Oregon.

  “I may or may not have already bought a dress before this all came out,” Sunny muttered.

  “Huh? What was that?”

  Anita didn’t sound that way to be sarcastic. She had genuinely not heard Sunny, because Sunny didn’t want to be heard. If she told her best friend the truth, then it was like pulling back the mask to reveal the scars. Everything felt much too late now. She had her chance to speak up, and had let it pass. Sunny might as well embrace the inevitable.

  “I said I’ve bought a dress already.”

  “Whoa. Really?”

  Anita dropped the decoration in her hand. Was it really so impossible to imagine Sunny in a wedding dress? Or was this all done for comedic effect at her expense? What was so wrong with her wanting to look like a bride alongside her fiancée? Maybe she had some visions that extended beyond Waterlily House. How could something that seemed so simple to her completely rock people off their foundations?

  “It was sort of spur of the moment.” Sunny sat on one of the desks, feet in the chair as she detangled one of the colorful streamers in the orange tote. “I didn’t mean to buy a dress, really, but when I saw it on the clearance rack…”

  “Wait, so you actually went into a bridal boutique and sifted through the clearance rack?” Anita put her hands on her hips, as if she were about to scold one of her students. “Here I thought you fell in love with a dress on a mannequin in a store window. Anyway, go on.”

  The desk rocked beneath the force of Sunny’s scoff. “I was curious to see what they had! Brandy and I had recently gotten engaged, and I felt the whole wedding thing until I realized it really wasn’t for me and that she should do it. I was compelled to go into a shop in the city. Most of it wasn’t really my thing until I started sifting through the clearance rack. Suddenly a $200 dress that only needs a few alterations doesn’t seem so bad. I tried it on and…”

  “You said yes to the dress, huh?” Anita slapped her hand on Sunny’s shoulder. The desk rocked some more. “When were you going to tell me about this?”

  “I haven’t told anyone. It’s been my secret shame ever since.”

  “Brandy really doesn’t know, huh?”

  “No. I have no idea how to tell her. If I ever do.” Maybe she would donate the dress to a charity that could resell it to a woman who desperately needed it more than Sunny did. “Brandelyn’s so wrapped up in me wearing a tuxedo to match her image that…”

  Anita didn’t hesitate to cut her off mid-sentence. “You have to tell her.”

  “What?”

  Shoulders squared and face grim, Anita turned her friend toward her. “You can’t start your marriage off like this. Are you crazy? Keeping something like this from Brandy, never asserting yourself about what is most important to you… that’s how you start a marriage off with her shoe treads all over your back. It’s only going to get worse. Because as soon as you’re married, she’s going to take everything she’s ever learned about you over the years and use that as the base of your interactions. Trust me. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “Says the woman who’s never been married.”

  “I’ve been in a committed relationship way longer than you. For Bonnie and me, it was moving in together that brought it out in us. Let me tell you, having seen a lot of couples get married over the years? Doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight. Shit changes. You don’t have to change your last name or move across the country to feel it.”

  Sunny hated to admit that her best friend was right. She had left her spine somewhere beneath the floorboards of Waterlily House, and she best dig it out again before it was too late.

  She simply didn’t know where she had stowed her hammer.

  Chapter 7

  BRANDELYN

  It took one day and two rental vans to haul Brandelyn’s extended family from the airport to her house in Paradise Valley. Why they insisted on coming two weeks before the wedding, Brandy could never guess, but she knew she would never again have peace until her honeymoon.

  Two vans full of Meyers? She might as well ask for a lifetime supply of Tylenol.

  “Lizzie?” her mother, Mrs. Cathy Meyer, shouted toward the third row. Brandy’s sister looked up from her phone. Between the first and third rows, a handful of Meyers bickered about the type of trees growing alongside the highway. All Brandy knew was that they were wrong. “How are those bagels holding up? You know I don’t like my bagels soggy!”

  Lizzie didn’t try to look in the bag holding the precious bagels Cathy insisted on bringing from New York. Supposedly, there was one for every day she would be in Oregon. Only my mother would pull a stunt like that. “They’re fine, Mom!”

  With a huff, Cathy threw herself into the passenger seat and motioned for Brandelyn to pay attention to her. “If you weren’t driving, I’d tell you to go check for me.”

  “There are plenty of decent bagels around here. We can stop at the Safeway and get you some fresh ones before we get home.”

  “What the hell is ‘the Safeway’? Is that like the Pig in the Blanket they have down in the south? Because I had those so-called bagels from the Pig in the Blanket when we went down to Helena, Georgia, and they were not bagels.”

  “I think you mean Piggly-Wiggly, Mom.” What if I told her they used to have them here in Oregon? “The bagels here are fine. I have them all the time.”

  “Because you’ve grown soft in Ore-gone!”

  Brandelyn cringed at her mother’s blatant mispronunciation of the state some of them now called home. “I suggest you don’t call it that while you’re here, Mom. The locals are a bit touchy about tourists mispronouncing things.”

  “I’m no tourist! I’m your mother! Lizzie!” Cathy’s voice was so loud that she silenced her grandson screaming out license plate numbers as they went by. “Where did you say your friend went to school around here, again? Will-uh-mutt College?”

  “It’s Willamette, damnit,” Brandelyn muttered beneath her breath. Then, louder, “Could you call your husband in the other van and tell him I need to pull over up here to get some gas? They barely gave me half a tank at the rental place.”

  Cathy begrudgingly did her duty as Brandelyn came upon the Pump-And-Go. Everyone over the age of sixteen balked at the price of gas out in rural Oregon, which was compounded when Brandelyn pulled up to the pump, cut the engine, and rolled down the window.

  “Oh, dear, it really is warm in here.” Cathy fanned herself with the road map she plucked from PDX. “Maybe we should get us some ice cream while you fill up the tank.”

  The station attendant popped out of his booth, orange warning vest flickering in the sunlight. He tipped his hat to Brandy, who hung out the window to orde
r her gas.

  “Oh, no, dear,” Cathy scoffed beside her. “We don’t need full service for a rental.”

  Brandelyn handed the attendant her rewards card. “Fill it with regular, please.” She turned to her mother as soon as the attendant grabbed the pump, much to the amusement of everyone in the van. “This is Oregon, Mom. You can’t pump your own gas.”

  “Whoa,” her oldest nephew Matthew said. “It’s like New Jersey!”

  Cathy informed her grandson that Oregon was nothing like New Jersey. Whether that was a good or bad thing, Brandelyn could only guess. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said to her daughter. “It’s no wonder your gas prices are so damn high when you’re paying people to do things you can perfectly well do yourself!”

  “Do you, like…” Lizzie began in the far back row, “do they, like, touch your car whether you want them to or not?”

  “Obviously,” Brandelyn said.

  “Remind me to never move to Oregon. Or New Jersey.”

  “You guys are so particular.”

  Brandy might as well have told them all they smelled like rancid BO and couldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance if they tried. When the attendant returned five minutes later, it was to a van full of women and children arguing over who, exactly, was particular, and who, exactly, was a big ol’ dumb butt who wouldn’t last two days back in Brooklyn. Someone might have to pump her own gas.

  I’m regretting this already. It was one thing to go home for a visit and be treated to the family that never shut up. It was quite another to bring them to her new home, let alone her literal home. While it wasn’t the first time either her mother or sister visited, Brandy never had her whole family, from parents to cousins, in her house at once. At least they can amuse each other while I’m working or doing wedding stuff. Cathy would insist on visiting the clinic to give her expert opinion on décor and bedside manner. Lizzie would spend half her days in the antique shops and the library. Her cousin Monica would run around town looking for a decent Wi-Fi hotspot, not because she had to study or conduct business, but because her biggest hobby was writing a blog nobody ever visited. (Except for Brandelyn. One time. With regret.)

  Their reactions to Paradise Valley were always of overexaggerated shock. “How can this place be so tiny?” Monica croaked. “Have you ever seen so many butch haircuts in your life?” asked Lizzie. “How can you get any services in a tiny town like this?” That was the thing Cathy cared about the most. “Do you have a post office? Where the hell is a Bank of America ATM? There’s only one place to get pizza around here? You must be kidding. This place thinks it’s the Catskills but it’s really no better than Appalachia!”

  Yet their criticisms soon turned to gasps of shock and awe when they beheld Brandy’s house on Florida Street. “Such Victorian charm! Were these really built in the Victorian era?” Lizzie grabbed her sons’ hands and hauled them toward Brandelyn’s door. “I didn’t think Oregon existed back then.”

  Take a history class, sis. Seriously. Did these people overlook the state’s founding date on the flag? There were five flags on Main Street alone. “I think these houses were built in the ‘80s. Or, at least, mine was.” She had bought it from a nice elderly lesbian couple who were downsizing and moving to the central coast. They had no need for four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a country kitchen. Nor could the one forever recovering from pneumonia bother with the yard anymore. Granted, Brandelyn didn’t need that many bedrooms, either, but at least she had the excuse for “growing a family” with Sunny. Whatever that entailed.

  “Oh my God, it’s the baby!” Cathy squealed to behold Brutus, ready for his afternoon walk. A neighbor should have stopped by earlier to let him out into the backyard for a run, but by the way he wagged his tail and slapped his nails against the hardwood floors, he hadn’t walked more than five feet in five days. “Who’s Grandma’s little fluffy butt, hm? Who’s a good boy and wants a treat?’

  Cathy opened her purse and dumped a whole bag of dog treats onto the floor. Her grandsons and nephew tore up the stairs to claim their room. Brandy’s stepfather ambled in with half the luggage, sweating like it was a hundred degrees. Monica lamented that there was no air conditioning built into the house. (When somebody told her she could open a window, she balked.) Lizzie went straight into the kitchen and moaned that her sister had the wrong kind of milk. She was supposed to have almond milk, not coconut! Where was the nearest grocery store? Three bucks should do it, right?

  The next time somebody asked Brandy why her family came two weeks early for the wedding, she would point to this mess and say, “It takes them two weeks to adjust to a small town on the west coast.” Everyone fought over the TV within two seconds, and the screaming didn’t stop once they realized that Brandelyn didn’t have the fabled satellite service they heard so much about. It was Hulu and Netflix or bust.

  “How is my husband going to watch the Mets while he’s here?” Cathy scoffed as she followed her daughter into the kitchen. “Would you hate it if he installed the ESPN app and logged into his account?”

  “He can do about anything he wants that doesn’t get me charged, Mom.”

  “I should hope so. Your stepfather is going to be bored out of his mind while we women get on with this wedding business. Now, where is your dress? I wanna see it!”

  Brutus nipped at their heels and danced around the upstairs hallway. Three boys argued over who slept in the bed in their room and who was stuck on an air mattress. Brandelyn’s stepfather’s coughing started the moment he settled onto the couch and shouted that he didn’t know how to download the ESPN app onto the TV. Monica rushed into the master bedroom to ask for the Wi-Fi password. Lizzie was already in the backyard smoking a cigarette.

  Not once did anyone mention Sunny or ask where she was. It took Brandy about an hour to realize that, and by then, her family had firmly settled into petty arguments over blankets and bachelorette parties.

  Chapter 8

  SUNNY

  The most inconvenient thing about getting married at the height of tourist season wasn’t blocking out B&B reservations for that week. It was telling nice old men like Mr. Murray that, no, the house wouldn’t be available at all until well after Fourth of July.

  “You mean you don’t have anyone running the place at all while you’re gone?” The wiry man with stark white hair and a collared shirt always tucked into his jeans followed Sunny into the kitchen, where she prepped the coffee pot for the afternoon. The landscaper that came by once a month rode by the window on his lawnmower. Between him and Mr. Murray, Sunny was liable to have a stress-related heart attack.

  “The whole place is totally shut down while I’m off on my honeymoon, I’m afraid.” Sunny offered her regular guest a smile. “I don’t really have anyone to run it while I’m gone. Nobody I trust enough, anyway.” She turned that fake smile into a genuine grin. “If you book now, though, I’m sure you can get a room somewhere for the Fourth of July celebrations, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s not so much that, Miss Sunny.” He always called her that, and she always called him Mr. Murray. Seemed weird to call the kindly old retired professor anything else. The man was hard at work on both a memoir and an original novel about the Portland underground. He rented a room for a few days every month, declaring Paradise Valley the best place to get away from the metro area and “just write.” Indeed, he was usually hard at work typing on his Chromebook or writing longhand in a notebook. The stacks of books he brought from the libraries – both in Paradise Valley and from Portland – confused some of other guests, who sometimes thought they belonged to Waterlily House. When Sunny informed him that the house would be closed while she was on her honeymoon, he looked as lost as the occasional bear wandering into the yard. “It’s… I’m not sure where to go now…”

  Sunny turned away from the coffee maker. Poor Mr. Murray was so defeated that he had removed his bifocals. “Now, I know for a fact you’ve been talking about going to Astoria fo
r a bit of change.”

  “Well, yes…”

  “I truly appreciate your continued patronage, Mr. Murray.” Sunny went as far as to put a gentle hand on his arm, which made him blush and look away in that infallible politeness of his. “You know how rare it is for me to get out of town for a while. Sometimes I have somebody take over the place, but for my honeymoon, I think I’d like to not have to worry about it.” Anita would be driving by every other day to keep an eye on things, but Sunny wasn’t about to ask her to run the place in her absence. Not even with young Leigh Ann volunteering at her side. That would be awkward, anyway. Leigh Ann is one of Anita’s students. It was already weird enough that Leigh Ann knew Sunny was best friends with the high school English teacher.

  “You really do deserve a break, Miss Sunny.”

  “Gonna be Mrs. Sunny soon!”

  “Indeed! And a doctor!” Mr. Murray’s chuckles meant he was about to put his bifocals back on his face. “Well, I’ll figure something out for my Fourth of July excursion. Like you said, I’ve been meaning to give Astoria another chance. I only worry it might be crazy over the Fourth of July, too. Sometimes these small towns take it more seriously than anyone in the city.”

  Sunny was about to suggest a town on the coast when she was summoned by the phone ringing next to the fridge. Mr. Murray excused himself from the kitchen. Sunny bypassed the sign asking guests to please not answer the phone if she was around. Likewise, local calls were free, but long distance required a small fee. Since service was still spotty out there for some cell phone types, it remained a pertinent reminder to keep an eye on the landline.

  Especially if it were ringing!

  “Hello, you have reached Waterlily House. This is Sunny speaking.” Sunny was alone by the time she answered. Good. Mr. Murray might be a bit miffed to know what happened next.

  “Yes, hello, Sunny, is it?” The woman on the other end was as no-nonsense as the wedding planner. “This is Dahlia Granger from Hibiscus Films. I believe I emailed you the other day? I hadn’t heard a response, so I’m calling to follow up.”