Borrow-A-Bridesmaid (26 page)

I pull his hand away. “Sam!”

“Eh?”

“The text was from Blaine.”

“Wait, who?”

My explanation warrants his aviators coming off completely. He tucks them into his shirt. I give him a quick BVH recap, and he nods knowingly. “Charlie hates that guy.”

“It was one thing when I thought she cheated in the past, but this is—this is— What do we do? I want to tell him, but I can only see that going badly.”

“Maybe we can get him to look at her phone.”

“If—
if
the text is still there. I dunno. I'm a total disaster.” And then I tell him everything, about Susan hiring me, about falling for Charlie, all of it. It comes out in a rush, and a few tears come with it. Kind of like how you cry when you throw up: Everything gets forced out. Or like birth. Birth! Oh God! They're having a kid together, and she's cheating on him!

I start hyperventilating. My hands are balled into fists. I feel so hopeless to fix this situation, to fix my own life, any of it.

Sam plants a soft kiss just to the left of my lips. “Piper,” he says. “Earth to Piper. Shhh. It's going to be okay. We'll figure this out.”

“Guys?” Charlie's head pops around the edge of the arbor. He takes in the ivy-framed scene: my back against the wall, Sam leaning toward me with one arm propped on the latticework above my head. “You're missing dessert. What's going on?” Charlie looks a little pale, and I take a quick vacation from my freak-out to wonder—is he jealous?

But it doesn't matter if he's jealous. The one he really should be jealous of is Mr. Soybean Eater, who's low enough to cheat with Charlie's pregnant fiancée. Or does Blaine even know Holly is knocked up? Is it all a WEB OF LIES? My breathing goes funny again.

“Nothing's going on, buddy.” Sam steps away from me. “Just educating Piper here about acid jazz. She'd never heard of the rare groove movement—crazeballs, right? Hey, do they have lava cake?” We all return to the table. Winding our way back through the restaurant, Sam casts me a look that says,
Hold steady. We don't make our move just yet.

Somehow I eat dessert. It's tiramisu, but I don't taste it, which may be an even bigger tragedy than deception and unplanned pregnancies. When it's over, everyone meanders into the parking lot toward their cars, drunk on carbs. A handful of glittering stars shine overhead: a perfect night in form, if not in substance.

Alex reaches over and squeezes my hand. I nod. This is it. Charlie deserves to know. I grab Sam, who's walking on the other side of Alex, surreptitiously trying to take her hand. “Focus!” I nod toward where Holly and Charlie are walking in front of us. “It's now or never. I need a diversion.”

He gives a military nod, puts his aviators back on, and runs full-tilt at them, screaming, “Red rover, red rover, send ME right over!”

Holly careens out of the way. Sam pursues her, wrapping his arms around her waist and hoisting her over his shoulder, carrying her toward a nearby imitation-Tuscan shrubbery and shouting, “Last chance for a piece of the S-Man!” Tiny Grandmother makes after them with her walker, outraged.

Charlie has stopped to watch the spectacle, so I'm only a few steps behind. I catch the sleeve of his dress shirt. Even before I'm in touching range, I can smell him, some kind of piney soap and the ineffable smell that is just
pure man
. I can't make out his expression in the semi-darkness, but his face looks muted, as if this experience is already sucking the soul right out of him.

I pull him between two parked cars. His reflection bends across the surface of a BMW window. “We need to talk.”

He glances at Holly. Seeing that she's out of commission, he turns back to me, studying my face. “What's going on? Are you okay?” Several dozen yards ahead of us, Holly's grandmother is hurling her shoe at Sam.

I take a deep breath, trying to get grounded in the present moment.
Don't eff this up like you do everything else, Brody. It's go time.

“Listen. I totally and completely respect your decision about this wedding. Even as my heart rages against it, I care about you more for being so noble. I'm crazy about you, Charlie. But you already know that, don't you?”

His eyes widen slightly, and his hand comes up to brush against my cheek, almost of its own volition. Just as abruptly, he drops his hand and closes his eyes, his weary sigh bouncing off the surrounding cars. “Piper, remember what I said about not making this harder than it already is?” He shakes his head slightly as if to clear whatever thoughts are percolating in there. “We should get back.”

“Wait. You probably won't believe me, and this is going to sound crazy, but I think—” I hesitate, not wanting to say the horrible words. But Tiny Grandmother has fetched Sam from the bush. Holly has wrangled herself free and is smoothing her hair and giving Sam the Look of Doom.

“I think Holly's cheating on you. With the veg—with Blaine. I mean, I know about before, the pond and all that, but this is new. Check her phone, okay? Ask her where she was this afternoon.”

Both Charlie and window-reflection Charlie are shaking their heads and frowning at me. They back toward the BMW's tailpipe. “Don't do this now.”

“Charlie, I saw the message on her phone. Alex did, too.”

He rests both hands on the top of his head, then pulls them over his face and shoves them in his pockets. “Jesus, Piper. This is really low of you. Just because you can't commit to anything in your own life doesn't mean I can't. You can hardly finish a short story.”

My heart is a gong, and he's taken a mallet to it. The pain of his words reverberates through me, but instead of crumpling, I reach for my verbal lassi. “Wow. Really? That's what you have to say to me? This whole time I've been looking out for you, trying to help you. Do you have the slightest idea what it's been like for me to be part of this wedding? Serving up my dignity like a blasted fig tart?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it.

I shrug. “It's your grave.” With that, I march away from him toward Alex's Miata, where Alex and Sam are loitering.

Sam has his phone out. “I seem to have lost my phone number,” he muses to Alex. “Can I have yours?” When he sees me approaching, he frowns. “Uh-oh. What did he say?”

I can hardly speak, and I've started shaking from anger.

“What the hell did he say to you?” Sam says.

“They deserve each other,” I tell him. To Alex, I say, “Get me out of here.”

Charlie's words rattle
around in my brain, still gonging my heart as I sit cross-legged and motionless on my bed hours later.
You can't commit to anything . . .

He was rude, but he has a point. The
City Paper
article, which is due in under a week, remains parsed into half-assed drafts. What I started with such gusto now lies literally in pieces around my room. Cheer Bear holds one of them on his lap.

What's the point in going to the wedding tomorrow? Maybe I should just leave them without a bridesmaid. Lena would probably kick Charlie's cousin off as a groomsman to balance the pictures. I imagine Josh being hurled out the church's front doors.

I stare out the window for a long time, watching cars fly down the Beltway. Frustration churns in me like a spinning wheel split into dartboard-like pie pieces: Sal, Billy, Holly, Lena, Kalil, Charlie. Sal, Billy, Holly, Lena, Kalil, Charlie. All of the humiliating, degrading experiences I've had since graduation keep spinning, gathering centrifugal force as they go. A rhythm whirs out from the spinning:
You're . . . not . . . worth . . . anything
. A shadow feeling that crept in all my inner nooks and crannies throughout college, but was papered over by As on projects and poetry awards, is abruptly revealed for the naked self-loathing it is.

I stand and pick up the handwritten loose-leaf pages. My eyes land on snippets of text, which now seem amateur and ridiculous.

For four years in college, I pored over texts. Milton, Whitman, Austen. I analyzed themes and motifs, learned snazzy words like “postmodernism,” “anachronism,” and other various and sundry “-isms,” and learned to write a twenty-page paper on a concept that probably could have been summed up in a couple paragraphs (Book Antiqua is a bangin' font—it
'll extend your paper at least two pages). After four years, I found myself, somewhat disoriented, sitting on the edge of my old bed in my parents' basement, eating Lucky Charms out of a mug because there were no clean bowls, wondering what the *&^% all that jaw yapping was about. (Not that there's anything unsatisfactory about a giant mug of Lucky Charms.) Had eighty thousand dollars really just gone down the drain so I could say things like “I think the motif here reveals the subtext of our protagonist's journey into liminal space”?

So if Professor Quillen were to lean on the edge of his desk and ask me what the theme is of my recent work, I'd say that
's a trick question. Life is disjointed, it's messy, and it never seems to fit into the neatly packaged stories I spent so many years studying. That's why we need stories—we'd like to think we have an arc, one that strides beautifully skyward like a kite, etches “happily ever after” into the clouds. My involvement in weddings gave me the same satisfaction I'd always gotten from stories. I wasn't there when the couple had their first fight about who washed the blue monogrammed towels in with the whites. I just saw them off on their skyward arc.

My recent job experiences have got me looking skyward. I don't know if there's a happily ever after for me, but there's a happily ever now, a present moment I'm just beginning to tune in to.

If I were to make a pithy poster out of my experiences, it might go something like this: Everything I learned in life I learned from being a bridesmaid.

1)
It's important to have some good skills, but what's most important is showing up.

2) Walk with purpose. Stand up straight. Boobs out!

3) ??? Something about there being a bridezilla in most life situations—work especially . . .

The spinning frustration creates a tornado inside me, a wind tunnel of destruction. I snatch pages out of Cheer Bear's lap, out from under mismatched pairs of socks, out of drawers they've been half closed into. One page rips right down the middle. I crumple them up one by one, push open the lip of the window, and hurl them toward the Beltway. They rain down across the weedy green strip behind the apartment building. Some are carried by a summer breeze almost to the highway, snared by the fence between the apartment complex lawn and the road. It looks like the antithesis of the Prayer Wall, like a place where prayers go to die. I slam the window closed, then press my back against the wall with my hands over my face.

A small voice inside reminds me that Charlie isn't the only guy I'm ever going to care about. But right now I care about him in a way that makes my heart feel three sizes too big. I care about him, and I have to sit back and watch him stand in front of a church filled with Lena's socialite friends and promise his life away to someone who doesn't love him. At least not in a way that allows him to follow his dreams.

That's what makes me the saddest. Charlie, with his big heart and shiny screenwriting dreams, deserves someone who's going to care for him, who's going to cheer for him with Lin-like enthusiasm.

The only talent I've unearthed from the whole bridesmaid job disaster is that I'm halfway decent at caring for people. Comforting Alex during her breakup and feeding her pretzels. Holding Stacey's hand when she thought her mom wasn't going to show up to her Hindu wedding. Even moments as small as passing Susan a handkerchief—these experiences made the zombie-bride-apocalypse disasters fade into the background. And they made this job so much more meaningful than any of my “official” ones.

But I've failed at caring for Charlie. I have to let him go. That makes me want to give up on everything. To go with my tail between my legs back to the airport and start over. Watching him walk down the aisle will feel like the culmination of watching all those 747s take off without me.

And it's not just Charlie. The thing is, Holly's hurting, too. I saw in those brief glimpses of her—her vulnerable look at the shower, the little girl in the campaign video—that she's not happy. Their marriage will drive them deeper into their destructive relationship cycle. Holly will seek love and validation at Charlie's expense, from him and possibly other men, never to be satiated. She'll keep trying to store love and validation in a leaky tank—a tank that leaks because Lena took a sledgehammer to it in Holly's childhood. Charlie will keep giving and giving and never fill his own tank. Neither one of them will have the chance to heal.