On the Rocks (2 page)

My phone beeped rapidly three more times in succession, but I refused to get down off the pedestal. I loved my friends, but didn’t they know that wedding dress shopping requires complete concentration and that I shouldn’t be disturbed?

“Oh. My. God,” Grace said as she stared at me, still clothespinned into the size 22 dress, enjoying, unbeknownst to me, the last few moments of happiness I would have for a very long time. “Oh my God,” she said again. The color had suddenly drained from her face, and it had nothing to do with the fact that prison waiting rooms had better lighting than this dressing room, or that she had rapidly consumed three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach.

“What?” I asked, finally able to tear myself away from my own reflection in the three-way mirror. I was beginning to feel a bit vain staring at myself for as long as I had, but I couldn’t help it. I looked freakin’ amazing in this thing.

“This can’t be right,” she said as she shook her head. “This can’t possibly be right. I’m . . . confused.”

“What?” I said again as I felt goose bumps rise all over my back and my arms. It was as if my subconscious was ready to admit there was a problem before my brain was, because my brain was too busy admiring the duchess silk satin I was swathed in.

“Check your phone,” she said as she snatched it off the floor and handed it to me. I scrolled through my text messages, realizing that I had three from friends and one from my little sister.

What the hell happened?

Are you okay?

Hang in there, Abby!

Hey sis, call me! I need to talk to you!

“Why is everyone telling me to hang in there and asking me if I’m okay?” I asked, confused. “What’s this about?”

“Someone is clearly just messing with him,” Grace said, forcing a smile so grotesquely insincere I worried for a second that her body had been invaded by a pod person.

“I sound like an echo, Grace. I repeat, What is going on? Answer me,” I demanded, my nerves finally detectable in my voice. “What the hell are they talking about? Why wouldn’t I be okay? I’m wearing Vera Wang. It’s impossible to not be okay in Vera Wang. It’s every girl’s happy place, a veritable bridal Shangri-la.”

Grace stuttered, and sputtered, and coughed, trying desperately to delay saying what she had no choice but to say. “Abby, look at Ben’s Facebook page,” she finally managed to squeak out as she tentatively handed me her iPad, the Facebook application already uploaded. “And here,” she said as she also handed me her champagne flute. “Drink this.”

For a second, I didn’t see it. I saw the usual pictures of him with his buddies, and wall posts from his friends, and stupid information about the Patriots and the Red Sox, but I didn’t see it.

Until I did. Then I realized there were a lot of things I apparently didn’t see.

Then everything faded to black.

Chapter 2

I Thought He Was the Love of My Life . . . and He Thought I Was a Sock

A
FTER
I
SAW
Ben’s Facebook post changing his status to single and telling everyone he had ever met in his life (except me) that we were over, I did what any red-blooded American girl who had been trying on wedding dresses for impending nuptials would have done: I went directly to his apartment and tried to break down his door with my fists. When that didn’t work, I walked halfway down the hallway, took off in a full sprint, and charged the door with my shoulder like they do on TV cop shows, but since I’m only five-two and weighed 110 pounds at the time, all I managed to do was bruise my shoulder so badly I couldn’t raise my arm above my head for six weeks. I probably could’ve tried ringing the doorbell like a normal person, which would have alerted me to the fact that he wasn’t home, but adrenaline and shock will make a girl do really stupid things.

I sat in the hallway outside his door for over three hours, calling him again and again and again until the battery on my phone died, with no answer. I had no clue what was going on, but I refused to admit that I had missed warning signs that Ben was about to freak out and tell me he didn’t want to get married by changing his Facebook status. Nobody is that stupid. Sure, there was his disinterest in all the wedding details, and the fact that I had to change the date multiple times because the timing wasn’t good for him. And sure, he was working really late every night, and we hadn’t hooked up in over a month, and then there was that random apartment rental site in Tucson I saw on his laptop that he swore was for a friend. But really, that’s not sufficient evidence to prove that your fiancé’s about to bolt. I mean, it’s not like he put it in skywriting or posted it on Facebook or anything.

Fine. I actually am that stupid.

I heard footsteps and knew it was him. We had been together so long I could recognize the rhythm of his walk, so I didn’t even bother to look up. “Oh, Abby,” he said when he reached the top of the stairs and saw me sitting on the floor with my head buried in my hands. “How long have you been here?” he asked, like he was oh so very sorry for the huge inconvenience of making me wait in the hallway.

“I don’t know. Since I saw you break up with me on Facebook while I was wearing a wedding dress. It seems that time sort of stands still after that.”

“Come inside, we need to talk,” he said as he extended his hand to help me up. I glared at him before smacking it away and climbing up off the floor on my own, busted shoulder and all. If he didn’t want to give me his hand in marriage, I didn’t want his hand at all—unless it was to shove up his own ass.

“You think we need to talk? Oh, I don’t know, Ben, maybe we could just start talking solely via Facebook posts since that seems to be your preferred method of communication these days. Actually talking to your fiancée must have gone out of style. Did Michael Kors announce that on
Project Runway
or something?” I wiped tears from my cheeks and tried to find the Ben I loved in the one I was looking at. He opened the door, and I followed him inside.

“I don’t even know what to say to you,” he said, his back turned toward me as he stared out the window. I had been in denial the entire time I was sitting on the floor in the hallway. It had been nice while it lasted.

“So it wasn’t some sick bachelor party–type joke?” I asked, my voice shaking so badly it actually cracked like a prepubescent boy’s.

“No,” he answered flatly.

“You actually wrote that.”

“Yes.”

This isn’t happening. I won’t allow it.

“What’s the problem, Ben? What in God’s name made you spaz out like that?” I felt like if I just kept talking I wouldn’t have to deal with listening to him speak. “Are you nervous? Because that’s totally normal, I forgive you, but you can’t just go around writing things like that on Facebook without thinking them through. Your little freak-out has gone viral. I’m getting condolence posts from people I haven’t seen in ten years. How am I supposed to fix this?”

“Abby, it wasn’t a freak-out. You can’t fix this, there’s nothing to fix. I don’t know how to tell you this, but I can’t get married,” he whispered, as if it pained him to say the words, although apparently not to type them.

“Yes, you can. And you will. See this?” I held up my left hand and wiggled my ring finger, the emerald cut stone I had fished out of a chocolate dessert only a few months before, a clear indication to sane people the world over that a wedding was going to happen. “This is the ring you gave me when you asked me to marry you. And when you ask someone to marry you, you don’t get to change your mind. This is not like ordering delivery and deciding that you’d rather have pizza than Chinese. This is not up for debate. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but we are getting married. End of discussion.”

“I know this is hard for you to understand,” he said as he stared at the floor. “I hate myself for doing this. I do.”

Nope. Still not letting this happen.

“No, calculus is hard for me to understand. Quantum physics is hard for me to understand. The Kardashians’ fame is hard for me to understand. This isn’t hard to understand. This is insane. I mean, where is this even coming from? Did you wake up this morning and think, ‘Gee, I’m going to have a bagel for breakfast, and then I’m going to break up with my fiancée?’ What planet are you living on?” I was hysterical, and still I thought that if I just kept talking I’d somehow be able to talk him out of it. Not exactly the way I imagined my marriage beginning.

He stared at me, or rather, through me, like I was some kind of apparition and not actually there. “Is there somebody else?” I asked. My breath caught in my chest, figuring that the only way he’d ever leave me was if he had someone else to run to. He didn’t even know how to do his own laundry.

“No, I swear to God there’s not,” he said.

“You’re not even leaving me for another woman? You’re just leaving?” I shrieked so loudly I was pretty sure people on the street outside could hear me.

“I’d have thought that’d be a good thing,” he replied, a bit stunned by my reaction.

“Think again.” I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t either. But it wasn’t.

“Thinking is all I’ve been doing, Abby. It’s all I’ve thought about since the day after I proposed. I don’t think I’m ready to get married; there’s still too much I want to do with my life. I want to travel. I want to experience life outside of the Northeast. I don’t want my Sundays to fucking revolve around Tom Brady.”

“Then don’t watch the Patriots! What does that have to do with me? Are you listening to yourself?” He didn’t flinch. He might have been in the acceptance phase of this process, but I was very much still entrenched in denial, and I was planning on setting up camp there. “Okay, this is completely fixable. This is good, because I can travel. I’ll go anywhere you want! I can get a passport. I like hotels. I know how to say hello in, like, three different languages! We’re going to Hawaii on our honeymoon; I have no problem with traveling. Aloha.” I knew I sounded desperate, and I didn’t like it. The problem was, I disliked having my fiancé leave me for reasons that so far made no sense to me whatsoever even more.

He sat down on his large leather man-couch, rubbing his face like he was trying to rip his own skin off. I figured if he was unsuccessful I could just do it for him. My nails were longer.

“I got a great job offer,” he whispered.

“Okay,” I said calmly, trying to soothe what clearly was just a really grotesque case of nerves. “That’s not a problem, I want you to work. I didn’t think that was something I had to tell you. We need the money, and hey, I fully support men in the workforce.”

“No, Abby, you’re not listening to me. I got a great job offer. In Arizona.”

“I’m sorry, what?” This didn’t help disprove his point that I wasn’t listening.

“I’m taking it.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I replied. That didn’t help either.

“It’s a great opportunity, and I need to do this, for me. It will get me out of this rut. I want to live somewhere else, meet new people, experience new things.”

“Like, the desert. You don’t want to get married because you want to experience the desert.” When he’d said he wanted to travel, I assumed he meant somewhere exotic like Bora Bora, or Laos. Not Arizona.
This isn’t happening. Not to me.

“I know you don’t understand. I’m not even sure that I understand. I just know that everything inside me is telling me I need to do this.”

“Oh, thank God. Now I get it.”

“You do?”

“Yes, so you’re hearing voices?” I was grasping at straws. Thin, weak, little straws of hope that I could somehow stop this catastrophe from occurring.

“Abby . . . stop.”

I didn’t recognize this person. It wasn’t the Ben I had known and loved for all of these years. It wasn’t the Ben I was ready to commit my life to. It was the Ben whose head I wanted to bash in with the large ceramic coffee mug sitting on the kitchen counter.

“I’m pretty sure people get married in Arizona. I’ll wear sunblock and turquoise earrings. I’ll exchange my satin pumps for cowboy boots. I’m willing to work with you on this. I don’t think that’s reason to call off the wedding.” I had crossed over the border of pathetic and was now so firmly entrenched in crazy town I could’ve planted a flag.

“Abby, listen to me,” he said as he grabbed my hands and pulled me down on the couch next to him. “I need to do this alone. You coming to Arizona with me isn’t the solution to our problems. I don’t want to uproot you and move you away from your friends and your family. You deserve better than me.”

“I’ll decide what I do and do not deserve. You don’t get to make those decisions without consulting me first. We’ve been together for ten years, Ben. Ten fucking years. And what problems are you referring to? I wasn’t aware we had any problems. Until an hour ago, the only problems I had were trying to pick out a wedding dress, trying to keep Grace from getting smashed before noon, and trying to keep my mother from liposucking herself into oblivion.”

“I know you don’t want to hear this, Abby, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Something isn’t right with us, and then this opportunity out west came up, and I think it’s a sign that we’re not meant to be together. I’m too young. I’m not ready.”

“You’re not ready? Do you think maybe you could’ve figured that out before you went and bought me a diamond ring? What did you think was going to happen after that, Ben? Usually, a wedding follows an engagement. I thought this was a concept you were familiar with.”

“I know. I think I just resigned myself to thinking that we had been together for so long, it was time. But it’s not. It’s not time for me. I feel like I can’t breathe.”

“Try loosening your belt. Better yet, take it off so I can strangle you with it.” I lunged at him, but he grabbed my hands and clasped them tightly against his chest.

“Abby, I hate hurting you like this, but I don’t want to be divorced in a year either. I don’t think we’re right together, and as much as I don’t want to, it’s better to admit we made a mistake sooner rather than later.”