Then I tried to exhale.
“I feel better now at least,” I said, pausing on the sidewalk and staring at the blue sky. “And I don’t have to worry about my internal organs liquefying from being compressed so tightly. So there’s that.”
Boone shouldered up beside me and looked at the sky with me. “There’s that.”
The people passing us on the sidewalk kept looking up as they passed by, trying to figure out what had enraptured the two of us. Unless they were as moved by the hue of the sky or the wispy clouds as I was, they would wind up disappointed.
After Boone had whisked me away from the disaster known as breakfast, take two, he’d “borrowed” one of my dad’s cars and driven me to the bridal shop. Our faces had been smashed against the glass door ten minutes before they opened, and Boone had rapped on it when they were thirty seconds late opening.
A half hour and a few hundred sighs later, the seamstress had me free of The Thing. It probably would have taken a couple more hours if I hadn’t accidently ripped the back open a good foot and a half. Once she’d unstitched me from the rest of it, she held the pieces of the dress like it was a dead animal and asked me what I wanted to do with it. I told her I’d let her know tomorrow, because today I didn’t trust myself to answer with anything short of torch it.
“Should we head back to join the festivities now that we’ve freed you of The Thing’s evil clutches?” Boone asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets while staring at the sky with me.
I stared up for one more moment before lowering my gaze. Everything around me was blurry with a blinding white haze. I tried blinking my vision clear. “Definitely not.” I plucked at the skirt of my dress, wanting to twirl I felt so free. “I think Charlotte would appreciate a day free from me.”
“I don’t care what Charlotte would appreciate,” Boone said.
“Well, I do,” I replied, wandering down the sidewalk with no real destination in mind. “I’m not trying to make a mess of everything related to her wedding . . . but that doesn’t change that I am, so I think I’ll give us both a day off.”
Boone wandered up beside me, matching my unhurried pace. “She was messing with Ford behind your back. She deserves whatever kind of wedding-week disasters you can toss her way. Intentional or not.”
I waved at the drug-store owner sweeping the front stoop as we passed by. He waved back, greeting me by name.
“Charlotte didn’t do what she did to hurt me. She didn’t even do it to spite me.”
Boone huffed his disagreement.
“Charlotte had been head over heels for Ford since long before he and I got together. I’d known it too.” I studied the sidewalk as I continued, feeling like pieces long forgotten or repressed memories were coming back to me. “I didn’t think much about it with her being so much younger than Ford—and that was such a big thing when we were kids—but I knew how much she liked him. I only had to listen to her go on and on about him every night from the time she was ten to the summer she turned fifteen and Ford and I . . . well, you know.”
Boone nodded once, staring at the sidewalk. “I know.”
“She’d liked him for years before I even considered liking him, and I didn’t acknowledge that when Ford and I started dating. It was almost like I shrugged her feelings off as a girlhood crush. It was clearly more than that.”
Boone rolled his head to the side, cracking his neck, but he stayed silent.
“Charlotte couldn’t help who she loved any more than the rest of us. I guess I just chose not to see that until this morning when I watched her scrubbing at Ford’s stained pants like a mad woman.”
Boone’s head turned in my direction. “Nothing like a woman waxing at a guy’s crotch to define the concept of love.”
I lifted my eyes. “That’s not how I meant it. I just meant . . . she loves him.”
“Agreeing to disagree with you on that, Clara.”
Boone and I slid to the side when a mom who had three more kids than she had hands for came stomping past us. It wasn’t quite ten o’clock and she already looked ready for bed.
“Sometimes the people we’re supposed to love are the hardest ones to. And sometimes the people we’re not supposed to love are the easiest.” I shrugged and continued through the crosswalk at the end of the block. “That’s something I figured out years ago. I just didn’t think Charlotte had figured that out too.”
Boone came to a stop, reaching for my arm. His face was a mask of confusion. “Was that just you paying your sister a sort of compliment?” His voice matched his expression. “Did you suggest that Charlotte might not be the root of all evil?”
I answered him with a shrug.
“And now I’ve seen and heard everything.” He smirked at me before continuing down the sidewalk.