I rubbed my forehead. She meant yes, we’re sure we love the dress. No, I was fighting with my mom about something else.
“Amy, don’t you say a word,” I said as I came out of the dressing room.
She gave me a wounded look and my mother looked up in shock. “I didn’t—”
“I’m going home. I worked all day. I’ll talk to you both later.” I stopped at the front of the store, where the saleswoman was behind the desk. “Can I call to order when I get the go-ahead from my brother’s fiancée?” She told me that was fine, and I left without a backward glance.
“What’s her problem?” I heard my mother asking Amy before the door shut behind me.
I felt my phone vibrate with a text message as I slid behind the wheel of my car. “Amy, I swear to God,” I said out loud.
But it wasn’t Amy; it was Alex. Whatcha up to?
We had been texting fairly steadily since our lunch. It didn’t have the all-day, everyday urgency of a budding relationship—more like the comfortable give-and-take of a friend with whom you never quite ended the conversation. I couldn’t remember if I had told him I was going dress shopping tonight or not.
Attempting matricide. You?
As your lawyer, I’m going to have to advise you to refrain from texting me details of that if I’m to defend you in court.
No juror would side against me. They might even give me a medal.
In that case, let me know if you need help getting rid of the body. If I learned anything from Breaking Bad, it was to not dissolve a body in a bathtub.
I chuckled. Good to know.
The three dots appeared, then disappeared, and then reappeared. You wanna grab a drink?
There was no hesitation. I would love to grab a drink. Someplace with food preferably. I’m starving.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sharon called me the night before I was due to go bridesmaid dress shopping with her, her sister, her future sister-in-law, and her mother.
“We still on for tomorrow?” I asked. I was on my sofa, painting my nails—manicures were another casualty in the bridesmaid budget. And I still remembered Mrs. Meyer’s horrified reaction to my chewed-up nails in college. If I used part of a cotton ball on a cuticle stick in acetone, I could probably clean them up enough to meet her standards—or at least to fly under her radar.
“Yeah, but . . .” she trailed off.
“But what?”
“I kind of need you to do me a favor.”
“No problem. What’s up?”
She paused. “I don’t want you to wear black at my wedding.”
“That’s fine. I’m wearing purple, pink, and Big Bird–yellow for three of the others. Whatever you want me to wear will be great.”
Another pause. “No—I mean—can you tell my mom you don’t want to wear black?”
This time I hesitated. “Why can’t you tell her that?”
Sharon sighed. “I did, but she just has this idea in her head of what it should look like, and she can’t hear me. So will you do it?”
I groaned internally. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was pick a fight with Sharon’s mom. But the only reason Sharon was having this wedding was her mother. If she needed a champion to make sure some part of it was hers, I supposed that responsibility fell to me. Her sister, the maid of honor, certainly wasn’t going to do it. I had never gotten a solid read on Bethany. Was she actually her mother’s little clone, agreeing with her every whim? Or was she doing what Sharon did and complying to survive? Or had it started as the latter and simply become the former? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask someone about her sister and overbearing mother.
“Please?” she asked, when I hadn’t responded.
“Okay. Is there any particular color you do want? If I’m going to die on the cross here, I want to make sure it’s not in vain.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want it to look like a funeral. Other than that, I don’t really care.”
“What if she wants to downgrade to navy?”
“Navy? I feel like that’s just as bad.”
“So something light?”
“Well not white, obviously. But something—I don’t know—happy?”
I wondered briefly if I could convince her to pick one of the three dresses I already had. Now that would be a victory, I thought. Then I shook my head to remove the disloyal thought. Sharon deserved her own dream wedding. Not her mother’s, and certainly not my half-assed attempts to be able to afford a proper manicure again.
I grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge and poured myself a glass after hanging up the phone. Then I looked down at my stomach. Becca walked in as I was attempting to pour the wine back into the bottle.
“Um . . . what?” she asked.
I looked up guiltily. “Do we have a funnel?”
“Why would we have a funnel?” I gestured toward the mess I was making with the wine. “You could just—I don’t know—drink it?”
“I need my wits about me for tomorrow morning. And wine has calories.” I looked at her. “Why are you so dressed up?”
She shot me a huge grin. “I have a date tonight.”
“With who?”
“Will.”
“Should I know who that is?”
Becca rolled her eyes. “You know, Will Will.”
“From work?”
“The one and only.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed. Becca had had a crush on him for forever, which she had all but given up on because he never seemed to show any reciprocal interest. “How’d you swing that one?”
“I have no idea,” she said giddily. “We were just talking this afternoon, and he looked at me and asked if I wanted to have dinner with him tonight.”
A little voice in my head wondered if she had misunderstood and it was more like a grabbing-drinks-with-Alex kind of thing, but I told it to shut up. If anyone was due for a little happiness, it was Becca, who hadn’t been on a date in the two years we had been living together and probably a while before that. She had been living with her last boyfriend until she caught him cheating on her. She hadn’t quite recovered from that one yet.
“Where’s he taking you?”
“Some new Asian fusion restaurant in Georgetown.”
With a smile, I held out what was left in the wineglass. “Do you need this?”
She laughed. “Yes, please.”
I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door before I went to bed and pulled up the stomach of my pajamas. I hated that my mom was getting to me, but between her, Caryn’s bridesmaids, and the sense I had that Sharon’s mom wanted to put me in black because it was slimming, well—I wasn’t feeling my best. Plus, not that I wanted to date Alex by any stretch of the imagination, but he had been a little too eager to jump into the friend zone.
I went back into the kitchen and threw away the bread, the cookies, and the bag of M&Ms that I had stashed on top of the refrigerator. If I waited until morning, I wouldn’t have the willpower.
Baby steps, I told myself as I climbed into bed. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand to set my alarm early enough to make sure I didn’t arrive with Helena Bonham Carter hair and saw I had a text from Alex.
Good luck tomorrow.
Thanks. Do you have anything fun going on this weekend?
Not really. Having brunch with Tim and Megan tomorrow.
Ouch. I hadn’t been invited to that. I wondered if that was deliberate on Megan’s part. Then again, she knew I was going bridesmaid dress shopping with Sharon, so she probably assumed I couldn’t come anyway. I hadn’t had time to do anything other than wedding stuff in forever.
Much more fun than I’ll be having. The bride wants me to tell her mother that she doesn’t want us to wear black.
Why doesn’t she tell her mother that?
I lay back against my pillows and texted out the short version of the story.
Remember not to dissolve the body in the bathtub.
I sent a laughing emoji. You seem kinda fixated on this dissolving bodies thing. Should I be worried?
Nah, I’m more like Dexter. I have a code for my kills.
If the FBI is watching your Netflix account, you may be in trouble.
He sent back the emoji with a finger to its lips and I shook my head, feeling better. I’m going to sleep. Gotta be well rested to battle the dragon tomorrow.
You’ve got this, he replied.
I was smiling when I put down the phone.