Page 22 of Sister of the Bride

Pippin

I weep for your patients

Toby

I’m still on peds rotation. I’ve finally found my audience!

It’s a quiet Monday morning in the Boston Public Garden, but my mind is loud. I’ve come here to find a bench where I can sit and start chipping away at the Marino-Bryan wedding plans. I figured the rustling leaves, rippling water, and passing duck tours would provide me with the perfect amount of white noise to help me concentrate, but instead all I can do is panic. Panic that my sister is actually doing this, and panic that I won’t be able to pull it off. Which is an odd, warring mixture of emotions, to be sure.

I pull out my phone and click on the app I downloaded as soon as I got home from the Bryan family brunch. I-To-Do is the highest-rated wedding planning app on the internet, which is why I chose it even though it set me back a whopping $19.99. I’m going to need all the help I can get if I’m going to put together the perfect wedding for my sister and my sister’s deeply uptight fiancée in just four months.

The app loads, and I type in the date Polly mentioned: October fourteenth. I half expect the app to laugh at me. Instead I get a pop-up box that informs me that I’ll be working through the “accelerated” checklist. I sigh. As much as I’m dreading this wedding, I do love a good checklist, accelerated or otherwise. And when the checklist appears, I feel a surge of serotonin when I see that the first item—select a date—is already checked. I fall in love with the app immediately for serving me up that reward.

I scan the list of tasks ahead of me, scrolling and scrolling and—my god—stillscrolling, my jaw dropping at the lengthy list. It seriously never ends. Good lord, how are we going to do all this? Flowers, officiant, music, dresses and shoes, vows, a cake, special utensils to ceremonially cut the cake, invitations, place cards and menus, a photographer and videographer and something called a soundscape? Guest travel plans and hotel room blocks and calligraphy and monogrammed robes and…custom dress hangers??

I take a hard right turn from hoping this wedding doesn’t happen to wondering if I can convince Polly and Mackenzie to pop down to Boston City Hall this weekend and tie this thing up for fifty dollars. (Yes, as soon as I saw a check box for custom ring bearer attire for dogs, I clicked out of the app and googled elopements.) I can see now why wedding planners make so much money. This is going to be another part-time job. At least.

Of course, Polly asked me tohelp, not run the whole show. But I can already feel high school group project Pippin rearing her ugly head. I’ve always been the queen ofjust let me do it, okay?And I have a feeling that I’m going to have to work very hard to remind myself that this isPolly’swedding and that I’m not a paid professional wedding planner and that maybe, just maybe, I should relinquish some control.

I add that to the checklist in the app.

Within minutes, my planning brain takes over and starts to break down the to-do list into smaller bites, eliminating things we don’t need—transportation between venues, for instance, since both the wedding and the reception will be at the Bryan family home. There are no dogs, so custom dog attire will not be needed, and Frantz begged to curate a playlist instead of hiring a DJ, so that’s done.

I’m deep in thought about the actual necessity of a wedding website when a flash of light blue catches my eye. I only have a moment to wonder what it is before a whole person hops over the bench from the back and thuds down beside me. I bite back a scream as I realize it isn’t some random park psycho but my wide-smiling, floppy-haired best friend in light blue scrubs and a pair of hideously neon sneakers.

“Toby, Jesus Christ, are you trying to give me a full fucking heart attack?” I huff the words out, my heart pounding in my throat. It feels like maybe it’s not hyperbole. Am I going to have to test Toby’s medical skills right now?

“Sorry.” He cracks open a plastic clamshell containing a salad and starts eating it like he’s worried a pigeon is about to swoop in and steal it. “You look stressed.”

“Maybe it’s because a full-grown man snuck up on me in a public park.”

“Nah, it’s something else.” He reaches up and points at the spot between my brows, his finger stopping just shy of brushing my skin. I feel an electric current zip up through my chest and zap me right where he didn’tquitetouch me, anddamneveryone for putting ideas in my head. We’ve had a perfectly good twenty-one years where I didn’t have one single dirty thought about Toby Sullivan, and now that’s two in a week (to say nothing of the dreams). The only explanation is…well, it’s like that salad Toby’s eating. When you see enough people eating salads or scroll past tons of pictures of artfully arranged salads on Instagram, suddenly you start to think you want a salad. But you don’t actuallywantthe salad. Nobodywantsa salad. You’ve just had the salad idea shoved into your head until your lizard brain picks it up and won’t let it go.

Toby is a salad.

And I have never in my lifewanteda salad.

I want a nice juicy steak.

Toby is nothing like the guys I usually date, who are broody and dark and mumble a lot. I like bad boys, okay? And yes, the bad boys often turn out to be bad in other ways, but that’s okay, because unlike Polly, I’m not trying to marry anyone right now. I’m just looking for a good time.

I swat his finger away and growl a little, but he just laughs, shoveling another forkful of his lunch into his mouth.

“Since when do you eat salad?” I ask, hoping a change of subject will redirect whatever misfiring hormones were in charge of that feeling a moment ago.

“Since I realized that Slim Jims and Mountain Dew would not get me through medical school in one piece,” he says, then quickly pivots right back. “You’re all crinkled up. It looks like you’re studying for AP chemistry again.”

“For the record, I was right. I have never used any of that knowledge ever again.”

“There were times in med school when I wished I could say the same thing,” Toby replies. He taps my phone, which has gone to sleep in my lap. “Stop changing the subject. What has you all frowny-faced?”

“You know how Polly’s engaged?” Toby nods. “Well, turns out she’s getting married.”

“I’m confused. Isn’t that how it usually works?”

“In four months. Four months! And because she’s also writing a dissertation and job searching,Iwill be planning this blessed event, which, in case this hasn’t penetrated, takes place infour months.”

Toby sits back and lets out a long, low whistle. “That’s definitely going to be intense. But, I mean, you love this stuff, so…” Toby stabs at a cherry tomato and cuts me a sidelong glance.

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