Page 24 of Sister of the Bride

Toby blinks at me. “Yeah, what about her?”

“Well, she was asking if you were single the other night. She’s interested in you. Maybe you should take her.”

Toby pauses, his puppy-dog grin flickering just a smidge, like a light bulb that hasn’t quite burned out. But it quickly reignites. “Nah, this isn’t really a first date kind of thing. This will be way more fun with a friend.”

A friend. Okay, well, if this is just a friends thing, then maybe I should do it. It does sound fun to get gussied up on a Tuesday and eat a five-star meal at one of the fanciest hotels in the entire city. Plus I might be able to get some ideas for the wedding in all that finery.

“Okay,” I say. “Sign me up. But think about Evie. She’s really cool. I think you guys would get along.”

“Yeah, sure. Will do.” Toby passes my phone back to me, then stands and stretches, his scrub top rising to reveal that damned sliver of toned stomach. I force my eyes up to his face so I don’t feel like an absolute pervert. “Okay, once more unto the breach. Later, Pip!”

And then he turns and jogs out of the garden, heading toward Charles and the hospital, leaving me on the bench with my wedding planning app and a strange, low-simmering concoction of weird feelings sloshing around inside of me.

Chapter12

Toby

I have a joke about chemistry, but I don’t think it will get a reaction.

Pippin

I don’t get it.

Toby

… sorry, I forgot science-based jokes are not your thing

Pippin

None of these jokes are my thing!

It’s been a week since I downloaded I-To-Do, and I am finally—finally—getting to check off another box. Just not the box I was hoping.

“According to my checklist, we need to start with setting a budget,” I explain, instinctively pulling out my phone and opening the app. I moved it to my home screen last night for easy access. As it loads, the screen promises me once again that I’m on my way to planning a successful wedding. More than once I’ve wanted to email the developers of I-To-Do and ask them what the definition of a successful wedding actuallyis. Clearly one where the couple ends up, you know,marriedat the end, but besides that, I suspect it also includes things like “none of the guests vomited from food poisoning,” and “everyone left with a tasteful mason jar full of artisanal gumballs.” I need a scale somewhere between those two things so I know what I’m aiming for. Where on the scale from vomit to artisanal gumballs do we need to be?

“Well, obviously we’re not going to go crazy,” Mom says as we make our way down Newbury Street.

“And finding the dresses will establish the vibe of the wedding, which will help us budget for everything else,” Polly adds.

“Plus dress shopping is the fun part. Start with the fun part, I say,” Nonna adds.

It’s a warm early-July morning, and the shops on Newbury Street are just starting to come alive. The four of us come to a stop in front of a gilded door with a classy, discreet sign on the front readingvow’d.

“Okay, but none of you actually saidnumbers,” I say, though I know this conversation, which I’ve been trying to have fordays, will be fruitless. Nobody wants to start with an Excel spreadsheet when wedding dress shopping is an option. I can already tell I’m going to be the Debbie Downer of this whole experience, and I try to suck it up and make peace with it. Someone’s got to be the heavy, crunching numbers and making calls. Someone’s got to tend to the checklist. And that someone isme. “Plus, we need to figure out who’s even paying, because you’re both brides, which means the yoke of the patriarchy won’t be foisting every single dollar of this shindig onto our shoulders. So three cheers for gay pride and all that.”

Polly rolls her eyes and reaches for my phone, prying it from my clutches and shoving it so deep into my back pocket that I stumble backward two full steps.

“Very romantic, Pip,” she says. “The community appreciates your full-throated support.”

“You better not have accidentally checked any boxes,” I say, retrieving my phone and examining the screen. I-To-Do is sacrosanct. One small mistake, one accidentally checked box, and we could wind up with a wedding with no music—or worse, no booze.

“We’re each going to buy our own dress, and we’re going to split everything else evenly,” Polly says.

“Excellent.” I’m already adjusting the balance sheet in my head. I googled how much the average wedding costs, and in Massachusetts it’s forty thousand dollars.Forty thousand dollars. That’s practically a down payment on a condo. It’s definitely a very nice car. We’re saving money by not paying for a venue, but still, I’m happy to cut the budget in half. It’s not like Polly, the perpetual college student, is flush with cash, and while Mom has savings, we’re not forty-thousand-dollar wedding people. We’re not even twenty-thousand-dollar wedding people, which is why I’ve been googling budget wedding ideas for the last week. Polly knows all this—Iknowshe does—and yet here we are on Newbury Street, looking at dresses without first firming up a budget with her fiancée. Something is off. But at least now I have a ballpark, if “half of a number we don’t know” counts as a ballpark. I make a mental note to adjust the actual Excel spreadsheet when I get home and smile to myself. Pivot tables are my love language.

“Stop doing math in your head. I don’t want to see you doing mental calculations while I’m trying on dresses,” Polly says.

“Fine, as long as you promise that after you choose a dress and establish said vibe, we’ll sit down and talk numbers?” Polly rolls her eyes, but I level her with a twin look. “Hey, you asked me to help plan this thing. You knew what you were getting into.”

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