Page 69 of Sister of the Bride

Pippin

See, was that so hard?

Toby

Switching shifts? Yes. It was actually very hard.

Pippin

No, I meant texting me without a dad joke

Toby

How do you get a country girl’s attention?

Pippin

I’m blocking your number

Toby

A tractor!

I’m not sure if it’s by accident or by design, but for the next six weeks, all I see of Toby are those blasted texts. His residency is absolutely brutal, full of rotations and labs and lectures and frighteningly little sleep. And I’m busy with my own kind of boot camp that comes with the sale of both a building and business. There are inspections and paperwork and so many conference calls as Kelleher prepares to take over.

In those six weeks, we manage to close the deal. Kelleher will temporarily shut down Marino’s before Thanksgiving so they can complete a much-needed kitchen renovation and some updates to the dining room. The plan is for them to reopen the new Marino’s in the new year.

I have my first interview with Ladl, Nate Hawkins’s consulting company. And despite my total lack of experience with job interviews, my vast experience with running every aspect of a restaurant seems to shine through. We schedule a second in-person interview for the Monday before the wedding.

Polly submits and successfully defends her dissertation. She’s officially Dr. Marino, and she’s got interviews lined up at four schools, all of them in New England.

And through all of it, I keep being friends with Toby. Just friends. Because the thought of shaking up that relationship amid the frenzy of checklists and contracts and plans makes me want to walk directly into the ocean. That’s not to say I don’t think about his tongue or his hands or his lips at odd intervals throughout the day, because I do. But our mismatched schedules make it much easier to pretend that nothing had changed.

For now.

* * *

And then suddenly it’s October thirteenth.

The night before the wedding.

After a rehearsal dinner in the Marino’s dining room that doubles as a family farewell of sorts, Polly and I are upstairs, washing off turmeric face masks before we crawl into bed, both exhausted and high on the giddy anticipation of the following day.

“Tomorrow is going to be incredible,” I say, stacking my pillows so I won’t wake up with a crick in my neck. I have to cruise direct an entire wedding, so it is imperative that I don’t sleep cramped like I’m in a deep-water submarine berth. “Everything is good to go, it’s going to be beautiful, and I think we might even have some fun!”

“I can’t believe what a complete one-eighty you’ve done,” Polly says, settling into her bed. Her face is shiny with layers of oil and moisturizer and something called a sleeping mask that I skipped because I’m too scared to try a new product and wake up with a zit the size of a pepperoni. “When I told you about the engagement, you looked like you wanted to snatch the ring off my finger and pitch it into the Charles River.”

I wing a pillow over at her, aiming for her chest so as not to muss her mask. “I was just…surprised, is all.”

“Because it was so fast?”

“That, and it didn’t seem like you, getting married so young,” I explain, thinking back to that shocking moment four months ago when this whole wild journey began. “You’ve always been so independent. Charting your course. You picked your path, and you followed it. All the way across the ocean.”

Polly laughs, climbing into bed. Then she clicks off the lamp so our room is illuminated only by the streetlights outside. I feel a hitch in my throat as I realize this is probably the very last time we’ll lie in bed next to each other in the dark.

“I never told you how Mackenzie proposed,” Polly says out of the darkness.

I sigh. “That’s because I’m a rotten sister who never asked.”

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