Page 42 of Brenna, Brat

“No, I’ve moved on from that.” She shook her head and frowned. “I said, Nicola is worried about you and that guy. I promised her that I’d try to get some more information.”

“She’s totally wrong about me being in love with Dion,” I said. “It’s ridiculous.”

“You know darn well that we’re not talking about your former coworker,” my big sister warned, but I was already heading for her front door because this was a topic I liked even less.

“We have an appointment with Juliet to get her wedding dress. Are you coming or what?” I demanded. Fortunately, we were taking separate cars so she wouldn’t be able to harangue me on the road, and I hoped that the setting of the bridal salon in Grosse Pointe and the focus on our other sister would head off any more of this discussion. For my part, I had absolutely nothing to say.

Nothing to say to them, I meant. “I’m going to the dress appointment. Meet you at the rink,” I quickly typed before I backed out of Sophie’s driveway, and I waited a moment to see if there would be a reply. Then my sister honked her horn and held up her hands as she looked at me in her rearview mirror, so I actually left.

We had to get a dress today, without question. The ceremony and reception venue was already taken care of: Beckett’s palatial, ancestral home. The flowers? Yes, I was working on those, and Nicola had taken it upon herself to personally invite all the intended guests (and probably bully them until she got the answer she wanted to hear) so that we wouldn’t have to worry about waiting for RSVPs. Cake tasting would be tomorrow, and by paying more money than most people spent on a year’s rent, my sister and her fiancé would get their dream dessert. Table and tent rental, catering, the band…oh, sugar. There were still a lot of details to hammer down. I opened the window to let in some fresh air because I seemed to be overheating, although the beginning of May wasn’t anything like hot in Detroit today.

“I love a June wedding!” Our mother had clasped her hands together in happiness when Juliet had made her announcement at our last family dinner (family minus one, my dad). “I couldn’t feel more…” But then she had stopped explaining how she felt as her eyes had filled with tears. She’d dropped her head so that they dripped onto her plate.

“Mom,” Nicola had cautioned, but I hadn’t been very cautious myself.

“Knock it off,” I’d stated. “This is about Juliet and her happiness, not your own mess of a marriage.”

And then I’d heard a big chorus of “brat” from many people at the table, but I had been correct. Juliet had thanked me later instead of getting mad at me like the rest of our siblings, even though out of all of us, she was usually the first person to defend our mother. It was because my sister was barely holding things together herself, and she just couldn’t stand Mom’s histrionics right now. The wedding was on, suddenly and with so much urgency, because Beckett had taken a turn for the worse. For legal reasons as well as emotional ones, he wanted to get married ASAP, but he also wanted Juliet to have a beautiful day. He wanted her to have a happy one, too.

“I don’t care what anything costs,” he’d told me quietly, when she couldn’t hear. “Please get this done for her. She trusts that you can do it.”

“I can,” I swore, and we’d shook on it. I had felt how thin his hand was…

Ok, I wasn’t going to get emotional either. I was going to get my sister a wedding gown, and I was going to get us all into bridesmaid dresses, and this was going to be wonderful. It would be perfect!

A while later, I perched on the edge of an overly tufted chair covered in unattractive polyester velvet, and I felt even more doubt. “Ugh, I can’t even look at that.” I held up my hand to block the view. “Please take it away.”

The saleswoman glanced at the gown she was displaying and then at me, and her frustration was clear. “There just aren’t many choices. We only have this dress because another wedding was called off,” she said.

“I wonder what happened,” I heard Sophie mutter.

“Maybe the groom saw that gown and realized that he couldn’t marry anyone with such terrible taste,” I suggested.

“Brenna!” Nicola snapped, and Addie said that whatever the reason, someone’s feelings must have been hurt. Grace mentioned that she didn’t plan to get married because wedding dresses looked itchy.

“Put on your shoes,” Patrick ordered her. He looked harassed. “I think I’m only here to keep you in line.”

He was correct about why he’d been invited; no one really cared about his opinion of our dresses. Still, it was good to have a place in the family, and I’d told him he’d better show up for his twin, Juliet.

“There’s a very, very limited selection,” the boutique owner reiterated, also frowning in my direction. “I’m sorry to say that you’ll have to compromise a little, due to your haste.”

I had seen Juliet’s face fall when she spotted the ugly dress approaching and she only looked sadder at this statement about compromise. “No, we won’t be doing that,” I told the owner and her minion. “I’ll need to go into your back room and see for myself.”

The owner’s head was moving in a negative, back-and-forth motion before I’d finished speaking. “I’m very sorry, but that’s not—”

“Let’s go, JuJu,” I said, and led the way. My sisters followed and when the six Curran women were on the march like that, no one could stop us. No one was going to stop me from finding the best dress for my sister.

“Don’t leave me in suspense,” Campbell said a few hours later. “Did you get one?”

“This is so tight that my toes are going numb,” I said, and held up my right leg where he’d tied the skate extremely forcefully.

“I think you’ll do better—I think you’ll feel more comfortable if your foot has more support in the boot,” he told me, but he did kneel to adjust it. “How about that? You have to be able to flex your ankle.”

I tried, and now I could. “Better,” I agreed.

“Ok, so what happened with her dress?”

I knew that his own day had been filled with meetings with his lawyers and a very tense lunch with his sister, father, and their legal representatives. He couldn’t have actually cared about these wedding problems, but I supposed that it was kind of a vacation for his mind to hear this kind of stuff. “Well, it was touch and go, because we found a good option but the people at the salon said that it wasn’t for sale and that it couldn’t be altered to fit her, anyway. But I pulled the owner aside and we had a little discussion.”