Page 26 of The Wedding Menu

Why! Why in the world would she want my wedding dress? My ankle-length, classic,whitewedding dress? What about the short, crazy, red wedding dress she once loved? For Christ’s sake, she lectured me for two whole hours about veils once.

And she’s my best friend! My sister, basically. I’ve known her my whole life—have been there for her through thick and thin.

With quick movements, I grab the phone and tap on the most recent contact, my heart thrumming so hard and fast, I might just have a heart attack. I hear the ringing, my fingers squeezing tighter and tighter around my phone, increasingly convinced she won’t answer, until eventually I hear a male voice say, “Hello?”

Unbelievable. She’s making Trevor pick up the phone for her? And he’s playing along? “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Whoa.”

I try not to let my voice reach a fever pitch. “Whoa?That’swhat you have to say?”

“Okay, look,” the voice says, unusually deep for Trev. “You kept reading my texts, so I figured you might be having a laugh. I shouldn’t have persisted. You didn’t answer, and I didn’t mean to force your hand. I’m sorry.”

Eyes wide, I stare at the phone, the name “Ian” on a black background. “Shit,” I mouth as I grit my teeth. I bring a hand to my lips, mentally cursing myself for just blindly tapping on thelast contact. Ian must have sent me his daily text during my freak-out, and now it’s one a.m. on a Sunday and I’m screaming at a stranger.

My finger hovers over the red button, then I stop. It’d be mighty shitty to ignore him for two weeks, then call him in the middle of the night to scream at him and hang up in his face.

Preparing for an awkward conversation, I bring the phone back to my ear.

“Amelie? Are you there? I’m truly sorry.”

“Yeah—hey. Hmm… no,I’msorry. I didn’t mean to call you.”

“Oh. So you weren’t—oh. Who’s ‘fucking kidding’ you, then?”

With my eyes darting left and right, I hesitate, then say, “Sorry again to bother you this late. I’ll—um, bye.”

“Is it Martha?”

I press my lips tightly.

“Frank?” he offers. “Come on. It’s either this or a documentary about penguins. Entertain me. What’s wrong with your life?”

This time I chuckle. “That was lame the first time you said it.”

“My lines, just like wine, get better with time.”

“I guess they need more time, then.”

His laughter makes me smile wide, and my shoulders begin to relax after the burst of tension from a few minutes ago. “So… Frank? Martha?”

“God. You’re relentless, you know that?”

“I do know,” he says proudly. “Out with it. Come on. Who were you planning to scream at at one in the morning?”

“I’d gladly scream at the two of them, actually,” I say, frowning. It’s crappy to be mad at both your best friend and your fiancé. I’d normally go to one to bitch about the other. And with Barb busy with the last arrangements before her honeymoon, the possibility of talking to someone who’s already proved to be a good listenerdoesn’t sound too bad. “Martha has another unreasonable claim, and Frank, he… well, he proposed, actually.”

“He did?” he asks, his voice laced with surprise. “Congratulations, then. Or not, since you’re angry at him.”

Angry at him. I could almost laugh. Anger is what I felt before, but now? Now it’s mostly resignation, disappointment, loneliness, doubt. I question myself, him, our relationship. And then try to push it all down until it turns into a stomachache. “Yeah, no. It’s great.”

“Sounds like it.”

I brush my fingers over the frame of a picture of Frank and me at our high school graduation. “He just… he suggested that we change a few things before the wedding.”

There’s a sigh, then he observes, “What a vague, nondescript dilemma you got there, Amelie.”

“He… he shifted the paradigm of our relationship.”

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