Page 1 of Townshipped
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MALLORY
Today would have been the day.
I would have been sitting with curlers in my copper hair, while a prestigious, high-profile makeup artist applied finishing touches to my face. Gabriela would have been standing nearby, making me laugh in hopes that I’d bypass the freight train of nerves running through me.
The bridal suite would have been a flurry of activity with bridesmaids primping, dressing, and chattering about their dresses, hair, and the eligible groomsmen. I would have donned my inordinately expensive Vera Wang wedding dress—the one I sold back to the boutique for half the original price two weeks ago.
And once I was dressed and had walked down the stairs to take my father’s waiting arm, Buck would have stood at the end of the aisle, with his expectant eyes and calm demeanor. Buck, the man whose heart I broke only sixteen days ago when I called off our engagement. Buck, the man whose mother probably wanted to reinstate the Salem witch trials after she heard how I had dismantled her dreams by calling off my wedding to her one and only son.
“It’s just not done in our circles. You can’t simply cancel an event of this magnitude,” she had said before she skewered me with a string of expletives that could make a sailor blush—at least every sailor in our yacht club.
Over the past year, my wedding had turned into a society event-slash-craft project that would make Martha Stewart salivate.
For almost that whole year I had avoided the small voice in my head saying,This is wrong,as I got dragged into marriage-prep mayhem. And that tiny inner voice of hesitation got swept along like a dust bunny on a hardwood floor when a wind comes through. Only I was a dust bunny being draped in beaded gowns, addressing three hundred embossed invites and deciding whether rose, crepe, or flamingo was a better shade of pink for the napkins and chair bows.
The closer the wedding had gotten, the more that inner voice went from a slight nudge to something more like a tackle from a two-hundred-fifty-pound linebacker.
I refused to see the truth, and for almost a year I didn’t say a thing—until I did.
So, instead of today being my wedding day, I’m currently sitting in the underground parking garage of the Niagara Falls Hilton, just having downed my last Red Vine and slurped the last sip of my forty-ounce gas station convenience store diet soda.
It obviously had been Buck’s idea for our honeymoon to consist of three weeks touring historic and notable landmarks of the Midwest. My suggestion of Hawaii seemed cliché to him.Everyone goes to Hawaii, Mal. Why don’t we do something more edifying and less crowded?
Bracing my hands on the steering wheel, I let out a sigh that feels like the first real breath I’ve taken in over two weeks. Then I pop open the trunk of the car I borrowed from Gabriela’s brother, Diego. I wasn’t about to take my new Accord on this two-thousand-five-hundred-mile trip, so Gabriela talked me into borrowing her brother’s car.
Diego’s on a scholarship to a four-year program at Oxford studying dead poets or dead languages or maybe it’s the dead language of dead poets. I remember it being a subject fully lacking in real-life application. While Diego’s away, his car has been sitting idle in his parents’ driveway. He was happy to have me drive it.
The sound of the liftgate popping echoes against the concrete pillars of the underground parking structure. I step out, hoist my suitcase and shut the trunk. Pulling my coat snug around myself, I take the elevators up to the sleek lobby with its marble-look flooring, glass fixtures, and high ceilings. One expansive hallway out of the reception area attaches the hotel to the adjoining casino. The other leads to the tower of rooms overlooking the falls.
I approach the welcome desk and mention my reservation was made for the Crowninshield party.
In a nasally but animated voice more suited to a circus ringmaster than a four-star-hotel clerk, the young man behind the counter says, “Welcome to the Hilton, Mrs. Crowninshield. And where is your dashing groom?”
Dashing groom? Seriously?
“I’m checking in alone. And it’s not Mrs. Crowninshield. It’s Miss O’Brien for the Crowninshield reservation.”
The hotel clerk, whose name tag readsRyne, scrunches up his face, searches the computer monitor in front of him and says, “Ah, yes. I see that here. So, you’re taking your honeymoon without your husband?”
His voice echoes across the tile and pings against all the glossy surfaces, somehow gaining volume with each ricochet. Other hotel guests look our way.
“Yes,” I answer in my indoor voice.
Okay. I grew up in Boston. We’re not known for being demure as a rule, but I’m from the circle of families considered old money. We trace our roots to the Mayflower. Which, somehow, means prestige. Though, I don’t know how descending from people who traveled over on a cramped ship and lived on corn and fish while dwelling in a drafty log cabin translates into a status symbol.
But, by my generation, our family name is synonymous with debutante balls, etiquette lessons, and a sense of propriety a mile long. I’m able to carry myself with decorum, even though I’ve never quite fit in with the whole high-society scene—at all. I’m well-versed in mustering up an indoor voice that says,Let’s all be more self-contained, why don’t we?
But Bellboy McMegaphone isn’t catching my drift at all. In an even louder volume, with an even more nasally tone to it, he presses on. “Do you still intend to stay in one of our king suites? Are you aware our suites can accommodate up to five people?”
“I am keeping our reservation as it was originally arranged,” I answer in a voice that would make a librarian beam with subdued pride.
We’re like dueling volumes, my soft answer to every one of Ryne’s crescendos. And, as you can tell, I’m losing the duel with each exchange.
“Alone?” Ryne blurts with confusion, but also maintaining his previous intensity. “On a honeymoon? Alone?”
He scrunches his face as he asks, and I wonder if he’s new to hospitality or merely unable to keep his thoughts from showing on his face like a jumbotron of judgment.
