Toss the Bride (10 page)

We push through the picket fence and step over cracks in the front walk. Maurice knocks on the door. No one answers. We stand there, unsure of what to do.

“Maybe we'll be really surprised,” I say with a dose of enthusiasm. “Maybe she's a genius and this is her swan song.” I trace the outline of a dress in the humid air, one arm clutching the file folder on Carolina's wedding.

“Maybe Aunt Gretchen has been hitting the sauce,” Maurice says, peering through the windows into the front room. Leaning over his shoulder, I look into the dusty Craftsman windows and gasp.

A woman whom I can only guess is Aunt Gretchen sleeps in a recliner, her mouth open and a beer can tucked between her legs. Her chest rises and falls rhythmically, so we know she's alive. Cats glide by, shaking their tails at each other. A fan rotates slowly, stirring the pattern pinned to a dressmaker's dummy. Other than that, there is nothing else in the room except hundreds of bolts of fabric. They are crammed into every available space. The television cart. On the couch, six or seven deep. Lining the walls. I see every type of fabric possible: wild prints, velvets, plaids, and florals.

“She's a fabric junkie,” I breathe out loud.

Maurice groans out loud. “Check out the dummy.”

I did not notice it before, but the pattern pinned to the mannequin is for a bridal gown. A heap of white material lies nearby. One of the cats performs an impromptu bath among its folds. I wince. That embroidered silk was pretty darn expensive.

Maurice straightens up and stretches his arms over his head. “Well, at least we know our answer. Give Carolina a call. Tell her to meet us at O'Dell's House of Bridal.”

My cell is halfway to my ear when I pause, arm extended. “Meet us where?” O'Dell's is a one-stop bridal chain our brides—and Maurice—despise. The dresses are (horrors!) bought off the rack. The bridesmaid dresses are last season's. They even have dresses for pregnant brides. There are dark bridal haunts into which our brides just do not venture. O'Dell's is one such place.

“Macie, Carolina doesn't have much choice. If she complains, remind her that old Auntie was her idea and that she wouldn't listen to me when I said we should go another route.”

I really hate getting stuck with the hard stuff, but I make the call. A bride without a dress who is getting married in three days is not inclined to be nice to the wedding planner's assistant. I long to dial up Avery instead, ask him how his tennis game went this morning, but I remember we parted awkwardly a few days earlier after our dinner at Tang. We've spoken a few times since then, but I don't feel very keen about him. He obviously knows that something is wrong, but I stubbornly refuse to bring it up again.

“Carolina? It's Macie.”

“Who?” The bride's voice comes on the line and she already sounds cross.

“Macie, Maurice's assistant.”

“Oh. What's up?”

I take a deep breath. Carolina is like all brides. She must be treated with extreme caution if something is going wrong. In this case, wrong would be an upbeat way to describe the situation. Crappy, awful, disastrous—all of these are better words. I decide to speak slowly, like I have everything under control.

“Maurice would like you to meet him at a local store to select some dresses—just in case we get in a jam with, well, you know.”

“Aunt Gretchen will have the dresses ready,” Carolina shrieks. “I'm tired of everyone questioning my judgment on this! Why can't I have a few people who believe in me?” A few sobs come through the line, and Maurice hears them clearly since he is standing next to me. He whips out his cell, punching buttons furiously.

“Hold on, Macie. I'm getting another call.” Carolina says.

I hang up and step back. Maurice looks ticked.

“Carolina, dear, Maurice on the line.” Maurice is all smoothness, although I can see the bulging vein on his forehead. It's beastly hot today, even in the shade of Aunt Gretchen's sad front porch. I glance back to the front room. She's still sleeping. A third cat arrives on the scene.

“Darling, you're going to have to meet us at the O'Dell's shop out near Perimeter Mall. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it's going to have to be. Really. That's right. No, I don't believe so.” Maurice nods and shakes his head in a regretful manner that I wish Carolina could see. He is the picture of sincerity.

I cast a tired eye around the porch, wishing for something on which to sit. My legs hurt a bit, either from cramming myself into Maurice's sports car or from walking around tense all week with this wedding on my mind. Finally, I plop down on the low stone wall on one end of the porch. I try to imagine fixing this house up a bit. Maybe scrape off the old paint, tear off the rusted awnings, plant some flowers. Back in Cutter, my dad always took care of our brick ranch on Tupelo Street. The yard was small, but it was trimmed with a white fence covered in climbing roses.

A man on a bicycle glides by in the street. He wears a fast-food uniform and carries a bag of groceries under one arm. He eyes Maurice's sports car and gives me a nod as he passes.

“Well, Carolina, if you must know, I think your aunt has had one too many,” Maurice says, his voice rising.

This gets my attention. It takes a lot to get him riled up on the outside.

“How do I know? Because I'm standing on her front porch and I have an armchair view of Auntie sleeping in her armchair. From the look of things, nothing has been sewn in this house for twenty years!”

I think that Maurice is going for bridal shock value. Instead of shielding Carolina from the worst of it, he's embracing the debacle and trying to force the bride to act. It's risky; I've never seen it work.

Carolina must be giving it to him. Maurice closes his mouth, nods repeatedly, and brushes a piece of lint off of his pants. Finally, he stands up straight and starts walking toward the car. I follow him.

“Now, get your mother and meet us at O'Dell's. We are going to pull this thing together, darling. I mean it. I'll see you in an hour.” Maurice's face is tense.

“What did you say? What did she say? She's coming?” I ask Maurice in the car as we speed away.

“It seems that Carolina knew all along Aunt Gretchen wouldn't be able to finish the job. In fact, everyone did except Gretchen. Her battle with the bottle has made her a bit, shall we say, overconfident. Carolina just got more and more desperate and started inventing fittings that didn't take place, just to protect her aunt. It's the most bizarre thing.”

“I guess she really loves her,” I say.

“I'd say,” Maurice nods, turning onto the expressway. “Now, are you ready to find this bride some dresses?”

*   *   *

O'Dell's is a huge white store built to live beside other huge white stores in a shopping center near the mall. Large posters featuring beautiful brides tossing bouquets, laughing at secrets, and kissing flower girls decorate the store. One entire side of the place is taken up by wedding dresses hanging from oversized racks. Some gowns are in plastic. Still others have fallen from their hangers and slump, defeated, on the mauve-colored floor.

Our goal is to walk out of here with a dress that looks like it took four European seamstresses four months to create, using really tiny stitches and pricey trimmings. I start pulling at fabric, fingering necklines, and flouncing skirts. Maurice takes over in a way only Maurice can.

“Donna, yes, that's the one. This chair will do.” Maurice waves to a woman with a name tag that identifies her as the manager. She lugs a satin chaise lounge over to a raised platform near the back of the store. “Put it down there, please.”

Next, another employee trots up with satin shoes and a strapless bra in Carolina's size. She disappears and yet another woman arrives on the scene with coffee and scones. “All I could get was raspberry from the coffee shop next door. I hope that's okay,” she says to Maurice and almost drops a curtsy. I roll my eyes and get to organizing the dressing room.

By the time Carolina slinks into the store with her mother—both wearing dark glasses, I kid you not—I have lined up several not-too-awful dresses. I will admit that spending the last year dealing with high-end silk doupioni and satin charmeuse has changed my ideas of what is nice and what is supernice. The dresses at O'Dell's are nice. I'd wear one. But they are not what people like Carolina wear.

As I slip the first dress over Carolina's perfect hips, I notice my bride looks bored or sorry that she lied—or both. It occurs to me that she was protecting her aunt but sabotaging her own wedding. Does that mean she does not want to get married Saturday?

“How are we doing, Macie?” Maurice claps his hands from outside the dressing-room door. Carolina's mother waits nearby on the chaise lounge.

I nod to Carolina and open the dressing-room door. She moves languidly, like the models at the bridal show we attended last winter. This dress is a pretty A-line with a seventy-two-inch train. But Carolina seems completely unimpressed. She drags herself and the dress over toward her mother, reaches for a scone, and nibbles delicately.

“If you'll notice the caviar beading here and here,” Maurice says. “Very fashionable over on the Continent.”

“Next,” Carolina's mother calls.

Dresses two, three, and four rouse Carolina's interest just a tad.

“Makes my rear end look huge,” she says about dress number two.

“It minimizes my waist,” she complains of dress three.

“I look poofy,” is her verdict on number four.

Donna helps us pull on the next dress. I think she smells a big sale because she has ignored every other customer in the store to attend to us. As she arranges the silk taffeta over Carolina's hips and closes up the back with the zipper hidden under a row of dainty, satin-covered buttons, I have a feeling this is the one. The narrow, strapless bodice is adorned with little clusters of tiny gold and glass beads. The ball gown skirt extends to a chapel-length train that can be bustled up neatly. It is really lovely. I could get married in this dress. I call to Maurice over the dressing-room door. He knows what this means.

Maurice hands a veil over the door. He follows that with a tiara he's been carting around for months. It was from a wedding that didn't happen last year—the bride bailed days before the big day—and Maurice was stuck with the delicate rhinestone-and-crystal piece. It's really elegant, but I know he would like to unload it on one of our brides. It cost nearly a thousand bucks.

I nestle the tiara into Carolina's hair, which I've twisted into a passable French knot. Then, with Donna's eager hands, we lift the illusion veil up and over Carolina's head, allowing the satin grosgrain ribbon edges to flutter down over her back and shoulders. Donna gives me a nervous smile. It's not every day that someone like Maurice comes into her store. She'll probably talk about this for weeks.

Donna pushes the dressing-room door open and Carolina walks out slowly. Carolina's mother looks up from her date book and smiles. Even Carolina seems fairly interested in her reflection. Maurice gazes at me with a certain amount of pride or maybe just disbelief. We have made Carolina look like a bride.

All of the images a woman is hit with over the course of her life make this moment different from any other. Sure, I've seen hundreds of dresses before, but this one is special. Maybe it's because the dress fits Carolina just perfectly. Maybe it is because we are desperate for a dress—any dress—for this wedding. Or maybe it is because I want to wear one of these myself.

I wonder what has happened to me. I used to care more about getting a good tan or reading the latest women's magazine. Being with Avery started out as a lark. He was funny, sweet, and caring. We talk about all kinds of things, and I feel like I can tell Avery anything. Well, almost anything. The one thing that's starting to matter most he just doesn't seem to understand. I shake my head slowly as Maurice frowns. I should be beaming, not thinking.

“Sweetie, this is a very nice dress,” Carolina's mother says, crossing her legs and letting one leather mule flop off her foot. “What do you think?”

“I guess it will do.” Carolina has a pouty face. I decide not to care.

Maurice takes this as a yes. “Donna, please wrap this up. We'll use the same veil and the tiara I brought in.”

“We have several nice tiaras—” Donna offers helpfully.

“This will do, thanks.” Maurice is on to other tasks. Donna backs away, chastened.

Our hope was to find five bridesmaids dresses at O'Dell's, but Carolina refused them all. “Tacky” was her judgment, so Maurice and I put our heads together. We need to find five dresses of varying sizes to match the wedding party. No bridal shop will have that many dresses on hand. Usually, they have only a sample size from which you order the real dress.

Carolina is exhausted, so we stop at a little coffee shop for a pick-me-up. While Carolina's mother chastises her for the fifth time that I've heard for being so silly about the dresses, Maurice and I huddle at a corner table. I suggest one of the better department stores at Phipps Plaza. This gets Maurice thinking, and I know he is on to an answer.

“We'll go to Rent-A-Gown. Perfect!” Maurice almost cackles.

I gasp. He cannot mean it. There is no way Carolina and her mother will follow us in their sleek foreign sedan out to the strip mall–ringed bargain highway where Rent-A-Gown is sandwiched between Hot Tub Heaven and a warehouse that sells unfinished furniture.

“They'll never go for it.”

“That's where our natural genius comes in,” Maurice says. “Here's what you do. Call that French café off Juniper. You know, the one with the vines and the murals. Get Elise to reserve the small room in back.”

“Where we had Darby's shower?” I sigh. Dealing with the French owner was such a big pain.