“Susie!” Marlee pops in front of me, and I blink back to reality. She’s short of breath, arms covered in beak-marks, and shoves a manila folder at me. “Letty told me to give this to you before you go.”
“Thanks, Mar—” As soon as I take it, Marlee dashes back into the fray. No doubt off to find the offending pigeons. Letty has to eat, after all.
I turn the folder in my hands. It’s thick with loose pages. The top tab reads: DALTON/WEST.
It’s a wedding assignment. The first since my hiatus.
My anxiety falls off me like snakeskin, and a grin bursts across my face. I’ve earned my wings back. I grip the folder as though it holds the cure for cancer in its pages. This is it. The most important wedding of my career.
Time to prove to them that I’m back in business. Look out, world. Here comes Susie Posy, wedding planner extraordinaire.
2
Susie
I don’t open the folder then and there. I wait, scandalously teasing its edges with my thumb until I find a nice quiet place to wrap my head around the contents.
Everlasting Love does enough business in the infamous Ritz-Carlton off Central Park that the bartenders will occasionally throw me a glass of wine on the house. I know it’s a stretch since I’ve been out of work for the better part of a year, but I decide to treat myself regardless. I’m going to start this wedding off on the right foot, and maybe the old-fashioned glitz and glam of an infamous New York City luxury hotel will inspire me.
Through the brass-lined doors, the doorman directs me to the Auden Bar in the left wing of the lobby. The seats are maroon leather, the bar table polished wood, and I sequester myself under an antique lamp.
I’m rusty and I know it. I used to fit right into this world, but when I look at myself in the mirror across the bar, I wince. My teased blonde curls have already softened, and my lipstick is starting to fade. I’ve got potential: a year shy of thirty (and clinging to it with everything I have left), a heart-shaped face, eyes that look sometimes hazel and sometimes green under the right light (or with the right mascara), and slender to boot (slender but not skinny—I’m still pinch-able). But I’ve let myself go, and it shows in the bags under my eyes and the wrinkles in my white, flower-patterned shirt. I tug a hand-knit beanie out of my purse and pull it over my head. This isn’t a beanie kind of place, exactly, but my hair is not currently for public consumption, so desperate times and all.
“What’ll it be?” The bartender materializes out of nowhere, smartly dressed with a perfectly coiffed pompadour. He already looks bored with me, and I know he’s got my number. It’s like he can smell that I’ve been drinking out of wine boxes for the past few months.
I hold my own. I clear my throat and ask with my best faux-elegance, “Is Chris Keller here?”
He narrows his eyes, confused. “No one by that name works here, honey.”
Right. I flew too close to the sun with this. No free wine for me. I backpedal with a smile and then say, “A glass of your house white, please.”
That’ll put enough of a dent in my pocketbook. He leaves to pour my glass, and I relax my shoulders a little now that I’m outside his line of scrutiny. The folder waits patiently in front of me, unopened. I’m suddenly less confident than I was when I walked in. Pompadour has crushed my high spirits. Is it possible to be so rusty that you can never un-rust?
Grow a pair of ovaries and open it, Susie.
I flip the folder open and I’m hit with a Post-it note. In Letty’s handwriting, there are these inspirational words: Don’t mess it up.
Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. Ironically, her challenge does light a fire underneath me to prove her wrong. I roll my eyes, paste the Post-it note to the inside cover, and start riffling through the contents of the folder.
My mission—should I choose to accept it—involves Bride, herein known as Cora West, and Groom, aka Ray Dalton. Cora is drop-dead gorgeous; even her candids look like headshots. Wide eyes, a tiny nose, and a bird-bone figure. Her smile is just a little too wide for her face, which only makes her seem genuine and all the more precious. I’m not getting any bridezilla vibes from her, but it’s hard to make that kind of prediction without meeting her up close and personal. Weddings do strange things to people.
(You know that firsthand, don’t you, Susie? Or have you forgotten how you broke a lawn chair, smashed a wedding cake, and threw up on the father-in-law all in the span of five minutes?)
There’s that cold prickle at the back of my neck. My wine arrives, so I sip it to distract myself as I drive into Ray’s page. Immediately, my assumptions about Cora’s good nature line up, because he’s the half of the couple that makes people wonder how they ever ended up together. Big-boned with a mess of curly hair that no one ever taught him how to style. He’s wearing plaid in every one of his pictures and, in one, standing in front of a farm labeled Dalton family home.
Popular girl and farm boy. Whodathunk? Already, I can feel the struggle of putting these two disparate pieces together, but I like the challenge. After all, who am I to put true love in a box?
But that’s not my only challenge. When I see the wedding date I nearly spit my wine out.
It’s two weeks from now. Two. I check and recheck to make sure it isn’t a typo.
So Letty isn’t giving me a starter-wedding. This is a shotgun, high-stakes job.
No problem. Right? Like learning to ride a bike on the freeway. Full of potholes. With dogs chasing you.
I get my yellow pad out and start scribbling frantically, notes like rustic and outdoors and rose arbor? My glass of wine has a hole in it. Only explanation for the way the honey-gold line keeps plummeting.
My pen stops suddenly when I flip to the flower selection. A laminated printout of white magnolias stares back at me.
Magnolias. Meaning purity and dignity. Often associated with yin. Femininity. A historically romantic flower.
(Magnolias. The same flowers Ace picked out for our wedding. The wedding that never happened, so the flowers died one by one on my kitchen table. The petals crumpled up and dried out, and then they fell, leaving nothing but empty, abandoned stalks.)
“Hey, I know you.”
I glance upward and immediately regret it. My eyes connect with two men standing at the bar beside me—one is a larger man wearing an “I Love NY” T-shirt, and his friend has a deer-hunting hat. My guess is they’re both tourists.
I get that pit-in-stomach sinking feeling. I try to swallow it back with a smile. “Sorry, I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, I do.” I-Love-NY points a stubby finger at me. “You’re on TV, right?”
Yep. Definitely tourists. New Yorkers know better than to accost celebrities in public—or normal people like me who suffered their five minutes of fame.
I shrug and keep up my war-paint smile. “I think you have the wrong girl.”
I turn my shoulders toward them and try to refocus on my folder. Please leave me alone, my body language is screaming. But, of course, they don’t take the hint.
His friend snaps his fingers. “Dude! It’s that chick from the Bride Attacks video!”
I pray that the carpet turns into a sinkhole and sucks me downward.