Always the Last to Know (Always the Bridesmaid) Read online

  Always the

  Last to Know

  a novel

  by

  Crystal Bowling

  Always the Last to Know. © Copyright 2009 by Crystal Bowling. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.

  This is a piece of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Many thanks to…

  Shawna Coudriet, Trista Lutgring, and Jeannie Butler for proofreading and listening to my incessant babbling.

  For Mom, for not taking me back to the cabbage patch where she found me

  One

  Monday, June 22nd

  Well, this is just my luck.

  I look at myself in the mirror. Scared blue eyes stare right back at me. Mom is right; the color does compliment my brown hair, but that’s the only part of my body it’s nice to. I see the red and white braided bracelet on my wrist that I’ve had since I was seven and sigh. Carla is my best friend, this is all for her.

  But if she thinks for one second that I’m going to wear a bonnet, our friendship is over.

  I hear footsteps and catch a pair of bright green eyes in the mirror. Twenty-two years of friendship is not worth this kind of torture.

  “Reynolds, what can I say? I’m speechless.”

  “This dress has one good quality then.”

  Riley Callahan, Carla’s older idiot brother, smiles at me. I have known Riley and Carla my entire life. We grew up next door to each other. Carla and I, only a month apart in age, were best friends from the beginning. We played at the park together, shared a cubby in second grade, had slumber parties, roomed with each other throughout college, and now I am going to be the Maid of Honor in her wedding to Evan B. Winters.

  My friendship with Riley is slightly different. We were far from civil to each other in our youth. He tended the put bugs in my hair; I tended to put his hand in warm water while he was sleeping whenever I stayed over at Carla’s. Through the years, we’ve let our sharp tongues take the place of our pranks and have become, in a very odd sense of the word, friends. No one has yet to figure out how we are able to survive each other when in the same room and, the truth is, I have no idea either.

  “Riley, I didn’t even hear you come in.” My mom grins as she walks into the room, measuring tape and a small sewing kit in her hands. My mother, unlike myself, has always thought the world of Riley, which just further proves that my mother is completely insane.

  “Hey, Mrs. Reynolds. I was just complimenting Jess’s dress.”

  I narrow my eyes at him in the mirror. His smile only stretches further across his face.

  My mom sighs as she looks me up and down, “There’s no need to be nice, Riley. This dress is awful.”

  “Then why do you carry it in the shop, Mom?”

  “Because the whole point of bridesmaids’ dresses is to make the bride look prettier than them. That’s why all the bridesmaids’ dresses in this place have some sort of horrible attribute, you know that.”

  I think about it for a moment. Having worked (and, when I say worked, I mean that I was involuntarily enrolled into slavery) at Something New Bridal Boutique through four years of high school and two summers in college, I realize that she’s right. All the dresses in the shop are some sort of hideous. Except for the wedding gowns, of course. They’re gorgeous.

  Besides, it doesn’t really matter what the dress looks like; I pale in comparison to Carla when I’m not wearing something that the Civil War threw up on. Carla is a couple inches shorter than me with long straight blonde hair and a tan. She’s never had a day of acne in her life and I am fairly certain that she can still fit into most of her jeans from middle school.

  If she weren’t my best friend, I would hate her guts. Because I’m definitely not tan - Riley once said that I resembled a vampire; I bit his arm, just out of spite – and my hair, though past my shoulders, is frizzy. Not wavy, not curly but some odd hybrid of the two that is impossible to make look decent. And I said goodbye to single digit jean sizes long, long ago. I have a pair of size 10 jeans hidden in the depths of my closet that I could wear, if it weren’t for that whole pesky breathing thing being so necessary to life and all.

  “What are you doing out here anyway, Callahan?” I ask as my mom sits on a small stool and sticks needles in the bottom of the dress to mark what will need hemming. She shoots me a pointed look due to the obvious annoyance in my voice. I don’t know why she gave me a mean look; I have been talking to Riley this way since I learned to speak. This is nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Looking for Carla. She won’t answer her cell and I thought that she might be out here.”

  “Ah.”

  He doesn’t need to explain further. Not only is cell phone service near impossible to pick up in this building, but Carla tends to turn her phone to silent every single time she tries on her wedding dress. She refuses to be interrupted while in that dress. I’m fairly certain that she isn’t going to let the priest get a word in during the ceremony.

  “She’s in my office. Some accessories,” Mom smirks up at me, “came in today and she was checking to make sure everything was right. You can go back there if you want.”

  “Great. Thanks, Mrs. Reynolds.” Riley displays a shit-eating grin for her as he walks to the back of the shop. Near the door, he turns and looks at me with a mischievous smile plastered on his face. Not good.

  “What kind of accessories? Like necklaces and bracelets? Or like cattle prods?” I’m certain that the only way I am going to enter a church full of people in this dress is if I’m getting a thousand volts of electricity to my backside as I walk down the aisle.

  Mom can’t help but chuckle at my comment, but composes herself quickly. “Trust me, you’ll wish it was a cattle prod.”

  Not good at all.

  At that moment, Carla comes into the room with a cardboard box in her hands. Riley is right behind her, smiling even more maliciously than before. My eyes make a beeline for the box.

  Oh my God. There is an umbrella handle and a bunch of lace sticking out of the box, all the same color lavender as my dress.

  I run a silent prayer through my head, asking God to strike me down, right here and now.

  “Is that an umbrella, Carla?” I ask through my teeth as nicely as I can.

  “No. It’s a parasol.”

  “Yeah Reynolds, it’s a parasol.” Riley says, his smile getting closer to his ears with each word. He’s going to be lucky if he doesn’t leave the shop with that parasol shoved up his ass.

  “I was thinking that the Southern theme in the wedding was too subtle and I thought it would be fun to play it up a bit more.” Carla explains, pulling the parasol out of the box. It’s covered in lavender fabric and even has a trim of lavender lace. She opens it and spins it around a few times. “Isn’t it fantastic?”

  “Like a dream.” A very, very bad dream.

  Riley is still grinning like a fool, “I think they’re great, sis.”

  Carla’s eyes widen in surprise, “Really?” When he nods, the excitement in her face is obvious. “I am so glad you said that because. . .”

  Her words stop as she sits the box down and digs through it for a moment.

  The smug smile falls from Riley’s face faster than Milli Vanilli’s credibility as musicians when Carla pulls out a lavender top hat. I snort loudly and try to cover it up as a cough. My mother, who would normally shoot me a disapprov
ing look at such a gesture, has also snorted at Riley’s face. We’re both fake-coughing up a storm as we watch Riley grasp what is happening to him. Carla is oblivious to us.

  “Don’t you love it?”

  “I don’t have any words. Really.” He is completely unable to stop staring at the hat.

  “I knew you would like it.” Carla smiles happily. “If it’s okay, Connie, I’m going to leave this box in the supply room… unless you think someone will take it.”

  Mom stops her ‘coughing’ episode to answer her, with a red face and tears in her eyes, “That’s fine. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about someone taking it.”

  Carla doesn’t catch the subtle burn my mother has given her. She smiles and says thank you before heading back to the supply room. Riley is still staring at where the hat had been.

  “I’m going to look like a pimp.” He says quietly and to no one in particular.

  I stop the phony coughing and wipe the tears away from my eyes to look at him more clearly. While Carla is tan, blonde, and short, Riley is just a shade of darker pale than me with bright green eyes and he hovers just over the six feet mark. His hair, like mine, is completely unmanageable. Since he’s a boy though, he can get away with his dark brown wavy locks being disheveled on his head. Most people find it youthful and I always have had an almost-uncontrollable desire to run my fingers through it.

  He does look quite pitiful standing there, though, and I can’t help but give him sympathy.

  “If it helps, there’s going to be two groomsmen wearing the same ridiculous hat.” He’s unmoved. “And since you’re walking Carla down the aisle, you’ll be the last one to enter and no one will be surprised by the hat at that point.”

  That was a lie. That hat would surprise anyone, regardless if they had seen it once or a hundred times. The lie seems to work though, and his spirit lifts a bit.

  “At least I can take the hat off. You’re stuck in that thing all night.”

  Great. The dress is now a thing. No longer a dress or a gown or an article of clothing. No, it’s a thing, a thing that will devour everything in its path if necessary. And due to the expansive hoop skirt and my natural ability to knock things over, it will probably destroy several things during the course of the wedding and the reception.

  Carla flits back into the room, without parasol or top hat, thank God. She does have the wedding binder opened in her hands though. The wedding binder, the bane of my existence. Carla has been packing that binder around for the past six months, making notes, adding pages from magazines, taping fabric samples down, and generally driving everyone within a hundred mile radius insane.

  I hate that damn thing.

  “Okay,” Carla is scratching in notes, “Brittany will be here tomorrow at three for final adjustments to her dress, right?”

  Mom doesn’t even look up from my dress, “That’s right.”

  “Good. Now, let’s see. I did that; I still need to call about that. . .” Carla mumbles to herself as she marks things off in the binder. It’s less than two weeks to the wedding and Carla, though slightly neurotic, is still keeping a good head on her shoulders. She is quite proud of herself for not becoming a hysterical bride.

  I’m just waiting for her to snap.

  ***

  “Jess, are you going with us to pick Matt up from the airport? Or do you just want to meet us at the tailor’s?” Carla yells from the living room.

  “I have to work until two. I’ll just meet you guys at the tailor’s.” I reply back from the kitchen where I have my hands down in soapy water while I wash dishes. Dirty dishes in the sink have always bothered me. I’m not a clean freak by any means but there is something about seeing a plate with lasagna caked on it or a cup with a milk ring in the bottom of it that gives me the unnatural desire to clean it and shove it back in the cabinet as soon as possible.

  Plus, Evan is in the living room with Carla watching something about the NFL on ESPN. While I do love college basketball and even the occasional game of soccer, football makes me want to curl up and die somewhere. I think it might be because I don’t understand the rules.

  Evan never has talked to me much, but when I asked the point of football one day, he was all too happy to explain to me why football players would run two feet just to be brutally tackled. Evan had played football through all four years of high school and for his freshman year of college, until he tore an ACL and had to quit the program. He still knows his shit though, and is even an assistant football coach at the local high school where he’ll begin teaching history in the fall. After twenty minutes of explanation and listening to him bitch about Green Bay’s defense, Carla had fallen asleep on the couch and Evan was so frustrated at my questions that he had given up all hope for me. That was the last time Evan and I had spoke more than seven words to each other. And it was three months ago.

  I have tried to stir up conversations with Evan. It’s just that we have absolutely nothing in common and talking to each other is like chewing on glass: it’s painful, unnatural, and neither of us really wants to do it.

  I put the last dish on the rack to dry before I head into the living room to talk to Carla. She’s sitting on the couch next to Evan. One of his muscular arms is draped on her shoulder. They look so oddly perfect together. They are both shorter (Evan’s about my height, actually) and Evan’s stout frame seems to compliment Carla’s smaller bone structure. They’re both blondies too. Of course, Evan’s short dirty blond hair is naturally that color whereas Carla has to make a regular appointment at the salon to keep her hair a light blonde before her dark roots make themselves known.

  I sit down at the ottoman by the television, trying to keep the football show out of my line of vision.

  “Where is this Matt guy flying in from again?”

  “Oklahoma. He moved out there after high school for college.”

  I was going to ask why he would move out of the state to go to college, but then I remember: we live in Kentucky, and that’s reason enough to leave. Being best friends from high school, Evan and Matt had grown up in a small town somewhere south of Louisville famous for bourbon or horses or something.

  “You’re going to love Matt. He’s really great, Jess.”

  I nod at Carla, but doubt that I will like Matt simply because I can’t stand the majority of Evan’s other friends. Even though he had to quit playing football, Evan is still friends with a lot of guys on the team and the majority of those friends are jackasses who seem to have it on very good authority that they’re God’s gift to the world.

  They are so wrong.

  “You’ll like him, Jess. He was so nice when I met him last Christmas up at Evan’s parents’ house.”

  “Wait. . . was he that dark haired guy you showed me a picture of?”

  Carla nods, “Yeah, Matt Mancini. The one that, when I said his last name, your eyes glazed over and you mumbled something about Italian boys.”

  “Oh.” I say softly, trying to recall how the guy had looked in the picture. I remember that he had black curly hair and a natural tan. And that he was taller than Evan, which isn’t really any feat at all. I can’t remember any other strong features about him. But I have a suspicion that he is kind of gorgeous.

  “Just one more thing to be excited for at the tux fitting, right?” Carla raises an eyebrow that’s accompanied with a smirk.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “In addition to Matt being handsome and single, I know that you’ve been jonesing to see Riley all cleaned up.”

  I laugh lightly. She has that right. The one thing that makes my dress a little bearable is the fact that Riley and the groomsmen are all stuck in lavender tuxes with matching lavender ruffle undershirts and top hats. Oh, the top hats make me so happy.

  “Did you ever find a date to the wedding?” Carla looks at me with a bit of a smile playing on her lips.

  I shake my head, “No, not yet.”

  Like I would actually ask a guy to go to the weddi
ng and see me in the dress from Hell. That would be too cruel, for both my date and me.

  “Well, Matt’s going to be free. Maybe you can go with him.”

  I snort, “Yeah, that’ll happen.”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “You said he was handsome and single, Carla. Handsome and single guys don’t like girls like me. We’ve gone over this.”

  “Oh, right, the whole Bubba Theory.” She rolls her eyes and snuggles closer to Evan.

  “That’s exactly right.” I mumble, tossing a small throw pillow at her. Evan catches the pillow before it hits Carla without taking his eyes off the television.

  “You ruin all the fun, Evan.” I say in a joking tone. He only grunts as a response.

  The Bubba Theory is the belief that I’m going to end up marrying a guy who wears his NASCAR shirts too tight and too short, therefore letting his severe DunLap Disease (where his stomach has ‘dun’ lapped over his waist) be exposed for all the world to see and he’ll wear his greasy long ponytail through the back of a ball cap advertising something about how he didn’t wake up grouchy this morning, he let her sleep in. Oh, and he will go by Bubba, regardless of what his actual name is. And I’d marry him and think very seriously every morning about poisoning his eggs and bacon but decide that jail isn’t worth killing the sorry son of a bitch. That’s going to be my future and though I’m not happy about it, I don’t see any other choice that I have.

  Other than joining a convent, that is. I mean, I’m not having sex now so what would I have to lose?

  “You never know, Jess. Matt may just sweep you off your feet.”

  “Carla, you’re not going to set me up, are you? You know how awkward that is, right?”

  “I only set you up for dates because I care.” She sighs, “We’re out of college now. We don’t have classrooms and parties during finals week to meet people. And,” she looks at Evan, “I don’t have that much time to help you with your love life anymore. This is my last ditch effort.”