My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

by Wendy Wax

  We look at each other, unsure what to do next. We’re out of practice as a threesome. I think we’re all afraid of making a wrong move.

  “THE DRESS is in my bedroom,” my mother says almost timidly. “Shall I help you put it on?”

  “Hell, yes,” I answer, hoping to see the smile again. It flickers briefly.

  “I’ll wait here with the champagne,” Bree says. “I may even pour us each another glass while I’m waiting for you to come out and model.”

  Bree’s eyes search my face then my mother’s. They turn back to the champagne bottle. Talking directly to each other without trying to inflict hurt is oddly strange and fascinating. It’s like being in a foreign country you haven’t visited for so long you’re not sure you’ll remember the language.

  In the bedroom I shed my clothes and step carefully into the satin pumps. My mother bends down and holds the dress open for me, leaving a bull’s-eye of carpet inside the circle of pearl-colored satin to aim for. I take a breath and place my hand on my mother’s shoulder.

  “I hope you know how very much I love you,” she says so softly I have to strain to hear her. “How important you are to me. You are by far the best thing I’ve ever created.”

  I wobble slightly as I lift one foot. “I don’t know, your beignets with chocolate pot de crème are pretty spectacular.”

  She laughs lightly as I balance my weight on her shoulder and step as carefully as I can into the circular opening.

  Once I have both feet inside, I stand perfectly still while she pulls the dress up so that I can slide my arms into the sleeves. The satin is cool and slippery against my skin as I hold the bodice to my chest and wait for her to step behind me so that she can pull the sides together.

  “Here we go.”

  I hold my breath as she slides up the side zipper in the skirt then begins to button the long line of satin-covered buttons. She works quickly and though I’m prepared to suck anything in that holds her up or slows her down, there’s no hesitation and no snag or delay. The dress cups my body like a caress. Even before she’s finished buttoning, before I steal a first peek in the mirror, I feel like a fairy-tale princess.

  There’s a gentle tug at my back as she arranges the train into a rounded arrow of Chantilly lace dense with flowers behind me. Next she retrieves the ivory headpiece from the bed and lifts it up so that she can place it on my head like a crown. Then she fusses with the floor-length floral lace veil so that it skims lightly over my shoulders and flows down my back to puddle with the train.

  I’ve never felt so feminine or so elegant. For the first time I can see myself walking down an aisle to a waiting Spencer.

  My mother kisses my cheek before stepping back to take me in. “It fits you perfectly. We won’t even have to hem it.” I flush slightly as I remember my delight at how many times the hem had to be doubled up when Bree wore it. A reminder that she wasn’t a Jameson by birth or blood. Because real Jameson women are tall.

  “Just like it fit you,” I say, and am surprised when I see her grimace.

  “Better.” She says this forcefully as if saying it strongly enough will make it so. “Here, come look.”

  I follow her toward the full-length mirror but I move even more slowly than I need to, afraid that the way it looks can’t possibly live up to the way it feels, but it does. The satin clings to my shoulders and shows a creamy expanse of chest without being at all revealing. My neck might belong to a swan. And the bodice drops and nips in giving me a 1940s pinup waist then falls to the ground in soft satiny folds. The lace mantilla is a sheer work of art in a fall of flowers that float over the satin. Every inch of it is beautiful. And in it so am I.

  “Do you need a hand in there?” There are footsteps. “You shouldn’t have left me out here with the bottle I think I’m getting . . . Oh!” Bree stands in the bedroom doorway blinking rapidly and I’m not sure whether she really has already had too much to drink or she’s blinking back tears. “I’m very relieved that we’re talking to each other again,” she says with a slight slur that answers that question. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to tell you how gorgeous you look.”

  “She does, doesn’t she?” My mother’s voice is thick. Her eyes shimmer with tears.

  “Don’t move. Be right back.” Bree races out to the living room and comes back with her phone. Then she comes over and stands before us. “Stand over in front of the armoire so I can take some pictures of the two of you.” She waves us in the right direction.

  Usually my mother avoids cameras but she swipes at the tears and says, “I’d love that. Here, Bree can pick up the train, you hold up the hem, Lauren, and I’ll keep the veil in place.” We do as she directs, sidestepping toward the armoire with its burled wood and antique brass handles. Then Bree steps back. My mother moves up beside me and slips her arm around my waist. I feel the deep breath that she draws and turn to face her while Bree backs up farther and lifts the phone into position. “Are you all right?”

  My mother nods. “I am. I just don’t ever want to forget this moment.” She hesitates. Her smile falters. “Whatever happens, no matter what it is or how it sounds, promise me that you’ll remember how much I love you.”

  This does not make me feel better. “Mom . . .”

  “Okay, you two. Smile!” Bree is already snapping photos and so I flash my best smile and tilt my head at its best angle. I tickle my mother’s waist slightly in an attempt to make her laugh or at least smile.

  “That’s it!” Bree exclaims without a shred of detectable resentment or envy or anger or any of the other things that we’ve come to expect from each other. For a second I feel like myself in a way I haven’t since I left for New York and Bree didn’t. In this moment, I believe that Bree and I can find our way back to what we once had, that Spencer and I will live happily ever after, and that my mother is young and healthy enough that I can get my imagination to give it a rest. A few too-solemn words at a moment like this are to be expected.

  “Can we take some photos in the living room? The light’s better out there.” My mother is smiling again. And I’m wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. It’s crazy to look for trouble.

  “Sure.” I walk in bridal steps because, after all, I’m wearing a wedding dress and because it would feel sacrilegious to do anything remotely undignified. We sip another glass of champagne each and then Bree arranges my mom and me in a number of different poses. When my mother tells her to come join us for a selfie, I’m okay with it. In fact, since I possess the longest arms I snap the photos, careful to smile elegantly in the first three or four. I can’t vouch for or be held responsible for the last few because I’m giddy from the dress, the champagne, and my mother’s happiness at having Bree and me in the same room, talking and laughing together. I mean, neither of us are about to call the other a bitch for fear that the other won’t remember it was an endearment, and I think we’re both afraid this is only a temporary truce fueled by champagne and THE DRESS, but this feels like a legitimately happy moment.

  Tires sound on the drive and we look at one another like little girls about to get caught playing dress-up. “Is Spencer allowed to see me in this? Isn’t that supposed to be bad luck?”

  I’m trying to turn to race back to the bedroom but there’s a lot of train and dress that has to go with me. Bree goes to the front window and looks out as a car door slams. “Oh, it’s okay,” she says. “It’s not the guys.”

  I’m still trying to get myself moving when footsteps sound on the deck. There’s a knock on the front door.

  “I’ll get it,” Bree says while my mother attempts to straighten me and the dress out.

  I’m half turned when the door opens. A male voice says, “Oh.”

  “Oh,” Bree says in surprise. “Hi.”

  My mother freezes. Not helping as I struggle to turn and face the door.

  The man is tall and has dark
hair peppered with gray. He looks familiar, like maybe I’ve met him before or seen him in a photo or on television or something. He stares at me without speaking for the longest time as if I’m some sort of apparition. I flush and take a step backward and my toe gets caught in the hem of the dress. I turn to ask my mother for help, but she’s looking at the man and shaking her head and holding her hands to her mouth as if she’s too stunned to speak.

  The stranger steps closer. “You look even more beautiful in that dress than your mother did. And that’s saying a lot.”

  Bree looks back and forth between the man and me.

  “You were at my parents’ wedding?” I can barely get the words out.

  “Yes, I was.” He looks directly at my mother even though I can practically feel her trying to hide behind me.

  “I take it she didn’t say anything to you about me.” I hear hurt and disappointment along with a note of anger—none of which you expect from a total stranger. He’s still looking at me in that too-intense way. Like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, but that I’m breaking his heart, too. Which makes no sense.

  “Were you a friend of my father’s?” I ask, still waiting for my mother to speak or explain.

  She clasps my arm more tightly. When she speaks she’s speaking to him, not me. “No, not now. Not yet. You weren’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. You shouldn’t have come without calling.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says almost gently. But it doesn’t really sound as if he is. “I did send you a text earlier, but frankly we’ve already lost forty years.” He looks at my mother in a way I’ve never seen anyone look at her before. Like he knows her better than I do. Like he can see right through her. He’s not violent or threatening, but it’s clear he has no intention of leaving until he does whatever he came here to do. He’s made my mother cry and I don’t even know why.

  Bree bristles as he comes closer. All three of us crick our necks to look up at him.

  “Who are you?” I ask, forcing myself to meet his eyes. “What are you doing here? And how do you know my mother and father?”

  He sighs. My mother’s eyes flutter shut. I feel her sway beside me.

  “Are you a relative of his? My mother said he was an only child.”

  “He was. In fact, he still is.” His eyes look so familiar.

  “I’m not related to your father,” he says so quietly I think I might be imagining the whole thing. “I am your father.”

  Eighteen

  For a nanosecond I am Luke Skywalker hearing Darth Vader’s claim to fatherhood. Like Luke, I assume that it’s a lie. Only my mother doesn’t deny it.

  My arm falls from my mother’s shoulder. I drop back a step then two. Numb with shock and disbelief I tremble where I stand as she and this man, whose name is Jake Warner, deliver their versions of the past. A past that bears no resemblance to the one I’ve lived.

  I try to absorb the details of the story that unfolds, but it’s hard to think when you can’t catch your breath and your head is spinning. Revisions are one thing. The complete rewriting of your life, your world, and the people in it? That’s something else entirely.

  I stared at a picture of a younger version of this man all these years. I grieved his loss and the fact that I never had the chance to know him, when in fact I could have. The hair at his temples has grayed and lines radiate from the corners of his eyes and bracket his mouth, but it’s him. The father I longed for and could never have. The father I learned to live without for no reason other than what? My mother’s fear of revealing the mistakes she’d made? Her determination to prove she could go it alone? I don’t even care what her reasons were though they’re flowing out of her mouth now, urgent and unchecked, like a river flooding its banks.

  “I was afraid my father would force me to put you up for adoption. That’s what he wanted me to do, that was his plan.” And then, “I didn’t find out I was pregnant until months after I ran from the church although I was already pregnant then and didn’t know it. Maybe there were just too many pregnancy hormones swirling around inside me to think clearly that day.”

  I fall back another step. “So you’re going to blame all this on hormones? On me?” Though I’m burning with rage my voice is frigid. My heart is a hammer.

  “No, of course not. I’m just trying to explain what I think happened. Why I was so emotional and not thinking straight. How I could panic and run from marrying someone I loved so much and then could never see my way back.” She drops her eyes. “And when I wanted to reach out it was too late. He was marrying someone else. Having children of his own. I . . .”

  Children who were more important than me. “How could it ever be too late to tell my father that I existed? How could you lie to me my entire life?”

  In that former life, the one that has just been blown to smithereens, the tortured expression on my mother’s face, her tears, her terror would have made me want to comfort her.

  But at this moment it’s all about me.

  She puts her hand on my arm and I pull away.

  “I’m sorry I’ve missed all these years,” my father says. “Genuinely sorry.”

  I blink away my tears and look at him. At his strong, even features, at the whiskey-colored eyes that I inherited from him and have been staring at in the mirror all these years.

  I have his nose, too, slightly too long and maybe a smidge too thin. The same wave that’s in his hair.

  He pulls out a picture of his mother around the age I am now and it’s like looking at myself in the mirror. My mother is tall and lean and dark haired so I always assumed, and was glad, that I looked like her.

  I feel like a kidnap victim who’s been brainwashed to identify with their kidnapper, one of those people grabbed and locked up who comes to accept what is a travesty as normal and who is suddenly reunited with her real family and doesn’t know how to behave.

  “Lauren.” My mother’s voice breaks. Her face is red and mottled. Her eyes are twin pools of guilt and sorrow and I’m viciously glad that she’s in pain. “His wife . . . she . . . she wasn’t well.”

  “What does that have to do with me? With telling me?”

  “Lauren.” Bree’s voice takes me by surprise. I’ve been so focused on the appearance of a father I never knew existed that I forgot she was here. “This is so . . . huge. Maybe you should all sit down together and, I don’t know, figure out a way to talk through this and work it out.”

  “Work it out?” I turn on her. “Talk it out?” In this moment it’s the very last thing I’d ever consider. “What planet are you living on?”

  Every instinct I have clamors for me to get out of there and as far away as possible. I need a cave. A place to lick my wounds and come to terms with my altered reality. I have a father!

  I turn to flee but my shoe gets caught in THE DRESS. “If you really want to help, get me out of here and out of this dress!” Even I can hear the panic in my voice as I shriek at Bree.

  I half expect her to argue, in which case I’m going to kick and rip myself free and the hell with THE DRESS. The thought is viciously appealing. Because really, given all the untruths now coming to light maybe this dress isn’t anything special at all. Maybe it’s just a dress that my mother has made up stories about. My brain is already off and running when Bree takes my arm and helps me move off the fabric then steps around me to gather up the train. My mother is still frozen in place when I grab the train out of Bree’s hands and prepare to make a break for the bedroom.

  * * *

  “Lauren, please,” my father—it almost hurts to even think the word—says. “I’m sorry everything spilled out this way. I truly regret taking you by surprise. I just couldn’t wait any longer to know you. And I didn’t realize a day would make that big a difference.” Or maybe he was afraid my mother would find a way not to tell me at all. “Please. Stay, like your friend said, so th
at we can figure this out.” He takes a step closer. “I know you’re upset and rightfully so. But let’s at least get acquainted. Start getting to know each other. We have a lot of lost years to make up for.”

  Blood whooshes in my ears. It’s all I can hear. That and the frantic pounding of my heart. I swallow and prepare to turn. Before I can move, the front door opens. My head jerks up. Spencer and Clay walk in.

  “Don’t look!” The words are automatic. I cover myself as if I’m naked and not just wearing a wedding dress he’s not supposed to see. In truth I might as well be naked given how torn apart and exposed I feel.

  “What’s going on?” Spencer strides to my side. “Are you okay?”

  I look at my father, who doesn’t seem to know what to do next, then at my mother, who’s still standing there, mute. Even Bree is slack-jawed, unsure what’s supposed to happen.

  “No. I’m not okay. I need to get out of this dress. I don’t care if I ever see it again. And I want to go home.” I hear how childish the words sound and I don’t care about that, either. I feel like a child, bereft and powerless. If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m going to dissolve into tears. Or throw myself on the ground, kicking and screaming in the kind of tantrum I, as the only child of a struggling single mother, was too aware of the load she carried to throw.

  “But what happened?” He looks around again as if searching for a weapon or some other threat.

  “Bottom line? This man”—I point to Jake Warner—“is my father. The father my mother told me died before I was born, when in truth she jilted him at the altar and never told him that I existed.” I wait for this soap opera plot that is my new reality to sink in before I continue. “The person I have loved and trusted my entire life—the person who taught me to never tell a lie—has been lying to me and everybody else for forty years.”

  His eyes are wide but he doesn’t waste time asking for more detail. He takes my elbow and says, “Right, then. Let’s get you out of that dress.”