My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

by Wendy Wax

  I could cry with gratitude. If I weren’t already in love with him I would be now.

  “Lauren, honey . . .” My mother steps toward us.

  “No.” I clutch Spencer’s arm as I face her. “I’m taking off this dress and I’m leaving. I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t even look at you.”

  “Oh no. You can’t mean that.” My mother blinks back tears. My father looks as if he’s watching a train wreck he doesn’t know how to stop. “I know I was wrong not to tell you, but everything I did I did to protect you. And Jake.”

  My mother wrings her hands. My father moves closer to her.

  “You may have told yourself that, but you had no right to keep my father from me.” I sniff back what I tell myself are tears of anger. “And to think I’ve been worrying that you’ve got some horrible illness.”

  Brianna steps up on my other side. “I know this is a terrible shock. But you two are a unit. She’s your mother. She’s . . .”

  “No.” I turn my death stare on Brianna. “The fact that we managed to survive each other’s company today doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do. Or how to feel. At least your parents were honest. They didn’t act all selfless and noble when they were lying to your face.”

  “But, Lauren . . .” Bree’s voice drops to a whisper that I tune out.

  “Sweetheart . . .”

  I cut my mother off with a look then glower at her and my ex–best friend. “You always wanted to pretend she was your mother. Well, be my guest. You can have her.”

  I turn my back on both of them and sail into the bedroom on a wave of righteous indignation. Spencer follows in my wake.

  Five minutes later we’re packed. I stalk back through the living room stopping only long enough to ask my father—my father!!—if there’s a number where I can reach him. Because I’d like to spend some time with him and have a chance to know him. I watch my mother’s face crumple as he hands me his card and tells me that he’s staying at the Dogwood and in that moment I’m glad that she’s suffering. I raise my chin, avert my eyes, and make my exit.

  * * *

  Kendra

  I stand very still as the nuclear blast detonates in my heart and mushrooms outward annihilating everything. I may appear intact on the outside, but inside I am Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  I make no effort to stop Lauren or Spencer. He flashes me a look I don’t know him well enough to understand and stops to say something to Jake before he carries the suitcases outside. All I know is that there’s nothing I can say or do that will put things back the way they were. My face feels like Jake’s looks—pummeled and bruised, stark with pain. The soundtrack in my mind is Bonnie Tyler’s gritty rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I can practically feel the darkness obliterating the light.

  I want to run outside and beg them to come back. Want to beg Lauren not to drive in the state she’s in. But I know I’m the last person she’ll listen to right now and so I do and say nothing even after the car peels out of the driveway.

  The four of us who are left stand stupidly, not moving.

  “Do you want us to stay?” Bree asks though even she looks at me differently. “Is there something I can do?”

  I want to reassure her, tell her it will be okay, that we’ll talk later, that nothing’s really changed. But I just shake my head. There’s nothing to be done right now. At least nothing that will alter or erase what has taken place. I would give everything to rewind, so that I had already confessed to Lauren before she ever put on the dress. There might have been less drama, but would that have ended any differently? I doubt she would have even tried it on.

  “Okay. I’ll check in with you later.” Bree gives Clay a look and the two of them depart. I hear their cars start up and drive away.

  Jake and I stand in silence. I wish I could blame this all on him, but I’m too raw to even pretend the blame belongs anywhere but with me. I had close to forty years to at least attempt to find a way to tell Lauren and Jake about each other. Surely I could have figured out how to do that without damaging Jake’s marriage and his family further.

  A stronger, smarter person could have done it. But I took the easy way out. I ran and hid and buried my head in the sand. I take a deep, shaky breath and exhale sharply.

  I deserve what happened today. But Lauren doesn’t. And neither does the man standing in front of me.

  Finally I look Jake in the eye. “Not exactly what you were hoping for, was it?”

  “No.” He runs a hand through his hair in the way I still remember. His smile is small and wry. “Not even close.”

  I expel another breath of pent-up air. “It was exactly what I was afraid of.” I feel the prickle of tears, but I’m too numb, too exhausted, to shed them. “All these years I told myself I was doing the right thing for both of you. But maybe I’m just a coward and the only person I was really trying to protect was myself.”

  His sigh is sad and heavy with disappointment. “I don’t know, Kendra. Pretty much none of my life has gone as planned, starting with the day you ran from the church. But in my experience denial is no one’s friend. We’ll all just have to get through this the best we can. I’ve done without a lot of things. But I shouldn’t have had to do without my daughter.”

  “I’m sorry.” They’re the only words that come to me. They’re way too small and far too vague, but at the moment, they’re all I’ve got.

  As he walks out the door I sink into the nearest chair, too exhausted to stay on my feet a second longer. The sound of his car fades away and still I sit. If an artist were painting me now the finished piece would be titled Woman Postatomic Blast. Or Woman After Hiroshima. Or maybe even Woman Viewing Total Eclipse with Eyes Wide Open.

  Nineteen

  Lauren

  Without actually planning, or possibly thinking, I drive to the Dogwood Inn, which makes it my second trip to Manteo today. I take Budleigh past the front of the inn, where its namesake is in full bloom, then turn onto Essex, where I pull the rental car up to the curb. Spencer follows me through the side yard and up the back steps. Wooden rocking chairs face the outdoor fireplace. Trellises that separate the back porch from the kitchen are threaded with wisteria and confederate jasmine. The latest in a long line of stray cats that all answer to the name “Cocoa” raises his head from his seat on one of the rocking chairs. His ears flick in casual interest as he blinks sleepily at us. Other houses are visible across the bright-green side yard but they’re comfortably removed.

  Spencer does a 360, taking it all in. “Very nice.”

  “Yeah. It’s a 1919 Craftsman. Deanna spent almost two years renovating and finding period-appropriate details and furnishings.”

  When I pull open the back door that leads into the kitchen without knocking Spencer starts with surprise.

  “I promise we’re not breaking and entering. This door is always unlocked. Guests can come in late at night or from the garage apartments to get a snack or drink or to hang out in the living room.”

  “Okay,” Spencer says. “So we’re not in Kansas anymore. And we’re definitely not in Manhattan.”

  As we step inside I wish more than anything that we were in New York. That I’d never been forced to discover that my mother lied to me my entire life. Though I guess that would also mean I still wouldn’t know my father.

  The galley kitchen to our right is empty. The office door is open on our left. Deanna gets up from her desk. One look at my face and she says, “What happened?”

  “Did you know that Jake Warner was my father?”

  She blinks, but in far more surprise than Cocoa the cat. “They ran into each other here last Saturday when Kendra came to cook breakfast. They said they both grew up in Richmond but . . . Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. They were engaged only she cut and ran. She left him at the altar. She never even told him about me.”

&n
bsp; I see the struggle on Deanna’s face. She doesn’t want to believe it. “I can tell you’re serious. But I know your mother. She must have had good reasons.”

  “I thought I knew her, too.” Once again I wish that this were some awful joke or misunderstanding. “She had reasons, all right. But that doesn’t make them good ones.”

  I keep drawing breaths but I don’t think any of the oxygen is reaching my brain. “I’m supposed to be the one who makes things up for a living, but she’s been spewing fiction my entire life.” I look Deanna in the eye. “You’re her best friend. And she never told you?”

  Deanna shakes her head, her confusion clear. I know the feeling. As angry and freaked out as I am I still can’t quite take in the enormity of it all.

  “We were both twenty-one and right out of college when we met. People came here to find themselves or to start fresh. I’d heard her husband had died. She never said otherwise.” Dee exhales and shakes her head again. “Wow.”

  There’s a beat of silence as she no doubt reflects on all the times she might have asked a question or my mother might have offered an explanation. Then she looks from me to Spencer and back. “I take it this is your fiancé.”

  “Oh yes. Sorry. Deanna, this is Spencer Harrison. Spencer, Deanna Sanborne.”

  She takes his hand and shakes it. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Ditto.” Spencer gives her a smile.

  “Quite an introduction you’re getting to the Outer Banks.”

  His grin goes a little crooked. “Can’t argue with that.”

  I watch them assess each other, but it’s as if I’m floating somewhere up near the ceiling. A punctured balloon slowly leaking air, but with a bird’s-eye view. Spencer keeps stealing looks at me and I know he’s trying to figure out what I need from him. But how can he figure out what even I don’t know?

  “So, what can I do for you?” Deanna asks.

  “Well, I needed to be somewhere besides the Sandcastle. And I’d like to get to know my . . .” I swallow. “My father.” Thinking the word is surreal. Saying it is even stranger. I’m forty years old and this is the first time I’ve ever uttered those words as more than a prayer or a wish that I had one. “Do you have a room for us?”

  I see the no on her face before she speaks. “I wish I did. But there’s a wedding tomorrow afternoon at Mount Olivet. The bride and groom and their immediate families checked in yesterday. They’re staying through Monday.”

  “Oh.” I deflate further.

  “I can make some calls to double-check, but it’s a big wedding and I’m pretty sure the other B and Bs in Manteo are full.” She thinks for a minute. “The closest hotels are the Surf Side and the Sea Spray but those are pretty bare bones and they’re near your mom.” She rejects this even before I shake my balloon head. “Or, you could head a bit north to Duck. The Sanderling’s very nice. I could give the manager a call. Or I could check with Clay to see if any of their beach rentals are vacant.”

  The idea of staying in a strange place right now—when my past has been yanked out from under me—makes my stomach turn. This is not the moment I want to feel like a tourist.

  Dee reaches out and wraps her arms around me. I feel her shaking her head again even as she pulls me tight. “I am well and truly gobsmacked. I can only imagine how you must be reeling.”

  Her sympathy brings tears to my eyes and I sniff in a fruitless attempt to hold them back. I’ve known Deanna virtually since birth. She was a tenant at Snug Harbor when we first came to Nags Head. We shared the Sandcastle with her in that first winter after it had been built when the owner was looking to put someone in it. She stayed on in later years because my mother couldn’t afford it on her own. She was the first person besides my mother that I knew. The tension in her arms tells me she feels almost as shocked by my mother’s secret past as I am.

  “Listen, why don’t you two have something cold to drink?” She throws open the mini-fridge that’s always stocked so guests can help themselves—and pulls out two bottled waters and a Coke. “And maybe a snack.” She motions toward the triple-chocolate cake under a glass dome on the counter that I recognize as one of my mother’s, and my lips quiver. “Well, at least a cold drink.” She puts a bottled water in each of our hands. “You’re welcome to hang out in the living room. Or maybe you’d rather sit outside on the porch? It’s a gorgeous day.”

  I nod numbly and she holds open the kitchen door for us.

  “Give me a few minutes to make some calls and see what I can come up with,” she says as Spencer and I drop into rockers across from each other.

  I’m vaguely aware of the sunshine and the chirping of birds and the soft breeze that wafts through the porch, but I’m still slightly detached and floating above it all. Cocoa springs up into my lap, pads around my stomach, then curls into my arms. I stroke him absently as I rock and stare into the unlit fireplace. If I had a lap to curl up in I’d be in it.

  “Are you all right?” Spencer asks.

  “Not really.”

  Spencer runs a hand over his face, scrubs at his eyes.

  “You don’t look so good, either,” I observe.

  “Yeah, well. I’ve never felt quite this helpless. I hate how blindsided you were today. I keep flashing on how I’d feel if my parents suddenly told me I was adopted. Or, I don’t know, that they stole me from a hospital nursery or something.”

  “You look exactly like your father.”

  “Yeah, well, you look a lot like yours, too.”

  I rock a bit faster as I try to come to grips with what’s happened. How despite my hair-trigger imagination and all the things it has dredged up in my lifetime, it never even suspected anything remotely like this. “The thing I keep thinking is how could my mother have done this? And how could I not have known? I mean, she’s the one person I’ve never doubted. If you had asked me, Who do you know who always does the right thing and puts others first, my answer would have been ‘my mother.’ I’m starting to doubt my instincts. Maybe I’m not the judge of character I’ve always thought.”

  “I hate that you’re looking at me right now when you’re saying that.” His tone is gentle but nowhere near teasing. “But it seems she did do what she thought was the right thing.”

  “I don’t see how keeping a child from knowing its father is the right thing—even if others could be hurt by it. And if I could be this wrong about my own mother how many other people have I been wrong about? For all I know you could be a serial killer. Or maybe the doorman at my building really is a spy.”

  He laughs. “I’ve met Tom and he’s no spy. Unless they’ve started teaching that Long Island accent in spy school.”

  I smile and rock a little slower. I watch Spencer from inside the thin rubber sides of my deflating balloon wondering how after all the bad boys I was attracted to I ended up with someone so sweet and well intentioned. If he weren’t here right now I’d be . . . I can’t even let myself think about how that would feel. I draw a deep breath. “I . . . I really can’t believe this.”

  He nods and rocks and I love him even more for not arguing one side or the other.

  “I honestly have no idea what I’m supposed to do next.”

  He rocks a time or two then says, “I don’t think you’re supposed to do anything. I think we just stay here for the rest of the week so that you can show me around and start getting to know your father.” He’s watching my face. “And then maybe we can go see your mother and sit down so that you can talk this out.”

  “No.” I don’t even let him finish. My refusal is a half bark that sends Cocoa vaulting off my lap. Even thinking about it makes my stomach roil. She made me feel as if I were her confidante, that we were a unit, in this life together. Only she didn’t share the most important information of all. And then there’s the fact that I can’t stop thinking about what my life could have been with a father in it. Grandparen
ts. I churn with what might have been, but wasn’t. “I don’t see what she could possibly say that could justify what she’s done.”

  A car door slams out on the street then footsteps sound on the porch behind me. Cocoa looks up from his spot near my feet then returns to licking himself. Spencer smiles slightly, and I turn to see Brianna approaching. Her step falters as our eyes meet.

  The kitchen door opens and Deanna walks out, but my eyes remain locked with Bree’s.

  “What are you doing here?” My tone is sharp and accusing. Whatever inroads we’ve made today are no match for the cauldron of emotions bubbling inside me.

  “I called her.” Deanna steps up between the rockers.

  “Why?” I try to back off the accusatory tone but I’m beyond vocal control or, it seems, control of any kind. The walls of my protective balloon burst, leaving me singed and exposed.

  “I told you this wasn’t a good idea,” Brianna says to Deanna. “Why don’t we just forget about it and . . .”

  “I called her because there are no available rooms in Manteo at the moment,” Deanna says. “I did find something in Kill Devil Hills, but I know you’d like to be here in town so that you can get acquainted with your . . . um, with Jake.”

  I don’t speak as I get to my feet. I can’t.

  “I’d be glad to have you stay in my cottage with me until the wedding party leaves,” Dee continues, “but I’ve turned the second bedroom into an office. You’d be sleeping on a pull-out couch.”

  Bree steps closer. “Deanna only called to see if any of Clay’s rental houses over near the sound might be open, but everything’s booked up.” She hesitates briefly. “Then I realized we have an extra bedroom. And I’d, we’d, be glad to have you.”

  I see the concern on Bree’s face and I think of all the times we were there for each other. Then I think of all the times we weren’t. This morning when we woke we were barely speaking to each other and while we may have mended a few fences, there are plenty of unresolved issues piled up between us.