Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger

by Beth Harbison

  An uncharitable part of her saw that she would be shaking her head and clucking her tongue at the dumb girl who’d ignored every sign that had been offered to her on a silver platter because she was so damn eager to wear a gorgeous dress and saunter down the aisle to a gorgeous man who was waiting there to take her hand in marriage.

  Oh, the sucker, she’d think to myself, she sold her soul to the devil, then tried to marry him in God’s house. Actually, no, she wasn’t that religious. Or that kind. Stupid bitch, she’d more likely scoff. Um, hello! It’s not just about the hand in marriage on the one party day, it’s about a whole lot of stuff, a lifetime of stuff, including “keep thee only unto her.” Look at her crying like she’s really surprised by all this! She wanted the nice sheep so badly she didn’t care that she could see his wolf fangs behind the mask.

  Well. Maybe Metaphorical Mean Quinn was right.

  She looked around at the wedding announcements—Joanne and Bernard Barton proudly announce the loving union of their daughter, Quinn Morgan Barton …—and the clouds of white satin and tulle that filled Talk of the Gown, her family’s bridal shop, where she had spent the past six months lovingly sewing her dream wedding gown, which now had dried mascara tears down the front of it and fucking gum on the back from when she was sitting on the curb outside the church, trying to figure out her life.

  That’s how all great decisions are made, right? Winston Churchill probably ground his coattails into three hundred years’ worth of grime on a Downing Street corner and questioned, Should we just give up and have some bratwurst? Ja or nein?

  But, actually, she didn’t even have her own last-minute thoughts and hesitations. She couldn’t even hang her hat on that small an accomplishment.

  Her decision was handed to her by someone else instead. Well, not her decision—even though she was essentially left with only the one possibility, it was her own. But her options were certainly presented to her by the wrong person, in the wrong way, at the worst possible time. There she was, literally on her way to the altar, and her options were practically hand-engraved and sealed in an envelope that read Pride—clearly marked so she could take it or leave it forever.

  As long as she lived, she would never forget the way it felt when Frank said she should stop while she still could. She’d thought it was a joke at first, yet she’d known—in that horrible gut way you sometimes know things—that it wasn’t.

  And now here she was, writing note after note after note, the same nine words; her only explanation to the two hundred guests who had come to see the fairy-tale wedding she’d dreamed about for years:

  Chose the wrong guy, gave him the wrong finger.

  She stopped. With maybe twelve more notes to go, she just stopped. And she went to the phone and dialed the number that was more familiar than her own.

  It rang twice before there was an answer.

  “Hi,” she said, out of habit more than salutation. “It’s me. I hate how everything happened today. And I totally hate how I feel now. I don’t think I can get through this going back to my house and going to sleep and picking up my life like…” Her voice wavered and faded. She closed her eyes tight for a moment before taking a steadying breath. “Can you come to the shop and pick me up? I need to get out of here. Just get in the car and drive as far away as possible. Let’s go to Vegas.”

  She only had to wait a moment for his answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said, and swallowed hard over the lump in her throat, looking at the work she’d done and knowing she was going to just pick up and go and leave it for her mother to clean up. Right now she just didn’t care. She couldn’t. “I’ll see you out front.”

  She hung up the phone and picked up a few pieces of silvery wedding gift wrapping and tossed them in the general direction of the trash can. Some fell by the side, but she didn’t pick them up.

  Instead, she took a length of receipt paper from the cash register, pulled it out, and wrote a note to her mother on the back:

  Gone away for a few days. Don’t worry, seriously. I’m okay. I’ll be back. Sorry to leave the paper all over.

  Then she set it down on the counter and went out front to wait for Frank.

  Chapter 2

  Present Day, Ten Years Later

  “Misssss Quinn!”

  I’d know that voice anywhere. Dorothy Morrison—grandmother of Burke and Frank Morrison—the biggest, brightest character in town. Everyone’s Auntie Mame. She had more energy than a toddler, and I didn’t think there was a person in Middleburg—or in the world—who didn’t love her.

  But I hadn’t seen her for a while. Actually, I’d wondered what she was up to. “Misssss Dottie,” I said, in her same tone.

  She bustled over to the counter, behind which I was sorting threads, and leaned down on her elbows. Which, actually, wasn’t such a far lean, since she was five feet tall, tops.

  “I have got news,” she said. “Big news.”

  I set down the threads I was sorting, careful to keep the greens in order—Kelly, mossy, sea. “Do you?”

  Now, Dottie always had something to say, so a declaration like this didn’t necessarily prepare one for a bombshell. On more than one occasion she’d circled the town with pronouncements about saving a robin that had fallen from its nest or finding a “bone” she was sure was a relic from the Civil War, despite the fact that it looked a lot more like a Meaty Bone dog treat to the rest of the world.

  Dottie was eccentric.

  And delightful. Truly. Never mind that her grandson had completely broken my heart, I had nothing but happy associations with her. It was impossible not to. She was just that kind of person.

  “You will never guess,” she said, peering over the counter at me. A waft of Estée Lauder’s Beautiful nudged over me. One of her only nods to the past couple of decades.

  “Did you save another robin?” I asked.

  “No.” She smiled. “Well, yes, but that’s not the news. This is big. Guess again, Quinn, go on!”

  “You got the parlor wallpapered?” Maybe she forgot she’d told me that last month.

  She looked at me as if I had just told her I was giving up the shop to join the circus. “That was quite a long time ago.” She screwed up her brow. “I’ll give you one clue: I may need to borrow something.”

  So, okay, in retrospect I see why she thought it was a good clue, but at that moment, she could have meant anything. She could have meant she’d smashed some Waterford and wanted to borrow my vacuum cleaner; she could have meant she was picking up her ancient sister from the airport and wanted to borrow my car; or she could have meant she was about to sneeze and wanted to “borrow” one of the embroidered handkerchiefs in the case before her.

  “I just don’t know, Dottie,” I said, shaking my head. “I give up. Tell me.”

  She pressed her lips together, and her cheeks bloomed like apples. “I’m getting married!”

  “Married?” I echoed dumbly. I hadn’t seen this coming. At all. This was crazy. Dorothy had rattled around that old farm for almost twenty years since her husband had died, without one date that I knew of, without any hint or gossip in town about her fraternizing with any man. “What do you mean?”

  She gave a spike of laughter and her expression sharpened into absolute clarity. “How many things could that mean, Quinn? I’m getting married. M. A. R. R. I. E. D.”

  I didn’t want to insult her by letting out all the confusion that came first to mind. “To who?”

  “Well.” Apparently satisfied that I was taking her seriously now, she gave a secret smile. “I met him online.”

  “You’re online?”

  “Good lord, child, I’m not that out of touch! Just because I don’t carry an ePad around, doesn’t mean I don’t understand what’s going on in the world of technology!”

  I had to smile at that. “Point taken.” I stood up and ushered her over to the sitting area—i.e., several very comfy boudoir chairs outside the fitting room—that
we had set up for those who generally had to sit and wait for brides to try on hundreds of different dresses, then try them again, and dither, and beam, and hope, and dream. “Have a seat and start from the beginning.”

  This was what I’d done almost every day of my life for more than a decade—I welcomed nervous/happy/excited/terrified/etc. women into my place of business and tried to make them feel good about themselves. Most of them were brides-to-be, some were prom dates, and there were smatterings of other Honored Guests of Special Occasions, but almost without exception their roles all carried high emotion of one sort or another.

  Usually it was happy excitement.

  Not always, though.

  In this case, I wasn’t sure at first.

  “I didn’t want to tell anyone.” She perched on the edge of the chair, so excited she could clearly barely contain herself. “You just know they’re all going to say there’s no fool like an old fool.”

  “No!” But yes. I could imagine people saying that.

  Dottie knew too, the look she gave me showed me that. “Well, one night after perhaps a little too much whiskey”—no delicate sherry or brandy for Dottie, she was a whiskey girl all the way—“I decided to click on one of the dating advertisements next to my list of Facebook friends.”

  Dottie had Facebook too?

  This was too much to process.

  For one thing, if she was on Facebook, why hadn’t she friended me?

  “It was for Silver ’n’ Gold Singles,” she went on, then turned the corners of her mouth down in a mock frown. “Doesn’t that sound absolutely ghastly?”

  It kind of did.

  Fortunately I didn’t have to commit to my agreement, as she kept on talking. “But I figured, what the hell, I’m silver and gold at this point, and most definitely single.”

  “Okay…?”

  “Oh, stop looking at me like I’m making up stories! I know that look! Do you think I don’t see it all the time? Heavens, girl, I am not a fool, I know people are skeptical about some of the things I say, but I never, ever tell a lie. I may have embellished here and there, possibly obfuscated, but have you ever known me to tell a lie? Come on, be honest.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Good, then we can move on to business. Because I, Quinn, am telling you the truth when I say I am going to need the fanciest dern wedding dress you have ever made, and I’m going to need it a month from yesterday.”

  “Wow.” Such an understatement. She wasn’t kidding. I couldn’t swear she wasn’t crazy—this still wasn’t adding up to the Dorothy Morrison I knew.

  “Wow indeed.” She reached into her purse, an old black leather cavern of a bag that Thelma Ritter might have carried and called a pocketbook. She pulled out a smartphone and started moving her pudgy fingers across the screen as quick as a kid playing a video game. Then she triumphantly turned it to me and said, “Here he is! Lyle! Isn’t he handsome?”

  Lyle. This was becoming real before my very eyes and it was cute and disconcerting.

  Lyle was handsome, actually. And easily a decade and a half—maybe more—younger than Dottie. Not exactly a baby, he was in his late fifties, close to sixty or just over the mark, I’d have to guess, but he wasn’t the octogenarian I might have expected, had I expected any of this.

  He had salt-and-pepper hair, more salt than pepper, and the smooth forehead of the fully Botoxed. But his eyes had a kind crinkle to them and a certain sincerity in them that I wouldn’t have expected if someone had just been telling me this story without showing me the picture.

  There’s no fool like an old fool. Poor Dottie, she was right. People were bound to leap to the worst conclusions first. But maybe this was on the up and up. I kind of got that feeling looking him in the photographic eyes.

  Not that I hadn’t been fooled by eyes before, of course, so what did I know? But those revealed a man who had smiled a lot, laughed a lot, and it was hard not to see a smiling, laughing man as a kind one.

  “He’s hilarious,” Dottie said, as if reading my mind. “Does the best Bob Barker imitation.”

  I laughed. Bob Barker? I guess you would know a Bob Barker imitation if you heard it, though who would ever expect it? That was almost like doing an excellent Kristy McNichol—it would be familiar to some, but why bother?

  Then again, the answer was right there in Dottie’s eyes. Bother because the right person is going to think it’s hilarious.

  The right person would get it.

  In my business I see a lot of right people, and a lot of wrong people. It’s terrible when there’s one of each in a couple, because you know someone will end up with a big heartache. At one point I started doing an x-stitch (idea being I was pre-disastering them so they’d be okay) on the back hems of gowns I imagined were going to lead to disaster, and though I didn’t know how all of them ended up, and some of them were still playing out, I knew enough to know I’d been more right than wrong.

  I’d stopped that, though, because my friend Glenn called me a ghoul and said maybe I was jinxing people and, believe me, I always, always hope my clients have a happy ending.

  It’s just that, all too often, one person is getting more out of the relationship than the other. There are obvious cases of wealthy men and shallow younger women—though who’s using whom more in those cases is hard to define—but sometimes it’s a wildly enthusiastic, nurturing bride I see, eagerly asking a distracted fiancé’s approval for all of her decisions about the wedding, and I just know what that’s going to look like down the road. Excessive attention to the seasoning of a pot roast, followed by the subtle but distinct letdown of disinterest. High-thread-count sheets, carefully washed with lingerie fabric softener, only to be met by the exhausted, beer-breathed body of a husband who falls asleep during foreplay. Clock-watching primping with the anticipation of greeting him at the end of the day, dressed in something he once called pretty, only to see the hands wind around the clock like something in a cartoon, until finally she calls him and is told he’s working late.

  Is he?

  It’s not just women I see headed for doom, though. Marriage is an equal opportunity for disappointment. Sure, obviously I’ve seen the lithe young brides, ordering custom dresses and paying with a black Amex card bearing a man’s name, while talking on their cell phones to someone whose male voice is decidedly younger and sexier than their intended’s.

  But there are more subtle disappointments showing themselves in the shop every day as well: the girl who insists on extracting her fiancé’s opinion, only to trounce it the minute he produces one. The bride who bullies her mother and bridal party so much they’re like head-shy dogs, flinching at her every gesture and word.

  And then there’s my favorite: the Ace Manipulator. It was so subtle at first I didn’t detect it: the bride who seems so meek initially that her groom brings her in with the gentlest lead, his chest puffing out bigger with every small, modest objection she makes to “fanfare.”

  These are women who will do whatever it takes to please that man until her retractable nails are firmly in his back. You’d be amazed at the subtle but steady trajectory of their steeliness, from acquiescent at first, to what can only be described as testing (“What if I can’t make lasagna like your mom’s, you won’t call off the whole wedding, will you?”), to the last I see of them before they start their life together: “You agreed to this, and this is how we’re doing it! God! What is your problem?”

  It doesn’t take long for people to get beaten down.

  Which was why I never tried the whole relationship/marriage thing again. Once burned, and all that. Look, I went into my relationship with Burke with a completely open heart. It was all his for the taking. I didn’t read, or follow, The Rules, there was no hard-to-get in my playbook. I loved him, I loved touching him, tasting him, pleasing him, nourishing him in every way I could. You could even call it selfish in a way because I, myself, got so much out of being indispensable to him. It never felt like I was sacrificing myself
in favor of him, but more that everything I did for him was rewarded with adoration.

  To this day, though, I don’t know if I was even the only one who felt that way.

  And that, right there, is the problem with betrayal. For five minutes of your life you’re pissed at the other person, but the bulk of the response is to the doubt you have left in yourself. In your own judgment.

  In your trust in anyone else, ever.

  Because who are you left with at the end of a relationship? Only you. The other person is gone—their choice, your choice, mutual choice, whatever, they’re gone—and you have only yourself to fall back on.

  And if you have given yourself—whole heart, mind, body, and soul—to someone who betrayed you, perhaps spent months or even years betraying you, well, how do you even fully trust the meter on the gas pump at your local Shell station?

  Everything becomes questionable, because you went so long unquestioning. Making idiotically sincere declarations like, “Oh, he’s home tonight because he’s tired, poor thing. He worked outside for so long today.…” Then you have to wonder if the person you were talking to knew better, was laughing at you behind your back.

  Poor little fool.

  Nope. For me, it wasn’t worth taking the chance. And I mean that seriously, not bitterly, not with crossed arms and a snarl, but it was just the decision I had made for myself. I had great friends and I got plenty of relationship drama—and intrigue and even the occasional truly romantic story—at the shop.

  Like now.

  For Dottie, I didn’t know if this was going to be truly romantic or drama, but so far it was certainly intrigue.

  And I was damn glad it wasn’t my own.

  “What does Lyle do for a living?” I asked, bracing myself for just about any answer, including “magician.”

  Actually, I think I was kind of expecting magician. He had the kind of face that would love looking at itself under a top hat and over a cape.

  She fidgeted with a screen display of earrings on the counter. “He’s independently wealthy. Doesn’t have to work at all!”