Always a Bridesmaid

by Lizzie Shane

  She bumped shoulders with one of her female cousins, also trying to wedge her way through the crowd to offer her greetings and congratulations—and also with the hunted look of a young, single female at a family gathering that was all about love and marriages, though Lolly was five years younger than Parv and hadn’t yet reached the pitying sighs stage.

  “Hey, cuz. Haven’t seen you up here in a while.” In a nod to the occasion, Lolly wore a pink-and-white floral sundress that perfectly complemented the hot pink streaks in her hair and the garnet stud in her left nostril. She worked as a singer in a San Francisco night club when she wasn’t going to grad school to get her PhD in compositional theory.

  “Haven’t been up in a while,” Parv admitted. “The shop keeps me busy.” She nodded toward the band in an attempt to distract her cousin from further questioning. “Do you know this song?”

  “Young at Heart,” Lolly answered instantly. “Popularized by Frank Sinatra.”

  “That’s it. I knew I knew it.”

  The crowd around her parents shifted then and she was saved from further small talk when her father spotted her.

  “Parvati! There you are!”

  She didn’t have to force the smile that covered her face as the crowd parted to make way for her. “Happy Anniversary.” She stepped up to give her parents each a one armed hug before handing them the cupcake case. “I made these for you. Your favorite Godiva with raspberry ganache.”

  “Oh, how decadent.” Her mother clutched the case greedily. “Thank you, baby.” Though fifty-nine, she could easily have passed for a decade younger, especially when she smiled. Once a developmental psychologist and educational advisor to the governor of California, she had taken advantage of her own quasi-retirement to write a book on the psychology of highly successful individuals and had become the darling of the motivational speaking circuit.

  Her mother had literally written the book on success and Parv was a giant failure. There really should be awards given for that kind of irony.

  Their hugs were warm, swallowing her up with acceptance and pride and making her feel like even more of a fraud.

  “How was your drive?” her father asked. “Good?”

  “It was great.” The desire to spill the entire truth rose up in her throat but she swallowed it down. “Gorgeous day for it.”

  “You should move closer,” her mother urged, in a familiar refrain. “Expand north. Monterey needs premium coffee too. Or Cupertino. All those programmers keeping their long hours.”

  “I’m busy enough with the one shop. I can’t imagine opening another.” Especially since the first was about to go down in a blaze of debt.

  What were they going to say when they found out the truth? She knew they would always adore her, but she couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing them.

  “Arjun, Sunila, come take a picture with the Lieutenant Governor before he has to go.”

  Her parents each squeezed her hands affectionately before allowing themselves to be ushered off for a photo op. Parv hated the little flicker of relief she felt when they walked away. Relief that she wouldn’t have to lie to their faces anymore. As crowded as the terrace was, she might not even see them again before the party ended.

  She drifted off in search of a cocktail, determined to lay low, but she’d only made it three feet before a firm hand gripped her arm hard and the harried, permanently exhausted face of her middle sister appeared in front of her. “Asha.”

  “Have you seen Hunter?”

  Parv automatically looked down, checking around Asha’s legs by habit. “You’ve lost one of your sons?”

  “Lost is a strong word.” Asha’s anxious gaze continued to scan the crowds. A muckety-muck at a Silicon Valley powerhouse, Asha had married at twenty-two—downright late for Parv’s family—but waited until her thirties to start having children, so the twin terrors were now only five. Parv could only imagine the destruction they would wreak once they hit puberty.

  “Did you try the pool shed? That’s where Dad keeps the water pistols when the kids aren’t playing with them.”

  “Pool toys. Of course. I knew you’d know how to think like a child.”

  Asha darted off in the direction of the pool shed and Parv made a conscious effort not to be bothered by her last comment—that was just Asha, thoughtlessly insensitive. And yes, Parv was the fun aunt. That was a compliment, damn it. She wasn’t going to give herself a complex just because her four perfect sisters seemed convinced she’d never grown up past the age of eight.

  “Auntie Parv!”

  A slim form slammed into her side and Parvati’s arms closed automatically around her eldest niece in a hug. “Katie!” She squeezed, rocking Katie in a hug. “How’s my favorite soon-to-be USC freshman?”

  “Ah-may-zing,” Katie gushed, bouncing back to stand at arm’s length. “New student orientation starts next week and Jonah and I already moved into our new place. It’s so gorge, Aunt Parv. You’ll just die when you see it.”

  Parv felt a little flicker of concern. “You decided not to live in the dorms?”

  Katie made a face. “They wouldn’t let Jonah and me live together and I can’t imagine having a roommate that isn’t him.”

  “But living together, that’s…big.”

  “We have two bedrooms. Mom insisted. Though I’m sure she knows we’re, you know, but this way she and Dad can pretend we aren’t.”

  “It’s good that you have your own space. Going away to college…a lot can change.” Though living with her high school boyfriend off campus, Parvati had to wonder how much of a college experience Katie was going to give herself. It seemed like she was closing off her options just when the world was opening up for her. “So you and Jonah are still good?”

  Angie appeared at Katie’s side before she could respond, her Bossy Mom persona in full effect. “Kateri, where’s Jonah?”

  “Around somewhere,” Katie said with the concern of a girl who had brought her boyfriend to so many Jai family gatherings he was practically a member of the family now.

  “Well, find him and go pay your respects to your grandparents. This is an important day.” Angie gave her a significant look and Katie’s grin grew suspiciously broad before she bounded off to do her mother’s bidding.

  Parv wondered if she could escape into the crowd before Angie noticed, but her oldest sister was already sending a piercing stare her way. “How are you, Parvati?”

  “I’m great.” She plastered a fake smile on her face—hoping to blind Angie with sheer brightness if she couldn’t muster up authenticity.

  Angie looked unconvinced by the high-beam attempt. “We worry about you.”

  Parv knew the “we” in this case referred to her sisters. Her four perfect sisters with their four perfect lives who could never quite figure out why Parvati couldn’t seem to float through life on a similar cloud of perfection.

  Angie, Ranee, Asha and Devi had each been born a year apart—in that order—and had ranged in age from ten to seven when Parvati made her unexpected appearance.

  Angie—as a typical firstborn—came into the world believing she was the boss of everything and everyone she surveyed. She met a boy who seemed perfectly content to agree with that assessment when she was seventeen and married him less than two years later. Parv had always suspected that Angie most likely proposed to Kevin herself, but since she was only a child at the time she’d been shut out of the sisterly gossip and could only speculate.

  Katie came along when Angie was a junior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, but Angie had still managed to graduate summa cum laude. She worked in local government—some sort of city planning thing that let her boss people around all day—and had produced three more Mensa babies, each more perfectly well behaved than the last. Her husband adored her—whisking her off for anniversary weekends in Paris—and her Santa Barbara home was always meticulously tidy.

  Some days it was hard not to hate Angie.

  Calm, unflappable
Ranee was the doctor of the family and at thirty-eight had already developed one of the most promising gene-therapy based treatments for cancer currently going through experimental trials. Married to a fellow M.D.—though the two had only been pre-med when they tied the knot—she lived and worked in San Francisco and had two children with such bright, inquisitive minds that they had made Parv feel a little slow since they were in kindergarten. Now twelve and thirteen respectively, they’d just returned from a summer trip to Africa for a clean water project.

  Tech-genius Asha and her husband both worked in Silicon Valley, at one of those massive tech campuses with private chefs and full-time onsite day care for the Twin Terrors, though they would be starting kindergarten soon.

  And then there was Devi. Closest to Parv in age, sometimes it felt like they were farthest apart in temperament. A self-described rabid feminist, Devi had made a career out of being militantly politically correct and taking offense at everything. A professor of sociology at Stanford, she’d recently published a book about race relations in America that had surpassed their mother’s on the nonfiction bestseller lists and was currently working on a manifesto about identity in the twenty-first century.

  Devi had married a man as politically and socially conscious as she was and their only child was a thin, intense nine-year-old girl with long black hair who used words like disenfranchisement and perspective bias in everyday conversation. Parvati considered it her personal mission to remind somber little Aya that she was, in fact, a child, and make her giggle as often as possible. A duty Parvati never shirked with any of her nieces and nephews.

  She loved the lot of them to distraction. She just wished her entire family didn’t make her feel so constantly inferior.

  Sadly, the genius gene appeared to have skipped Parv. While they were all busy curing cancer and changing the world, she was running her cute little coffee shop in Eden—running it straight into the ground.

  “What’s to worry about?” Parv asked Angie cheerfully—then immediately regretted phrasing it as a question to give her such an easy opening. Not that Angie needed an opening. She probably would have bulldozed right through regardless of how Parv responded.

  “We just want you to be happy. Don’t you want more? A family? A home of your own rather than renting an apartment over someone else’s garage? A husband?”

  She wanted all those things. She wanted them with that same ache in her chest that kept making it hard for her to breathe today, but if she told Angie how much she wanted them then she’d have to admit how inept she was at getting the things she wanted. “Sure I do. Eventually. And I am dating. It’s not like I’m not looking.”

  “But what are you looking for? If you’ve been looking this long and you haven’t found the right guy, maybe you’re being too picky. Or focusing on the wrong things. I can’t help feeling you’re missing real opportunities at happiness.”

  “You’re going to give me dating advice? You haven’t had to try to meet a guy since you were seventeen and all you had to do then was bat your eyelashes in chemistry class.”

  Angie ceded that point for the moment. “At least think about your career. A coffee place is a cute hobby, but don’t you think it’s time for something more permanent?” She seemed to see the way Parv’s face was tightening with irritation, because she held up a hand. “Just promise me the next time you get a real job with a real employer that you’ll make sure it’s someone with a good 401(k) matching program. We worry about your future.”

  You worry about having to support me if I’m broke and alone when I’m seventy. Parvati bit back the words, knowing they were unfair—but Angie’s words were unfair too. How dare she assume Common Grounds was just a hobby?

  The fact that it hadn’t made a substantial profit in the last three years and was about to go out of business might support that belief, but Angie’s lack of faith that she could make something of herself made her want to scream—right there in the middle of her parents’ garden party.

  She’d always been the baby. Always the one who was patted on the head and left behind. Always the one they talked about rather than talking to. And they were still doing it. Worrying about her en masse when she wasn’t around. Discussing all the ways she was screwing up her life.

  Wouldn’t they just love it when Common Grounds went under and proved them all right?

  But even as she had the thought, she knew it was unfair. They didn’t want her to fail. They really did worry about her. Even if they never understood her. Or what it must be like not to meet the love of your life in high school or college. To actually have to look for him. To have to wait for Prince Charming to find you for an entire freaking decade.

  Though if she was one hundred percent honest with herself, she had thought she fell for the man of her dreams when she was fourteen. He just hadn’t fallen back. A concept Angie probably couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  “We’re just worried that—”

  Thankfully a fork striking a glass repeatedly interrupted whatever worry Angie was about to add to the pile. Parv turned gratefully toward the gazebo steps where her father stood, flanked by her mother on one side and Katie on the other.

  “Oh jeez, now?” Angie grumbled.

  Her father waited for a hush to spread over the guests before he raised his voice, smiling broadly. “I thought we were done with speeches for the day, but our eldest granddaughter has just given us some news. We could imagine no better gift for our fortieth anniversary than that she share it now with all our family and friends.”

  He turned to Katie, who moved up a step, tugging Jonah up with her by their joined hands.

  Parv’s gaze fell to those linked hands, a sudden gaping sense of dread opening up inside her. She knew all of Katie’s news. Katie told her everything. It was something to do with USC. Or moving in together. It couldn’t be—

  “Jonah and I are engaged!”

  That.

  A gasp and cheer rose in quick succession and the floor dropped out from under Parv.

  Chapter Four

  She hadn’t fainted.

  So that was good. In retrospect, it felt like quite an accomplishment, staying on her feet with her blood rushing in her ears—though her sisters would have certainly rolled their eyes and declared it a melodramatic overreaction if she’d collapsed in a heap at Katie’s announcement.

  She remembered when Katie was born.

  Remembered being taken to the hospital when she was eleven years old and having that tiny little person placed into her arms. Remembered the feeling—the massive, awe-inspiring feeling of loving someone she’d just met more completely than she’d ever loved another being in her life.

  From that moment on, Katie had been special.

  And now she was engaged. Eighteen, about to start college, with her parents still paying her share of the rent for the apartment she was living in with Jonah, and getting married.

  And no one else seemed to see the wrongness of that.

  They’d cheered. They’d toasted. They’d hugged the happy couple and teased them about their own fortieth wedding anniversary. They’d asked when the wedding would be—and Parv hadn’t been able to think past scheduling a honeymoon around a semester break.

  Did no one else see that they were babies? Yes, the Jai family had made a tradition out of teenage marriages, but Katie was different, wasn’t she? And times had changed in the last twenty years, hadn’t they?

  Or was Parvati only reacting to the fact that Katie had proven, once and for all, that she wasn’t like Parv.

  The aunties had swarmed around Parv for the rest of the party, clucking and tsking and patting her on the hand like she was in mourning. Parv had kept a smile on her face and even managed to hug Katie and squeak, “Congratulations!” with an admirable degree of sincerity. She posed for family pictures with her sisters, her parents, and the cast of thousands that was her extended family, and never once did her cheerful Everything is going to be great attitude waver.

 
Until she was driving home and finally had a chance to process the day.

  No one had tried to set her up.

  She didn’t know why those words seemed to echo in her mind like the Gong of Doom, but they were the first thing to penetrate her determined good cheer as she headed toward the 101, taking the fast route and forgoing the pretty coastal highway.

  No one mentioned a nice boy they knew. No one threatened to introduce her to a coworker who had just gotten divorced.

  Her family had officially written her off.

  Katie was getting married and Parvati was a lost cause. An old maid. A spinster.

  She hated those words. Words that didn’t even exist for men because no one judged them for remaining unmarried past the age of twenty-five, but Parv had apparently missed her one chance at happiness by not locking someone down before high school graduation.

  Angie’s well-intentioned words came back to her—along with the bite of them. Her sisters worried about her. Worried that she was going about her life all wrong and was going to end up miserable and alone. Of course they did. She was the failure sister. The one who couldn’t land a man—and whose single focus in the last five years was about to go out of business.

  Parv fumbled with her cell at a stoplight while she waited for the green, punching in Sidney’s number by heart even though it was programmed in. She put the phone on speaker in her lap as the light turned green and listened to it ringing. And ringing.

  She knew even before she heard that familiar click-pause of the voicemail taking over that she wasn’t going to reach Sidney. She rarely did these days. She waited through the familiar message—you’ve reached Sidney Dewitt of Once Upon a Bride. I’m sorry I’m not available to take your call at this time, but please leave a detailed message…