Wedding Girl

by Stacey Ballis

  “Sophie, honey,” she says in a loud whisper that is anything but conspiratorial. “I was so sorry about all that business with Dexter. You know I know how cruel those tabloids can be.” This is true enough; she’s fought her share of public embarrassment at the hands of the smear press. I wonder if we have more in common than I would like to admit. “But I’m glad to see you’ve landed on your, um, feet here. Good for you!” The tone is full of pity and condescension, and any potential softening of my heart towards her firms right back up. I put on a wide smile.

  “I’m just so delighted to be back here, in a place that is genuine and authentic and serves the community. It’s much better for my soul than the path I was on, and frankly, I’m awfully grateful to Dexter for giving me the opportunity to find that out.”

  Behind her, both assistants are now decimating the sample tray on Herman’s side of the counter as if they have not eaten in days. Which, considering the size of them, isn’t unlikely.

  “I’m so glad to hear that. It is nice when things can end amicably. Have you been to Abondance yet? We were there last week, and it is just spectacular. They are really doing something special there.” My stomach turns over. I knew that Dexter and Cookie were getting good press, but that is often as much about a talented PR firm as it is about what the kitchen is doing. But whatever else she may be, MarySue is a woman with a refined palate, and a lot of fine dining under her belt, and if she is raving, then it is likely great. Or she is just poking at me for the fun of making me squirm. Can’t decide which is worse.

  “That is wonderful for them. I wish them much success. Now, is there anything I can get for you today? We have a lot of specials for the festival, plus all of our usual offerings. Please do try a sample.” I push the tray over in hopes that if I give her something to put in her mouth, that noise will stop coming out of it. She waves me off, pushing the sample tray back with a wink.

  “I would love to taste just everything! Girls, why don’t you make some selections for us to take back to the office to share with the team? Put it on the card. I do have to go outside to make a call; I’ll meet you in the car. Herman, lovely to meet you, and see your charming store. Sophie, good to see you, um, thriving.” She looks me up and down again, clearly taking in every bit of my bulk, smiles her blinding smile, and whisks out the door.

  Blonde 1 says, “Um, give us one of everything?”

  Blonde 2 says, “Yeah, but maybe a couple extra of those peanut butter thingies?”

  “Oh, for sure,” the first blonde says, nodding. “Those are killer.”

  “Coming right up.” I’m trying to prevent my eyelid from twitching. Usually in this business, other bakers will absolutely show up in support. So the order of “one of everything” doesn’t surprise me. It’s just that in this case it feels like an act of charity instead of solidarity. But I’ll take every cent of her money without thinking twice. I start going through the case, grab one of each cookie, but six of the peanut butter sandwich cookies. One of each flavor of rugelach, Pop-Tart, and brownie. A pair of almond horns. A small cupcake box for one of each flavor, today a total of six: the usual chocolate and vanilla, with the new banana, plus a carrot cake version with cream cheese frosting, a strawberry cake with chocolate frosting, and, especially for the festival, a Chicago cupcake of lemon-scented white cake with white and blue vanilla icing and four raspberries making the Chicago flag across the top. I load a bag with loaves of all of our breads, savory and sweet. A bread pudding, two summer berry puddings, a chocolate babka, and a cinnamon babka. Then I ring them up, wishing I could be more gleeful at such a large total. They don’t blink at the cost, hand me a Cake Goddess Amex card, and receive the bags I hand over.

  “The peanut butter cookies are on the top of that first box,” I say, trying to be happy they ate them and enjoyed them, and not hate the women by association.

  “Awesome. Thanks.” And they are gone in a swirl of pastels.

  I take a deep breath, let my shoulders unclench, and turn to help the next customer, attempting to ignore the fact that MarySue Adams is now standing in front of our window, blithely signing autographs and taking pictures with adoring fans, all of our customer base basking in the glow of her veneers and spray-on tan.

  “You did great, schnookie, really great,” Bubbles says as we walk home after dark. She stayed the whole day, reading to the kids, schmoozing the hipsters, cooing at the mommy mafia and their nut-free, gluten-free, lactose-intolerant, organic-only offspring. She sat with the old biddies drinking iced tea in the afternoon, telling stories, and enjoying the summer breezes and shortbread cookies. As the festival wound down, she wandered over to Kolmar’s and picked up some of the special sausages they had made, plus homemade sauerkraut, potato salad, and cucumber salad, and brought them back for us. We split open some of our salted rye sticks and made sandwiches that the three of us snarfed up without even talking, washing it all down with some dark beer that Herman fetched from his apartment. Then she made us tea as we cleaned up and tallied the day. It had been a huge success, and I couldn’t wait to check the computer to see how our social media push had gone.

  “Thank you for everything, Bubbles; you were an enormous help.”

  “Pish. It was less than nothing, and a pleasure, every bit. But the poor dog may need a vacation.” Snatch is extra slow and waddly today, having consumed a zillion treats and biscuits, and god knows how many pieces of sweets snuck to him by his adoring fans of the under-eight set. Thankfully, Bubbles was there to keep a watchful eye out to make sure none of them tried to give him any chocolate, which could poison him.

  “It’s his own fault for being such a glutton.”

  “Are you a greedy Snatch? Never satisfied? Can’t ever get enough in you?” Bubbles coos at him. I have to remember to tell the girls about this one; they love her accidental porn conversations with the dog.

  “Pity Herman’s son couldn’t come,” she says. “It would have been so nice for him to see it today.”

  I had also been hoping to see Mark, just to witness the look on his face when he saw that the place was hopping and buzzing and everyone was raving.

  “Herman said that he got called back to the West Coast unexpectedly, some work thing,” I say.

  “Herman mentioned it when I asked where he was. Although he thinks it was less a work thing than a relationship thing. I think he is afraid an engagement might be in the offing, and he isn’t sure she is the right girl.”

  “Well, they’re sort of like chalk and cheese, those two; would any girl Mark chose be the right girl in Herman’s eyes?”

  “I think he wants his son to be happy, and thinks if this girl were making him happy, he wouldn’t seem so lacking in lightness. Love makes you a feather on the wind, and Herman Jr. is a little leaden.”

  I laugh. “He is at that.” I wonder about the whole girlfriend thing. Mark has never even mentioned her existence to me, but Herman seems to believe they are really serious. Curious.

  “Not our circus, not our monkeys,” Bubbles says with hands raised in surrender. It’s one of her favorite old proverbs, and reminds us both to keep our noses out of other people’s business. If only I could. I have at least forty Wedding Girl emails waiting for me.

  We get home and Bubbles immediately heads for bed, the day finally catching up with her. Snatch can’t even make it up the stairs and instead snuffles over to the dog bed in the front room and collapses, snoring like a pig with a sinus infection. I pour myself a restorative bourbon with a squeeze of lemon and a splash of ginger ale, and head upstairs to see if I can knock out some of my email backlog before I pass out. Lucky for me, most of the questions are now routine, and I cut and paste, listening to some Patty Griffin on my headphones, getting into the groove. I get one email from an older bride who wants a wedding that is “all bread and no circus,” so I recommend a small mid-afternoon Sunday wedding ceremony followed by cake and champagne, and
then a private dinner for the immediate family only that evening at a restaurant. A May bride is worried about her December groom and how their friends will mix and mingle at the various wedding events considering the generation gap, so I suggest doing mixed table seatings based on common interests in hopes of creating easy conversation. And a bride who is about to have her own personal Brady Bunch moment wants to know how to use the wedding planning to bond her three boys with his three girls and begin to create a blended family. I tell her that to start, she should include his girls in all her girlie stuff, and he should do the same with her sons and the boy stuff. Then they should do some fun stuff, with the eight of them, and solicit the kids’ advice on the wedding planning. Better to end up with a hodgepodge wedding that all of the kids feel they had a hand in than a perfect event where everyone’s on eggshells.

  I check the social media sites and see that we had an exceptionally good day, our follower and likes numbers are through the roof, and there were lovely postings on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Then I spot it. @CakeGoddess What a charming treasure right in my new backyard! Thanks for the delicious treats @LangersBakery! With a picture of her standing with all of her sherbet-clad minions in her office behind the detritus of their haul, reduced to crumbs and bits. She had tweeted this to her 800,000 followers, and they proceeded to follow us, tweeting how sweet she is to support other bakers. I hate that she actually helped our cause, but diligently go through and favorite and like and retweet and reply. Can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even if said mouth is full of ceramic teeth that look like Chiclets and belongs to the one person who can and probably will put us out of business.

  It’s just after two when I finally finish, feeling good about clearing out the inbox, when one more email arrives. It’s Jake.

  Sunny—

  Looking forward to continuing the conversation, and grateful for your kind and forgiving nature. And of course I will report back on the bachelor party. More soon.

  Jake

  I smile. I go to hit Reply, but then stop myself. It’s Saturday night at two a.m., and I should be either asleep or out having fun. Despite that it feels a little bit like game-playing, I don’t want him to think that I’m just sitting home waiting out the summer to finally meet his fabulous personage. I’ll reply tomorrow, let him sit on it a bit. I finish the last of my drink, now essentially just lightly bourbon-scented ice water with a hint of lemon, and get ready for bed.

  Just as I’m about to drop off, I wonder.

  Is Mark out there in California somewhere having put a ring on it?

  And will I be more annoyed if I have to make his wedding cake or if I don’t?

  My Favorite Wife

  (1940)

  I bet you say that to all your wives.

  • IRENE DUNNE AS ELLEN/EVE •

  “Don’t you find this a little strange?” Ruth asks when she picks me up at the bakery.

  We are on our way to Hanna’s house in Forest Park. She has invited us to a surprise birthday party for Jean, who hates her birthday.

  “Well, maybe this will flip the script on Jean’s whole birthday thing. She is a little insane about not marking the occasion.”

  “Look, I get that for someone who is mostly all earth mother goddess, she is weird about not wanting to mark the passage of time. I don’t think it’s a vanity thing, but whatever, it’s her bag. But they have been dating for less than two months, so throwing a surprise party? For a birthday that isn’t even a special number? That is just weird.”

  “Maybe thirty-seven has some special astrological meaning?”

  Ruth makes a harrumphing noise. “And what about the whole kid thing? That’s not odd to you?”

  Jean divulged, offhand and almost accidentally, at our drinks date with Amelia the other night that Hanna has a three-year-old daughter. From her previous marriage. To a man. “Didn’t I mention it before?” she said when we all were a little shocked. She decidedly hadn’t.

  “Maybe Hanna just wanted to have a summer barbecue and wanted to invite people for Jean, but thought we wouldn’t come unless it was a special-occasion sort of thing. It isn’t like she’s dumb; she has to see that it’s a bit awkward with all of us.”

  Ruth and I have been really trying on the whole Hanna front, since Jean seems so keen on her. They are going away for a long weekend next week to the beach in Connecticut, borrowing the house of a director pal of Jean’s, and Ruth agreed that only once they get back can we have any opinions on how things are going in that department as it’s hard enough to get Jean to take a vacation, and really not our place to ruin it.

  Ruth harrumphs again and turns off of the expressway. I’m distracted anyway. I switched my hours around this week so that I could have this rare Saturday afternoon free to participate in this party. But I hate leaving Herman on his own on a weekend day—ever since the relaunch, our Saturdays and Sundays have been busy as hell, which is great, but I worry about him handling it on his own. And which is worse, this morning I tanked a batch of this week’s special Pop-Tart flavor—blueberry with lemon glaze—because all I could think about was the email I got today from the Wedding Girl site.

  Dear Wedding Girl—

  One of the paralegals in my office suggested that I check out your services, as I have something of a problem. I am about to make an honest woman of my partner of 43 years, the love of my life, and mother of my exceptional child. We never thought we would marry, but frankly we are at the stage of life where planning for the future is a moral imperative, and we have been advised by our estate planner that being legally married will make the eventual machinations of dealing with health issues or things that come up after death much easier on both of us, and the aforementioned offspring. Being a lawyer myself, I always knew this deep down, but the die-hard hippie in me has always balked against it.

  Ever since we decided to go ahead and make things legal, my lovely compatriot has gotten, a bit, shall we say, aggressive about some things related to the gathering we’re planning. I frankly had assumed we would hit the courthouse with our daughter and my mother, and then maybe have a barbecue back at the house. But apparently if you have a woman in your life, even one you know is enlightened beyond fancy parties and sparkly things, wait 43 years for a wedding? She goes a little gonzo. Last thing in the world I would have expected, but there we are. Can you give me some advice on how to gently try and rein her in a bit, get her back to rational so that I don’t spend the next three months in wedding plan hell with a woman I barely recognize?

  Any advice is most welcome.

  Best wishes,

  Robert Bernard, ESQ.

  Yeah, because the only thing more awkward than being the epically-left-at-the-altar wedding advice girl is getting an email from your dad asking for advice on managing your newly shockingly bridezilla mom. Fantastic.

  “Hello? We’re here.” Ruth pops me out of my reveries as she pulls up in front of Hanna’s address. The house is a lovely little cottage style, small front yard abloom with landscaping, and has a wide driveway leading to the garage. There is a large catering truck parked in the driveway, but plenty of street parking is available, so I wonder if we are early. Ruth grabs the large beribboned bag from the backseat, our gift for Jean, a cast-iron plancha for her new grill. Jean costumed a show in Barcelona three years ago and got addicted to the simple grilled foods she ate at all the small restaurants near the theater. She came back and bought a grill for her back porch, and now has become one of those insane Chicagoans who is outside regardless of weather, cooking things over fire. She’s been using a big cast-iron skillet in place of the traditional slab surface, but a pal of mine who works at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! hooked me up with a real plancha, so it can be all tapas authentico all the time at Jean’s from now on.

  Hanna greets us with massive hugs and tells us how excited she is for us to be seeing her place at long last. The “long last” part throws
me, because, two months, and Ruth raises an eyebrow at me. We walk inside, where there is a large open-concept great room, incorporating the kitchen, dining room, and living room. It is, to say the least, sparsely populated. She introduces us to her parents and her daughter, Pippi, a tiny thing in pigtails with a thumb in her mouth, hiding behind her mother’s skirts. Which are voluminous. Hanna is dressed sort of like Donna Reed; all of the funky youthful style she’s exhibited on the couple of times we’ve met her, the skinny jeans and ironic T-shirts with the leather moto jacket and hair in a messy bun, is gone. In its place, apparently, a rejected picnic costume from the Mad Men fire sale: a cotton belted shirtdress with a kicky print of twinned cherries and bluebirds, with what appears to be a freaking crinoline under the skirt.

  Across the room we spot one of Jean’s favorite colleagues, Gary, and his partner, Richard, both of whom Ruth and I have met at numerous opening-night parties. They wink at us, and we head to their side of the room.

  “Have you taken the tour yet?” Richard asks. “It is epic.”

  “Be nice,” Gary says with a smirk. “But you really should see it when you get the chance.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we will,” Ruth says.

  I walk over to kiss Jean’s sister Margaret, who is looking a little gassy. Margaret is twelve years older than Jean, and lives out in the burbs. She has always been more of a mother figure for Jean, especially since their mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years ago and moved into the memory-care unit at the assisted-living place near Margaret. She is sitting on the couch with Hanna’s mom, Therese, right next to her, on the receiving end of what sounds like a barrage of information about how great some person named Jeanine is. Ruth mouths “Jean” at me, to clue me in that for some reason these people are all using Jean’s full given name. Margaret’s husband, Glenn, is in the kitchen, where Hanna’s dad is apparently grilling him about their family life and history.