Once and for All

by Sarah Dessen

  More laughter. Meanwhile, I still couldn’t find the sunscreen.

  “Hold on,” I said to William. “Mom actually likes this guy?”

  “I know, it’s insane. They only just met! But he’s taking her out on his boat today for lunch.”

  “But she hates the water.”

  “Apparently it’s different here? Or she is.” He snorted. “Anyway, don’t worry. We spent half of last night researching him on the Internet and he’s legit. Not my type, of course. But we can’t all get so lucky in first class.”

  “We’re just friends,” I heard my mom call out, which was reassuring. Until she added, “For now, anyway.”

  My phone beeped again: it was Jilly. “I need to go,” I said. “Call me later?”

  “Will do,” William said cheerfully. “Miss you!”

  “Love you!” my mom chimed in.

  Everyone is insane, I thought as I clicked over to Jilly. “Hey,” I said. “Are we still on for ten?”

  She sighed, answering this question. “I’m so sorry. Kitty has an earache and I have to take her to urgent care. Even if it’s not an infection, and it totally is, she can’t swim.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I can come along, help with the kids.”

  “That’s so nice of you!” she replied, as some kind of shrieking—in Baker family style, of indeterminate source—erupted behind her. “But to be honest, Michael Salem already offered to take them to the park with his little brothers for me. We’re all going for lunch at the truck later. You could meet us there, if you want.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just hang out here, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “But what are you doing tonight? Did you finally make plans with Ben?”

  “We’re supposed to talk this afternoon, when he’s off work.”

  Ever since the previous weekend and his invite to World of Waffles, we’d been trying to make something else happen. But Thursday, the guy who worked at Jumbo Smoothie the shift after him didn’t show up and he had to close. Then the night before, when he was free after nine, I’d just come from dinner over at the Bakers’, where they were testing out a new sandwich, the Good Gouda-lee Goo, and was too stuffed to do anything. We would work it out, though, if only because I had a bet to win.

  “Well, let me know if you guys end up going out,” she said. “I’ll be kid free by seven if all goes as it should. And you know how often that happens.”

  I did. But I told her I’d see her later anyway, then hung up, sitting back against the wall. It was now mid-morning, and the whole day stretched out in front of me. I was sure I’d spend it answering wedding questions for Ambrose, and expected more texts as I changed, then went downstairs and made breakfast. But my phone stayed silent. In my heart, I’d been alone for a long while. But this was the first time in ages that I’d felt like it.

  This is good, I told myself, climbing the stairs back to my room with a big cup of coffee in hand. I had a closet to clean out before I left for school, a task I’d been putting off for ages. I grabbed a garbage bag for thrift shop donations and another for trash, then pulled open the door and got to work. An hour later, I was sweaty and sneezing from dust, and both bags were full. There was a third pile as well, marked JILLY, of the clothes of hers she’d abandoned among my own. All that was still left to deal with was the one outfit off to the side.

  I’d brought that black dress to Colby that August weekend in a garment bag, the shoes still new in their box. Coming home that Sunday morning, sleepless and giddy, I’d tossed them both into a plastic hotel laundry bag which, when I dumped it out later, also poured forth a fair amount of sand. I got the dress dry cleaned, something I’d later regret so much. Even so, more than once, I’d press my face to it, wishing to find just the slightest bit of Ethan’s smell, the ocean, and that night still on it somewhere. Otherwise I just left it, hanging on its single hook, the shoes lined up beneath it. Like the shroud for the body of the girl I once was and would never be again. Now it had been almost nine months. Maybe it was time.

  I pushed my hair off my damp forehead, then picked up Jilly’s pile, turning to toss it outside the door before I walked over to the dress. I reached out, touching the bodice, then felt the tiny row of sequins, almost invisible, along the hem. In my mind, time blurred, moving sideways: Ethan sliding a strap off my shoulder, the skirt blowing across my bare legs, down at the end of the world. I bit my lip, imagining myself sliding it from the hanger, folding it carefully, and putting it in the donate bag. It wouldn’t carry my memory: that would always stay with me. I knew that now. And yet, I remained unable to take those few steps to do this last task. Yet.

  My phone beeped from where it was on my bed. I ran out and grabbed it so quickly I would have been embarrassed had anyone been watching. Which, of course, no one was.

  KIND OF A TABLE EMERGENCY. SUGGESTIONS?

  WE HAVE A FEW, I typed back. HOW MANY YOU NEED?

  AS MANY AS YOU GOT. I’LL HAVE SOMEONE PICK THEM UP.

  I looked back into the closet at the dress, those shoes, and wished yet another time I could slide back into them, like Cinderella under the fairy godmother’s spell, take a spin and begin all over. But it was just an outfit, and Ethan was gone. Things would change, but never that. No matter how many times I told anyone, it would always be the end of this story. But maybe not, I was beginning to see, of mine.

  NO, I’LL BRING THEM, I wrote Ambrose back. JUST TELL ME WHERE.

  Bee’s house was a pretty bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac with sunflowers blooming up the front walk. Much better than a smoking patio. As I climbed out of my car and started for the front door, I realized I was actually curious to see what Ambrose had come up with. After knocking a few times with no response, I heard voices from the backyard and headed that way.

  “They’re supposed to be in the trees,” someone wailed just as I came up to the gate. “You don’t put lights on bushes!”

  “Says who?” another voice, sounding equally frustrated, replied.

  “Everyone! God, Roger, just stop. That looks awful. Give them to me.”

  I leaned over the gate carefully, looking into the yard. Across the bright green grass, Maya and her groom were standing by a holly bush with a few lights flung across it, the rest in a tangle at their feet. Even though they were facing away from me, the tension was clear: her arms were crossed, his, on his hips.

  “Hello?” I called out. “I was told to bring tables?”

  Maya turned, seeing me. “Oh, Louna, hi! Honey, go help her. I’ll get some backup.”

  As she ran, barefoot, across the grass and up the back porch steps to the house, Roger made his way over to me. He was about my height, skinny, with black curly hair, wearing a T-shirt that said I DIG FOSSILS. Pit stains were visible beneath both his arms.

  “Do we need tables?” he said to me, in lieu of a hello. “I was thinking everyone could just sit on blankets.”

  “Just doing as I was asked,” I said cheerfully, starting back to my car.

  His response to this was an audible grumbling. Maybe Ambrose had called this right and he was a CG after all. “Up until last night, we were getting married at a coffee shop.”

  “I heard that,” I said, surprised and yet not at how swiftly I’d shifted into my ever-pleasant-I’m-staying-out-of-this work mode. “I brought six. That’s all we had.”

  “Six?” he said. “How many people are they inviting now?”

  Instead of replying, I popped the back of my Suburban, sliding the top table out so he could grab one end of it. He didn’t, instead now focused on his phone. I looked back into the car, realizing I was probably going to have to ask him to help me, when suddenly I felt hands grab the other end.

  “Got it,” Ambrose said, sliding it farther out. “Yo, Roger! You and Maya take this. We’ll get the next one.”

  “Sure thin
g,” I heard Maya say cheerfully. Nothing from Roger. A moment later they were walking awkwardly, the table between them, up the path to the side gate.

  I pulled the next table out, Ambrose took the end, and we put it between us, following them. “So how’s it going?” I asked. “I sensed some light tension.”

  “Oh, no, there’s heavy tension,” he replied, shaking that curl out of his face. The door of the house opened and Bee and Lauren came out, making their way down the walk. “In the truck there, ladies! We’ve got four more to carry around!”

  “I meant tension about the lights,” I corrected him, dodging a rosebush as it came up on my left.

  “Oh, there’s that, too.” He glanced behind him, adjusting his trajectory toward the gate. “Turns out you really kind of need a ladder if you want them in the trees.”

  “You don’t have a ladder?”

  “My plan was to hurl them,” he explained.

  A word I had never, in all my years, used while discussing wedding prep. “Somebody on this block has to have one. You just need to go and ask.”

  “How can I do that, though,” he replied, shifting his grip on the table, “when every time we add any tiny wrinkle Roger sighs loudly and Maya starts crying?”

  “Why are they even here?” I asked. “You know my mom never allows the bride or groom at the event pre-ceremony, even if they want to be. It’s asking for trouble.”

  “I don’t have that many people!” he shot back. I raised my eyebrows. “Sorry. It’s just . . . this isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Like, it’s not easy. At all. Shoot, I just banged my leg on this fence. Watch it as you come through, okay?”

  “Ambrose!” Maya yelled from behind him. “Where do we want these?”

  “Arranged in an orderly and yet not rigid fashion!” he replied.

  “What?”

  In return, he grimaced. I’d honestly never seen him so stressed, and had to fight the urge to laugh, which was absolutely the wrong response, I knew. “Just put it down,” he said, his voice tight. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t understand why we need tables,” Roger was saying as we put ours next to the one they’d dropped unceremoniously by a large tree. “What happened to my blanket idea?”

  “You can’t expect people to sit on the ground and balance a plate in their lap at a wedding,” Ambrose told him.

  “Why not? Not everyone needs a chair.”

  I was facing Ambrose, so I saw his expression—one of sudden realization, then dread—as he heard this last word. I said carefully, “You do have chairs, right?”

  He just looked at me as Lauren yelped. “Ouch, I just totally whacked my leg. You guys, hazard over here by the gate!”

  “Ambrose, where do you want this table?” Bee asked.

  “He said in an orderly but not rigid fashion,” Maya told her.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Before Ambrose could respond, a huge clump of lights fell from the tree above us, landing with a clank on the grass. So the hurling had worked. Sort of.

  “Jesus,” Roger said. “That could have killed someone!”

  Maya sniffled, putting her hand to her mouth, as Bee and Lauren exchanged looks. But I was focused only on Ambrose, looking around the backyard with obvious, rising panic on his face.

  “Go find a ladder,” I told him. “I’ve got this.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  MY MOTHER always said that a good wedding is eighty percent organization, fifteen percent guest behavior, and five percent luck. But really, no matter the size or type, you took all the luck you could get.

  So far, we’d had some. Like the fact that Bee’s neighbor two doors down was a contractor who had several ladders, one of which he happily climbed, lights in hand, then draped them across the branches as I directed him. He also had six folding chairs in his garage, which we were able to add to the five that Bee found wrapped in spiderwebs behind her water heater, where they’d been left by the previous owner of the house. We still needed more, though, which was why it was especially fortunate the Bakers kept an ample supply in their own garage to set up, along with small tables, for impromptu food truck seating. One call to Jilly—sure enough, Kitty had an ear infection—and she’d offered to bring as many as we needed of each. When I told Ambrose, he exhaled such a big breath I thought he might collapse outright.

  “Thank God,” he said. “If I had to hear Roger talking about blankets one more time I would have lost my mind.”

  “She and Michael Salem are going to try to bring them by five at the latest. Ceremony is at six, right?”

  “That’s the plan,” he said, unpacking another mason jar from the box at his feet. “It should be super-fast. Then we’ll immediately start receptioning.”

  “Not exactly a word,” I pointed out, lending a hand with the jars. “What about food? Are you doing it right away, or waiting?”

  “It’s all finger stuff that has to be heated,” he said. “So I figured we’d do it in waves. That’s why I put that one table down at the bottom of the stairs. We can run out the trays, plop them down, and let everyone have at them.”

  Plop, like hurl, was a word I hadn’t heard much before in terms of planning. “You may get a mob scene, though, especially if people are hungry. Might be better to pass some, so they can’t all rush one spot.”

  “Oh.” He stopped unpacking. “I didn’t think about that. We don’t have servers, though.”

  “I can help with that,” I told him, picking out another jar. “And I’m sure we can enlist a couple of others. There’s a certain kind of wedding guest that likes a job. You just have to ID them.”

  This, of course, was different from someone trying to wrest control of the event. There were types who just thrived on managing a guestbook or collecting bouquets from bridesmaids for the cake table, and William was great at spotting them within minutes of arrival. Without him there, I’d just have to trust my own instincts.

  “Oh, I don’t want you to have to stick around,” Ambrose said now, as we finally emptied the box. A dozen jars for six tables: eighteen would be better, but it would do. “I’m sure you have plans tonight.”

  Instantly, I felt embarrassed. Here I was inviting myself to the very wedding I’d been adamant only the day before I wanted no part of. Stupid, I thought, and wished for a second I’d ignored his text and just stayed home, maybe tried again to deal with that dress. Then, though, I looked in the wide window in front of us and saw Maya at the kitchen island, bent over the crowns she and Lauren were weaving from flowers picked in Bee’s garden. She was smiling as she said something, then covered her mouth and laughed.

  “Not until later tonight,” I told him. “I mean, I don’t want to force myself on you. But if you need my help, you have it.”

  Ambrose looked up at me. “I think it’s obvious that need is not even strong enough a word. Please stay.”

  Now I smiled. “Okay. Now let’s talk tablecloths.”

  It was a short conversation, as this detail, like many others, had been overlooked. “Oh, shit,” Lauren said, when we went inside to report this. “With the whole blanket debate those totally slipped my mind.”

  “You don’t absolutely need them,” I pointed out. “It’s just the tables are kind of banged up.”

  “So we need six tablecloths,” Ambrose said, looking around the kitchen as if they might suddenly materialize. That would be luck. “And probably some plates.”

  “Probably?” I asked.

  “We have lots of napkins!” he told me. “It’s finger food.”

  “People will get a new napkin for every item they eat?” asked Roger, who unlike the tablecloths, had suddenly appeared. “That’s so bad for the earth.”

  “Roger, it’s a napkin, not fracking,” Lauren told him, sounding more peeved than I thought was possible for her.


  “It’s still wasteful. What we should do is give everyone one plate and one cup when they arrive, and they keep it until the end.”

  “What?” Maya said.

  “Oh, shit.” Ambrose sighed. “Cups.”

  “We don’t have cups?” Lauren asked.

  “I am not asking people to carry around their plate for three hours!” Maya said, her voice more adamant than I’d heard it all day.

  “Three hours?” Roger said. “How long are we planning to do this?”

  “I can’t believe you forgot cups,” Lauren said to Ambrose.

  “I’m in charge of everything,” he shot back. “You can’t keep up with paper goods?”

  “I was dealing with flowers!” she said.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Nothing could fray nerves like this kind of detail, and my instinct told me words might be about to be spoken that would not be able to be taken back. “You ordered a keg, yes?” I asked Ambrose. He nodded. “Then they’ll bring cups with it. As far as plates, there’s a dollar store two blocks away where they also have paper tablecloths. They’re cheap and will rip eventually, but at least they’ll look nice when people arrive.”

  “Dollar store,” Ambrose repeated. “Right. Let’s go.”

  “Go?” Lauren said. “You’re supposed to be helping with the bouquets. You promised, like, an hour ago.”

  “Did you not hear me say I’m kind of busy dealing with all the other details?” he said. In return, she glared at him. That got ugly fast, I thought.

  A knock sounded on the glass door in front of us. When I looked up, Leo was standing there, in black pants and white shirt, carrying a guitar case and an amp. “Where do I plug in?” he called out, his voice muffled.

  “Plug in?” Roger said. “We’re going electric with this?”

  “I thought he was just doing his DJ thing on his computer,” Lauren whispered to Maya. “I didn’t even know he played.”