Big Summer(39)
“As if.”
“Hey, weddings make people romantic! You never know.”
I spun around slowly, looking from the bay to the hot tub to the mansion where I’d be staying. “It’s incredible.”
“I want you to be happy.” Drue put her arm around my chest, pulling me back until she could rest her cheek on the top of my head. “I’m so glad that you’re here. That you agreed to do this.”
I let myself lean back against her, smelling her hair and her perfume. She’s your Kryptonite, I heard Darshi saying… but when Drue said “Thank you,” I felt myself smile. Maybe she really had changed. Maybe I was doing the right thing.
Below us, the beach was swarming with crews of workers, in the process of erecting a series of tents. The wedding ceremony would be held at a winery a few miles down the road, but the rehearsal dinner tonight, and the pre-wedding photographs tomorrow, would be on the beach. Because there were no fancy hotels in Truro, in addition to taking over the nicest hotel in Provincetown, the Cavanaughs had rented half a dozen homes on the bluff near the Lathrop family seat, where the wedding party and immediate family would stay. Each house had been given a name for the occasion. Drue and I were in Sea Star, a three-story, four-bedroom house. Our bedrooms were on the second floor, and two more bedrooms were on the ground floor, the larger of which had been turned into a spa/salon/dressing room, complete with massage tables, mirrors, and a reclining chair with a steam machine beside it for Drue’s facialist/bridesmaid Minerva to use. The top floor was one large room, a combined kitchen/dining/living room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the bay. The caterers had set it up as a hospitality suite, with a rotating buffet of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and snacks in between, not to mention a round-the-clock open bar.
Stuart and his folks were next door, in a place called Sea Breeze. Drue’s parents and maternal grandparents were in the Lathrop family home, Sea Glass. Other, lesser participants and guests had been assigned to Driftwood, Starfish, and Clearwater (that last, Drue whispered, was on the other side of Route 6 and didn’t even have a water view).
Back in my bedroom, a wooden bench with a woven seagrass seat stood at the foot of the king-size bed, with a giant, beribboned “Welcome to Our Wedding” basket at its center, with #DRUEANDSTU underneath it. The basket was crammed with goodies, all carefully selected by Drue after endless consultation with me. There were bottles of wine and prosecco, bags of smoked and candied nuts, biscuits and crackers, an assortment of dried fruit, salmon jerky and bluefish paté, chocolate truffles, each wrapped in gold foil, a hangover-helper kit, which included Advil, Alka-Seltzer, some kind of herbal headache cure, and condoms (“In case any of Stuart’s friends get frisky,” Drue said with a wink). In the bathroom, I knew there would be soaps and scrubs and monogrammed bath bombs, along with razors, toothbrush and toothpaste and mouthwash, hairspray and mousse and bobby pins, and pretty much anything else that a guest might have forgotten to pack. “The nearest drugstore’s back in P-town,” Drue had explained. My gifts were in there, too—I’d made sachets, scented with lavender verbena, tied with curls of silver ribbon, with Drue and Stuart’s monogram embroidered on the front. A heavy-stock card with a schedule of the weekend’s events, with the word WELCOME in gold at the top, was tucked into the basket, between the cheese twists and the bag of dried apricots. I picked it up and read through it. “There’s an app for the wedding?”
“It’s got the schedule and maps and all the hashtags for stuff. Now come on,” she said, plucking the bottle of prosecco out of the basket and pulling me to my feet. “The party starts in three hours! We have to get ready! We have to pregame!”
“Hold on! I’m downloading the app,” I protested as Drue pretended to tow me to the door. Being near the ocean always improved my mood, and between Drue’s enthusiasm, the beautiful setting, and a suitcase full of gorgeous clothes that I was being paid to wear, it was almost impossible not to feel happy.
“Please. You probably know the schedule better than I do,” Drue said. I wasn’t sure that was true, but I at least knew the weekend’s contours. Tonight, there would be a rehearsal dinner featuring a clambake on the beach. Tomorrow morning, there’d be optional paddleboard yoga, followed by a brunch for the female wedding guests in our house, Sea Star, with a companion brunch for the men next door at Sea Breeze. After brunch, we’d all get our hair and makeup done and get into our dresses. The photographer wanted us on the beach at five o’clock sharp, just as the setting sun would tint the air peach and tangerine and gold (“Sunsets on the outer Cape are magical!” Drue had told me, and I hadn’t wanted to mention the story I’d read in Scientific American that had explained that the lovely sunsets were the result of all the pollution that had drifted up the East Coast). At six-thirty, a bus would come to drive us to the winery. At seven o’clock, a string quartet would start to play the wedding march, and the ceremony would begin. When it was over, there’d be a cocktail hour and dinner at the winery, and dancing all night long, first to the music of a band, then to a DJ, flown in from Holland for the occasion. Every single detail had been covered, up to and including the installation of a funicular for guests who were too incapacitated or too inebriated to manage the four flights of stairs from the beach back to the houses.
Don’t count other people’s money, my nana liked to say. In general, I tried to follow her advice, but as the wedding had gotten closer I’d found it almost impossible not to keep a running estimate of how much the entire affair would cost. The home where we were staying rented for $18,000 a week. I knew because I’d looked it up online. The other places had to come with similar price tags. Then there was the cost of the food, and the musicians (string quartet for the ceremony, twelve-piece band for the party, big-deal DJs flown in from Los Angeles and overseas). There were the florists from New York, and makeup artists, also from the city. Drue’s dress alone had cost more than any car my parents had ever driven, and it was one of three that she’d be wearing on her wedding night. The whole affair could end up costing more than a million dollars. A lot of money under any circumstances; maybe a crazy amount if Darshi was right and the Cavanaugh Corporation was in trouble.