Save the Date(96)

I shook my head, not wanting to put this on her when she was getting married so soon. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

I waved it off. “We kind of had a fight,” I said with a shrug, like this really didn’t matter to me at all. “But it’s not a big deal. I mean, I don’t really need her. I have you guys. And she’s leaving next year for school anyway, so . . .”

Linnie nodded, but in a way that I could somehow tell meant she wasn’t agreeing with me. She reached out and smoothed one of my curls down, then took a breath before speaking. “It can’t always be about us, Charlie,” she said, her voice a little tentative, like she was carefully choosing each word as she spoke it. “You have to have people outside the family too.”

“I do,” I said automatically, before wondering if this was actually true any longer.

Linnie gave me a look that clearly said she didn’t believe me. “What happened with Jesse?”

“Nothing,” I said, and gave her a quick recap of Mike getting drunk and ruining the mood. “But maybe tonight . . .” Even as I spoke the words, I could feel my heart start to beat faster at the thought of it—I would be seeing Jesse soon. Like, in a few hours.

“Well, have your fun. Just be careful,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me.

“Girls?” I heard my dad’s voice—from the sound of it, he was on the landing.

“Yeah?” we both called back in unison.

“Uh—there’s someone named Ralph downstairs who claims he’s here to marry Linnie.”

Linnie shot me an exasperated look, and I clapped my hand over my mouth, trying not to burst out laughing. “He’s going to marry her to Rodney,” I called. “He’s a judge.”

“Ah,” my dad said. “Well, that makes more sense. I was worried there was going to have to be a duel or something.”

“Do we need to go down?” Linnie called.

“Pretty soon,” my dad said, and his voice was getting fainter, like he’d already headed down the stairs. “Almost picture time!”

“So,” I said, looking across at her and feeling myself smile. “Should we get you married?”

Linnie looked around the closet, then took a breath and nodded. I held out my hand to her and she clasped it, and we pulled ourselves up to standing together, the way we’d been doing ever since I was little. “Yes,” she said, straightening out her train and giving my hand a squeeze. “Let’s do it.”





CHAPTER 21


Or, The Boy I’m Gonna Marry




* * *



IS EVERYONE HERE?” WILL ASKED as he walked past us all—the bridesmaids and groomsmen, all lined up in the kitchen in our proper order, with Linnie and my parents waiting at the end of the line, in the dining room. “Are we all ready?”

“Is this a rhetorical question?” J.J. asked, sounding not sarcastic, but genuinely interested. “Because I think we’ve been ready for, what, twenty minutes?”

Jenny W. nodded, and I saw Elizabeth roll her eyes. But the truth was, J.J. was right for once. We’d all been ushered into the kitchen so that we could walk across the lawn in formation to the back of the tent. It seemed that getting the bridal party in place was not such an easy thing when there was nowhere to stand hidden before processing down the aisle. Since we’d be visible the second we entered the tent, we weren’t going to do it until the wedding was actually a go. According to Will, there was nothing worse than the guests seeing a bride in her wedding dress before the event had begun.

But every time it looked like we were ready to go, another guest would come in late, and we’d go into our holding pattern all over again. I couldn’t help but think about Rodney, waiting up at the front of the tent with his parents, and hoped that someone had told him we were waiting because people kept showing up late, not because Linnie had changed her mind.

The last two hours had been a frenzied blur, as it seemed like time was speeding up the closer it got to the start of the wedding. The pictures had taken far longer than I would have ever imagined pictures could take, and by the end of it my cheeks hurt from smiling—but now they were done, which was the important thing. Linnie and Rodney had wanted to do them before the ceremony, as opposed to after (which really made the insistence that Rodney and Linnie not see each other before the wedding seem that much sillier). They figured that this way, there wouldn’t be a long pause while everyone waited for the bride and groom to get their pictures taken. It was a good idea in theory, even though J.J. kept pointing out that if either Linnie or Rodney changed their minds mid-ceremony and didn’t say “I do,” we’d be left with a lot of awkward photos.

As we’d gotten closer to the start time, Will and Bill had kicked into high gear, and it seemed like they were both in ten places at once as they ran around, both in their tuxes, communicating by walkie-talkie, looking more like they were in the midst of pulling off a heist than planning a wedding.

I had been waiting for more stuff to go wrong, but as the wedding had gotten closer to its start time, things had seemed to calm down somewhat. Brooke had taken Waffles for a walk and then closed him upstairs in my room, where he seemed happy enough to nap on the blanket that she’d folded at the foot of the bed for him, so he wouldn’t start howling during the ceremony.