2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) (35 page)

Sunday, February 27
^th

“So, are you ready?” Fynn asked as they walked back
inside the house after seeing off Drew and Klein, who had also taken Tara back
to their place so they could be alone for the night. It was a welcome reprieve after
the madness of the move-in, unloading the truck and finding homes for all of
her things among all of his things. The Trager house had doubled in stuff and
things and whathaveyou’s in one fell swoop, so in the interest of square
footage for maneuvering there was a lot of dickering, girls against guys, over
what should stay and what should go—thank God the men were outnumbered (turns
out Tara was good for something). It was far from perfect as yet, more
“cluttered” than a true design style, but Catherine definitely saw potential.

“Am I ready for what?”

“The happily-ever-after portion of this relationship.”

She leaned up and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Absolutely, totally, completely ready. You’re going to have to race me down
the aisle.”

“Sounds fun.”

She waved him off. “Speaking of the wedding, do you
have everything set on your end?”

“Well, there’s the tux… and me… so yes, I’m pretty
much set.”

“Says the man with too little to do,” she sighed.

“I would have done whatever you asked me to do,” he
said smoothly. “Whatever you want, you just have to ask.” His eyes were
piercing right through her, heating her up.

“Well then, I would like—”

“Except tonight. Yesterday was our pre-weekiversary
and you missed it… so I was thinking you might like to give
me
something,
seeing as how I started this whole wedding thing.” He spun the diamond ring on
her finger suggestively.

“Are you going to spend the next eighty years of our
life together making up holidays and events on which we should have sex?”

“It’s not like Hallmark makes cards for this sort of
thing, so we have to show our appreciation for each other somehow.”

“I guess you sort of have a point.” Catherine nodded
her head lightly, willing to be swayed. “And you did agree to add Connor to
your wedding party for little old me, so I
should
repay that kindness
anyway.”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

She kissed his self-satisfied smirk off his face,
hands wandering freely on her soon-to-be legal property.

“You know,” he said, coming up for air, “speaking of
the wedding party, I heard from my friend Jason… my best man.”

She pulled away from him, suddenly alert to potential
disaster—
of course he has the Ebola virus and can’t make it to the wedding.

“He said it was a pleasure meeting you.”

“What?” she asked, startled and confused.

“Yesterday. In Illinois. Ringing any bells?” Fynn prodded.

“Uh… yes, I remembered Illinois,” she said carefully.
“It’s a beautiful state. Entirely underrated…. So that’s where Jason lives?”
she added innocently.
If I’d addressed the invitations I would know this.

“Do you happen to remember the Dewsom County Police
Department?”

“Jason was there?” she asked, coughing lightly. She
felt like she was choking on her own tongue as it swelled to five times its
size.
Am I allergic to something now? The truth? Is the truth going to
suffocate me? I get this far and I’m still going to die single?

“Detective Banks, yes.”

“Oh.” She didn’t have any defense, anything she could say
at all.

“So you lied about going the wrong way.” He pushed her
up against the wall to interrogate her, sexily.

“Would
you
admit to something like that?” she
asked breathily.

“Something like that wouldn’t happen to me…. Only to
you, my dear,” he said deliciously.

“But really, what are the chances there would be two
idling U-Hauls in the same parking lot at the same time?”

“For you? Pretty good I’d say, considering....”

“I think Tara is a bad influence or she’s tainted or
something,” Catherine charged, explaining away her predicament-prone tendencies
as out of her hands. And right then she almost told him the rest of her Tara
troubles—the whole wedding fiasco—just to seal the case on Tara being the root
cause of everything. But there was a big difference between owning up to an
honest mistake like taking your rented truck’s twin out of a parking lot
unknowingly, and telling your fiancé about that time a couple weeks back when
you wigged out and canceled their wedding and ever since have been piecing
together a semblance of that event with spit and scotch tape and rubber cement.
Two
very
different things.

“I think you can get yourself into plenty of trouble
all on your own.” He ran a finger down the inside of her arm lightly, all the
way to the wrist.

“Hey,” she protested the characterization feebly,
unable to muster much indignation what with her weak knees and tingling lady
parts.

“Come to think of it, you’re just about to get into
all kinds of trouble.”

Friday, March 3
^rd

“You saw
The Hangover
, right?” Catherine asked from
the passenger seat after being dragged out of her parents’ house where she’d
been planning to have a nice quiet evening with her parents and Fynn and Cara
before the wedding.

“I
dream
of an adventure like that someday,”
Tara swooned.

Catherine cringed. A last-minute bachelorette party
with Tara in charge had all the potential for disaster, even if it was
conceived in good faith—celebrating mission impossible: Cat Tying the Knot.

“Don’t worry, this party is going to be considerably
more tame,” she assured her. “We’re not even leaving the state, hardly even
leaving town.”

But there was plenty of trouble to be had in any town
Tara was in.

When she announced, “We’re here!” Catherine peered
between her self-imposed finger blindfold carefully, only to find herself
looking out the window at her brother’s house.

“This is it?” she blurted, shocked in a good way.
This
she could do. An evening with the girls in suburban Pennsylvania where the
worst that could await her was maybe a bad stripper.

Tara got out and went around to the trunk, handing her
an overnight bag and a garment bag, and then grabbing several grocery bags for
herself.

“What are these for?” Catherine asked, bewildered.

“You’re staying here.”

“What do you mean I’m staying here?”

“I brought your stuff so you could stay here. We’re
having a slumber party and getting ready together in the morning—manis, pedis,
hair, makeup. The whole ball of wax—which you can also do, by the way. A gift
from my Cousin Vinnie for any ‘misunderstanding’.”

“Seriously?” Catherine felt her eyes well up.

“Yup. I told you he has a heart of gold. Now
skedaddle,” Tara said, pushing her toward the house. “We have some work to do
before the fun begins.”

“Shouldn’t I call Fynn and let him know I’m not coming
back?”

“He knows. The guys are taking him out. Bachelor
party.”

“But what about Cara?”

“Your parents are watching all the girls—Cara, Niki,
and Nell.”

“So you took care of everything?”

“It’s all good.”

As soon as they reached the front step, the door
opened and Georgia enveloped her in a hug. “I can’t believe you’re getting
married tomorrow! How does it feel?”

“Like it’s about time,” Catherine admitted with relief.

“The gang’s all here!” Tara hollered, barging in.

“I’ll open the wine,” Lacey said, heading for the
kitchen.

“Not so fast. First we have some work to do.”

Everyone looked to Tara who had never proffered work
over wine before in her life.

“Are you feeling okay?” Georgia asked.

“I’m great. I just don’t want us baking under the influence—that’s
how burns happen.”

“Baking?” Georgia’s expression was bemused.

“If you want munchies, I bought all kinds of treats at
the store. No need to make anything,” Lacey noted tightly.

“Well, unless you bought cake we have some work to do.”
Tara dumped the grocery bags out onto the coffee table—boxes of cake mix and
canisters of frosting.

“You didn’t,” Georgia growled.

“I don’t understand.” Lacey looked confused.

“Tell me this isn’t what I think it is,” Georgia
demanded.

“That depends. What do you think it is?” Tara asked
plainly.

“Tell me we aren’t about to make
a wedding
cake.”

“I can’t do that,” Tara admitted.

“You
promised
you had the cake covered,”
Georgia said sternly.

Catherine felt her lips begin to tremble as everything
that had seemed right about her life and the wedding for the past week suddenly
started to crumble before her eyes under the unmistakable Betty Crocker banner.

“I do have it covered.”

“
This is called covered?
” Georgia raged.

“This is called using a little ingenuity to get what we
want.”

They all stared at Tara, trying not to freak out, trying
to follow her before killing her. But if it came down to it, at least it would only
be second degree murder—a crime of passion. That wasn’t death penalty stuff,
right?

Tara sighed with exasperation. “Listen, I couldn’t get
the cake. It was locked up tight in another wedding. But I nabbed a look at
Vinnie’s files and I
found
it. It isn’t even very far from here. It was
delivered today. I figure we can make a decoy and then pull a switcheroo.
Bam
—everyone’s
happy.” She smacked her hands together.

“Oh no, I’m not stealing a cake from someone else’s
wedding,” Catherine said, having just made a deal with herself last week that
her stealing days were over.

“But it’s
your
cake. The one Fynn picked out,”
Tara reminded  her.

“But it will destroy another bride’s dream.”

“What about
your
dream?” Tara asked—the devil
on Catherine’s shoulder. “You deserve it as much—even
more
than she
does. You had it first.”

Catherine felt herself wavering on the cusp of
integrity.

“I can’t sanction or support this endeavor,” Georgia
stated righteously, trying to put a swift end to the whole crazy idea.

“Not even if this bride is Rachel Craig herself?” Tara
asked. “Turns out she is
literally
having a shotgun wedding.”

“That bitch from the store the other day?” Lacey asked
in shock.

“The one and only.”

“I’m in,” Lacey said.

“Oh, I’m in,” Catherine agreed, her voice guttural and
determined.

They all looked to Georgia….

“You know, if we were truly capable of making a good
enough replacement cake, we wouldn’t actually need to steal it,” she said,
pointing out the chink in the plan.

*****

“Okay, so it isn’t as perfect a plan as it seemed on
paper,” Tara admitted lowly.

“Not as perfect?” Catherine’s voice was just below a
screech, her eyes taking in the crumbling cakes before them.

“They’re too moist; that’s the problem,” Lacey noted.

“I thought moist was a good thing. It says it right on
the box.” Tara showed the front with a flourish.

“It’s fine for a sheet cake or a simple 2-layer cake, but
for tiers… they crumble under their own weight,” Lacey observed. “I guess
that’s why real bakery cakes are drier; it helps them hold up to the pressure.”

“Makes them taste like crap too,” Tara pointed out.

“It’s more about the display.”

“Well, sue me for trying to make a delicious decoy.”

“The wedding cake Fynn picked out tastes delicious,”
Catherine smarted, not that anyone was concerned with such a trivial statement
of fact.

“So now what?” Georgia asked, having joined them
because she couldn’t beat them—not without an entire lecture series on morality
and ethics.

“Why don’t we just buy ready-made cakes to tier?” Lacey
offered. “I’m not going to say they’ll be perfect, but I did take a cake
decorating class a few years ago.”

“And why did you take a cake decorating class?” Tara
asked pointedly, pretty much saying she was a dork for that decision.

“Because I thought it might come in handy someday… I
don’t know… like now,” Lacey said darkly, holding her own.

“Touché,” Tara said, bowing slightly. “But
unfortunately this weekend must be some kind of obscure cake holiday or
something because the bakeries are slap out. Grocery stores too. This was the
best I could do.” She presented the cake mess before them like it was a
childish piece of modern art—layers of cake in various stages of total
breakdown.

They all stood somberly around the island, a cake
funeral.

“I got it!” Tara exclaimed suddenly.

All eyes looked to their leader in this venture,
waiting for brilliance to shine down upon them.

“We just need something that
looks
like cake,”
she said excitedly.

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Georgia said, putting
her misgivings on the island with the mangled cake, just in case there was any
question in the future when the authorities came knocking on the door—she most
certainly
did not agree
with what was about to go down here tonight.

Catherine, on the other hand, had no choice—no matter
how crazy the idea. It was this or be cake-less on her wedding day….

“I feel like I should be wearing a chef hat or a white
coat or some kind of disguise,” Catherine whispered as she tiptoed her end of
the hatbox cake tower into the reception hall.
Actually I feel like I should
be the one safely squirreled away at Lacey’s instead of risking arrest—
the
whole but-we’re-mothers-with-infant-daughters argument was getting old.

“I thought we learned something from the last time,”
Tara hissed. “If you get caught it looks a lot more incriminating when you’re
wearing a disguise.”        

Catherine thought back to their black shoe-polished
faces in the dark of a Nekoyah night and a giggle escaped her lips. At that
moment when Fynn found them on his property she would never have imagined that
she would end up here now, planning another robbery, or even better, marrying
him in less than twenty-four more hours.

“This way we could literally be a couple chicks who
wandered off the street and stumbled into the hall looking for a phone or a
bathroom or something else completely innocent,” she reasoned.

“A couple of chicks who just so happen to be carrying
a wedding cake through the streets in the middle of the night?” Catherine asked
dubiously. A stunning wedding cake at that, the hatboxes made perfect yet wholly
inedible tiers… but this was Rachel Craig they were talking about—all
appearances with nothing sweet on the inside.

“Every plan has its downside,” Tara admitted.

“Some more than others.”

“And another thing: don’t tiptoe, it makes you look guilty.”

Catherine tried to stand up, walk tall (or as tall as
possible for the height-challenged) and fight her natural inclination to sneak.

“Dammit, it isn’t out on the cake table,” Tara noted,
scanning the room full of perfectly appointed tables.

“What do you know about cake tables?” She was the one
getting married and she didn’t think she even had a cake table. But they had to
put the cake somewhere surely—  

“It’s got to be in the back. Probably the kitchen.
Come on.”

Catherine dutifully followed, pulled along by the
pressure from the other side of the cake tray which Lacey had fashioned from a
piece of plywood covered in fabric.

“So where is it?” she whispered, eyes darting around
the empty kitchen.

“It
has
to be here,” Tara almost whined,
showing the first crack in her certainty that they could pull this off.

“May I help you?” A man’s voice from behind.

Tara immediately spoke up. “Yes, actually…. We were
wondering where we should put this cake. We’re late delivering it and—”

“The cake was delivered hours ago,” the gentleman
noted. It seemed Rachel had sprung for a wedding guard—not so much a picture of
brawn with hands that were lethal weapons, but he looked like he could handle a
phone and dial 911.

“Oh, that was the
wedding
cake,” Tara stressed,
and Catherine was certain she had burst a blood vessel and was stroking out.
What
the hell are we carrying then?

“Yes,” the man said warily, like perhaps he too
thought Tara was batty.

“This here… it’s the groom’s cake,” she said simply.

“The groom’s cake? I heard nothing about—”

“The groom didn’t even order it. His mother did. She’s
southern through and through and couldn’t let her baby boy get married without
a groom’s cake.”

Catherine eyed Tara in awe—the girl never ceased to
amaze her how she came up with this stuff. Probably got it from watching
Steel
Magnolias—
useful life lessons from meaningless entertainment.

“It looks an awful lot like a wedding cake to me,” the
wedding guard pointed out.

“I know, usually the groom’s cake is less… formal,”
Tara admitted, appraising the white basket-weave frosting and florets that
Lacey had done expertly in record time. “But this particular groom likes
vanilla everything and so his mother insisted.”

“I’ll have to check—”

“No!” Tara said quickly. “Please don’t. It’s a
surprise—although not necessarily a happy one considering the couple isn’t even
married yet and this is classic mother-in-law meddling.”

The gentleman bowed his head just slightly in a show
of understanding, probably thinking of his own in-law woes.

“So, could you point us in the right direction so we
can drop this off before we’re fired? We have a long trip back.”

“I’ll just take you there myself,” he said, intent on
chaperoning. Obviously this guy took his position as man-in-chief of the
reception hall too seriously—who was going to tamper with a wedding?

Catherine’s heart was in her throat as they were led
to a room down the hall from the reception space. What were they going to do, put
the fake cake next to the real one and leave empty-handed after everything
they’d gone through to get here? Or kick the guy where it hurts, grab the real
one, and take off? She hoped Tara had thought to pack her pepper spray or
nunchucks or something.

They placed the cake on the table, eyeing the real one.
The final piece of her wedding puzzle. They were so close she could almost
taste it—victory that is, seeing as how she’d given up cake until tomorrow.

“Do you need me to sign anything?” the gestapo asked.
But before they could answer he held up a finger. “Hold on one second; I need
to take this call.” He put his phone to his ear, turned and left the room; like
they were making too much noise just standing there.

“That’s our cue.” Tara motioned toward the cake.

“How did you do that?” Catherine asked, bewildered
that the phone would ring at that exact moment.

“I didn’t do that. We were absolutely cooked. But I
know not to let an opportunity go to waste. Let’s get out of here.”

*****

“Floor it!” Tara shrieked from the back, scoping out
the window like they were being pursued. But Catherine saw only a dim light
from the door of the reception hall reflected in the rearview mirror. No one
was following them. They were home free.

“Turn left… wait, right!” Tara hollered.

“Which is it?” Catherine snapped back.

“It’s…um… left.”

Catherine took the turn too sharply, having almost
missed it by the time Tara made up her mind, and in response she heard the
distinct sound of something sliding across the backseat.

“Tara, please tell me that was you.”

“I would but that wouldn’t be the truth.”

“Is the cake all right?” she screeched.

“For now.”

“Didn’t you secure it?”

“What was I supposed to do, buckle it in?”

If it were only that easy
.
“Just keep it
on the seat and upright.” Catherine tried to keep her mind on the road and trust
Tara with the cake.

“Wait, turn right,” she blurted suddenly. “Right
there!” Tara’s finger emerged from between the front seats, pointing at the
fast-approaching next corner.

Catherine cut across two lanes with no blinker,
thankful there was no traffic at this hour. “A little warning next time would
be helpful,” she admonished. “What next?”

“How should I know?” Tara grumbled.

“You got us here in the first place.”

“Everything looks different from back here.”

“Great. How do you suppose we find our way out of this
damn town?”

“We could ask someone.”

“It’s the dead of the night. Do you see anyone to
ask?”

“How about that car behind us,” Tara pointed out.

Catherine’s eyes flashed to the rearview mirror again.
“Shit!” she shrieked, watching the blue lights approaching quickly.

She pulled over to the side of the road, stopping
short before a fire hydrant, trying not to amass any more violations on top of
whatever they had already seen her do. She glanced at the clock on the dash—two
minutes to midnight. She felt like Cinderella—time against her. “I can’t get
hauled in on my wedding day,” she whined. “What will people think?”

“Caught cake-handed,” Tara said with a giggle.

Catherine wasn’t amused. “Just tell me the cake is
okay,” she said, trying to breathe, afraid it was smashed to smithereens behind
her.

“Cake’s fine bee-atch. I know how to cushion a turn or
a rough stop—
years
of copiloting pizzas. You got to go with the flow to
keep the cheese in place. Same-same cakes,” she said, snapping her fingers.

“Good evening ma’am,” a ridiculously handsome officer
said, leaning down to look in the car.

“Evening,” Catherine eked out, hating that damn word that
kept rearing its ugly head in the most inconvenient places and times, mocking
her.  

“Where are you rushing off to at this hour?” he asked,
a loaded question if she ever heard one. He perused the interior of the car
with a professional eye, taking an inordinately long time on the backseat.

He knows about the cake. Someone must have filed a
report that it was stolen. They’d spent enough time talking to that guy at the
hall that he could probably describe every pore on their faces. And maybe there
were security cameras too….

“Just trying to get home and get a good night’s
sleep,” she said honestly.

“You know even when the streets are empty we still
have to follow the rules of the road.”

“I know officer. I apologize for that. I didn’t see my
turn until the last minute and I didn’t want to miss it. Next time I’ll—”

Tara started giggling uncontrollably from the back,
her laughter garbled but still undeniable.

“You girls don’t happen to have been drinking,” he
prodded.

“Of course not!” Catherine said quickly,
irately—perhaps too much so.

“Could I see your license and registration please?”

She dug through the pell-mell offerings in what was
now Tara’s glove box—a space that had birthed a big mess in a week’s time.
Thankfully though, the paperwork was in there.
Shit—shit—shit—
ran like a
broken record through her mind as she reached in her purse and slid out her
license to add to the offering before handing it over.

“Excuse me?” he asked.

“Um….” She didn’t know what he was looking for.
Here
you are your highness? Thank you for your service?
Did he want her to slip
him a Lincoln, a Jackson, or some other presidential “paperwork”?

“Did you just swear at a police officer?” he challenged.

“What? No.” She shook like some kind of demented
bobblehead.

“It’s not you,” Tara assured him from the back. “She
has Stress Tourette’s. Can’t stop herself.”

“Stress Tourette’s?”

“It’s a syndrome. Her therapist says it should go away
when the stress goes away. She’s getting married, you know.”

Please stop trying to make things better,
Catherine
pleaded inside.
Just stop while we’re still at only one ticket-worthy
offense.

He stood there for a moment, thoughtful disbelief on
his face. Then he turned back toward his vehicle, his headlights spotlighting
the whole takedown, and shrugged in that direction, either at his partner or maybe
the onboard camera that was probably catching it all on tape, to be used
against her in a court of law or on YouTube—whoever got it first.

“Could you please step out of the vehicle?” he
demanded, making her wonder why they bothered phrasing it as a question.

“But I thought this was about my blinker—”

“Ma’am, step out of the vehicle.”

For a moment she thought maybe this was some kind of
joke Tara had set up, having a stripper pull them over and ask her to get out
so he could put on his show for her—
this is my bachelorette party
. But
when she got out of the car, her hope was extinguished.

“Have you been drinking this evening?” he asked,
squinting at her license to read it in the glow of his patronizing flashlight.

“No.” She put her hand to her chest, trying to make
that one word as heartfelt as possible. And it was the God’s honest truth. Not
a stitch of alcohol—although she could
really
use a drink right now. But
of course that was what they all said, right? And she
had
been weaving across
the empty lanes what with Tara’s horrible navigation skills. Speaking of which,
Tara should be the one out here—

“Could you please walk a straight line for me?”

If that was what it took to clear her good name then
so be it. She stepped away from the car and toward the officer, stumbling
immediately.
Oh my God, maybe I am drunk—drunk on evil-doing. What the—
she
looked down at her right shoe. The heel had snapped off. She’d heard the sound
of a snap, like a twig breaking, on the way back to the car with the cake, but
running on pure adrenaline, she hadn’t even noticed that it had come from her
shoe. Served her right for wearing heels to a robbery anyway. Her wedding
shoes. The ones everyone told her to wear for a bit each day in order to break them
in for the wedding…. Now they were broken in all right.

“Can I just take my shoes off first?” She lifted her
foot to show the broken bottom, probably looking like a lunatic from an asylum,
wobbling there in sweatpants and silver strappy shoes.

The officer sighed. “Fine. Just move it along.”

She pulled off the offensive shoe and its pristine
mate and took her place in bare feet on the asphalt, walking heel to toe with
ease, moving her arms to touch her nose as commanded. She felt ridiculous and
noticed that suddenly the empty night was full of regular passersby, cars
slowing just enough to watch her spectacle. She looked toward the backseat where
Tara was, wondering why she wasn’t doing her usual routine, making a ruckus. She
would have expected her to be jumping out to save the day. But what she saw
there made her reel back in horror—Tara looked like a white ghost in the window.
Brilliant white. The color of frosting. Her entire face covered in it.