Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched (2 page)

“I won't let you down, Clem. I'll be fine. I'm just . . . distracted right now. I'll be fine tomorrow. Swear.”

Hey, sometimes it happened. And it never happened to Alanna, so she got a pass. “Go. If you need to talk later, call me, okay?”

She nodded and practically ran out.

“Gunnar, you're acting sous chef tonight,” I told him. “Evan, take Everett's spot as line cook. Everett, you're on vegetables.”

“Don't you mess up my station,” Gunnar hissed at Evan. Gunnar, late twenties and stick skinny with a mop of blue-black hair and narrow, green eyes, was famous for a serious approach to vegetables and his lack of a sense of humor, but he managed to make me laugh every night. Despite being so young, he was long divorced and had a nine-year-old daughter he adored, who looked just like him, minus the constant smile. Gunnar wasn't a smiler—except when it came to his girl.

Within ten minutes, Gunnar and I made seven stir-fry specials, four orders of fusilli, and eight vegetable kebabs. I'd scalded myself with boiling water, had red-pepper sauce in my hair and wet flour under my nails, but we were only five minutes behind. Fuck yeah, we got it done.

Until a party of ten came in and we ran out of tofu for the blackened-stir-fry special. How the holy hell had I let that happen?

I took over Alanna's and my job, sent Gunnar back to vegetables, and sent Evan to Xander's—one of my favorite late-night markets—for five pounds of firm tofu pronto.

No more distractions,
I ordered myself. While I'd been checking inventory earlier, even
my
normally focused mind had wandered to whether to substitute agave nectar for the sugar in Zach's sister's wedding cake. When I
should
have been thinking about how many blocks of tofu we'd gone through.
Next time one of Zach's relatives gets married, don't volunteer to make a wedding cake for two hundred and sixty guests when you have to be at the wedding on prime Saturday night during prime kitchen time,
I mentally yelled at myself as I stared into the refrigerator.

Six minutes later, Evan, whose flushed face and mussed hair indicated he'd sprinted to the market and back, returned with the wrong kind of tofu because he was in a rush and I'd freaked him out. You should have seen his exhausted, hangdog face. How could I yell at him?

I'd yell at myself. Inventory was my thing. And I'd better step it up and fast. In six weeks, a
New York Times
reporter was
coming to the restaurant as part of a piece on “veganmania” across America. For the travel section in a
Sunday
edition. This was a shot at Holy Grail–level publicity. Only a few restaurants from a handful of US cities would make it into the article. Clementine's
had
to make it in. Which meant the minute the wedding was over tomorrow, I was sneaking away from the reception and Zach's zillion relatives and coming back to work. From now on, there would be no running out of firm tofu. There would be no running behind schedule. There would be no sautéing braids.

There would be
no
distractions.

A
t just before 6:00 a.m. the next morning, I started setting out the ingredients for the wedding cake on the huge center island in Zach's kitchen, and my mind went where it usually did when I had flour and sugar and vanilla extract in front of me. Desserts for the restaurant. Minicupcakes. Chocolate-hazelnut with coconut-pecan icing. Lemon-raspberry with lemon frosting. Gingerbread with caramelized mango. A mix of three per serving, I decided as I added six cups of flour and an ungodly amount of sugar to the big silver mixing bowl on the kitchen counter. This was distraction in reverse and okay by me.

I grabbed my little notebook from my bag to jot down the cupcakes, which got me thinking of slightly gooey German chocolate cake with caramel and maybe fresh-peach crostata
for tomorrow night's specials. I added a note to call Alanna around ten to see if she was all right. I couldn't afford for her to be off her game on a Saturday night. I could always call my good friend Alexander, a vegan chef at Fresh, the restaurant where I used to work, to see if he could cover for her if he wasn't working tonight.

I had so much on my mind that I jotted that down too and suddenly felt eyes on me. Charlie, Zach's ancient, little beagle. Giving me that begging look. Not for a lick of the bowl, since I'd barely gotten started on the cake. Charlie wanted to go out—now. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 6:08.

Glancing out the dark window, I asked the dog, “Can't you hold it till Zach wakes up?” The sun wasn't even up yet. I was barely up. And Jolie's wedding started at three. I had to get cracking on the cake. Five tiers, Pacific Ocean–blue fondant, tiny seashells cascading. The venue was a three-minute drive down Ocean Avenue from Zach's house, at a boutique hotel's private stretch of beach, which was why I'd decided to use Zach's state-of-the-art kitchen, since transporting would be a breeze. And that had included myself down the stairs from his bedroom before the tush-crack of dawn.

Charlie looked at me with those huge brown eyes. No, he couldn't hold it.

“You're lucky you're so cute,” I told him, leaning down to give him a scratch behind his ears.

As I looked around the kitchen for Charlie's leash, I thought of Zach, sleeping upstairs. What I wouldn't give to
be back in his incredibly comfortably king-size bed, snoozing for another couple of hours myself. But Jolie and Rufus's wedding cake had to be perfect. I adored Jolie, badass daughter of Zach's father and the second of his three wives (a fourth was imminent). Jolie was only eighteen and marrying a musician she'd been dating since her sophomore year of high school, which technically wasn't that long ago. She wasn't pregnant or immature or even out of her very young mind. She was in love, and she was getting married, whether anyone liked it or not. Several family members, including Zach,
didn't
like it.

Jolie had told her father, of the
You'll get married and be an actress over my cold, dead body
pronouncements, that she'd rather give her up megatrust than not marry her baby-faced fiancé and go for her dream of becoming the next Jennifer Lawrence. Her father had finally relented. But to avoid the possibility of anyone's objecting during the ceremony, such as Zach or his father lunging from his seat and screaming,
“She's eighteen and ruining her life,”
Jolie had wisely told the minister to cut the traditional “speak now or forever hold your piece” spiel.

Hopefully she'd do away with some other traditions too, such as the mind-numbing bouquet toss. A lineup of single women vying to be “next”?
Shiver
. I'd been to three weddings in the past two months, and at last Saturday's nuptials, my high school friend Carrie's, I had to bear witness to the grinning fourteen-year-old nephew of the groom sliding the something-blue garter up the red-faced thirty-seven-year-old bouquet catcher's bare leg.

Brides of the world: Just say no!

Case in point: Three Saturdays ago, at my sister Elizabeth's wedding, a disgruntled single guest in a hot-pink sheath dress had walked up to Elizabeth as the reception wound down and asked when she was planning to do the bouquet toss. The woman added that she didn't want to miss the lineup while freshening her lipstick in the ladies' room.

My sister, the least sentimental, least nostalgic, least superstitious person alive, had let out her trademark snort. “If I'm tossing the bouquet to anyone, it's straight at my mother-in-law, who paid over four hundred bucks for it.”

“But your mother-in-law is
married
,” the single guest had protested.

I'd been able to tell from Elizabeth's expression that she was dying to lecture the woman on archaic, antifeminist traditions that made her blood boil. Elizabeth got seriously worked up over these things. But she held her usual let-loose tongue. “I just meant I'm not doing a bouquet toss.”

The single guest walked away with an “Oh,” shoulders kind of slumped, heading back to her table of singles, where she'd been seated between a ten-year-old cousin using a rubber band to slingshot crap at unsuspecting guests all night and the groom's mentally unstable bachelor uncle. Elizabeth called out the single woman's name, and when the guest turned around, my sister, who was much kinder than she let on, tossed that bouquet, albeit with a slight roll of her eyes, directly into the guest's hands.

With a surprised smile—and a silent, triumphant
I will be next!
—the single guest went back much happier to the ten-year-old, who'd barfed up his third piece of wedding cake on her chair.

“Jesus H. Christ on a Ritz cracker,” my best friend, Sara, had said as we'd watched the woman's entire demeanor change from despairing to hopeful. “If I ever get like that, which I never will, please slap me really hard across the face to snap me out of it.” Sara and I were both in committed relationships, but marriage—and cheesetastic wedding rituals—was the furthest thing from either of our busy minds. If anyone tried to toss a bouquet in Sara's direction, she'd instinctively drop-kick it.

“Oh, I will,” I'd said. “And same here.” Not that either of us would be getting married anytime soon. I'd been with Zach seven months, and Sara and Joe had been together for six. Couple newbies! But spring wedding season, with its bouquet tossing and ice sculptures and bands still playing Kool & the Gang, had taken over our lives.

Last month, Sara and I had attended our Pilates teacher's wedding, the bride and groom in lotus position in the woods. Zenia, one of the coolest women we knew, had shocked us by calling for the single women to line up for the bouquet toss. Zenia, of all people!

“A wedding itself is traditional, is it not?” Zenia had said in her usual Zen style to our “How could you!” questioning afterward.

“I'm making a statement by not lining up,” Sara had whispered to me. “Can you imagine if I actually caught the bouquet? I don't want to be next! I'd run for the hills. Join a nunnery. Anything to not be next and marry
that
guy.”

We'd glanced over at Sara's boyfriend, the loudest person at any social event, but especially in the calm quiet of the woods, telling another cringe-worthy story about “the loser schmuck wannabe chef” he'd humiliated as host of his own weekly TV show,
Eat Me
, on the Food Network. Sara was something of a cohost, and how she'd landed that gig was a frightening story for another time. But her boyfriend, Joe “Steak” Johansson, was the only person alive capable of embarrassing Sara, who was hard to offend. It was half the reason she liked him so much.

“No way will Jolie do a cheesetastic bouquet toss,” I whispered now to Charlie as I searched the kitchen for his leash. “That chick is as antitradition as they come.”

Evident by her choice of wedding-cake baker. Despite having her pick of the best bakeries in LA to make her wedding cake (this was a no-expense-spared, unlimited-budget wedding, paid for by Cornelius Jeffries, bajillionaire father), Jolie had asked me. I'd met Jolie back when I was getting my Skinny Bitch Bakes business off the ground, cakes and muffins and cookies and scones and pies for coffee shops all over Santa Monica. That was just six months ago, but my life had completely changed since then. Now, I was baking those cakes and pies only for Clementine's No Crap Café. New note to self:
think about hiring a pastry chef so you can focus on running the kitchen. My other best friend, Ty, the
best
vegan pastry chef, was working in Paris for the year. He'd know someone I could count on.

The other big change? The amazing guy sleeping upstairs. Zach and I had gone from rocky beginning to true love. No one, Zach and I especially, expected a mouthy vegan such as me and a steak-house-owning carnivore such as him to last more than five minutes in the same room together. But seven months later, Zach and I were still going strong.

Not that I'd seen much of him these past two months except for late at night when I'd leave Clementine's No Crap Café feeling exhausted, exhilarated, and covered in tomato sauce and smelling like garlic. He'd pick me up on the Harley (leaving the annoying Mercedes at home), bring me back to this spectacular beach house, make a mess in the kitchen as he whipped us up a late-night snack of spiked fruit smoothies, and then we'd hang out on the couch for a little bit, watching TV and talking until one of us led the other upstairs. Zach was always gone in a suit and tie before I ever woke up. Our hours were as different as we were, but somehow, during the brief time we had together lately, Zach and I had grown even closer.

Zach was a package deal—he came with Charlie, waddling, little beagle, who continued to stare at me, tail wagging. It had taken me a while to win over the ancient, sweet-faced dog, but I'd done it. Which meant I had to take him out for his morning pee and let him get oohed and aahed at by the early-bird
joggers on the beach.
If
I could find his leash. Where was it?