What He's Been Missing (12 page)

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Authors: Grace Octavia

BOOK: What He's Been Missing
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“I'm sorry. I was just pointing out that he was where he was supposed to be. King wasn't a leash dog. Not all dogs are meant to be tied to a person like that. He was out here free. Could come and go as he pleased. He chose to stay until he couldn't stay anymore.”
“He was a good dog,” I said. “Had my back.”
“That's what a good dog is supposed to do.”
I watched Ian so closely in the car on the way back to Grammy Annie-Lou's. I was still thinking about King, but I couldn't help but remember what Journey said about me committing to not love him. Grammy Annie-Lou was right: he was so good to me. So supportive. So loving. I wondered if I'd let him slip by me. If he'd let me slip by him.
I slid my hand over his on the armrest between the seats. We smiled at each other the rest of the way.
When we got to the house, Grammy Annie-Lou had cooked everything she could find and had lain it out on the dining room table. There were ribs and greens. Macaroni and cheese and yams.
Ian started rubbing his belly and she giggled so deeply I knew they were in love.
“Pies in the oven. Be ready in an hour, but then it needs to cool,” she said and it was easy to imagine that it was how she'd sounded when she'd offered my grandfather a plate long before I was born.
“No worries,” Ian said, sitting in one of the dining room chairs before the massive afternoon meal. “I got all night.”
“All night? Don't you have to get back to Atlanta for your Valentine's date with Scarlet?” I asked when Grammy Annie-Lou went back into the kitchen.
“Canceled it,” he said nonchalantly.
“Canceled what? You can't cancel a Valentine's Day dinner with your fiancée—unless you want to die!”
“It's not my life you should be worried about,” Ian said, laughing. “She didn't sound too happy that you had an emergency!”
“Ian! That's awful. Go back to Atlanta and be with your fiancée. I can bring the pie.”
“Rachel, I'm where I want to be. I'll see Scarlet tonight when I get home.” Ian reached down and unbuttoned his belt. “But now, we eat!”
4
“Pretty in Pink”
#Youneverreallyknowwhosomeoneisuntil . . . you help that someone plan a wedding. As the old cliché goes: there's something about weddings and funerals—they bring out the worst and sometimes the best in people. Too often, I've learned that weddings bring out the worst . . . in women. Maybe it's because most women start planning for their weddings the moment that first Barbie doll is slid into their soft little hands and they consider, without even being told, that finding a Ken and getting a Barbie Dream House after the perfect sunset wedding is the most desired chain of events in a woman's life. And by the time they actually get to that perfect sunset wedding—if they get to that wedding—most women are raving lunatics trying to make a day in their real adult life match up with the expectations of their seven-year-old imagination. I wish the outcome was more pleasant. But it never is. As amazing and beautiful and wonderful as the actual day can be, it'll only come close to being a representation of that imagined day. And the frazzled female walking down the aisle, crying because it all turned out worse than she expected or better than she believed, is just a fragment of the lovely human being she was before her future husband put a ring on her finger. If he's super lucky, time and epiphany will return that woman he only proposed to because he thought she'd never change. Luckily, most of these men wait it out, though. They give in and give out, sit on the sidelines, and agree to whatever they need to just to get her down the aisle and things back to normal.
I wasn't having any delusions that this set of events would be different with Scarlet. It didn't matter what she'd told me about me having total control and her and Ian following my lead. At the end of the day, I was the wedding planner and it was her wedding. She'd transform like all of the other transformers I'd seen. I just wondered what she'd transform into. Would she be the nitpicking, worry-wart, drama queen, or full-on bridezilla? And how would Ian handle it all?
One month before the wedding, and Krista and I came up with the answer to the first question. Scarlet wasn't in any of those common categories. Oh no. Ms. Scarlet outlived and outshined all who came before her. In the short time we had to plan her destination wedding in a town she knew nothing about and on a quarter of the budget we were used to working with, and while we were planning another celebrity wedding in just weeks, in private e-mails and on Post-It notes around the office Scarlet became known as “Two Face.” The name—which Krista came up with in homage to the Batman comic book character Harvey Dent after a vial of acid thrown on the left side of his face left him horribly disfigured and forced his dormant split personality to the surface—perfectly described Scarlet's hourly changes of heart. One hour, she'd be in a meeting with me, all granola and Mama Africa, trying to save the world and refusing to have wedding bouquets ordered from shops that wouldn't guarantee that workers, from picking to delivery, were paid above minimum wage. The next hour, she'd send a text to Krista all hard and harsh in all caps and with no periods and smiley faces at the end, demanding only the best orchids and saying her father would pay top dollar. Krista would forward the text to me with an intro: Two Face strikes again.
After the day King died in Social Circle and Ian held me in his arms tight like he was my father and knew just how to love me at that moment, it was hard for me to watch and witness and work around all of this. I knew in that car on the way back from the vet that I was in love with Ian. I'd known for a long time that I was in love with Ian. I just couldn't admit it to myself. I was happy, I was comfortable with the way things were—the way they'd been. I didn't want to break what hadn't been broken. Thinking about it that way, I wondered if maybe the same way Ian had been enjoying two pies, I was also getting water from two wells. I was single and so sad about it. But I was never really alone when Ian was around. Bad date: he'd always be there. Need a comforter: I didn't even have to call. He was my boy-best-friend. And having him in that category maybe made him better than any other man in my life. Like Journey said about me, he wasn't going anywhere. But with Scarlet's regime picking up the pace, I wondered how long that would be true. I also started to wonder how long I could keep my secret from Ian. If I needed to.
 
Scarlet's mother was out of town at a conference the morning of Scarlet's final dress fitting. Scarlet called me before sunrise crying—literally crying—and begging me to go with her. She didn't want to take any of her friends, saying she wanted them to see her dress for the first time at the wedding. Ian was out of the question and Scarlet's father was busy at his practice. Half asleep, I was so eager to get her sobs off my phone that I agreed to meet her at the Buckhead Dress Studio first thing in the morning. When I said yes, she cheered like a crying child who'd just been given a candy bar. I could literally hear the tears dry up through the phone.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” she cried. “You're the best. I know why Ian loves you so much.”
I hung up the phone and told Krista she'd have to have the intern take over the office for the day. There was no way I was sitting through that fitting alone with Two Face.
Scarlet was waiting outside the shop in Ian's car. My heart skipped a beat when Krista and I pulled up.
“I can't believe we're still going through with this wedding,” Krista said, parking in a spot beside Ian's car. All of my epiphanies about Ian hadn't been self generated. Over after-work margaritas a few days after the day in Social Circle, I'd told Krista about sliding my hand over Ian's in the car. How he didn't move. How he'd said, “Rachel, I'm where I want to be.”
“What am I supposed to say?” I asked. “Hey Scarlet, I can't plan your wedding anymore. I fell in love with your fiancé when my dog died?”
“You could start there.”
“Ian would be so confused. He'd probably move to Afghanistan and join a madrasah.”
“Or admit that he loves you and take the ring from Two Face,” Krista said, pointing at Scarlet waving at us excitedly from inside the other car.
“Oh God!” I cried. “What the fuck am I doing?”
“I don't know,” Krista said. “Look, why don't you let me take over on this one? I can lead. You're in the wedding. It doesn't make sense for you to be the lead planner. What are you going to do on the day of the wedding?”
“I'll think about it.”
Scarlet had e-mailed me pictures of herself in her wedding dress when she picked it out. I commonly go to fittings with my local clients. I like seeing the dresses and imagining what they'd look like floating down an aisle draped in purple Peruvian lilies or terra-cotta royal roses. It inspires me as I plan. And it also helps me to bond with the bride, who most times never imagines I'd even ask to come.
I didn't request an invite to Scarlet's picking, but I did ask for shots. The Hotel St. La Rho, where Ian and Scarlet's wedding would be, had two reception halls: one with windows all along the back, another with a view of the sky from a window on top of the dance floor. I thought that seeing Scarlet's dress and picturing how the lights from the pier one block away from the hotel might look crawling over her shoulders or imagining the moon kissing her forehead could help me decide which setting to ink. The picture had been of a contemporary Monique Lhuillier that looked more like it was for the two-month marriage of a Hollywood starlet than for a future graduate student and UN Ambassador. I went with the lights on her back.
The staff at the Buckhead Dress Studio knew me, so they had a full spread of drinks and food awaiting Scarlet. Her dress wasn't cheap, but I knew that red-carpet treatment wasn't without reason. They were spoiling her in front of me in hopes that I'd send other clients their way.
Scarlet downed two glasses of Perrier-Jouët before following the studio attendant into the fitting room.
“Two Face,” Krista whispered to me on the couch where we were sitting and not touching any of the food or drinks—after seeing the burnt orange mermaid dress Scarlet had me walking down the aisle in, I'd committed to losing seventy-five pounds by the wedding. “I hate to see what she's like when she's drunk.”
“You guys ready?” Scarlet called from inside the dressing room.
“Jesus, please be a fence,” Krista said and I elbowed her.
“Yes! Come on out,” I answered Scarlet.
The attendant, a short Italian woman who hardly spoke English and had pins darting up the front of her right sleeve, walked out of the little room first and held out her hands dramatically toward the door. “The bride,” she announced.
Scarlet walked out, all smiles, and I went from being the least anxious person in the room to the most confused.
The bride, who was supposed to be dressed in white, was dressed in pink.
“Pink?” Krista confirmed my vision.
“It's rose.” Scarlet's smile evaporated and her face looked more like mine and Krista's. She looked at me with her shoulders ready to slump. “You like it?”
“What . . . ? Why . . . ?” I was at a loss for words. It was the same ML from the picture she'd sent, but it was a new color. And Scarlet really did look beautiful in it, but colorful wedding dresses just never went over well.
“It's my signature color. My favorite,” Scarlet whined and I had the sense that if someone didn't say something nice fast, she'd run out of the store in the dress and right into traffic. The fragile girl in front of me needed me to approve.
“Beautiful! Molto bello!” The little Italian woman must've sensed it, too. She kissed her fingers.
Krista and I gave her a “butt-out” glower and she stepped out of the fitting area apologetically.
“You hate it?” Scarlet's eyes were already red.
“But you sent me a picture of a white dress,” I said, avoiding answering the question. I got up and walked over to her. She looked so desperate standing in front of the couch alone.
“I had it dyed. Ian loves this color on me.”
“Well, it's your wedding. It's not necessary to wear your favorite color at your wedding,” I said, feeling ridiculous for having to point that out and afraid that if I mentioned white, Scarlet would go into some speech about “purity” and “male domination”—only pink (rose) wasn't any better than white. She looked like a girl going to her first dance. The quaint yet elegant event I'd planned was about to look like a 1980s prom.
Living up to her nickname, Scarlet tried to stand her ground. She put her hands on her hips defiantly. “This is what I want! There's nothing wrong with it.” She sounded like she was about to have a tantrum.
Krista and I looked at each other.
“We're not saying there's anything wrong with it,” Krista said carefully. “It's just that in our history, most times when we see colored wedding dresses, it doesn't come off quite as beautiful as the bride intended. We don't want you to go for this and then be disappointed on your wedding day.”
“But it's my day!” Scarlet cried and ran back into the fitting room.
“What the hell?” Krista said. “Did Angela Davis just have a breakdown over a pink wedding dress?”
The attendant came back in and headed to help Scarlet out of her dress.
I stopped her. “Let me get her,” I said.
I knocked on the door. “Can I come in?”
“It's open.”
I opened the door. Scarlet was still in the dress and sitting on a dressing stool with her elbows on her knees.
“You might want to stop crying. Don't want to damage your ML,” I said, trying to get her to laugh. I'd been in this position so many times. Weddings are emotional events. And women are emotional beings. For most weddings, I was more of a clinical psychologist than a wedding planner. Scarlet just needed a human touch. A reminder of what the wedding was all about and who she was. The only problem was that this wasn't just any wedding and any bride. After my epiphany, I'd been going on pure instinct, maneuvering the wedding planning for Ian. But was I capable of talking his fiancée into not freaking out and becoming the Goliath of all monster brides? A more conniving and diabolical person would take advantage of the situation and use Scarlet's mania to her benefit. Maybe push her over the ledge and make Ian see her for who she really was: a little girl in a pink dress. But . . . I'm a professional and I was raised better than that.
“I thought it would be pretty. Different,” Scarlet cried, ignoring my comment about stains. “Ian likes it when I'm different.”
I sat down on the floor in front of the mirror Scarlet was facing.
“I think you look pretty,” I offered.
“You do?” Scarlet looked at me.
“Your skin . . . the rose does compliment it,” I said. “It's just different. And what we fear, what Krista was explaining, is that if you wear something different, people will be so busy looking at your dress, they won't notice you.”

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