Sharon smiled and thanked her mother, then returned to the dressing room to put her clothes back on. “Now what on earth will we put you in?” Mrs. Meyer asked, turning to me. “It’ll have to be black, I think.”
“For a wedding?”
“You’ll look lovely in black,” she said, patting my arm. “It’ll be so flattering.” She looked down at my arm under her hand. “Something with sleeves, I think.”
I wondered if I could get away with slipping a laxative into her cocktail at the wedding.
But for now, Sharon was happy. And that was what mattered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I felt so good about finding dresses for both Caryn and Sharon （and surviving my encounter with Mrs. Meyer） that I decided to treat myself to my favorite salad for dinner. I asked Becca if she wanted to meet me at the restaurant, but she was at happy hour with friends from work. I texted Megan next to see if she wanted to grab dinner, but she was at her soon-to-be in-laws’ house, so I called and ordered my salad to go. The fact that I would be dining alone was not lost on me after Mrs. Meyer’s questions. But could I celebrate my successes with a glass of wine and an extravagant twenty-eight-dollar salad that had a crab cake in it anyway? As a Marylander, that sounded divine.
I got home, kicked off my shoes, poured my wine, pulled up my latest Netflix binge, and settled in to enjoy my overpriced salad. My phone dinged and I glanced down reflexively, then set my salad on the coffee table.
It was an email from my bank. The subject was Urgent: Overdraft.
Oh God, I thought. That card reader at the gas station must have had a skimmer on it.
I logged into my bank account, expecting to see that someone had bought a ninety-inch 4K TV and a Louis Vuitton purse and praying that their fraud division would be easy to deal with. Not how I wanted to spend my evening, I thought as the wheel spun. The page finally opened.
My mouth dropped open.
There were no weird purchases. My salad had sent my bank account twelve dollars into the red.
Meaning I had started the morning with sixteen dollars to my name.
Holy crap.
I knew my bank account was low from the auto deductions to the wedding account, but I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. And I had never overdrafted before.
My heart was racing and my mouth was dry. I quickly moved two hundred dollars out of the wedding account and into checking to cover the overdraft fee I had just incurred and pad the account a tiny bit, but that was literally the amount that I assumed I would need for a dress for one of the weddings.
Yes, I could start putting all of the wedding expenses on credit cards, but that made me nervous. I wasn’t exactly a financial wizard, so I tried to limit myself to spending money that I had. And I really didn’t want to spend the next decade of my life paying off these weddings. I needed to find some way to generate additional income, but other than writing about science, I didn’t have any marketable skills. I couldn’t fold clothes to save my life, so retail was out, and my last foray into waiting tables had ended disastrously in college when I spilled an entire pitcher of sangria on a little girl in her white first communion dress.
“How to make money writing,” I typed into Google. About 1,130,000,000 results. People can make money writing, I thought, clicking on the top link. Start a blog, it suggested.
I paused. What would I blog about? Becca frequently said I should have a reality TV camera following me all the time because I was the only person she knew who found herself in situations like I did with the mystery groomsman. But would I actually make money off a blog about my life?
I googled “wedding blogs.” About 256,000,000 hits. So that was a thing.
But would I have any friends left if I did that?
“Anonymous blogs.” About 317,000,000 hits.
Okay then.
I went to my bedroom for my laptop and began researching how to make money from a blog. Basically, I just had to enable ads on my site. I would make money （granted not much unless I developed a large following） every time someone clicked on a post. It looked like it was a slow process, so I would be stuck with credit card debt in the meantime, but if I could build a following and be smart about it, this could be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Becca walked in a little after nine. “Whatcha doing?”
I glanced up, startled. I hadn’t even heard her open the door. My salad sat long forgotten in front of me. I realized I was hungry but didn’t know if crab could sit out that long, and the lettuce had started to wilt.
“Do you think anyone would read a blog if I started one?”