“Yeah, but . . .” she trailed off.
“But what?”
“I kind of need you to do me a favor.”
“No problem. What’s up?”
She paused. “I don’t want you to wear black at my wedding.”
“That’s fine. I’m wearing purple, pink, and Big Bird–yellow for three of the others. Whatever you want me to wear will be great.”
Another pause. “No—I mean—can you tell my mom you don’t want to wear black?”
This time I hesitated. “Why can’t you tell her that?”
Sharon sighed. “I did, but she just has this idea in her head of what it should look like, and she can’t hear me. So will you do it?”
I groaned internally. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was pick a fight with Sharon’s mom. But the only reason Sharon was having this wedding was her mother. If she needed a champion to make sure some part of it was hers, I supposed that responsibility fell to me. Her sister, the maid of honor, certainly wasn’t going to do it. I had never gotten a solid read on Bethany. Was she actually her mother’s little clone, agreeing with her every whim? Or was she doing what Sharon did and complying to survive? Or had it started as the latter and simply become the former? It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask someone about her sister and overbearing mother.
“Please?” she asked, when I hadn’t responded.
“Okay. Is there any particular color you do want? If I’m going to die on the cross here, I want to make sure it’s not in vain.”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want it to look like a funeral. Other than that, I don’t really care.”
“What if she wants to downgrade to navy?”
“Navy? I feel like that’s just as bad.”
“So something light?”
“Well not white, obviously. But something—I don’t know—happy?”
I wondered briefly if I could convince her to pick one of the three dresses I already had. Now that would be a victory, I thought. Then I shook my head to remove the disloyal thought. Sharon deserved her own dream wedding. Not her mother’s, and certainly not my half-assed attempts to be able to afford a proper manicure again.
I grabbed a bottle of wine from the fridge and poured myself a glass after hanging up the phone. Then I looked down at my stomach. Becca walked in as I was attempting to pour the wine back into the bottle.
“Um . . . what?” she asked.
I looked up guiltily. “Do we have a funnel?”
“Why would we have a funnel?” I gestured toward the mess I was making with the wine. “You could just—I don’t know—drink it?”
“I need my wits about me for tomorrow morning. And wine has calories.” I looked at her. “Why are you so dressed up?”
She shot me a huge grin. “I have a date tonight.”
“With who?”
“Will.”
“Should I know who that is?”
Becca rolled her eyes. “You know, Will Will.”
“From work?”
“The one and only.”
I raised my eyebrows, impressed. Becca had had a crush on him for forever, which she had all but given up on because he never seemed to show any reciprocal interest. “How’d you swing that one?”
“I have no idea,” she said giddily. “We were just talking this afternoon, and he looked at me and asked if I wanted to have dinner with him tonight.”
A little voice in my head wondered if she had misunderstood and it was more like a grabbing-drinks-with-Alex kind of thing, but I told it to shut up. If anyone was due for a little happiness, it was Becca, who hadn’t been on a date in the two years we had been living together and probably a while before that. She had been living with her last boyfriend until she caught him cheating on her. She hadn’t quite recovered from that one yet.
“Where’s he taking you?”
“Some new Asian fusion restaurant in Georgetown.”
With a smile, I held out what was left in the wineglass. “Do you need this?”
She laughed. “Yes, please.”
I stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of my bedroom door before I went to bed and pulled up the stomach of my pajamas. I hated that my mom was getting to me, but between her, Caryn’s bridesmaids, and the sense I had that Sharon’s mom wanted to put me in black because it was slimming, well—I wasn’t feeling my best. Plus, not that I wanted to date Alex by any stretch of the imagination, but he had been a little too eager to jump into the friend zone.