“You drank more of it than my cousin Gina. And then you were flirting pretty hard with—”
“LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU! YOU PROMISED!”
“Geez,” Megan chuckled. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“No. Did I do anything horrifying?”
“Not at the party. But I hear you have a shirt that needs to be returned.”
I scrunched up my face. “He told you to get his shirt back?”
“No, he walked out of the hotel without it this morning and Tim got the story for me. I love that you made him do a walk of shame, too, though.”
“I think it’s a walk of pride when a guy does it, not shame.” I paused. “Why didn’t he have another shirt?”
“Because he was planning to drive home after the party before you became a factor.”
I rubbed my temples. A vague recollection of holding a male arm while a disembodied voice asked a concierge if there were rooms available danced at the outskirts of my memory. “Can I give you the shirt next week and have you never speak of this again?”
Megan agreed warily. “But don’t you think it’ll come up? You’re going to see him at the rehearsal dinner and the wedding.”
“That’s ten months away. It’ll be old news by then.”
“If you say so. Probably for the best anyway. This way you won’t decide you hate him and make me rearrange the entire wedding.”
Even though that was well deserved, I cringed. “See?” I said, faking a cheerful tone. “Totally responsible decision on my part.”
I could practically hear Megan rolling her eyes through the phone. “You’re insane. I swear, you should write a book about your life.”
“Right,” I said. “Lifestyles of the drunk and too old to be single. It’d be so popular.”
“It would, actually.”
“Yeah, and I totally want that out there for the world to see.”
“Whatever.” I could hear the shrug in Megan’s voice. “Use a pen name. People would read it. And it’d be more interesting than what you write for work. You’d have fun.”
I told Megan I would think about it, with absolutely no intention of doing so. Besides, even with a pen name, I would have to put a Sylvia Plath clause into a contract if I wrote a book about my current exploits. There was no way I could publish a book in which I didn’t know whom I had slept with unless my mother was good and dead. But, with Megan’s agreement to never again discuss my drunken amnesiac escapades, I could consider the subject closed for now.
CHAPTER FOUR
The rash of engagements all happened in the summer and early fall. There’s something about warmer weather that apparently makes people want to commit themselves to a life of fidelity. That or engagements are contagious. Like the flu. If you don’t wash your hands a lot, you might wind up sneezing and wearing a diamond. I don’t pretend to understand it.
There’s also apparently an unspoken rule of engagements that they’re supposed to last just longer than a pregnancy would （coincidence?） and the ensuing wedding, if at all possible, is required to take place in June, or failing that, May or July.
I assume these rules are given out to all couples by the wedding deities as soon as a ring is purchased. Or they’re the result of a biological urge that is activated by diamonds. Either way, having never been engaged, I didn’t know either rule.
When Caryn got engaged, with eleven months to plan, I figured everything would be a piece of cake. I would have nearly a year before I actually needed to do anything for any of the weddings, and time to save money for dresses.
But once I had five weddings to plan for, I needed to buckle down and calculate how I was going to do all of this.
I estimated that each bridesmaid dress would probably cost around two hundred dollars. For five dresses, that felt ridiculous, because no one ever wears a bridesmaid dress again, no matter what the bride tells you. But over the course of nine months, I could budget a thousand dollars for dresses. Just saving a hundred and eleven dollars a month wouldn’t be so bad.
Of course, there would be gifts too. So an extra hundred dollars each for that? Adding that to my current total and rounding up a little, that was one-seventy a month. And showers and bachelorette parties. The bridesmaids had to pay for those too. And bridal shower presents, which apparently didn’t count as wedding presents. That was another two hundred per bride. Suddenly I was at nearly three hundred a month.
Where was I going to find three hundred extra dollars a month?