“I’m fine,” I said quickly, giving him a smile. I nodded at the mug he was pulling down. “That for me?”
“Obviously,” he said, pouring me a cup of coffee and adding just the amount of milk I liked, then handing it to me with a wink.
My dad, as ever, looked a little rumpled, even though he couldn’t have been up for very long. Despite the fact he wasn’t teaching today—he was a botany professor and the head of the physical sciences department, which meant he had enough pull at Stanwich College that he hadn’t had Friday classes in more than a decade—he was wearing what he always wore during the week, corduroy pants and a button-down shirt with an elbow-patched cardigan over it. His glasses were pushed up into his hair, which was mostly just salt now, with a sprinkling of pepper.
“Hungry?” my mom asked. There was a pencil holding up her curly blond hair and she was wearing her drawing clothes, an oversize sweater and black pants, even though she hadn’t had to draw new strips for six weeks now—there was a lag time so that the strips could get inked and colored. So while she’d known for weeks how Grant Central Station ended, none of the rest of us had any idea. Linnie really wanted to know, but I wanted to read it in the paper and find out the end of the story along with the rest of the world. “Rodney should be back any minute now.”
“Well, it’s not the window sensor,” my sister said as she came into the kitchen from the dining room. She smiled at me. “Nice of you to join us.”
I grinned back at her. “I thought I might as well make an appearance.” My sister laughed as she pulled down a mug and slid it across the counter to my dad, who caught it, then poured her a cup of coffee.
“Happy wedding eve,” I said, clapping my hands together. When I was six and Linnie was seventeen, I used to think she was the most beautiful girl in the world. And now that I was seventeen and she was twenty-eight, I still pretty much thought that. She took the most after our dad—his dark wavy hair and blue eyes and, to her eternal disappointment, his sticking-out ears. At five seven, she was just two inches shorter than me, but the fact that she’d inherited our mother’s curvy figure, and I decidedly had not, meant that while I stole Linnie’s clothes whenever I could, most of her dresses were off-limits to me.
“I don’t think that’s a thing,” Linnie said, taking a sip from her mug and then nodding at my dad. “That’s good coffee, Daddy.”
“I do my best.”
The doorbell rang—on the front door, the one that was only used by deliveries and company, since we all used the kitchen door almost exclusively. “Who’s that?” my mom asked, squinting at the kitchen clock. “I didn’t think any guests were coming until this afternoon.”
“It’s probably a delivery,” Linnie said, starting to move toward the door, but I shook my head and hopped off the counter.
“I’ll get it,” I said, taking my mug with me as I pushed through the kitchen door and headed to the front hall. “I should make myself useful!”
I could hear my dad laugh as the door swung closed again behind me and I crossed the front hall, taking a sip of coffee as I walked. The front door was half glass, and I could see someone standing on the step outside, their back to me. I unlocked the door and pulled it open, and the guy standing there turned around.
“Hi there,” he said with a smile, and I immediately took a step back. I don’t know who I’d been expecting, but not this—a guy who was very cute and who looked around my age.
He was tall and lanky, an inch of wrist showing below the dark-green fleece jacket he was wearing with jeans and rubber-soled duck boots. He was holding a matching green binder in one hand and a cup of to-go coffee in the other, the name on the cup an illegible scrawl. He had thick, dark-brown hair that swept down long and straight across his forehead, reminding me for a second of an actor in a movie my siblings had shown me when I was little, about a werewolf who plays basketball. When he turned his head slightly, I couldn’t help staring at his profile—he had a snub nose, almost squared off at the end, like Matt Damon or Dick Tracy. I’d never seen it before on anyone who wasn’t a movie star or a cartoon character.
“Hi,” I said, glancing down at myself briefly and wishing that the sweatshirt I’d pulled on over my pajamas had not been this one—an ancient one of J.J.’s that read GO BIG OR GO GNOME on the front. (A fierce-looking gnome was printed on the back.) “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” the guy said, smiling even wider. “Where There’s A Will.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding as I took a step back and started to ease the door closed, wondering what kind of weird cult person I’d just opened the door to. He didn’t look like a weird cult person—but then again, he probably wouldn’t have been very successful if he had. “Good point. Thanks for stopping by—”
“Wait,” he said quickly, his face falling as he stuck a foot out, keeping the door open. “Sorry—I mean I’m from Where There’s A Will. The event planners?”
“We already have an event planner,” I said firmly, knocking the door against his boot, trying to get him to move it. “Thanks though.”
“Yeah, Clementine Lucas,” the guy said, raising his voice, and I paused and opened the door a little wider.
“How did you know that?”
“Pland sent us to take over,” he said. “I guess my uncle hasn’t arrived yet? I was kind of hoping he’d be here to explain.”
I opened the door all the way. “Come in.” Normally I might have been embarrassed about the way I’d just treated him, but right now I needed to figure out what was happening, because it really didn’t sound good. The guy carefully wiped his feet on the mat and stepped inside, and I noticed now that “Where There’s A Will” was written in script on his fleece, just over his heart, sewn in gold thread.
“Charlie?” Linnie called from the kitchen. “Who is it?”
“It’s, um . . .” I looked at the guy.
“Bill,” he supplied. “Bill Barnes.” I nodded, trying not to look surprised. There were a ton of Wills and Williams at my school, and even a Willem who got really annoyed if you didn’t pronounce his name correctly, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever met a Bill my age before.
“I’m Charlie.”
Bill nodded. “Bridesmaid, right?”
“Um,” I said, wondering exactly how he’d known that and what, precisely, was going on. “Yeah. But—”
“Charlie?” Linnie called again.
“It’s Bill,” I yelled back, even though I knew this wouldn’t mean anything to her. I headed toward the kitchen and gestured for him to follow me.
“Who?” Linnie asked, as we walked through the swinging door.
“You’re new,” my dad said, frowning at Bill and then taking his glasses off his head, putting them on, and squinting at him. He turned to my mom for reassurance. “Eleanor? Not one of ours, is he?”
“I’m Bill Barnes,” Bill said. “Um—I work with my uncle Will Barnes at his event planning business, Where There’s A Will. Pland contacted us last night and asked us to step in because they’d had some . . . um . . . issues with Clementine Lucas?”
“What?” Linnie asked, and it looked like she’d gone about three shades paler. “What do you mean issues?”
Bill cleared his throat and looked around, like he was waiting for someone else to take charge, and I remembered what he’d said about expecting his uncle to be here already. “Um. So apparently she has been mixing up clients’ events, not responding to e-mails, embezzlement . . . not booking venues . . .”
“I’m sorry?” Linnie asked, staring at him. “Did you say embezzlement?”
“Has she been arrested or something?” my mother asked, standing up from the table and walking over to my sister, who looked like she was about to fall over.
“Um. Well,” Bill said, clearing his throat. “Pland didn’t tell me that, but apparently she’s stopped making contact with them or with any of her clients, so their working assumption is that she has skipped town.”
“No,” Linnie said, p
ulling out her phone. “There must be some misunderstanding, because she just e-mailed me last night. . . .” She scrolled through it, then held it to me. “See?” I squinted down at the screen. The e-mail was one sentence long, with no subject line. It just read EVERYTHING IS FINE!!!
“I don’t know,” I said, looking at my sister. “This actually seems like kind of a bad sign.”
“Huh,” Linnie said, staring at her phone. “I guess I just thought she was being reassuring.”
“So what happens now?” my dad asked, crossing his arms over his chest. His voice, I noticed, had dropped into his frighten the underclassmen timbre. “You do realize my daughter is getting married tomorrow?”
Linnie, who’d started typing frantically on her phone, let out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a slightly hysterical laugh.
“We’re aware,” Bill said quickly. “Pland is deeply upset about this and has hired us to take over on Clementine’s behalf. You’ll have your fee completely refunded.”
“I don’t care about that,” Linnie said, her voice going high and panicky. “I realize this isn’t your fault, but my wedding is tomorrow. And that’s pretty late to be getting a new wedding coordinator.”
“I completely understand,” Bill said. He took a step farther into the room, set down his coffee on the kitchen island, and flipped open his binder. “And my uncle can certainly speak to this in more detail than me—he should be along at any moment. But he drew up a plan last night, and I think—”
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. The alarm went off again, much louder down here than it had been up in my room.
“Aaaaagh!” My future brother-in-law had just entered, jumped at the sound, and fumbled the pink bakery box he’d been holding, sending it crashing to the floor.
“My bear claw!” my dad cried, running over to the donut box.
“Why is this happening again?” Linnie yelled, covering her ears.
“It’s fine,” I yelled as I hurried to the panel. “What’s the code?”
“Twelve thirty-four,” my mom yelled, and I punched it in. It took a second, but then the alarm shut off, and Linnie cautiously moved her hands away from her head.
“It’s off,” I assured her.
“The donuts are okay,” my dad said, sounding incredibly relieved as he stood up with the box.
“What,” Rodney asked, looking at the alarm panel, “is going on with that? Twice in one morning?”
“Three times,” I said, taking a step back from the panel slowly, like I might set it off again. I turned to Rodney. “Did you get me a strawberry glazed?”
Rodney adjusted his glasses, which had gone a little askew. “Of course I did. I didn’t just get here.” Linnie had met Rodney Daniels on their first day of Dartmouth. He was one of the very first people she’d encountered in the school—he’d been wandering the halls alone, clutching his laundry hamper and shower caddy, trying to find his room. They’d met again that night at a new-student mixer, and they’d been together ever since—except for the five months they’d broken up when they were twenty-three. But even at twelve, I’d known that their split wasn’t going to last long. Linnie and Rodney just belonged together. They were incredibly similar, well matched from the very beginning, even though Linnie was white and had lived in the same house in Connecticut practically her whole life and Rodney was black and an army brat, and had grown up on bases all over the world.
Rodney’s dad, an air force general, and his mom, an army nurse, had eventually settled on a base in Hawaii, where he’d spent high school. Because getting from New Hampshire to Honolulu and back again was time-consuming and really expensive, Rodney had spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with us all four years of college. When I’d had a meeting with my guidance counselor last week, she’d asked me how I felt about adding a new member to the family. And it had honestly taken me a minute to work out what she was asking me, because Rodney had already been a member of my family, for the last ten years.
“I got your text,” Rodney said as he crossed over to my sister, slinging an arm around her shoulders and kissing the top of her head—at six two, he was nearly a head taller than Linnie. He tended to keep his head shaved and had been dressing pretty much the same way since he was eighteen—in jeans and a crisply pressed button-down. My parents frequently pointed to Rodney as an example when they were trying to get my brothers to dress more like adults and less like middle schoolers with credit cards. “I didn’t—quite understand it.”
“What do you mean?”
Rodney pulled out his phone and squinted down at it. “Where are you? You need to get here. Ducking Clementine is gone and I’m about to ducking lose it. DUCK.”
“Stupid autocorrect,” Linnie muttered, shaking her head.
“Clementine quit?”
“She didn’t even have the decency to quit! She just embezzled a bunch of money and disappeared!”
“What?”
“Hi, I’m Bill,” Bill said cheerfully, not reading the room very well as he smiled and held out a hand to Rodney. “Where There’s A Will.”
“Uh . . . sure, man,” Rodney said, shaking his hand. “Good attitude.”
“Bill and his uncle are taking over for Clementine,” I explained. “So they’re going to handle everything.” I said this with more confidence than I felt as I crossed over to the donut box, nudged my father out of the way, and picked up my strawberry glazed.
“Where’s your suit?” Linnie asked Rodney. “Weren’t you going to get it along with the donuts?”
Rodney winced. “It wasn’t ready yet. They said I can pick it up first thing tomorrow.”
“But tomorrow’s the wedding,” Linnie said, her voice going wobbly, like she was on the verge of bursting into tears. Everyone in the kitchen who wasn’t Linnie exchanged a quick, panicked glance. It was like we all were thinking the same thing—don’t let the bride cry.
“I can go get it,” I said immediately. I grabbed Linnie’s favorite donut—chocolate with sprinkles—and put it on a plate for her. It seemed like she could maybe use some carbs right about now. “I’ll go out and get it tomorrow morning. You don’t need to worry about it. Consider it taken care of.”
“But . . . ,” Linnie said, looking around.
“And I’ll go call the alarm company, how about that?” my dad asked, his voice soothing. “So we can make sure it doesn’t go off again.”
“And I’m sure Bill and his uncle are going to have everything handled,” my mom said while looking right at Bill.
“Yes,” Bill said, giving Linnie a smile. “And he should be along at any moment.”
“How does that sound?” Rodney asked, widening his eyes at me in thanks as he took the donut plate. Linnie nodded, looking like she was starting to pull herself together, but before she could answer, the landline rang.
The handset was closest to me, and I tossed it to my mother, who caught it with one hand. “Honestly,” she said, shaking her head. “What is with you kids and not answering the phone?” She pressed the button to speak, her annoyed tone immediately turning into something more polite. “Eleanor Grant.” She listened for a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was warm, like she was thrilled to be talking to whoever was calling. “Yes, hello. If you’ll just hold on a moment, I’ll take this in my office.” She pressed the button to put the call on hold, then grabbed her donut and headed across the kitchen. “That’s the Times,” she said to us as she headed toward the door Rodney had left slightly ajar. “So if you could not get on the line for the next twenty minutes or so, I won’t have to disown any of you.” She pushed her way out through the door, heading across the backyard toward her office, the one she’d built when the strip really took off and she could no longer work from the kitchen table.
“The Times?” Bill echoed, looking after my mom, his brow furrowed. “Like—the New York Times?”
“Yeah,” Rodney said, gesturing toward the donut box. “Did you want a donut?”
“Thanks,” Bill sa
id, taking a step closer to the box, still looking confused.
“I’m going to try to see what’s happening with this alarm,” my dad said, taking his mug with him as he headed upstairs, ruffling my hair as he passed me and giving Linnie’s arm a squeeze.
I took a restorative bite of my donut and a long drink of coffee, though I wasn’t sure I needed it—the last few minutes had been more than enough to wake me up.
“Okay,” Bill said. He set his glazed donut down and picked up the binder he’d been carrying. It was green like his fleece and had the Where There’s A Will logo printed across the front. Underneath it was written GRANT-DANIELS, and just the sight of it—proof that someone was organized and was going to be keeping this wedding on track—was making me feel better. When I’d pictured this weekend—all of us together, everything going perfectly—it had not allowed for things like an embezzling wedding planner disappearing on us. “So it looks like everything is pretty much on—”
The kitchen door flew open with a bang, and everyone in the kitchen jumped, including Bill.
“Well, well, well,” J.J. said from the doorway, glaring at each of us. Then, maybe feeling like this hadn’t been enough, he added, “Well.” My middle brother had arrived.
CHAPTER 3
Or, Acronyms Are Not Always a Good Idea Or, AANAAGI
* * *
HEY, MAN!” RODNEY SAID, SMILING at J.J. “Welcome home. Want a donut?”
“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” J.J. spat.
“Um . . . sure?”
J.J. scoffed. But just as he’d done ever since he’d read this phrase when he was twelve, he said the word “scoff” instead of just making the sound, and none of us had been able to convince him this actually wasn’t correct. He strode into the kitchen, dropping things—his jacket, a garment bag, a suitcase—as he went. “Like a donut is going to make up for being abandoned.” He looked around and, maybe seeing he was out of things to drop, took off his Pirates cap and flung it to the ground. “All of you have disappointed me. Linnie, Rodney, Charlie—” He was glowering at all of us in turn, but he faltered when he got to Bill. “Who are you?”