“Fine, I’m in,” I said, relenting. There was no conceivable way that my brother was going to be able to find a date, so I might as well get fifty dollars out of it.
“Say good-bye to your shekels,” J.J. said, raising his eyebrows at me. He turned to Bill. “Billiam? Want a piece of this action?”
“No,” I answered for him. “What were you saying, Bill?”
“Right,” Bill said, flipping open his binder, looking relieved to be back on track. “My uncle wanted confirmation that the rest of the wedding party would all be here by six for the rehearsal.”
Linnie nodded. “There’s an exhibit at the Pearce Museum for my mom. And it starts at four, but we should be back in time.”
“Got it,” Bill said. “But everyone else in the wedding party is confirmed for six?” He squinted down at a piece of paper. “Max, Jennifer, Jennifer, Priya, J.J., Danny, Charlie, Elizabeth, Marcus, and Michael?”
I rolled my eyes. “You can take Michael off the list.”
Linnie sighed. “Charlie.”
I just looked at her as I picked up my donut. “He’s not going to come.” Mike had been invited to the wedding, of course—Linnie and Mike had always been close, just like me and Danny. But he wasn’t coming—I’d just assumed that Linnie had invited him so that he would feel included, but without any expectation he’d show up, same as Rodney asking him to be a groomsman. They were both just gestures.
My siblings had all seen Mike in the year and a half he hadn’t been home—when Danny had business in Chicago, or when J.J. was in town when the Pirates were playing the Cubs. And Linnie and Rodney had gone to see him last summer. But I hadn’t, and neither had my parents, and I didn’t think a wedding would be the best time to have what was sure to be an incredibly awkward reunion—and I had a feeling Mike probably felt the same way.
“I don’t know. I mean—he did RSVP yes,” Linnie said, and even though she shrugged as she said it, I could hear the hope in her voice. “I don’t think he would have done that if he wasn’t going to show.”
“And he said he was bringing a plus-one,” Rodney added. Then he looked at J.J. and sighed. “Although I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“I’m going to get a date,” J.J. insisted, brandishing his phone at us. “You’ll see. You’ll all see—”
“He’s not going to come,” I said, pushing the very thought away. In all the times I’d pictured this weekend, Mike had never, not once, been a part of it. If Mike showed up, there would be drama—and not fun, gossipy drama, like when we were all speculating that J.J.’s former girlfriend was secretly a Scientologist. It would wreck everything I’d imagined for this weekend, one perfect last Grant adventure with my siblings in our house—the ones who wanted to be there, that is. The ones who’d never once tried to break away from our family.
“I was just surprised by the plus-one,” Rodney said. “I guess Mike is dating someone at school.” Then he shuddered. “Unless Corrine is back in the picture?”
Corrine had been Mike’s high school girlfriend, and she’d been a nightmare. To say that none of us were fans would be an understatement.
“He’s not going to show up,” I said firmly. He may have told Linnie he was coming, but he’d told my dad he was coming home last Christmas, and that hadn’t happened, so it wasn’t like Mike’s word meant anything.
“Did you RSVP for a plus-one?” J.J. asked, waggling his eyebrows at me.
“Me?” I asked, startled. “Um, no. Who would I even—” As soon as I said it, Jesse flashed into my head. I was suddenly back with him in the rain, laughing with him as he carried me up to the guesthouse, his hands sliding up my waist. . . .
“Charlie?” I looked over to see everyone looking at me. “You were saying?” Linnie prompted.
“Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “Um, no. No date.”
“It might not be too late,” J.J. said as he scrolled through his phone.
Bill’s phone beeped with a text, and he looked down at it just as the front doorbell rang. “My uncle’s here,” he said. “And everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”
He smiled reassuringly. And then the alarm went off.
CHAPTER 4
Or, Can’t You Hear, Can’t You Hear the Thunder?
* * *
WILL BARNES, THE HEAD OF Where There’s A Will, seemed nice, very efficient, and looked nothing like what I’d been expecting a wedding planner to look like. He was tall and built more like a linebacker than Rodney’s brother, Ellis, who’d been an actual linebacker for the air force. But he’d come in with such an aura of confidence—like it wasn’t going to matter that Clementine had vanished the day before the wedding—that I could feel myself start to relax in his presence, and it looked like Linnie and Rodney were doing the same.
Feeling like things were in good hands, I’d used his arrival as an opportunity to take a shower, put in my contacts, and finally change out of my pajama-and-gnome ensemble. I’d put on jeans and, even though it wasn’t quite cold enough for it, the cashmere sweater I’d worn home that night from Jesse’s house. I shook it out and breathed it in, trying to see if I could still detect any of him—but since I’d brought it to imPRESSive Cleaners at least twice since then, it just smelled like dry-cleaning solution. I pulled it on anyway, twisted my wet hair into a knot, and left my room, heading back down the two flights of stairs.
The third floor, also known as the kids’ floor, was barely decorated—probably because nobody ever saw it except people who lived here. Our four bedrooms—J.J. and Danny had the biggest room and had always shared—branched off from a central landing, and for a while there, we’d all been involved in an indoor paintball game and had gotten very good at aiming from behind our cracked doors, sniper-style. You could still see the faint colored circles on the wall if you looked hard enough.
The second floor was at least a little more decorated—family pictures lining the walls and a decorative bench that inevitably became where bags and stuff got piled. The second floor was also four bedrooms that split off from a central landing—my parents’ master bedroom, my dad’s study, and the two guest rooms that we’d always called the Blue Room and the Ship Room. It seemed crazy, as I took the last flight of steps down to the front hall, that in only a few hours, all the rooms we had would be filled with wedding guests.
I was nearly to the front hall when I heard raised voices, and I stopped short. My parents had been fighting a lot earlier in the year—I’d walk into the kitchen and everything would go silent, like they were counting on the fact that I’d gone temporarily deaf before I’d opened the door. There was a crackling tension in the house, so that it felt like even the smallest exchanges, about what to get on our pizza, or who was supposed to buy the milk, had taken on a different significance. For a few months there, it was like I was trapped in a foreign film where everything was a metaphor. I hadn’t told my siblings, because there wasn’t really anything I could point to that was wrong. There was just the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right, which was much harder, somehow, to prove.
But it all changed a few months ago, right around the time they’d told me they were selling the house. The whole vibe between my parents seemed better since then, which I took to mean they’d been fighting over what to do about the house—and once the matter was resolved, the fighting had stopped, and now arguments about pizza toppings were just about pepperoni versus sausage again. But I didn’t want it to be happening again—not during Linnie’s wedding weekend.
“Because you’re not the only one who lives on this street, Don!” I heard my dad snap, and, relieved, I took the rest of the stairs down to the front hall two at a time, now knowing exactly what I would see.
Sure enough, my dad was standing in the foyer across from Don Perkins, our two-doors-down neighbor. He was in his sixties and had lived on our street longer than we had. He was nosy, forever in our business, always calling or stopping by when he thought things were too loud. He w
as also in the Gardeners’ Association with my dad, and over the years, a rivalry had developed, Don always trying to outdo my father’s garden in the yearly competition. This rivalry was mostly one-sided, though, since he’d never once won and my dad had won three times, the last two years consecutively. This had only served to make him a worse neighbor, and his complaints increased with each one of my dad’s victories. Don had, of course, become a character in the strip—though the fictional Grants’ neighbor Ron was eventually revealed to have a soft side under his gruff exterior, which I really didn’t foresee happening with the real-life Don.
“Morning,” I said, widening my eyes at my dad as I came to stand next to him.
“Oh,” Don said, giving me a curt nod by way of a greeting. “You’re still here, are you?”
“Um,” I said, glancing at my father.
“Thought maybe you’d gotten them all off to college, now that you’re selling this place.”
“Charlie’s starting Stanwich in the fall,” my dad said, giving me a smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Why on earth would you go there?” Don asked, shaking his head. “Oh—were you not a very good student?”
“You know I teach there, right?” my dad asked, his voice frosty.
“My condolences.”
My dad’s face turned a very dark shade of red. “Listen here—”
“Like I said, Jeffrey,” Don said, talking over him, his very bushy eyebrows meeting in a frown, “I don’t want to be disturbed this weekend. There have already been all kinds of people coming and going, your alarm going off . . .”
“As I’m sure you remember, Donald, we sent out a letter to all the neighbors about this wedding months ago—letting you know it would be happening and asking for your patience and good neighborliness for just the one night.”
Don snorted as he looked through the open kitchen door, toward our backyard. My dad immediately took a step to block his sight line. He always suspected that Don’s coming over to complain about things were just excuses to see what my dad was doing with his garden and steal a win from him by spying.
“Well,” Don said with a huffy sigh, “it had better not get too loud tomorrow night. There are noise ordinances in this town, you know.”
“Yes,” my dad said, his tone getting calmer and more pleasant, always a bad sign. “Just like there are zoning laws that would have prevented you from building that gazebo. But some of us don’t feel the need to mention these things. Yet.”
“Yeah, well,” Don muttered, glaring at my father. He glanced toward the backyard one more time, then shook his head. “Just keep it down and we won’t have a problem.”
“Charlie,” my dad said, giving me a look that clearly told me whatever would follow wouldn’t exactly be a suggestion, “why don’t you show Don out? Through the front door.”
“Sure thing,” I said, quickly crossing to the front door and motioning for Don to follow, as my dad stalked away. “Hey, have you been having problems getting the Sentinel?” I asked as I pulled the door open for him. “The papergirl hasn’t been delivering to us.”
Don scoffed. “I don’t read the Sentinel,” he said, heading down the front steps. “I subscribe to actual newspapers.”
“Hey, hey, Maddie.” I turned to see J.J. passing through the front hall, his phone to his ear. “Yeah, I know it’s been a while. But isn’t it good to hear from me? Wait, not even a little?”
I shut the door, then headed into the kitchen. Linnie, Rodney, Will, and Bill were clustered around the center island. I could see that Will was wearing the same green fleece as Bill, except that under WHERE THERE’S A WILL was written WILL, which seemed to me to be a few too many Wills for one piece of clothing.
“Well, if you’d told me it was your birthday, I wouldn’t have broken up with you!” J.J. said, following me into the kitchen. “Maddie? Hello?”
“Date search going well?” Linnie asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“This is just like the ’86 Mets.” J.J. had a habit of bringing everything back to baseball; as far as he was concerned, there was a baseball analogy for every situation in life.
“Is it, though?” Rodney asked.
“Everyone counted them out too. But then—”
“Okay,” Will said, in a voice that wasn’t particularly loud, but was authoritative enough that we all quieted down. “I’ve made a list of the vendors Clementine was working with, and I’ve gotten in contact with all of them, so they know not to reach out to her. I’m still trying to reach Party in the Stars. . . .”
“What’s that?” J.J. asked.
Will shot him a look that made it clear he didn’t appreciate the interruption. “Wedding band.”
I could have told J.J. that. I’d heard a lot about Party in the Stars in the run-up to the wedding. Linnie and Rodney had seen them at one of their friends’ weddings and they had been their first choice, even though my parents had told them a DJ would require a lot less equipment and wouldn’t need a stage.
“Moving on,” Will said. “The tent should be up later this afternoon, and once it’s up, we’ll get the electrical and the furniture—” There was loud buzzing sound. Will stopped and pulled his cell phone out of his belt holder. “Will Barnes.” He listened for a moment, his brow furrowing. “I see. And you just found this out now?” He listened again, his expression growing more annoyed. “I’ll send someone to help out. They should be there in twenty. You too.”
He hung up, and I saw that during this conversation, my sister had silently been getting more and more stressed—I could see the vein in her temple, the one that I used to tease her about endlessly, starting to show. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a small problem at the Inn,” he said, referring to where the rehearsal dinner was taking place tonight. “Something about the decorations. I’d go myself, but I need to supervise the tent guys—”
“I knew this would happen,” Linnie said, her voice getting shakier and higher with every word. “Our wedding planner disappears, and then everything starts—”
“I’ll go!” I jumped in. “I can get it sorted out.”
Will nodded. “Sounds good. Bill, you go as well, okay? And report back.”
“Sure,” Bill said, nodding. Then he looked at me. “If it’s okay with you.”
“Of course,” I said. I gave Linnie what I hoped was a confident I’ve got this look. “I’m sure it’s not anything big. But whatever it is, we’ll handle it.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door and raised my eyebrows at Bill. “Let’s go.”
* * *
It was a twenty-minute drive from our house to the Inn, and for the first fifteen, either Bill or I had been on the phone. Bill was fielding texts and calls pretty much nonstop—apparently, they’d had to move some things around to take on Linnie’s wedding at the last minute, so he was having to reschedule appointments. And Siobhan had called me, wanting to know what the text I’d sent her—Your fruit name theory was right—meant. We’d had a quick talk, but since I was driving, the call was over the car speakers, and I was all too aware that it wasn’t just me listening. It wasn’t until we were nearly there that Bill set down his phone, looked across the car, and smiled at me.
I smiled back, and in the quiet that fell between us for the first time this whole ride, I suddenly realized that I was in a small enclosed space with a guy I didn’t know—like, at all.
“So,” I said, figuring that I could just treat Bill like he was the subject of a profile I was writing and get the basics of his background. The Wedding Planner’s Nephew, it could be called, even if it kind of sounded like a bad romantic comedy. I was just going to cross off the “who” of the all-important five Ws—who, what, where, when, why—that all journalists used. These words were painted three feet high in a mural in the Stanwich High newsroom. “Do you like working in event planning?”
Bill looked over at me with a smile, and I was star
ting to realize that this was his default expression—it was like he had resting cheerful face. “I do,” he said. “It’s always something different, at any rate. I worked for Where There’s A Will all through high school, and I didn’t have any exciting spring break plans, so when my uncle offered to fly me out if I would help him this week, I said sure.”
I nodded. This had always been my favorite part of the work at the newspaper—talking to people, putting their story together, knowing when to jump in and when to hang back and nod and hope they’d tell you more. Maybe it came from being the youngest and having to listen and observe, but for whatever reason, it had always come easily to me. “Where are you on spring break from?”
“University of Chicago. In . . . Chicago,” he added, then laughed. “I guess that’s pretty self-explanatory. I’m finishing up my first year.”
I took a breath, about to mention my Northwestern acceptance, but stopped myself before I spoke. I wasn’t going to Northwestern, and there didn’t seem to be much point in talking about where you weren’t going to college. “Did you go to Stanwich?” I asked instead, even though I was pretty sure the answer was no. Stanwich High was a huge school, but most of the people there were at least vaguely familiar. And Siobhan and I had made it our mission to know who the cute guys were. And while Bill was no Jesse Foster, he was someone we definitely would have noticed.
He shook his head. “I’m from Putnam,” he said, naming the town one over from Stanwich. “And . . . sometimes Albuquerque.”
I glanced over at him, surprised, but before I could ask a follow-up, I saw the sign for the Inn and signaled to turn down the long and winding driveway that led to the main building.
“I think I’ve been here before,” Bill said, squinting as he leaned forward. “I can’t remember what for, though. Maybe someone’s sweet sixteen?”
I nodded. “Sounds about right.” The Inn was where I had attended lots of various functions over the years—weddings, receptions, birthday parties, the bar and bat mitzvahs that seemed to take up every weekend of my seventh-grade social calendar, and even junior prom last year when a pipe burst at the school and we couldn’t hold it on campus. It was an old mansion with a carriage house that had been converted to a hotel, with guest rooms upstairs and a restaurant and ballroom downstairs. I pulled into one of the empty parking spots out front and killed the engine, getting out of the car at the same time as Bill.