Page 34 of My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

I’m not exactly hyperventilating, but I’m not anywhere near calm, either. In fact, I’ve been pacing the house since everyone left. At the moment, the pool of dread inside me feels as deep and unpredictable as the Atlantic. I haven’t been this anxious since the morning I left Aunt Velda’s with my four-day-old baby, afraid that if I lingered too long my father, who could be frighteningly persuasive, would show up and somehow convince me to give Lauren up.

I unwrap THE DRESS with clumsy fingers and lay it gently on my bed. It came to me shortly after Aunt Velda’s death just as her will stipulated, accompanied by a handwritten note from her asking that I continue to make it available to any Jameson bride who wanted to wear it. I suspect it was her attempt to bring Lauren and me back into the family fold. It arrived along with things that had belonged to my mother. My baby book that she’d meticulously filled in, a silver brush and comb set engraved with my initials, and the portrait of my mother in THE DRESS that had always hung above my parents’ bed. My father refused to forgive me or allow my mother to see me up until the moment he drove the two of them into a tree one wintery night after suffering a heart attack behind the wheel.

My hands shake as I arrange THE DRESS on a padded hanger and hook it carefully over the top of the open closet door. I take my time positioning the train in a perfect swirl on the floor and place a pair of satin high-heel pumps next to it. Half of me can’t wait to see Lauren in it. The other half is afraid I won’t be able to bear it, given the confession that will follow.

I stand next to the dress and stare into the dresser mirror on the opposite wall, taking in my ramrod-straight back, the careful way I’m holding myself, the look of terror on my face. If an artist were to paint me in this moment the work would have to be titledWoman Awaiting Doom. Or perhaps more succinctly,Impending Doom.

I turn my back on the mirror and look instead at THE DRESS... What can I say about the dress? Only that it’s still beautiful. And that whatever happens next will not be its fault. Any more than it was to blame when I turned and ran. As far as I know I gave it its only black mark. Plenty of women have worn it all the way through their ceremonies. Many of them have lived happily ever after. Or at least happily enough.

Not for the first time I let myself wonder if my mother was ever happy.

Pictures of her as a girl show her with an uncertain, tentative smile. After she married my father her face looked increasingly serious, ever more careful. Pictures of her holding me as an infant show her pinch faced and anxious. The only time I remember her laughing out loud were those rare occasions when she was with her sister and my father was nowhere in sight.

Bree

Lauren doesn’t say much as we get in the car for the drive back to Kendra’s and neither do I. I’m too busy thinking about the celebration we just left and whether Kendra wantedLauren to witness it or was only bent on throwing Lauren and me together.

Of course, I might have been able to enjoy the celebration more if I hadn’t been so aware of what Lauren must have been thinking of making such a big deal of such a small accomplishment compared to hers. And if I hadn’t recognized the too-careful expression on her face.

That’s the problem with knowing, or having known, someone so well. You’re forced to recognize the truth whether you want to or not. It’s easier not to think about Lauren or miss the friendship that once meant everything to me when she’s not here as a reminder. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to let go of her, but while I’ve met, liked, befriended, and even admired lots of women, I’ve never gotten that close to any of them. I think that kind of effortless bone-deep connection comes along maybe once or twice in a lifetime if you’re lucky.

I guess that’s why what she thinks still matters to me. And why I cringe when I imagine how she must see me. How silly that “party” must have seemed to her. Lauren’s actually accomplished the things I only dream about. And I’m not stupid. The chances ofHeart of Goldever getting published are probably about the same as Clay never looking at another woman.

I almost snort at the thought, but manage to stop myself in case Lauren is watching. In fact, I feel her gaze flicker over me. Am I just imagining that the silence feels different? Or is it the result of letting myself remember how much she used to mean to me? How much we meant to each other.

Uncomfortable with the silence I can’t quite identify, I flick on the radio. There’s a commercial for a new restaurant in Kill Devil Hills, a public service announcement for an upcoming 5K run, a sale at Miss Lizzie’s boutique. And then out of nowhere, the opening drum licks of Ray Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” fill the car.

Lauren and I turn to face each other. We don’t speak orcomment or ask what the odds are of “our song” playing on this particular radio station at this exact moment. Our heads are already bobbing to the beat. We turn our eyes back to the road as the opening guitar riffs come in, but our heads continue to bob. Our chins get involved. Our chests. Our shoulders. We sway and bob from the waist up.

We hit the first line, “Pretty woman, walking down the street,” right along with Roy and we stick with him word for word, phrase by phrase. We bob the whole time, doing double bobs and shoulder-drop sways in the exact spots we once choreographed them. The beat and the music and the memories swell inside me.

Lauren’s eyes close. Her hands go up. Her bent arms move to the beat and I know she’s seeing us dancing together in my grandmother’s living room, filling its empty silence in the same way she and this song helped fill the emptiness inside me.

I keep my eyes mostly on the road but my brain reenacts each step, bob, bump, and sway. My lips stretch into a smile that mirrors Lauren’s. Her fist goes up like a microphone and I automatically lean toward it. Our past slams into the present as we shout/purr “Mercy!” in unison. We do the same on Orbison’s signature “rrowwwwllll.” We do not miss a single word or nuance. We’re at a stoplight when we shout the final words of the song together with identical emphasis, “Oh, ohhhhhh... pretty woman!”

We turn into Kendra’s driveway moments later in shocked silence.

“Wow,” Lauren finally says. “I don’t guess there’s any way my mother could have arranged that?”

“No, but she would have if she could have.” I pull to a stop in front of the Sandcastle, where I stare out the windshield. “That was so...”

“Bizarre?”

“Yeah. Completely crazy.”

The car’s still running and we’re both trying to come to terms with our musical blast from the past. I’ve decided I’m not going to be the one to suggest that the universe is trying to tell us something when Kendra comes out the front door and leans over the porch railing. “Come on, you two. I’ve got champagne. THE DRESS is waiting.”

I turn to Lauren and summon the courage to be direct, which has never been my forte. “It’s your call. I don’t want to intrude if you’d rather share this moment with Ken... with your mother.”

Our eyes lock. I brace for a pithy put-down or a nasty send-off, but for a second or two I see the Lauren I once knew better than anyone.

“I always pictured you standing beside me while I tried it on,” she says so quietly I think I might be imagining it. I catch my breath in surprise. Her face tells me she’s surprised, too.

Lauren wasn’t here when I tried on THE DRESS, but she did come back for our wedding. She came back angry and bitchy. Acting as if my decision not to go to New York was a huge hardship and betrayal of our friendship. But she did serve as my maid of honor even if it was grudging. Still, I’m not about to take a chance that I’ve misunderstood. “Which means?”

She takes a deep breath then lets it out slowly. Her face still says she’s as surprised by her invitation as I am. Then in a friendly tone I haven’t heard in twenty years and thought I’d never hear again she says, “It means let’s go inside and drink some champagne, so I can try on THE DRESS and make my mother happy.”

Lauren

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