Page 9 of My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

“Oh my goodness! Really?” She holds the phone tighter toher ear. “Why... how... oh my gosh! Right there in the restaurant? How wonderful!” She listens again intently. Then she covers the mouthpiece and whispers, “Lauren’s engaged!”

Shock and surprise take my breath away. Waves of conflicting emotion wash over me. There is excitement, even delight. Lauren and I dreamed of this when we were little girls. Whispered about it for hours on end. Imagined our weddings and each other’s roles in them repeatedly, sometimes even scripting them out.

Those initial happy emotions give way to darker ones. Dismay. Regret. A yawning loss. Because I’m hearing this secondhand where once I would have heard it even before Kendra. Would have known it might happen. The stab of jealousy comes last, and I latch on to it because it’s the sharpest and most familiar, the one I’ve been nursing the longest. And it doesn’t hurt as much.

I watch Kendra’s face for more clues. It must be the playwright that I Googled not long after they started dating. A high achiever even by Lauren’s standards. Good-looking and from a wealthy, philanthropic family. Lauren has never done anything by halves so I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Since there’s no longer any need to pretend I’m not listening, I move in closer to mine Kendra’s voice and body language for more clues.

“He wants to talk to me?” Kendra asks, clearly pleased. “Of course. Put him on.”

There’s a long pause as she presumably listens to the man who’s about to become her son-in-law use his gift with words on her.

“Of course I forgive you for not asking me first,” she says, like the Richmond debutante I know she once was. “I promise I’ve been asking her to bring you down.” She laughs. “Yes, she can be a little stubborn.” And then because Kendra would never willingly hurt anyone’s feelings, especially her daughter’s (how else could she walk the minefield between us all these yearswithout being blown up?) she adds, “But I believe she comes by that naturally.”

Apparently there’s more because she chuckles, nods, smiles. “Yes. Lauren and I can talk about the details later. But I’m so excited for you both and I look forward to meeting you.”

She laughs at whatever he says next and then adds, “I know just how discriminating my daughter is, so you are clearly a paragon of all things.” She laughs again. “Besides, how could I not approve of someone who loves my daughter?”

I busy myself rinsing out our mugs and puttering about until the good-byes are finished.

I spend a little of that time secretly hoping that Lauren will ask to speak to me, that she’ll want to use this pivotal moment to apologize for appropriating the book we plotted together and using it to become the Queen of Beach Reads. (At which point I might attempt to point out that my not getting on that bus to New York was not about her. That she is not in fact the center of everyone else’s universe.)

This doesn’t happen, of course, and so I focus on smashing my jealously back down into the dark hole where it lives so that Kendra won’t see it. I owe this woman virtually everything and will not intrude on her right to be happy for her daughter. I’ll have to settle for being happy for Kendra.

When she hangs up she’s crying what are clearly happy tears. “I’m so happy for them both. And so incredibly grateful that she’ll have someone to love and to share her life with. Like you do. It’s not even too late for children.” She whispers this last part as if Lauren might overhear her.

I just nod and smile in a brainless bobbleheaded way while Kendra continues to both grin and cry; a contradictory response that reminds me of “a monkey’s wedding,” a phrase my parents once told me South Africans use to describe a sun-shower.

It’s odd how huge this announcement feels to me when in truth it has nothing to do with me at all. Kendra envelops mein a hug and I wish that Lauren and I were still five-year-olds who believed we were sisters and that a pinky swear could actually last forever.

Neither of us mentions that there’s been no talk at all of THE DRESS. And whether Lauren plans to wear it.

Kendra

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when I dream about weddings all night. It’s all vague, barely formed images. Bits and pieces of everything from Princess Di and Charles’s “wedding of the century,” to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s more recent joining. Liz and Chris on30 Rockappear. Bree and Clay’s wedding flits by and includes shots of Lauren’s unhappy face. Of course, no disturbing dream sequence would be complete without a highlight reel from my own botched ceremony. Me being helped into THE DRESS. Me walking down the aisle on my father’s arm. The expression on Jake’s face as he watches me draw near.

I wake groggy and distressed and with an odd sense of foreboding that no amount of splashing cold water on my face dispels. I pull on my bathrobe and walk into the kitchen to brew my first cup of coffee, telling myself that it’s silly to react this way to such good news. That Lauren is a grown woman who knows her own mind and not the panicked twenty-one-year-old I was. I pull my wool shawl from its hook near the back door and wrap it around me then carry the coffee outside to the back deck, where I lean over the railing and stare out across the dunes and the narrow strip of beach that separates them from the ocean.

Even as I sip coffee in my favorite spot on earth, my mind is still filled with images of my wedding day, the horrible way it ended, and all that followed.

I had no idea where I was headed when I tiptoed out of myaunt Velda’s house, more to keep my aunt from being an accessory than because I thought she’d bar my way, buckled my swaddled newborn daughter into the bucket seat next to me, and fired up the engine of the blue 1970 Dodge Challenger convertible my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I just got on Highway 64 and headed east until I reached the coast of North Carolina, then drove over two long, wind-battered bridges that seemed to go on forever and left no question that you’d left the mainland behind.

I stopped for gas and snacks on Roanoke Island, where the Outer Banks begin, then took yet another bridge that spanned Roanoke Sound to NC 12, a winding, narrow two-lane strip of asphalt that connects most of the islands together and that locals still refer to as the Beach Road.

From my deck I can see the vague outline of Jennette’s Pier jutting out into the ocean a couple miles down the beach. That’s where I ended up that first day and where I carried Lauren all the way out to the tip of the fishing pier where I stood right out over the ocean.

I still remember those first heady breaths of air. How blue and clear the sky was. The rush of wind in my ears. It was wild and untamed. I felt freedom and possibility all the way down to my toes.

At the time there was nothing much around but a few restaurants and businesses and a couple mom-and-pop hotels and cottage courts. Weathered houses on stilts backed up to the beach. There was scrub everywhere and small cottages here and there.

Even now when I catch myself complaining about the traffic and the noise and the outlet malls, I remember the emptiness that stretched between small outposts of civilization. How few structures stood in the way of the near-constant wind. The sand it tossed and blew around, building mountainous dunes that became part of the scenery. The sea oats bent double beneath itsonslaught. The sound of waves crashing or sometimes swishing on- and offshore.

It was so bold and so intensely beautiful I thought my heart might stop. And despite having been raised in the carefully manicured city of Richmond, it felt right. A place you would run to, not from. And of all the mistakes I made then and in the years that followed, it was the one thing I was right about.

As the sky lightens and separates from the Atlantic I settle into an Adirondack chair and try to picture my daughter and her fiancé together. I’ve seen Spencer’s picture but never a photo of the two of them. Lauren’s told me all about his plays and his talent and how much she admires his work, but only small scraps about his background and his family. I wonder what their relationship is like and how marriage will change it. Who will move in with whom? Or if they’ll start fresh in a place that they can think of astheirs?

The sun continues its rise and even after all these years I don’t take the sight for granted. I breathe in the salt-tinged breeze, my face turned up to the warming sun. Finally, I make my way back into the kitchen to pull ingredients for the blueberry muffins I’m due to deliver today to two B and Bs. My triple-chocolate and Italian wedding cakes are delivered fresh several times a week. On select mornings I cook a full breakfast on-site for the guests.

I began learning how to cook out of desperation not long after we arrived here. My mother had always had “help,” and I didn’t really pay much attention to how food got on the table. In college at Washington and Lee I lived in a sorority house where food also miraculously appeared when I was hungry.

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