Then, I sold everything touched by my former relationship. Dresses of every kind. Engagement photo dresses, engagement party dresses, bridal shower dresses, bachelorette dresses. The after-party and the next-day brunch outfits, the honeymoon looks. Those fabulous magenta shoes and the veil. Anything I’d worn with the ex. All the random bits of wedding kitsch I’d carefully collected. Even two-ish years of bridal magazines.
And that damn gown. As it turned out, I hadn’t ripped it in any significant way. Just a tear along the side seam, nothing a tailor couldn’t handle. Seeing as that designer hardly ever made anything to fit a size sixteen gal like myself, there were dozens of brides lined up to buy it from me.
There wasn’t much left after that. The clothes I wore to teach kindergarten. A collection of yoga pants in assorted shades of fading black. A shoebox filled with wacky earrings I loved but my ex-fiancé had hated.
So, here I was with new hair and fresh ink, guzzling liquor while bingeing mindless reality television on my best friend’s couch in days-old pajamas as the ex enjoyed the honeymoon I’d planned and paid for as a wedding gift to him. That was my prize for following the rules.
That, and whatever the hell I had to sign for at the door.
I shuffled across the apartment, a blanket draped over my shoulders and clutched tight to my chest because this tank top could not be trusted to contain me. One wrong move and it was tits out.
Jaime leaned against the wall while I handed over my identification and signed for the letter. “What is this?” I asked the courier.
“Not my job to know,” he said. “Just my job to serve the papers and you didn’t make this one easy on me.”
“Cryptic, much?” Jaime said as he took off down the hall.
I turned the envelope over in my hands. “Whatever it is, I don’t think I care,” I said, trudging back to the couch. I tossed the envelope to Jaime. “Just tell me what it says.”
I stared at the television, blanket pooled at my waist as I slurped up the last of a truly heinous blend of red wine, ice, and Diet Coke. Heinous. A crime against wine. Also delicious.
Jaime tore into the envelope and I appreciated—not for the first time—the complete absence of judgment from her. Some people wouldn’t abide this much wallowing. They wouldn’t debate tattoo designs or cheer when the first locks of hair hit the salon floor. Jaime didn’t judge, she embraced, and that was only one of the best things about her.
“It’s about your step-grandmother,” she said as she flipped through the pages. “The one who died.”
I rattled the ice in my cup. Grandma Lollie died a couple of months ago, quiet and happy in her bed at a Florida retirement community she’d insisted on describing as “aswinginggood time.” She’d been ninety-seven years old though that never stopped her from tearing it up on salsa night. I’d lived with her for a time during high school when things were complicated for me and I loved her dearly.
She was one of the only family members that I considered truefamily. I’d believed with my whole heart that not having Grandma Lollie at my wedding was the worst thing that could happen to me.
That was a cool way to tease fate.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jaime murmured, shuffling the pages. “It sounds like she left you a—afarm. InRhode Island.”
My gaze fell to the laundry baskets, trash bags, and mismatched boxes assembled along the wall. This haphazard, ramshackle mess loudly and proudly proclaimed that some combination of my sweet, amazing, crazy friends went to the luxury high-rise condo in the Back Bay of Boston I’d shared with the ex and snatched everything they believed to be mine.
Everything, right down to a nearly empty bottle of olive oil and a broom I’d never seen before.
They were the best friends anyone could ever ask for and the closest thing I had to family here in Boston. They kept asking if there was anything I needed, if I was okay. And the truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not even close.
But I didn’t say that.
I glanced back to Jaime, asking, “What?”
She shook her head, pointing to the cover page. “We need to call your step-grandmother’s attorney because I don’t understand this stuff and there are a whole bunch of dates and requirements in here that seem really important.”
I wandered into the kitchen to insult another glass of wine with ice and soda. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s probably a mistake. Lollie wouldn’t have left me the farm. It’s been in her family for hundreds of years and she had four actual grandkids, you know, from my stepdad’s first marriage. She would’ve left it to them. Or my stepdad. Or anyone else.”
Jaime pointed to the document. “We need to call this guy.”
“I don’t have a phone,” I said. “You took it away. Remember?”
She’d pried the phone from my hands at some point. Between her and the others, they held me off in the moments I wanted to scream at the ex for waiting until the last possible seconds of our wedding day to end our relationship, and in the moments when I wanted him to explain what happened, to tell me what went wrong, whatIdid wrong. Why he’d chosen to make a fool of me.
The explanation wouldn’t help. I knew that. But there were bits of time when I was tired of being drunk and sad and numb, and I wanted to stand inside the rage of being wronged in such a careless manner. I wanted that rage to exhaust me. To drain me to the extent that I was too tired to cry, too tired to even feel the numbness.
That rage was the truest thing I could feel, and even then it was little more than charbroiled disappointment. I’d planned that wedding down to the last inch and then—poof. It was gone, like none of it had ever existed at all. Like everything the wedding had represented—everything it had meant for me—never existed.
“We’ll use mine,” she said, pulling the device from the back pocket of her jean shorts.
