

"On to the Classic Bride," Astrid announced with yet another clap of her hands. "Philippa, make your choice from your two racks. You have five minutes."
Poor Philippa. At least I'd had ten minutes. Such was the perk of being an associate staffer instead of an assistant.
Two years ago, after getting downsized from Posh Publishing and suffering through an exhausting job search, I'd been hired by Astrid on a probationary basis as associate art associate. "You were promoted to assistant art director only a few months before you were 'let go' at Posh, so you didn't have time to learn the job," she'd said. "Here at Wow, we have to do the job before we can fulfill the promise of the title." If I hadn't been so desperate, I would have gone back to calling every contact I'd ever made and circling ads in the Times. I accepted the position at Wow Weddings magazine with the rationalization that my prepromotion title at Posh had been assistant art associate, so, in a way, Wow was a step up.
Philippa zoomed for her own forbidden zone, to a rack on the outskirts of my Modern area. "I am so in love with this one! Isn't it just fabulous?"
Superfabulous was more like it. A strange muted yellow and sparkly, with a low-cut halter-style top, mermaidcut skirt covered with yellow feathers and a huge Sarah Jessica Parker/Carrie Bradshaw feather-flower on the left breast, the gown hardly seemed preppy Philippa Wills's style---or the least bit classic.
"Yes, yes, yes! This is definitely my choice for my wedding gown," Philippa said, holding it up against her tall, willowy frame in the floor-length mirror on the wall. "With the right makeup, I'll look fabu in yellow!"
You'll look like Big Bird, was my first thought. Not that Philippa would wear the dress; Astrid would nix it in two seconds.
"No. Absolutely not," Astrid came in on cue with one shake of her head. Her poker-straight platinum bob didn't move. "Does that look like a traditional gown to you, Philippa? As our Classic Bride, you must choose a traditional gown. In any case, we're not choosing wedding gowns today."
Philippa pouted and fingered the flower on the Big Bird dress. "But it's my dream gown. I love it. I don't see why yellow can't be considered trad---"
"You may choose your bridal party's dresses from this rack---" Astrid swiveled to extend an entire arm at a rack of your standard-fare-bridesmaid dress in every color "---or that rack."
My bridesmaids poked their heads out of the dressing rooms. While Astrid was busy glaring at Philippa, Jane was mouthing this rack or that rack while Amanda and Natasha were pointing exaggeratedly to the left and right. Beth, sister-in-law-to-be, stared back and forth from Philippa to Astrid. As an accountant in a tax-law firm, Beth didn't ordinarily come in contact with pouters or Dragon Ladies with tiny square eyeglasses and cashmere wraps the size of a bed.
"Philippa, I have a meeting at five-thirty," Astrid said. "You have two minutes left to make your choice before I make it for you."
Philippa glanced from the boring rack on the left to the more boring one on the right, then slid each dress along the rack as tears pooled in her eyes.
"This one's gorgeous, Philippa," I said, spying the floaty pink Midsummer's Night Dream dress buried in the middle of her "this" rack. "It's very 'I'd Like To Thank the Academy,' like you said you wanted."
She glanced at the dress and her face lit up. She was relatively easy to please, if you knew how to do it. "Oooh, yes! It's lovely! Good eye, Eloise. We'll all look good in pink." She glanced at her fiancé's sisters; they bobbed their heads and smiled. Philippa beamed. "Okay, I made my choice."
"Fine," Astrid said. "Fashion editor, please speak with It's Your Day's manager about ordering the maid of honor's version---it will be almost the same, but with special beading detail on the empire waist." She glanced up. "Which one of you is the maid of honor?"
The three blondes glanced at me. I glanced at them. None of us said, I am!
"Um, actually, I haven't chosen my maid of honor yet," Philippa said. "I have so many girlfriends and it's so hard to choose! But my top three choices for the honor of standing up for me are all a size four."
Oh brother.
"Places, people!" Astrid barked with a clap of her hands.
Devlin began arranging Philippa's bridesmaids, her fiancé's three sisters and me. As the sisters were all queens of classic, he had very little to do insultwise other than making me borrow a peach cardigan sweater and insisting I remove my tiny green pterodactyl earrings. We gazed, we smiled, we fake oohed and aahed.
This was actually our second day of fake oohing and fake aahing for the camera. Yesterday Philippa and I had taken some preliminary "I'm So Happy I'm a Bride-to-Be" shots in front of the very classic Tavern on the Green in Central Park and the very modern Puck Building in SoHo.
Devlin had ordered me to look happier, to glow more. Difficult to do when you suddenly weren't so sure your fiancé was really Mr. Right.
"Like this," Philippa had said to me, and strangely enough, on cue, her face lit up.
Then and now, as she glowed for each snap of Devlin's camera, I realized I was jealous of her. Jealous that she was so sure of her future, her fiancé.
I was desperate for a girls' night out, but Jane, Amanda and Natasha all had after-the-dress-selection plans. Jane and Amanda were heading to a pre-prenatal yoga class (I kid you not) "for those just thinking about womb flexibility," and Natasha had a playdate in a sandbox. Even Noah, who was pretty good at girl talk, had plans tonight.
"Okay, it's a wrap," Astrid announced with a jangle of the five thick silver bangles on her emaciated wrist. "As it's four-fifteen, I've decided not to require you to return to the office."
What a gal!
"Philippa and Eloise," Astrid continued, "your diary entries about this shopping trip are due first thing Monday morning. I want two hundred and fifty words, perky, lots of exclamation points." She flipped through pages on her clipboard. "Which one of you has the deceased mother? I can't find it in my notes."
You could hear the clichéd pin drop. The Wow staffers darted uncomfortable glances at me and Philippa.
What a complete shithead Astrid was. I glanced at Jane, whose mother had also passed away. Jane raised an eyebrow, but didn't hurl a rubber dress at Astrid.
"That would be me," I said, my cheeks burning.
"El-o-ise," Astrid said in slow motion as she jotted down Dead Mother: Eloise. "Your diary entry should focus on the poignancy of shopping for your bridal party without Mother. It's a strong human-interest point for our readership." She thought for a moment. "Yes, a theme of Mother's unfulfilled dream---to see her little girl married."
My mother's dream for me was to marry. But for much more complicated reasons than Astrid's backward baloney.
Before I could even formulate an evil thought about Astrid, she moved on. "I'm going to have your final wedding-plans schedules for you on Monday," she continued, "but don't plan anything---a manicure, drinks with friends, even a headache---for the next eight weeks until you receive your schedule. Also, family-photo shoots will take place one month from now. That way, family members who need to fly in can make arrangements. You'll receive the exact dates in your schedule packet."
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
"Um, Astrid, what if my father or brother can't come to the shoots?" I asked around the lump in my throat. "Just in case, I mean."
"Simple," she responded. "You hire standins. You contact one of the model agencies we use or even an escort service and inform them you're looking for a fatherly type and a brother type with your coloring. In fact, standins are even better than the real thing, since they're invariably more attractive, and readers like attractive real-life models. If you do need to hire standins, make sure they have an urban appeal as befits relatives of the Modern Bride. If your real family is able to come, we'll enhance their 'hip and cool factor' for the shoots. Same goes for you, Philippa, but with a Classic enhancement."
My brother would please Astrid. Twenty-nine-year-old Emmett Manfred was as hip and cool as you got. But he was also who-knew-where, probably thinking deeply on a hill in Oregon or sleeping with a few rich, older women on Park Avenue for rent money. I hadn't seen or spoken to my brother in over a year.
As for my father, I had no idea if he was hip and cool. Actually, I'd bet my life savings that he was the furthest thing from cool there could possibly be. I hadn't seen or heard from Theo Manfred since I was five years old.
"Thank you all for coming, bridesmaids," Astrid said. She flipped her wrap over her shoulder, snapped on her Jackie O. sunglasses and left It's Your Day, disappearing into a black sedan double-parked in front.
Noah's sister eyed me, said, "We'll discuss later," and huffed out.
Philippa and her future sisters-in-law, chattering excitedly, followed.
Jane, Amanda and Natasha took one last look at the rubber bridesmaid dress.
"The dress isn't half as bad as your boss!" Amanda said, pulling a Fair Isle hat over her shiny blond head.
"It's not a quarter as bad," Natasha put in. "What a witch."
Jane nodded. "Hey, maybe you could hire a standin for Astrid. A boss with normal, decent, human appeal!"
They laughed, then all peered at me.
"Are you okay?" Jane asked, her best-friend brown eyes searching mine.
I nodded. "It's just a dress."
"That wasn't what I meant," she whispered.
"I'm okay." Sort of. Not really.
"Amanda, what do you say we skip pre-prenatal yoga and help Summer make Elmo sand pies instead?" Jane asked.
Amanda nodded. "Sounds good to me."
Natasha settled Summer into her stroller and clicked her harness into place. "Summer will be thrilled to have her honorary aunts at her playdate. Eloise, you can come, can't you?"
"Sure," I said.
Did I mention how grateful I was for my friends?
"Elmo! Elmo!" Summer shouted.
Jane squeezed my hand. "El, if it's any consolation, the dress you're wearing in my wedding is worse."
"No, I think they're tied," Amanda said.
Jane laughed and slung an arm around my shoulder. "C'mon, my girl. To the sandbox for a much-needed session of the Flirt Night Round Table."
Twenty-two-month-old Summer Nutley was the most recent member of the Flirt Night Round Table, so named for the flirting the adult members used to do preserious relationships and the intimate discussions on every topic imaginable: love, work, sex, men, money, family and life in general. The Flirt Night Round Table began on a street corner eight years ago, when Jane and Amanda and I worked in the same building and became friends over puffs of cigarettes (none of us smoke anymore).
Natasha Nutley might have been a glam celebrity (she'd written a bestselling memoir about her love affair with a famous actor and had a small role on All My Children as a nurse), but soon after she became a weekly member of the Flirt Night Round Table two years ago, our group's name could easily have been changed to the Frump Night Round Table. The Frump Afternoon Round Table (we rarely met at night anymore, unless Natasha could get a baby-sitter). Two years ago, Jane had gotten hot and heavy with boyfriend-now-fiancé Ethan Miles, Amanda had gotten engaged to now-husband Jeff Jorgensen, Natasha had been pregnant and recuperating from way too much heartache and I'd given up flirting and nicotine for long walks and then met Noah.
Flirting, dating, sex---all the juicy talk had been replaced by relationship talk. Wedding talk. Baby talk. I knew just about every detail of Ethan's and Jeff's and baby Summer's lives. Ethan's favorite food. Jeff's least favorite sexual position. Summer's frequency of bowel movements. What Ethan's childhood had been. How long Jeff's penis was. The size of Summer's skull. How Ethan liked his eggs. And my friends knew that Noah was amazing in bed. But had the World's Most Annoying Mother. And whispered "I love you" in my ear every night before he drifted off to sleep. And, because I'd changed Summer's diaper at least a hundred times during baby-sitting duty, I even knew the color and consistency of her poop. If I weren't a diaper changer, I'd know anyway from our Frump Afternoon Round Tables.
Did it sound boring? It wasn't. The new focus of the Flirt Night Round Table was everything we didn't even know we wanted, baby poop included. Until I met Noah, I'd been a serial dater. I'd been famous for meeting guys everywhere---ATM machines, bars, the frozen-food aisle of supermarkets, newspaper kiosks, work, blind dates (Amanda's hubby had way too many available-for-a-reason friends, which Jane could attest to, pre-Ethan), red lights, vending machines, museums. Once, I'd even met a guy while sunbathing on my fire escape. He was on his fire escape, across the street, and he held up a giant sketch pad that said: Got Suntan Lotion? We dated for a month before he ditched me for a woman with a summer share in the Hamptons.
I'd also been famous for dating all kinds of men, nationalities, colors, sizes, shapes, personalities. There'd been interesting so-so-looking guys. Dull hunks. Raging activists. I'd been to every kind of religious dinner with various relatives. Seders. Greek Orthodox Easter dinners. Kwanza celebrations.
I hadn't always been a serial dater. There was Lee in high school, the love of my young life and the breakup of all breakups until Michael in college, who had surpassed Lee as both the love of my young life and the breakup of all breakups. And then there was the dating. A lot of dating. Two and a half years ago there was the mini-engagement for three weeks with Serge, a very sweet guy I'd dated for four months. But between college at twenty-one and Noah at thirty-two, I'd been the dating queen of the eastern seaboard. After a thousand dates and a thousand stories to tell my friends over brunch or at Flirt Night Round Table get-togethers, I started itching for something else, something more.
Something truly fun, like love.
And then I met Noah. Noah, with his silky dark hair, hazel-green eyes, dimple in left cheek, and collection of ties with tiny cartoon animals. It was Snoopy when I met him. And little Lucys. Snoopy, spinning around doing the Snoopy dance; Lucy glaring at him, hands on hips.
It seemed unthinkable that a guy wearing such a tie could scare the hell out of me. But he had. I'm not talking your average butterfly. I'm talking I Just Met the Man I Could Imagine Marrying But Can't Because I'm Too In Love With Him.
Ack. I met Noah and his Snoopy tie at a prepublication party for Natasha's memoir, The Stopped Starlet. Posh Publishing had gone all out and invited every magazine, newspaper and television show for three hours of high-end drinks, hors d'oeuvres and advance-reading copies of the tell-all memoir. A great many people had shown up, including one Noah Benjamin, a reporter for Hot News, a Times-meets-People weekly magazine. I wasn't a book person; I was a graphic designer, and at the time an unemployed book-cover designer, so while Jane (Natasha's editor), introduced Ethan to her co-workers and schmoozed with the press, and Amanda and Jeff ogled a few celebrities, I stood in a corner popping cheddar-cheese cubes into my mouth.
"Excuse me, I'm a reporter for Hot News, and I'd like to ask you a few questions."
Mouth full of cheese, I turned around to find one of the cutest guys I'd ever seen, wearing that red tie with tiny dancing Snoopys and glaring Lucys.
"Um, I'm not anyone," I said like an idiot. "I mean, I'm just a friend of the editor."
He whipped out a tiny notebook and pen. "Name?"
"Eloise Manfred."
He jotted that down. "Favorite food?"
"Um, Mexican."
He jotted that down too. "Favorite type of movie?"
"Romantic comedy."
He tapped his little notebook with his pen. "I'll need your phone number to verify these facts and officially ask you out to a Mexican dinner and a romantic comedy."
Go away. Even the sight of you is giving me heart palpitations.
"I'm on a hiatus from dating," I told him.
"It wouldn't be a date," he said. "It would be an investigation...of our compatibility."
Who could resist? Between the dimple and the tie and the pen tapping on the notebook and that face---that intelligent, sweet, delicious face---I was a goner.
During date one, over black-bean enchiladas, two mango margaritas and an Adam Sandler comedy, I'd fallen in serious like. His cell phone rang six times and he was beeped four times by Hot News about a groundbreaking development---a minor celebrity had been spotted walking down Third Avenue on the Upper East Side, shopping in the Gap and Banana Republic and daring to peruse the sale racks. Scandal! We'd spent a fun hour trailing the actress, who yakked on her cell phone the entire time---while walking, trying on clothes, even paying. In Nine West, as she finally put down the phone to try on intricately laced boots, Noah introduced himself as a Hot News reporter and asked if he could interview her about her shopping habits. She put on sunglasses and fled with an "Absolutely not!"
There was date two. Three. Four. Seeing each other. A relationship. Casual-serious. An unspoken exclusivity. Living together. But no talk of marriage. Never any talk of marriage.
Until he proposed five days ago.
I'd said yes without hesitation. Three hours later, I was popping Tums in my bathroom. Chewing my cuticles. Having mini-breakdowns in Starbucks with my friends. My ambivalence made no sense. I'd been fantasizing about his asking me to marry him since date number three.
"Yeah, because on date number two, he announced he wasn't ready for a serious relationship," Jane had said when I called to ask if she had any Tums the morning after I'd gotten engaged. "As long as he was noncommittal, you felt safe. He's committed now, and so you're scared to death."
Why? How could I go from wanting to marry Noah more than anything in the world to suddenly wanting things to go back to the way they were before?
Which was wanting him to propose.
Tums, anyone?
"Anyone have a Tums?"
Jane, Amanda and Natasha, sitting next to me on the rim of the sandbox in the Carl Schurz Park playground, dug into their purses, pockets and tote bags. It was unusually warm for early January, almost fifty degrees, and the playground was packed with children in puffy down jackets. Summer was in the sandbox, making Elmo pies from a plastic mold of the Sesame Street character, surrounded by toddlers wielding brightly colored shovels and pails and dump trucks. One little girl was filling her doll's hollow head with sand.
Jane tossed me a bottle of tropical fruit-flavored antacids. I chomped on two as fast I could.
"Me want!" Summer demanded, sticking out her hand at me.
"Sweetie, this isn't yummy. It's yucky!" I grimaced. "Ewwww!"
"Ewww!" Summer repeated. She grabbed a fistful of sand and teased her mother by bringing her hand to her mouth. "Ewww!"
Natasha wagged her finger. "No eating sand. No, no, no."
Summer laughed. "Yes, yes, yes!"
Yes. Yes. Yes. That was exactly what I'd said to Noah when he proposed.
I said yes---three times. So I must have meant yes.
And very soon I was expected to write a five-hundred word article for Wow Weddings about why I said yes. Why I Said Yes! was a regular monthly feature in the magazine, another of Astrid's brainstorms for increasing readership. The articles were written sometimes by celebrities but often by ordinary people about why they fell in love and said yes to their marriage proposals. Astrid wanted articles by both Philippa and me to accompany our feature.
Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.
Blank page. Blinking cursor.
I said yes because...
Blank page. Blinking cursor.
Part of Philippa's job was to weed through the thousands of Why I Said Yes! submissions that came in to Wow every month, choose three and submit them to the articles editor, who'd select the best one or scrawl a no on all three and send Philippa back to the mail sack. Part of my job was to read the approved column, design a cute graphic to accompany it and choose an interesting quote to bold for a sidebar. Soon after I started at Wow, Philippa received a submission from a bride-to-be in Texas named Laura R. (Wow was big on initials only for last names.) Laura R. had been seeing her boyfriend for a year when he was called to service for the army and sent off somewhere awful to fight. He proposed to her in a letter on her birthday, and she wrote back one word: YES! He'd sent her a makeshift ring, a piece of scrap metal he'd fashioned to contain a pretty pebble. He never came home from the awful place, and his parents had given her back the YES! letter with the diary he'd been keeping, which described how happy he was that she'd said yes, how he couldn't wait to get the hell out of there to come home to Texas and marry her and start a family.
I'd sobbed through her entire article. That evening, I'd spent hours at home creating a graphic worthy enough to accompany her column. And then Astrid had decided to reject Laura R.'s submission. "It's too depressing," she'd insisted. "Wow's readers want happy endings. They're anticipating happy endings for themselves. Not war and death."
Astrid also nixed Yes! columns by pregnant brides, overweight brides, gay brides, unattractive brides and blue-collar brides (unless they were marrying up).
"Wow's mission is to preserve the fairy tale," Astrid scrawled in red atop the nixed columns. "Fairy tales are about dreams. Not reality. Wow Weddings magazine is about dreams."
I dream you disappear! I prayed with closed eyes during editorial meetings or whenever I heard her heels clicking down the hallways of the Wow offices. But then I would open my eyes and she'd still be there. Therefore proving herself wrong. Wow Weddings was really about reality.
Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.
Twice in the past week I've said yes, yes, yes without a moment's hesitation when I meant I don't know, I'm not sure, let me get back to you:
When my boyfriend, Noah, proposed marriage.
When my boss, editor in chief of this very loser magazine, offered me a free dream wedding in exchange for selling my soul as Star Trek Bride.
"Just call me Uhura," I moaned to my friends. "I can't wait to see the futuristic gown I'll be walking down the aisle in to a guy I'm not even sure I should be marrying. Lord knows what he'll be wearing. A space suit, maybe."
"Ura," Summer repeated. "Ura. Ura."
She made a new Elmo pie; a little boy, a toddler around her age, came over to inspect it.
I held up my left hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at the beautiful ring I'd thought I wanted so badly. Now all I thought I wanted was to give it back. Why, why, why?
"Eloise, you're just going through the adjustment of living with a guy," Jane had said the morning after Noah popped the question. "And you've got a bad case of commitment jitters. I think you really do love Noah, but he's committed now, and so you're scared. It's the opposite of what happened with Serge and that little proposal fiasco."
She was referring to two and a half years ago, when the very nice guy I'd been dating suddenly proposed and I'd said yes because I wanted It so badly---to be loved, to feel safe in the world. But I didn't love Serge and I'd known it. My friends had known it. If I'd told my grandmother about the engagement, she would have plucked the ring off my finger and mailed it back to him.
I was afraid of commitment? Huh?
"Eloise," Jane said, sifting sand through her fingers, "I really think you did mean yes. To both Noah and the free wedding. I think it's your fear of commitment creating your cold feet, and not your real feelings. I said this before, but I'll repeat it---I think you said yes to the free wedding so that you couldn't easily take that ring off."
But...
"You know what else I think?" Jane said as Summer jumped on her Elmo pie. "I think your sudden Tums addiction has more to do with your family than with Noah."
"How about those Mets!" I responded.
"Me out!" Summer said, heading for the shallow steps. She stopped as a man placed a toddler next to her in the sandbox. The little boy put up his arms and said, "Da-da. Da-da."
Summer put up her arms, too, and said, "Da-da."
The man smiled uncomfortably, as every man did when Summer called him Da-da, which she did to every man, everywhere. In elevators, on the street, in restaurants. Every man was Da-da.
"Where Da-da?" Summer asked Natasha, her green eyes curious.
No matter how many times Summer asked Natasha that question, the same strain tightened Natasha's beautiful features. "Your daddy's in California," Natasha replied, as she did every time. And satisfied, as she was every time, Summer continued playing. She climbed out of the sandbox and ran smiling to the slide.
Natasha waited at the end of the slide to catch Summer. "At least I think he is," she whispered to us. "He's not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d," she spelled out. She shook her head, then smiled up at Summer. "Come down to Mama!"
The father of Natasha's baby had broken up with her when she told him she was pregnant. His name was Sam and he lived in California, and for reasons I would never understand, he wasn't interested in knowing his child.
How was that possible?
This was a question people had tried to answer in my own life. Your father was never the settling-down sort. Your father's creative. Your father's this. Your father's that.
Your father is a piece of shit.
No one ever said that, but a long time ago, I'd begun to think that was the reason Theo Manfred had walked out on his family, never to be seen or heard from again.
The problem with that line of thinking was that you didn't want to think of your father as a piece of shit. You wanted to think of him as a hero.
As Summer ran around the jungle gym and back up to the top of the slide with a "Me do! Me do!" and tried to make her way down alone, I wondered what she'd say when people asked where her father was.
Summer, where's your dad?
He's in California.
When's he coming back?
Never.
Why?
He's not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d.
Eloise, where's your dad?
I don't know.
Why don't you know?
I never had an answer to that, so in elementary school I started making things up. He's in Alaska, working on the pipeline. He's climbing Mount Everest (that one was my favorite). He's in China, Switzerland, France, California on business.
The two things I never said was that he was dead or that he took off. I didn't want either to be true.
I picked up a fistful of sand and clenched it. "I haven't seen my father since I was five and I haven't spoken to my brother in over a year," I blurted out.
Three pairs of eyes were staring at me.
"Oh, honey," Amanda said, sitting down next to me on the rim of the sandbox. "I didn't know about your father. You never talk about him."
"Now we understand why," Jane said, squeezing my hand. "I'm so sorry, El."
I shrugged, not knowing what to say, how to respond. It wasn't as though I could say, It's okay. Something like that wasn't okay and never would be. Not when it happened and not now.
I haven't seen my father since I was five, but it's okay.
Could you imagine a more ridiculous statement?
"I just don't understand it," Natasha said, her eyes on Summer. "I'll never understand it. How does someone leave his own child?"
I shrugged again. "It's too bad the two people who could explain it are MIA."
"I doubt Summer's dad or yours could explain it either," Jane said. "What answer is there for that question? It's not about not loving the child."
How did she know? Maybe it was.
"I love you, Elly-Belly," my father had said often.
So was he lying, or is there no answer for why fathers are able to leave their children and never see them again?
"Your father loves you, Eloise," my mother had said many times. "I'm sure he'll always love you. But he's not the sticking-around kind. It isn't about you or your brother or even me. It's about him. Something in him."
"Yeah, it's called not loving me or Emmett."
"No, Eloise. Something might be lacking in him, but it isn't loving you or your brother. I know it's hard to understand now, but it'll get easier when you've been through some stuff yourself."
Well, I'd been through some stuff myself. And understanding why my father left---left as though he'd never known us at all---hadn't gotten easier.
Natasha handed Summer her sippy cup of juice. "Eloise, I didn't even know you had a brother."
"We've been on the outs for the past year," I explained, and then burst into tears.
"El, I'm so sorry," Jane said.
Amanda and Natasha nodded sympathetically.
I hadn't even told Jane, whom I usually told everything, about the last time I spoke to Emmett. A year ago, when my grandmother was in the hospital recovering from a stroke, Jane (who'd come every single day bearing fortifying treats for me, like bottles of Coca-Cola and M&Ms), had asked why Emmett hadn't visited.
"Because he's a self-absorbed jerk asshole," I'd screamed like a lunatic.
And for the millionth time in our friendship, which was probably the only thing in the world besides my grandmother that I couldn't live without, Jane had slung an arm around my slumped shoulders and off we'd gone to St. Monica's Church to light candles for our losses, our monthly ritual despite the fact that neither of us was Catholic. Jane's father died from a brain aneurysm when she was nine, and her mother died from ovarian cancer, as mine did, when she was nineteen. She understood.
During some of those candle-lightings, when I'd been there more for Jane than myself, I would wonder which was worse: a dead father or a deadbeat father. A father who was taken from you by the fates of the universe, or a father who was taken from you by his own free will.
Jane and I had never had that conversation because I never spoke about my father.
"So was I right?" Jane asked, shaking sand out of her shoe. "Is it possible that what's going on with your cold feet has something to do with your family?"
"I really don't want to talk about it," I said. I couldn't talk about it.
But I was going to have to. Because a month from now, my brother and father were expected in the Wow photography studios for a family-photo shoot.
"Are you going to hire standins?" Amanda asked.
I shrugged. "I guess."
Hello, I'm looking for a fake father and a fake brother to stand in for my real father and real brother at a photo shoot. They should wear black T-shirts, and use hair gel for that "urban appeal." No, I don't need to meet them beforehand; the more like strangers they seem, the more like my real family they'll be!
"El-eez sad?" baby Summer asked, peering up at me from her mother's lap, her sandy little hands wrapped around her sippy cup.
I played with her pretty auburn curls peeking out from under her knit hat. "No, sweetie. Eloise happy."
Summer smiled, handed me her Elmo mold and began clapping. "Elmo. Elmo!"
Making Elmo pies with a two-year-old till the sun went down sounded pretty good to me at the moment.


