How to Say Our Final Goodbye novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Twenty-Six
On the morning of my twenty-sixth birthday, the head of housekeeping did up thirty covered buttons down my back.
She did them one at a time, in the Bridal Suite on the eleventh floor, with her reading glasses on the end of her nose.
She didn't let the seamstress help.
"I did these for your mother," she said. "Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You're breathing. Stop that."
Dolly was sitting on the chaise in a green dress, with a clipboard, a headset and three phones.
She'd been planning this wedding for ten months.
She'd fired two florists and a cake.
"The cake was fine," I said.
"The cake was beige, Clem. It had a beige attitude." She checked a phone. "Grandma's in the building. She's annoyed about the roses."
"I know."
"I told her they're your roses. She said, and I'm quoting, 'Roses at a wedding are for people with no imagination.'"
"Did you tell her whose idea they were?"
"I told her. She said, 'Oh,' and sat down."
The last button closed.
The head of housekeeping stepped back.
I turned to the long mirror.
Ivory silk. The high lace collar. My mother's dress, taken in two inches at the shoulders, because I swam and she didn't.
The silver frame from her desk was propped on the dresser.
Her, laughing, under forty lanterns.
Me, not laughing, because I was trying not to cry and ruin Dolly's makeup schedule.
"Don't," Dolly said, without looking up. "We're four minutes behind."
The head of housekeeping took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed under my eyes anyway.
My father had pleaded guilty in April, two floors down from where Kirsten had.
I hadn't gone.
I'd sent him nothing, and he'd sent nothing back.
That was the agreement, and for once he was keeping it.
At four o'clock the doorman knocked.
Two short, a pause, three short.
He was in his green coat, brushed and pressed, with a white rose in the buttonhole.
The new brass plate on his post downstairs said HELD SINCE 1976, and he polished it every morning before anything else.
"Miss Clem," he said. "It's time."
I took his arm.
He'd asked me in January, very formally, in the lobby, with his cap in his hand, whether he might walk me down the aisle.
I'd said I'd been waiting for him to ask.
We went down the main stairs together.
The whole night staff was lining the hall outside the Lantern Room.
The bellmen. The engineer. The banquet captain. The night cook in a clean white jacket, holding a spatula, for reasons he wouldn't explain.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of How to Say Our Final Goodbye are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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