Downgrade My Ride? I'll Upgrade My Groom! novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Night Before

The night before my wedding, there were four tiers of lemon and elderflower cake on Gran's kitchen island, and Sydney was guarding them with a palette knife.

"Nobody touches the cake," she said.

"It's my cake," I said.

"It's my cake. You're just the occasion."

Gran sat at the end of the island in her green cardigan with a glass of sherry, watching Sydney pipe sugar peonies.

"You've got buttercream in your nose ring," she said.

"It's a look," Sydney said.

"It's a very bold look."

"Thank you, Mrs. Eastman."

"It wasn't a compliment, Plus Chaos."

Sydney grinned and kept piping.

The kitchen windows were open to the lake.

Across the hedge, the lights were on in the Atwood house for the first time in three weeks.

A family with two little boys had moved in on Monday.

One of them had already fallen off the dock.

Gran said that was how you knew a house was in good hands.

"Your father called this afternoon," she said to me. "He wanted to know which pew."

"What did you tell him?"

"The last one. On the left. By the radiator." She sipped her sherry. "He said thank you. I didn't know what to do with myself."

I looked down at my hands.

My new ring and the signet ring on my thumb, side by side.

"Is he okay?"

"He's living in a one-bedroom on Dearborn and eating soup out of a can," Gran said. "He's exactly as okay as he deserves to be. And he asked which pew. That's a start."

Sydney put down her piping bag.

"Okay. Before I forget, and before I cry, which I'm going to."

She went to her bag on the counter and came back with something long wrapped in a dish towel.

She unwrapped it on the island in front of me.

A silver cake knife with a white ribbon tied on the handle.

"I took it out of that church seven weeks ago," she said. "Nobody was cutting my cake for that woman. I've been saving it for the right wedding."

I picked it up.

It was heavier than I expected.

"Syd."

"Don't. I've got buttercream on my face. If I cry, it'll go everywhere." She wiped her eyes with her wrist anyway. "You're cutting the cake with it tomorrow. Both of you. And then I'm keeping it forever and nobody's allowed to ask."

I came around the island and hugged her, buttercream and all.

Gran watched us over her sherry.

"Well," she said. "Now I need another glass."

At ten Gran sent us all to bed.

"The groom is sleeping at his own apartment in the city," she announced from the stairs. "As tradition demands. I don't want to see him, hear him or smell his aftershave until two o'clock tomorrow."

"He's forty minutes away, Gran."

"Good. Forty minutes is plenty."

I went up to the big guest room at the back of the house.

It had French doors that opened onto the terrace over the lake.

My mother's gown hung on the closet door, freshly pressed, the seams let back out to fit me.

My mother's pearls were in a little dish on the dresser.

I lay down in Clay's old Cubs T-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts and looked at the gown in the moonlight.

At ten past twelve, something crashed in the garden below.

Then a man swore, quietly and with feeling.

I got up and opened the French doors.

Clay was standing in the middle of Gran's hydrangeas in jeans and his field jacket, picking blue petals out of his hair.

"You're forty minutes away," I whispered.

"I was," he whispered back. "Then I was thirty-nine. Then I kept going."

"Gran will kill you."

"Gran's asleep."

"Gran's never asleep."

He climbed the terrace steps two at a time and stopped in front of me in the doorway.

There was a petal stuck to his collar.

I picked it off.

"I just wanted to see you," he said. "Once. Before tomorrow. When it's just us."

"You'll see me at two."

"In front of three hundred people." He took my hand, the one with both rings. "I wanted the last one before that to be mine."

I pulled him into the room by the front of his jacket and shut the French doors behind him very, very quietly.

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