My Favorite Mistake. Stephanie Bond

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СКАЧАТЬ trying it on…for you. It was the closest thing I could find.”

      Cindy’s blue eyes bugged. “You should keep it, Denise. If Barry got a look at you in that dress, he’d fall on his knees and beg you to marry him.”

      I laughed. “Right.” Barry had never been on his knees in my presence—to propose or do anything else—but I had to admit, I was tempted.

      A flushed, middle-aged woman stopped and looked me up and down. “Are you going to keep that dress?” Without waiting for an answer, she proceeded to pick up the fabric of the skirt to scrutinize the pearls.

      A proprietary feeling came over and I firmly removed her hand from my—er, the dress. “I haven’t decided.”

      The woman glared at my bare left hand. “My daughter Sylvie already has a wedding date.”

      I frowned. “So?”

      “So,” the woman snapped, “what good will that dress do you hanging in your closet?”

      She was testy, but she had a very good point, especially considering the fact that I’d been lamenting only yesterday how small my closet was. Still, what business was it of hers if the dress hung in my cramped closet until it dry-rotted? (A distinct possibility.)

      Cindy stepped up and crossed her arms. “My friend is going to get married again someday.” Cindy still harbored lingering guilt over my impromptu marriage—she blamed herself for getting the flu and leaving me to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas by myself. Otherwise, I might not have fallen under Redford’s illicit spell.

      “Again? Someday?” The lady snorted and her body language clearly said that women who didn’t get it right the first time around didn’t deserve a production the second time around. Another good point. I had blown it the first time I’d walked down the aisle—well, okay, to be morbidly honest I hadn’t “walked down the aisle.” I was married in a chapel drive-through, which, in my defense, had seemed the most economical route at the time.

      My groom, who I barely knew, was a gorgeous officer on leave. And the spontaneous marriage had been prompted by intense physical chemistry (Redford was rather spectacularly endowed), and perhaps a bit of misplaced patriotism that I had mistaken for love. It was one of the oldest clichés in the book—an observation which, I realized ruefully, was also a cliché. The biggest mistake of my life was redundant. Ridiculously, tears pooled in my eyes.

      Cindy gaped at me. I never cried…ever.

      “There, there,” the older woman said, and actually patted my arm. “You’ll feel better once you take off that dress.”

      Cindy drew herself up. “Keep moving, lady—the dress is ours.”

      The woman huffed and stalked away, head pivoting, presumably looking for other women she could provoke to tears.

      Mortified, I blinked like mad to rid my eyes of the moisture. “I don’t know…what happened.”

      “Never mind,” Cindy said in her best-friend voice. “Let’s go pay for our dresses.”

      I shook my head. “I can’t buy a wedding dress, Cindy.”

      “Of course you can…everyone knows you have a fortune squirreled away from clipped coupons and rebates.”

      I had a reputation among my friends for being, shall I say, “thrifty.” “I don’t mean I can’t afford it. I mean I…I don’t think I’ll ever get married…again.” But if that were true, why hadn’t I simply handed over the dress to the pushy woman?

      Cindy shrugged. “Fine. If you still feel that way in six months, sell the dress on eBay. Knowing you, you’ll probably make money on it.”

      I bit my lower lip. Cindy was right—even if I took the dress home, no one was going to stick a gun to my head and make me get married. Barry seemed to be as leery of walking down the aisle as I was. Although if one day Barry got the urge…

      I almost laughed out loud—Barry wasn’t the “urge getting” kind of guy. He was just as methodical and nonsensical as I was, which explained how we had contentedly dated off and on for the past two years without the drama that most couples endure. I was lucky. Luck-eee.

      “It’s a great deal,” Cindy urged in a singsongy voice.

      I looked at the price tag and wavered at the sight of the red slash through the original price of $2000 and replaced with the hastily-scrawled $249. I loved red slashes. It’s a great deal. And I probably could turn around and sell the dress on eBay for a profit. In fact, I might make enough to surprise Barry with plane tickets for a vacation. He’d been wanting to go to Vegas, and I’d been resistant, for reasons that now seem childish…

      As childish as me standing here obsessing about buying a gown simply because it resurrected too many memories…? Memories a wedding dress might exorcise…?

      “Okay,” I said impulsively. “I’ll take it.”

      Cindy clapped her hands, then stopped, as if she were afraid that her celebrating would change my mind, and herded me toward the checkout counter.

      Only later, when a gushing salesclerk handed me the gown, bagged and paid for, was I seized by a sudden, unnerving thought:

      What if Cindy’s “self-fulfilling prophecy” experiment rubbed off on me?

      2

      THE WHOLE “self-fulfilling prophecy” thing was still nagging at me when I got home and I realized I would have to get rid of something in order to make room for my impulsive purchase. Buyer’s remorse struck me hard and I cursed my weakness for a good buy. To punish myself, I laid out the brown suede fringed coat I had splurged on last spring but rarely wore, plus a pair of rivet-studded jeans and a white embroidered shirt that had seemed exotic in the store, but smacked of a costume when I stood before the full-length mirror in my bathroom. I had never worked up the nerve to wear the outfit. As much as I loved the pieces, it seemed unlikely that the urban Western look was going to come back in style anytime soon, and if it did, I obviously couldn’t carry it off. But my friend Kenzie could, and since she now lived part-time on a farm in upstate New York, she would probably find a way to wear them and look smashing.

      Looking for other things that Kenzie might wear, I unearthed a sweater with running horses on it that Redford had given me and, after a moment of sentimental indecision, added it to the giveaway bag, as well. Then I hung the wedding gown in the front of the closet because it was the only place the skirt could hang unimpeded by bulging shoe racks.

      The phone rang, and I snatched up the handset, wondering who it could be on Saturday afternoon. (I was too cheap to pay for caller ID on my landline phone.) “Hello.”

      “Hey,” Barry said, his voice low and casual. “What are you doing?”

      I dropped onto my queen-size bed whose headboard still smelled faintly of woodsmoke two years after the fire sale at which I’d bought it. “Just cleaning out my closet.”

      “I have good news,” he said in a way that made me think that if I’d said, “I just bought a wedding gown,” he wouldn’t even have noticed.

      I worked my mouth from side to side. СКАЧАТЬ