“Please!” Liz begged.
“I bet there will be alcohol,” Carter said.
“You’re not invited,” his girlfriend told him. “You’d just derail the entire meeting.”
“I can party plan,” Carter insisted. “Flowers, bells, papier-mâché, cake—boom! Wedding.”
“This is why you have to be the best man, Mark,” Grant said with a laugh. “Carter will turn it into a train wreck. You’re the only one of us who is marginally organized.”
They’ve only been engaged for a few hours, and I’m already sick of weddings.
5
Brea
Iwould never be sick of weddings. Even though the engagement party had only just occurred, I was already envisioning the perfect wedding. Everyone had their own idea of what the key part of the wedding was. For some people, it was the cake, for others, the décor, and for some, the food. For me, it was the dress. There was an art to the perfect wedding gown. The dress had to complement the venue, and it had to fit the bride’s personality. I had a few ideas for Liz’s dress, though none of them screamed “sexy.” There was only so much I could do with a baby bump, especially since by the time she stood at the altar, it was going to be a full-on baby.
“She’s back!” my parents called when I opened the door to the small two-bedroom walkup.
My two dads had moved to New York from their respective small Southern towns in the eighties, fallen in love, and survived the AIDS crisis by being introverted recluses and rarely leaving their apartment. They loved to eat, and they loved a bargain. So the apartment was packed with stuff and food, which was just how I liked it.
“We thought you might have found a man, fallen in love, and run off to a foreign country,” Todd Bachler said as he ate a slice of pizza.
“As if,” I scoffed, grabbing a slice of peperoni from the box.
Beau, his husband, held up a Roomba, giggling. “We adopted another one.”
I looked around the apartment. My dads had a soft spot for the robots. We weren’t allowed to have pets in the apartment, so they adopted Roombas. They hated seeing the little round robot vacuums being abandoned, so on their walks, they would take in Roombas that people had put in the trash. The eight-hundred-square-foot apartment was now home to six Roombas, and they all had names and backstories.
“I think we’re going to call him Horatio,” Beau said, patting the Roomba affectionately. “Can you make him a little outfit? We want him to fit in with everyone else.”
“Sure,” I said, flopping down on the small couch with them.
“Your mother called,” Todd said.
I stopped mid chew.
My mother was a fag hag, as my father affectionately called her, and when she had turned thirty, she’d decided she wanted to be a single mother by choice. She had used a turkey baster to impregnate herself and ended up with twins. Not wanting both, she had given my dads yours truly and kept my sister.
I’d always felt like I’d gotten the better end of the stick, even with the Roombas and the clutter. My mom had dragged my sister around the world, and she had never had a stable home. Mom went from bad boyfriend to bad boyfriend. I was sure that was why my sister was bananas, and not in a fun way.
“She wants to know why you aren’t friends with her on Instagram,” Beau added.
“I can’t have all those pictures of her half naked with her crooked breast implants all over my Instagram feed,” I told them as my dad hefted himself up to grab a container of chocolate Rice Krispies treats. “I have to work with high-end brides; they and their families are very conservative. If I want to show them a dress I like on Instagram, I can’t have Stella Rose and her animal-print thong-kini all over my phone screen.”
I took one of the chocolate Rice Krispies treats Todd offered.
“Yum! These are the best.”
Beau threw some loose cereal down on the floor, and the Roombas whirred by to vacuum it up.
“Honestly,” Todd said in exasperation.
“They were hungry,” Beau protested.
I gave my parents each a hug, and they went back to watching British comedies. As much grief as I gave them about being pack rats, I couldn’t talk. I scooted one of the Roombas, which was wearing a purple-and-silver tutu that I had made, out of the way as I went to my room.
It was my sanctuary. The ceilings in the tiny apartment were higher than normal, and I had filled every inch of wall space with shelving. My shelves held yards and yards of silk, lace, and tulle. I had an extensive antique button collection and thousands of dollars’ worth of seed pearls that I meticulously sewed onto wedding dress gowns and bodices.
