The rational part of me fortunately stayed fairly quiet, and I spent my evenings with my friends planning my wedding.
“Where do you want to go for your honeymoon?” Minnie asked me one afternoon. I was at the Grey Dove Bistro after work, sipping a green tea latte.
“I don’t know,” I mused as Minnie scrolled through honeymoon destinations on her tablet.
“You have to go to Paris,” she said.
“No, London!” Rose said, bouncing in her seat. “You can stay in a castle like a princess.”
“You should do a whole tour of Europe,” Minnie suggested. “We’re reading Victorian period books in school—they’re so romantic! The Victorians would take these long trips all over continental Europe. You could go to Athens and the French Riviera. You have to buy all new clothes and hats and cute shoes!”
“And Hunter can buy you a huge house to move into when you come back,” Rose said with a sigh.
“You can’t just rely on men,” I scolded them. “Women need to be responsible for their own money.”
“You weren’t responsible with it,” Minnie argued. “You let Uncle Barry piss it away.”
“Watch your mouth,” I admonished her. “Besides, we’d probably have to, I don’t know, live with the Svenssons if Hunter and I got married.”
“I’m not living with the Svenssons!” Minnie cried.
“I thought you liked Isaac?” I teased.
“Yes,” Minnie said primly, “but I’m not giving it away until I have a ring.”
“Dayum,” Hazel said. “You play hardball.”
“Isaac said he would propose to me once we were eighteen.”
“Over my dead body,” I told her. “You will not be getting married as a teenager.”
“It’s better than waiting until your late thirties when you’re a penniless spinster,” Rose said with a sniff.
“Jeez, you really are hitting the Jane Austen pretty hard,” I remarked.
“Yeah, that was harsh,” Minnie agreed. “Besides, Isaac said Hunter is absolutely marrying you.”
“He did?” I was giddy.I’m getting married!
“Yup! Garrett told him he had to.”
“Garrett?”
But my sisters were already off on another topic.
“Hunter has to buy you a house that we can all live in, then he needs to buy you a pied-à-terre where you two can hook up,” Rose listed off.
“Yeah, you can’t do that in our house, married or not,” Minnie added.
It was a dose of cold reality on my dreams. I couldn’t leave my sisters to fend for themselves. We were clearly not moving in with the Svenssons. Surely Hunter, after living with all his brothers, did not want to move into a house that he had to pay for and that also contained hormonal teenage girls. Besides, there was no way he was leaving his little brothers.
We couldn’t get married. It was impossible.
Still, it was fun to fantasize—to plan my perfect wedding, pick out my dress, daydream about the flowers and the cake and the decorations. It kept me from thinking about the dire state of my finances, from thinking about what Hunter was hiding, and from worrying about what was going to happen with the election.
Real life was harder than a fairy tale.
It was a few days before the final debate, and I was in my campaign office, working on my arguments.
