“Did you make enough food?” I asked Elsie.
“I always make too much food,” she boasted.
Meg was already standing in line with a plate as her soon-to-be brothers-in-law set out the big pans of food and lit the Sterno cans.
“I need to hire all of you boys,” Elsie said.
“You don’t have to pay me at all,” one of them said, pulling down his sunglasses to grin at her. “I’ll work for food.”
Ivy climbed to the landing of the wide staircase and clapped. “If we could start.”
The Svensson brothers all ignored her. She pursed her mouth. “Everyone?”
A small girl with blond hair and big gray eyes jumped up on a table and let out a piercing whistle.
All of her brothers winced.
“This is a wedding!” she bellowed. “Show some respect!”
“Annie’s right,” a slightly older girl said loudly, jumping up on a table beside her sister.
“We are here to pick dresses,” she announced, clapping to punctuate each word, “not eat our future sister-in-law out of house and home. Speaking of, Mike, I don’t see anything green on your plate.”
A six-foot-four adult male sheepishly served himself some salad.
“Ha! Enola told you!” his brother crowed.
“You have barbeque sauce on your face, Josh,” Enola scolded him, dipped her napkin into a glass of water, grabbed her older brother by the collar, and furiously scrubbed his face.
“The floor is yours, Ms. Ivy,” Annie said brightly.
“On that note, who’s ready to pick out some wedding dresses?”
Instead of taking their food and leaving, which was what I had expected all the Svensson brothers to do, they all settled in on the couches.
“They cannot be here. This is a wedding dress session for the bride,” I hissed to Sebastian.
“I need them here,” Meg said, voice carrying over the burble of the crowd. “I want to make sure that I pick a dress that Hunter likes.”
“You need to pick out a dressyoulike,” Brea reminded Meg.
“And Hunter’s going to like whatever you like,” I assured her.
“We have several different styles of dresses to choose from,” Brea said as I helped her wheel the mannequins to the front of the room.
“Do that one on the end!” one of the little girls piped up excitedly. “But in bright pink!”
“With rhinestones!” her sister added.
“Has my vote,” one of her brothers said as he speared several of the cheesy potatoes au gratin Elsie had baked.
“It’s a wedding dress,” I said, eye twitching slightly. “It has to be white.”
“What about the other kind on the end?” someone else suggested.
“The trumpet silhouette?” Brea prompted.
“No, a princess gown!” several of the girls complained.
