“A great love is just that, though. Great.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“So it doesn’t usually involve a bad breakup, like yours did. Which is the opposite of great.”
Now I was kind of stuck. I cleared my throat, recalibrating. “Things end,” I told him. “Even with the best—or greatest—of beginnings. And yellow and blue make green. Such is life, right?”
I wrapped another large pillar in tissue, then put it in thebox. After a few moments of silence, Ambrose said, “I can’t decide if you’re really this cynical or just guarded.”
“Maybe both,” I said.
I was trying to be funny, or at least lighten the mood. It was bad enough to be surrounded by the evidence of a romance that had crashed and burned; did we really have to share our own war stories, as well? The moment I thought this, though, I felt a pang in my heart. Ethan wasn’t a battle for me. Loving him had been the easiest thing I’d ever done. Maybe that was why I was so sure if anything else ever came even close, it would be nothing but hard.
Just then the door opened, the beep sounding overhead. I looked over to see Lauren coming in, wearing flip-flops and a sundress, another girl following along behind her. “Hope it’s okay we dropped in,” she said to Ambrose, waving at me. I waved back. “I just really wanted Maya to meet you.”
“It’s fine,” Ambrose said, putting down the guestbook he’d been about to pack up and walking over to them. “The famous Maya. It’s great to finally make your acquaintance.”
“And you are the infamous Ambrose,” the girl, who was taller than Lauren, with dark hair and a nose ring and wearing jeans and a tank top, replied. “Who has my cousin in the best mood I’ve seen her in for months.”
At this, Lauren blushed, but still reached out to take Ambrose’s hand, wrapping her fingers around it. “Maya got the brunt of my breakup darkness,” she explained to us. “I went a bit goth for a while there.”
“If you can even imagine that,” Maya said.
“I can’t. Lauren is all sunshine,” Ambrose replied, and of course at this she beamed, glittering even more. I went back to my candles. “So. Big day’s tomorrow, huh?”
“Yep,” Maya said, glancing at the cake topper. “And I hear you can actually attend?”
“I can,” he replied, and Lauren smiled even wider. “We had a last-minute cancellation. Hence all this stuff and no use for it.”
Maya picked up a bottle of bubbles tied with a ribbon from a nearby basket. “Wow. Looks like it was going to be a big deal.”
“All weddings seem big once you work a job like this,” he replied. “No matter the size, it’s the small details that kill you.”
He sounded just like my mother. I bit back a smile, bending over my box.
“Well, I guess it’s good we decided to forgo all that for the most part, then,” Maya replied.
“Maya’s getting married tomorrow,” Lauren explained to me.
“You are? Congratulations,” I said. “Where’s the ceremony?”
She and Lauren looked at each other, then laughed. “Good question. Right now, it looks like it might be at that Jump Java a few doors down, in that little patio part out back. Unless we can find someplace better.”
I raised my eyebrows. “The patio? Aren’t there just smoking tables out there?”
“We’re hoping to relocate the ashtrays,” Lauren saideasily, as Maya moved her hand over the votives left on the table. “Maya and Roger want it low key, and Leo’s boss okayed it, as long as we don’t linger during the evening rush. It’s all about the party after, anyway.”
“And where’s that?” I asked.
“Probably we’ll all just go up to the Incubator for drinks,” Maya said. “That’s our favorite bar. We actually met there.”
I looked at Ambrose, who had gone back to piling blue-and-yellow-edged napkins into the box. “Wow. After all we see around here, it sounds so easy.”
This word just came to me, and I was grateful for it. Better than the next one, which was sad. But maybe the whole Margo thing was getting to me. Maya said, “Well, Roger just hated the idea of a big, expensive thing, you know? And we’re doing a party in a couple of months in Michigan for his whole family, so none of them are coming. It’s just us and my mom, the friend who got ordained on the Internet to marry us, and a few others.”
“It’s going to be perfect,” Lauren said.
“Oh, totally,” Maya added. To me she said, “What are these?”
