I pulled the next table out, Ambrose took the end, and we put it between us, following them. “So how’s it going?” I asked. “I sensed some light tension.”
“Oh, no, there’s heavy tension,” he replied, shaking that curl out of his face. The door of the house opened and Bee and Lauren came out, making their way down the walk. “In the truck there, ladies! We’ve got four more to carry around!”
“I meant tension about thelights,” I corrected him, dodging a rosebush as it came up on my left.
“Oh, there’s that, too.” He glanced behind him, adjusting his trajectory toward the gate. “Turns out you really kind of need a ladder if you want them in the trees.”
“You don’t have a ladder?”
“My plan was to hurl them,” he explained.
A word I had never, in all my years, used while discussing wedding prep. “Somebody on this block has to have one. You just need to go and ask.”
“How can I do that, though,” he replied, shifting his gripon the table, “when every time we add any tiny wrinkle Roger sighs loudly and Maya starts crying?”
“Why are they even here?” I asked. “You know my mom never allows the bride or groom at the event pre-ceremony, even if they want to be. It’s asking for trouble.”
“I don’t have that many people!” he shot back. I raised my eyebrows. “Sorry. It’s just... this isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Like, it’s not easy. At all. Shoot, I just banged my leg on this fence. Watch it as you come through, okay?”
“Ambrose!” Maya yelled from behind him. “Where do we want these?”
“Arranged in an orderly and yet not rigid fashion!” he replied.
“What?”
In return, he grimaced. I’d honestly never seen him so stressed, and had to fight the urge to laugh, which was absolutely the wrong response, I knew. “Just put it down,” he said, his voice tight. “I’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t understand why we need tables,” Roger was saying as we put ours next to the one they’d dropped unceremoniously by a large tree. “What happened to my blanket idea?”
“You can’t expect people to sit on the ground and balance a plate in their lap at a wedding,” Ambrose told him.
“Why not? Not everyone needs a chair.”
I was facing Ambrose, so I saw his expression—one of sudden realization, then dread—as he heard this last word. I said carefully, “You do have chairs, right?”
He just looked at me as Lauren yelped. “Ouch, I justtotally whacked my leg. You guys, hazard over here by the gate!”
“Ambrose, where do you want this table?” Bee asked.
“He said in an orderly but not rigid fashion,” Maya told her.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Before Ambrose could respond, a huge clump of lights fell from the tree above us, landing with a clank on the grass. So the hurling had worked. Sort of.
“Jesus,” Roger said. “That could have killed someone!”
Maya sniffled, putting her hand to her mouth, as Bee and Lauren exchanged looks. But I was focused only on Ambrose, looking around the backyard with obvious, rising panic on his face.
“Go find a ladder,” I told him. “I’ve got this.”
CHAPTER
23
MY MOTHERalways said that a good wedding is eighty percent organization, fifteen percent guest behavior, and five percent luck. But really, no matter the size or type, you took all the luck you could get.
So far, we’d had some. Like the fact that Bee’s neighbor two doors down was a contractor who had several ladders, one of which he happily climbed, lights in hand, then draped them across the branches as I directed him. He also had six folding chairs in his garage, which we were able to add to the five that Bee found wrapped in spiderwebs behind her water heater, where they’d been left by the previous owner of the house. We still needed more, though, which was why it was especially fortunate the Bakers kept an ample supply in their own garage to set up, along with small tables, for impromptu food truck seating. One call to Jilly—sure enough, Kitty had an ear infection—and she’d offered to bring as many as we needed of each. When I told Ambrose, he exhaled such a big breath I thought he might collapse outright.
