Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts by Courtney Hamilton

Author:Courtney Hamilton [Hamilton, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women’s fiction, humor, satire, literary fiction, contemporary women’s fiction, romantic comedy, chick lit, humor romance, Los Angeles, Hollywood, humorous fiction, L.A. society, Eco-Chain of Dating
Publisher: Forrest Thompson Publishers
Published: 2014-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

11

Did You Vest?

I’m not one of those people who like to stay in contact with a boyfriend after we break up. I think the act of breaking up demonstrates that on some level you hate each other. To stay in contact with each other on the basis of some ridiculous lie, like a pretense of friendship (“let’s be friends”), only prolongs the inevitable. There isn’t going to be any friendship. You’re not going to get any closure. You repulse each other. So cut it off. When it comes to a former fiancé I take this theory to a higher level. Whereas with a boyfriend I’ll acknowledge that I did date him, with a former fiancé I generally refuse to publicly acknowledge that he ever existed. This keeps me from inane thoughts about how our wedding would have been, what our children might have looked like, or what in God’s name I’m going to do with the $6,500 raw silk wedding dress sitting in my closet. I find that this is the most effective method for enduring the naked humiliation of it all.

So when Frank disappeared from my life and never spoke to me again, I was actually quite relieved. It wasn’t messy. It was just over, and he was gracious enough to remove his ancient gray spanky pants from my apartment before I actually gave him the boot.

What Frank did leave was an unreasonably permanent six-by-eight-inch carrot juice stain from all those sloppy mornings of running his juicer on my own primordial gray shag carpet. This confused my poor cat, Abyss, who wondered who had marked her domain. In an act of territorial rage, she began to pee on the carrot juice stain in a pattern which seemed to follow one spray every two weeks. To my horror, the fog of urine which sailed through my apartment on the 15th and 30th of every month became a never-ending reminder of Frank, the most recent disaster in my life.

So when I actually did hear from Frank again, I wasn’t pleased. It wasn’t much. It was a five-by-seven-inch cream-colored card, eleven lines long, written in black cursive handwriting.

It said the following:

Mr. and Mrs. Chad Bingham

request the honor of your presence

at the marriage of their daughter

Tracey Anne

to

Mr. Franklin Thomas Jamieson

Saturday, the Twentieth of October

at two o’clock in the afternoon

La Boca Inn

Palos Verdes, California

Well at least it wasn’t going to be at the Bel Air.

I had played one too many weddings gigs at La Boca. It had a spectacular view, being located on one of those roads to nowhere on the bluffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. But the ballroom had a seedy, chipped paint, unglued wallpaper, dusty chandelier look to it, like it was tired. I wondered if they were going to serve those little Swedish meatballs in that two-foot-deep serving vat.

Frank had attached a little handwritten note to the invitation. “I guess you’re probably pretty surprised to receive this,” he wrote. “Sorry we haven’t spoken for a while, but I hope you’re doing well.

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