My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding by Wendy Wax

Author:Wendy Wax
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-one

Kendra

I spend the rest of Saturday in my bathrobe, slumped in the old cane rocking chair on the back deck, staring out at the ocean. The wind is strong. Clouds scud across the low gray sky. Waves pound the sand in a relentless rhythm that drums itself into my head. I’m vaguely aware that I should go inside but I just sit there. Rocking.

When it gets too dark to distinguish sky from sea I go inside, but I don’t even consider getting into bed. It’s nightmarish enough replaying what happened in the daylight. I cannot risk reliving it alone in the dark.

The thing I’ve feared above all else for forty years has happened and I now know that anyone who says that the truth will set you free has never been forced to listen as someone else revealed it. If only I could have come up with a way to tell Jake and Lauren about each other without doing harm to either, none of us would be hurting right now.

The soundtrack of Lou Rawls’s “If I Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda”—so sad and soulful and heavy with regret—plays in my head.

As I sit waiting and praying for Lauren to call me back, I tell myself that she’s an intelligent forty-year-old woman who’s about to get married and who might even have children of her own. Surely that will let her see this through the eyes of an adult rather than those of a hurt child.

I know that nothing I say or do is going to erase what’s happened or eliminate the mistakes I’ve made. I’m going to have to live with the fact that our relationship may never be what it was. That she may never again look at me in the way she used to. But, oh God, please let her forgive me enough to be a part of each other’s lives.

Just before sunrise Sunday morning I finally fall asleep on the living room couch, curled into a ball and clutching my cell phone. I blink awake to the sound of it ringing. Hope spikes through me. As I fumble the phone to my ear I tell myself that things are going to be okay. That Lauren just needed a day to cool off and absorb everything and that now she’ll hear me out.

“Hello?” My heart pounds as I push out the word.

“You need to come right now and deliver a cake or something.”

I slump back on the couch at the sound of Dee’s voice. “I’m not scheduled to cook or deliver anything today.” I scrub at my eyes and look out the window. The sun is already up. The sky is a clear, vibrant blue.

“I know. But Lauren’s here having coffee with her . . . with her father.” There’s a brief pause as we both absorb the word. “I can find a way to keep her here until you get here, but you’ve got to hurry.”

This time there’s no spike or even glimmer of hope. “She hasn’t answered her phone and she hasn’t called back.

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