I’ve learned to put up with Aria’s new and unimproved personality transplant, but I admit I miss the big sister who used to organize elaborate pranks for us to play on our parents during family vacations and stay up all night giving makeovers and telling silly stories about the guys she dated.
“Lark, you’re here!” Melody, my younger sis, bounds across the room with a squeal, clapping her hands. “How was the wedding? Was it amazing and romantic and all around fantastic? Was Lisa beautiful? Did Matt cry? Did you cry?”
“It was perfect. Of course, a little, and of course,” I say, laughing as Melody pulls me in for a giddy hug.
Melody loves weddings almost as much as she loves to cook and only slightly less than she loves to eat. Her commitment to all things culinary means that she graduated from culinary school only one year behind me, even though I’m two and a half years older.
My little sis and I share a love of preparing food, the same long, sandy blond hair and brown eyes, and nearly identical rounded figures that give testimony to the fact that we hit the cheese board more often than the gym. When we were younger, people mistook us for twins, until Melody hit a growth spurt and left me behind.
Now, at five-foot-two, standing between my taller sisters, I’m a short, squatty novel—probably a cozy mystery, with a punny, food-themed title, like Murder and Marinade—wedged between two mismatched bookends.
No one knows where Aria’s red hair and green eyes came from. There are rumors of a ginger great-grandmother on our father’s side, but they remain unsubstantiated. If Aria didn’t have our dad’s nose and super long fingers—or if all three of the Bliss River postmen weren’t actually postwomen—I’m sure the jokes from Dad’s poker buddies would have been never ending.
“I hated to miss it,” Melody says with a sigh as she releases me. “Did you tell Lisa I was thinking of her? And wishing her the best day ever?”
“I did, and she said thank you for holding down the fort here so I could be her maid of honor.”
“Of course!” Melody waves a hand in the air. “You had to be her maid of honor. It would have been a sacrilege if she’d picked anyone else.”
“Though it might have been nice to give someone else a turn,” Aria says, ducking between us as she heads for the sink. “You know what they say about the March girls and weddings…”
I wrinkle my nose. I know exactly what “they”—the town gossips, the women in our mother’s book club, Nana’s friends at the DAR, and all the been-married-forevers who have nothing better to do than predict who is, or isn’t, going to get married next—say about the March girls.
Too many times a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Between the three of us, we’ve been part of a wedding party no less than twenty-seven times. Melody holds the record, with ten bridesmaid appearances and three turns as maid of honor, all before her twenty-third birthday. At this rate, she’ll have a dozen plastic bins full of hideous old dresses in our parents’ garage before she’s twenty-five. Aria and I aren’t far behind her, tied with seven stints each down the aisle in scratchy taffeta.
“Well, I think it’s nice that so many people want us in their weddings,” Melody says. “It means we have a lot of good friends.”
“Besides, you already proved them wrong, anyway,” I say to Aria’s back. “One March girl has been married, even if it didn’t stick. There’s still hope Melody and I will have weddings of our own someday. And you’ll get a second chance with someone truly fabulous.”
Romantic, happy-ever-after-dreams do come true, I think, a little wistfully. I see it all the time, and there’s going to come a day when I won’t be on the outside looking in at the romance while clearing the appetizer spread and wondering if we’re going to need more mustard.
It just might take a little longer than I was expecting…
After breaking up with Thomas last year things have been pretty quiet in the romance department. Not that Thomas was particularly romantic. He inherited his dad’s pool supply company and spent his days peddling chlorine and water filters, but as a former high school football star, his true passions were following Bliss River High’s football season, obsessing about his Fantasy Football Roster, and yelling at the television with his buddies down at the sports bar. We had a good time when we got together to grill catfish or see a movie, but there were never any real fireworks.
The earth didn’t move.
The butterflies didn’t take wing.
My knees didn’t go soft and spongy every time we touched.
Not like with He Who Shall Not Be Allowed Back in My Thoughts.
Him. Mason Freaking Stewart, the only guy who’s ever made me boil like chicken stock left in the crockpot a little too long.