The Wedding I Didn't Choose

Celia found a parking spot half a block from the boutique and walked the rest of the way. Through the front window a bride stood on the low fitting platform in a column of satin while a seamstress knelt at the hem with pins in her mouth, and an older woman in a camel coat watched from a sofa with her hands folded, offering some opinion that did not carry through the glass.

Three weeks earlier it had been Celia on that platform, wearing her mother's gown. It was ivory lace over silk, with a simple fitted bodice, long sleeves that tapered to a point at the wrist, and a short train that seemed plain beside the beaded dresses on the racks around it. Her mother had worn it on her own wedding day, and because the two of them had been nearly the same height, the seamstress had needed to do very little. Celia had turned slowly so the hem could be checked, and in the mirror she had looked a little like the woman in the photograph on her bedside table.

The bell over the door gave its small dull chime as she stepped inside. The reception desk was tucked to the left, clear of the mirrors, and the young woman behind it looked up from her screen with the reflexive brightness of someone who smiled at brides all day.

"Hi. I have a pickup at eleven. Celia Whitcomb."

"Whitcomb." The receptionist typed, and the brightness slipped while she read whatever had come up. She read it again, glanced at Celia, and then raised her voice toward the curtained doorway behind her. "Would you give me one second? Renee, can you come out here?"

Renee turned out to have reading glasses pushed up into graying hair and a name badge pinned slightly crooked on her cardigan. She came through the curtain already asking what the trouble was, saw Celia waiting, and checked the receptionist's screen before she spoke.

"Ms. Whitcomb. Hi." She came around the desk with the unhurried calm of someone who had fitted half the Lunas in Northbridge and had never yet been rattled by a bride. "You're here for the gown."

"I am. Is there a problem with it?"

"Not with the gown. It went out this morning. I handed it over myself, a little after nine." Renee gave it the tone of a delivery time, and only then seemed to notice that Celia had not moved.

"Handed it over to whom?"

"Paige Harrow. She's on your account."

The name took a moment to settle. Paige, her fiancé Colin's childhood best friend, had been helping with the wedding for months, but Celia had not told her about this appointment. She was almost certain she had not.

"Paige came and took my mother's dress." She tried the words out loud, mostly to hear how they sounded.

"She did. I assumed you knew." Renee paused, and her voice had gone careful by the time she continued. "She was on the account as an authorized pickup. Mr. Merrill added her when he settled the alterations balance. I would never have released anything to someone who wasn't on the account, but she was, and she signed for it."

In Celia's mind the gown was already somewhere it should not be, draped over the back of a dining chair in Paige's apartment with a glass of wine set down too close to it.

"I don't understand."

"I'm sorry. I really am." Renee hesitated, and this time it lasted. "She picked up both gowns. I took it the two of you had already discussed it."

"Both gowns?"

Renee let that sit, then stepped behind the desk, pulled the reading glasses down, and brought up the order. The receptionist leaned out of her way without being asked.

"The second gown. The custom order Ms. Harrow placed in April. It was finished last week, pressed and bagged, and it left with yours this morning." She turned the monitor so Celia could see.

There was a designer's catalog photo attached, and Celia knew the dress before she read a word beneath it. It was strapless and heavy with crystal beading at the bodice, and the full skirt fell in tiers. She had tried it on at her first fitting, months ago, along with five or six others, for the fun of it, and Paige had been the only one in the room to say she liked it better than the lace.

Renee waited until Celia's eyes left the photo. "It was ordered and paid for in April, and the alterations were done to your measurements. The same ones we took at your first fitting."

Celia stood in the quiet front of the shop with the hiss of the steamer behind the curtain and the bride on the platform asking her mother whether the hem was too short. She could have taken this for a misunderstanding, a scheduling tangle, Paige being overhelpful in the brisk way she was about everything. It would have been a comfortable thing to believe, if Celia had not spent most of a year watching Paige take one choice after another about this wedding out of her hands.