Take Me Home | ✔

Chapter Forty-Seven

The fact that he’s probably on his way here right at his very moment doesn’t help. Seeing him again won’t clear my head. But he’s already on his plane here.

I just don’t want to go into something so fast without thinking. I needed to think first.

But even though I stood in the hot shower for about twenty minutes, it was just a disfigured haze in my mind.

* * *

I was halfway back to the guest room in a thin baseball tee and some pants when I heard a desperate piercing scream from the kitchen.

“Oh my God!”

It was Angie.

Instantly, I ran towards the stairs taking them three at a time, and behind me, I heard Elliot’s door swing open, his footsteps pounding right behind me in seconds. Another door flung open, much slower, and I could imagine Tess stumbling out, still half-sleep and woken up by the scream.

I turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Angie covering her mouth with one hand, another on her heart. Her back was turned to us and she was bent over the kitchen counter over something we couldn’t see.

“Angie?” Elliot asked, surging forward in front of me with his tall figure. When we reached her, we saw a box of cake big enough to fill the whole counter.

“Oh, it’s all ruined. Completely ruined. The cake shop messed up with my order!” Angie frowned.

A cake? That was all this was about?

“I ordered a simple cake, nothing they could mess up, I made sure of that,” Angie explained, flushed and red. “It had wedding bells with butter cream icing and piped flowers with edible vanilla blossoms on the corners and they send me this!”

When I took a closer look at the cake, it looked nothing like they described. It was a cake, alright. But not one for a wedding. It was decked out in multicolored sprinkles, and there were dog biscuits sticking out everywhere. It was a chocolate and strawberry flavored cake with red icing on top. The yellow, blue, and green piping spelled out “HAPPY 8TH BIRTHDAY GOLDIE, THE BEST GOLDEN RETRIEVER IN THE UNIVERSE.”

Tess came into the kitchen and stared at it. “Well now there’s a golden retriever out there who’s probably really confused.”

Angie sighed heavily, resting against the counter, her face in her hands. “This isn’t even the worst of it. The caterer dropped those boxes this morning,” she gestured with a limp hand to the kitchen table filled with white boxes, “And they brought the wrong order to me too! I ordered mini quiches, caviar in wedding bell shaped glass cups, smoked salmon for the non-veggie guests and a tofu castle for the vegetarian ones. And do you see any of that there? No! Because they sent me fried chicken. With tubs of gravy.”

“Wait, all those boxes are filled with fried chicken?” Tess asked suddenly.

Angie nodded dismally.

In seconds, Tess rushed to get a plate out of the pantry and started tearing through the boxes with glee.

Elliot and I exchanged a long glance. Behind him, the window opened up into graying clouds turning black.

“Oh, what will I do now?” Angie slumped into one of the bar stools, closing her eyes. “The girls at the country club will think of me as a joke. I tried so hard to be one of them, so fancy and lady-like, but when they see all of this, I’ll be the laughingstock of the club.”

I suddenly knew why Angie went to such great lengths to perfect every single detail of her wedding vow renewal. Maybe it wasn’t because she was a die-hard perfectionist. Maybe it was just because she wanted to fit in. She wasn’t just marrying into a new family, she was also marrying into a new town with new people. Leaving everything behind and adjusting was hard enough as it was. I should know.