“Which I will—”
“You have to publicly admit that you were wrong. And pay me twenty dollars.”
“Oh, it is on.” J.J. stuck out his hand, and Linnie shook it. “Witness?”
“Witness,” Rodney and I replied in unison. “But I don’t think you’re going to pull this off,” he added.
“You don’t, eh?” J.J. asked, arching an eyebrow. “You want to make this interesting?”
“Things are interesting enough,” I said.
“Side bet? Fifty bucks says I can.”
“I’m already out twenty,” Rodney pointed out.
“Fine, I’m in,” I said, relenting. There was no conceivable way that my brother was going to be able to find a date, so I might as well get fifty dollars out of it.
“Say good-bye to your shekels,” J.J. said, raising his eyebrows at me. He turned to Bill. “Billiam? Want a piece of this action?”
“No,” I answered for him. “What were you saying, Bill?”
“Right,” Bill said, flipping open his binder, looking relieved to be back on track. “My uncle wanted confirmation that the rest of the wedding party would all be here by six for the rehearsal.”
Linnie nodded. “There’s an exhibit at the Pearce Museum for my mom. And it starts at four, but we should be back in time.”
“Got it,” Bill said. “But everyone else in the wedding party is confirmed for six?” He squinted down at a piece of paper. “Max, Jennifer, Jennifer, Priya, J.J., Danny, Charlie, Elizabeth, Marcus, and Michael?”
I rolled my eyes. “You can take Michael off the list.”
Linnie sighed. “Charlie.”
I just looked at her as I picked up my donut. “He’s not going to come.” Mike had been invited to the wedding, of course—Linnie and Mike had always been close, just like me and Danny. But he wasn’t coming—I’d just assumed that Linnie had invited him so that he would feel included, but without any expectation he’d show up, same as Rodney asking him to be a groomsman. They were both just gestures.
My siblings had all seen Mike in the year and a half he hadn’t been home—when Danny had business in Chicago, or when J.J. was in town when the Pirates were playing the Cubs. And Linnie and Rodney had gone to see him last summer. But I hadn’t, and neither had my parents, and I didn’t think a wedding would be the best time to have what was sure to be an incredibly awkward reunion—and I had a feeling Mike probably felt the same way.
“I don’t know. I mean—he did RSVP yes,” Linnie said, and even though she shrugged as she said it, I could hear the hope in her voice. “I don’t think he would have done that if he wasn’t going to show.”
“And he said he was bringing a plus-one,” Rodney added. Then he looked at J.J. and sighed. “Although I guess that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“I’m going to get a date,” J.J. insisted, brandishing his phone at us. “You’ll see. You’ll all see—”
“He’s not going to come,” I said, pushing the very thought away. In all the times I’d pictured this weekend, Mike had never, not once, been a part of it. If Mike showed up, there would be drama—and not fun, gossipy drama, like when we were all speculating that J.J.’s former girlfriend was secretly a Scientologist. It would wreck everything I’d imagined for this weekend, one perfect last Grant adventure with my siblings in our house—the ones who wanted to be there, that is. The ones who’d never once tried to break away from our family.
“I was just surprised by the plus-one,” Rodney said. “I guess Mike is dating someone at school.” Then he shuddered. “Unless Corrine is back in the picture?”
Corrine had been Mike’s high school girlfriend, and she’d been a nightmare. To say that none of us were fans would be an understatement.
“He’s not going to show up,” I said firmly. He may have told Linnie he was coming, but he’d told my dad he was coming home last Christmas, and that hadn’t happened, so it wasn’t like Mike’s word meant anything.
“Did you RSVP for a plus-one?” J.J. asked, waggling his eyebrows at me.
“Me?” I asked, startled. “Um, no. Who would I even—” As soon as I said it, Jesse flashed into my head. I was suddenly back with him in the rain, laughing with him as he carried me up to the guesthouse, his hands sliding up my waist. . . .
“Charlie?” I looked over to see everyone looking at me. “You were saying?” Linnie prompted.
“Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “Um, no. No date.”
“It might not be too late,” J.J. said as he scrolled through his phone.
Bill’s phone beeped with a text, and he looked down at it just as the front doorbell rang. “My uncle’s here,” he said. “And everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”
He smiled reassuringly. And then the alarm went off.
CHAPTER 4
Or, Can’t You Hear, Can’t You Hear the Thunder?
* * *
WILL BARNES, THE HEAD OF Where There’s A Will, seemed nice, very efficient, and looked nothing like what I’d been expecting a wedding planner to look like. He was tall and built more like a linebacker than Rodney’s brother, Ellis, who’d been an actual linebacker for the air force. But he’d come in with such an aura of confidence—like it wasn’t going to matter that Clementine had vanished the day before the wedding—that I could feel myself start to relax in his presence, and it looked like Linnie and Rodney were doing the same.
Feeling like things were in good hands, I’d used his arrival as an opportunity to take a shower, put in my contacts, and finally change out of my pajama-and-gnome ensemble. I’d put on jeans and, even though it wasn’t quite cold enough for it, the cashmere sweater I’d worn home that night from Jesse’s house. I shook it out and breathed it in, trying to see if I could still detect any of him—but since I’d brought it to imPRESSive Cleaners at least twice since then, it just smelled like dry-cleaning solution. I pulled it on anyway, twisted my wet hair into a knot, and left my room, heading back down the two flights of stairs.
The third floor, also known as the kids’ floor, was barely decorated—probably because nobody ever saw it except people who lived here. Our four bedrooms—J.J. and Danny had the biggest room and had always shared—branched off from a central landing, and for a while there, we’d all been involved in an indoor paintball game and had gotten very good at aiming from behind our cracked doors, sniper-style. You could still see the faint colored circles on the wall if you looked hard enough.
The second floor was at least a little more decorated—family pictures lining the walls and a decorative bench that inevitably became where bags and stuff got piled. The second floor was also four bedrooms that split off from a central landing—my parents’ master bedroom, my dad’s study, and the two guest rooms that we’d always called the Blue Room and the Ship Room. It seemed crazy, as I took the last flight of steps down to the front hall, that in only a few hours, all the rooms we had would be filled with wedding guests.