Summer at Sunset: (The Summer Series Book 2) Page 18

  That was when I formed Theory #1—that Eric hired a stripper to come to Epcot Center and dance for Graham.

  That’s also when I figured out where Janice and Francine had gone off to. There was Francine, standing off to the side holding her cell phone in the air with Britney Spears music blasting out of it, and Janice standing next to her taking pictures.

  Suddenly, the middle-agedness of the stripper made a bit more sense, and I moved on to Theory #2—that Francine and Janice hired a washed-up stripper to come to Epcot Center and dance for Graham, so that they could send me incriminating photographs.

  But Summer, you’re thinking, It’s a bachelor party! Let the man enjoy his stripper! Who cares who hired her? To that I say, 1) Graham already had his chance for a stripper-filled bachelor party when he went to Vegas, and 2) We’re at Epcot Center. This is not normal. Where the heck is park security, anyway? The whole point of coming here was to provide our parents with an innocent alternative to coming to our real bachelor and bachelorette parties. Graham should have nipped these shenanigans in the bud. But no, there he was, falling right into Janice and Francine’s trap.

  And then, things got even worse.

  Once I stopped staring at the stripper’s jiggling body parts, I was able to take notice of her face. And once I was able to take notice of her face, the more familiar that face began to seem. And then, all at once, it was like one of those Magic Eye pictures coming into focus, and I let out the kind of shriek that I typically reserve for when a spider lowers itself into my face.

  In my mind, I was no longer at Epcot Center. In my mind, I was back on the Bermuda cruise—squeezed into a two-person hot tub with that very same woman—while she held a martini glass up in the air and called Lulu and Jessica on her cell phone. It was her.

  Lana.

  Lana from the bloody cruise. Of all the strippers, in all the world, they had to go and hire that one. No, not they. It couldn’t have been Eric or Janice or Francine. That’s when I moved on to Theory #3—that he hired her. He as in Graham—as in the only person here who could possibly know her. But why? I mean, I know that I sometimes refer to Graham as a complete psychopath, but I never actually meant it. I can’t even wrap my head around this. It’s like I’m in a Lifetime movie and I just found out that my boyfriend is the Craigslist Killer.

  “Why would he do that?” I shriek.

  “I...I don’t know,” says Tanya. “I mean, he’s a guy, so...you know how they get...sometimes Eric likes to—”

  “No, it’s not just that,” I say. “That woman, he knows her, she was—”

  That’s when something catches my eye directly behind her.

  Dad.

  My father is sitting in a wheelchair, under a tree, and he looks unconscious. Let me repeat—my father is unconscious in a wheelchair, while my fiancé, brother, and future father-in-law stand by watching a stripper.

  “Dad!” I yell, and take off towards him. He’s slumped over in the chair with a bottle of Gatorade in his lap. I shake him gently. No response.

  “Summer?” Graham finally runs over, drawn away from the strip show by the sound of my screams. “What happened?”

  “How much has he had to drink?” I yell. “And why is he in a wheelchair?”

  “He was using it to rest!” shouts back Graham, who is totally slurring his words, by the way.

  “Resting?” I yell. “You mean like his final resting place? Look at him! Dad? Wake up!” I shake the chair again, with more force, and his head flops over to the side. He mumbles a few words. I breathe a bit easier as I realize he is, at the very least, still alive.

  “I swear, he’s barely had anything to drink!” says Graham. “I’ve been drinking everything for him, just like you asked! Rich? Come on, man! Wake up!” He shakes the wheelchair again, even harder. This time, Dad falls out of it and onto the ground.

  I dial 911.

  ***

  Have I told you about my first bachelorette party in Miami Beach?

  It was perfect.

  My girlfriends and I spent a relaxing four days and three nights lounging on the beach and partying at the hottest night clubs in the city. I returned home relaxed, mildly tanned, and ready to move on to the next chapter of my life as Mrs. Graham Blenderman. I was perfectly satisfied to leave it at that.

  Then came bachelorette party number two or, as I like to call it, the one where Dad ended up severely dehydrated with a blood alcohol content of .14.

  He’s going to be fine, although I’m still quite shaken up by seeing him that way. He’s at the hospital right now, hooked up to an I.V., and resting comfortably with Mom by his bedside. The rest of the family is sitting around the waiting room, each with our own degree of dehydration and blood alcohol content.

  As soon as the paramedics arrived at Epcot, we all attempted to leave the park to drive to the hospital—only to realize that we’d taken the monorail from the hotel and that none of us had a car. There was also the little problem of all of us being too drunk to drive, even if we did have a car. Graham ended up calling us a couple of Ubers, and so here we are. Graham also still has the keys to the bus, so we’ve left about fifty residents of Sunset Havens behind with no way of getting home.

  I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

  Once we got the report from the doctor, we all sat around the hospital waiting room trying to figure out how Dad could have possibly become so intoxicated. Graham continued to insist that he didn’t let Dad drink too much, and that the reason he was so hammered was because he drank all of Dad’s shots. The only reason I leaned toward believing him was because he reeked of Jagermeister, and I know Graham wouldn’t normally touch that stuff with a ten-foot pole. Then Graham mentioned how he even made sure Dad kept drinking Gatorade in order to stay hydrated. That’s when the light bulb turned on in John’s head, and he asked if it was the same bottle of Gatorade that had been stuck in the back pocket of the wheelchair. When Graham said yes, John said that Roger had been carrying around a bottle of Gatorade mixed with vodka, and that he’d stuck it in the back pocket of the wheelchair after Roger had passed out.

  Mystery solved.

  “You gave my father a half-empty, old bottle of Gatorade to drink from?” I ask. “Didn’t you see Roger drinking out of it? What is wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me is that you told me to make sure your father stayed sober! Of course my judgment was going to suffer!”

  “Oh, so this is all my fault?” I ask. “I never told you to drink all of his shots! I told you to dump them in the bushes!”

  Graham shakes his head. “One doesn’t simply walk around Epcot Center, pouring drinks into the bushes. It’s not done.”

  I can’t even argue with him. Not in front of his parents and all of these waiting room strangers. But I know, deep down, that this isn’t my fault. This whole second bachelor party thing was his idea—hence, all his fault. And let’s not forget about Lana. I haven’t even had the time to yell at him about that little issue yet. I wonder if he thinks I didn’t notice. Ha! There is no way he can charm himself out of that one.

  “I’m gonna go find some coffee,” says Graham, standing up and leaving the waiting room.

  Yeah, you do that, Graham. You go find some coffee. Maybe Lana can make you some, and then she can pour it for you while she shakes her big, fake boobs around.

  The wedding is so off.

  31

  I run my hands over my face and stare at the hospital ceiling. Graham never came back from his coffee run, so I’ve just been sitting here thinking. John, Babette, Eric, Tanya, and my bridesmaids have barely said a word to me. I think they’re afraid I’m having a nervous breakdown. In reality, I’ve simply come to the conclusion that, unlike vodka and Gatorade, Graham and I just don’t mix. I mean, how could we if he’d stoop so low as to contact Lana? Graham’s poor judgment today is nothing compared to how bad mine must have been these past two years, when I thought that we should actually be together. The thought that thing
s could change so quickly brings tears to my eyes.

  “Hey,” says Graham, coming back into the waiting room. “Mind if I sit?”

  I quickly wipe my eyes and give him what I hope is an indifferent shrug. He sits down on the couch beside me.

  “That was some bachelor party,” he says.

  I don’t respond.

  “Gatorade?” He holds a bottle of red Gatorade under my nose.

  He actually went and bought that thing just to make a bad joke. I close my eyes, count to three, and then don’t respond. We sit in silence for a few minutes.

  “Still want to marry me?”

  Ah. The big moment has arrived. What I like to call, the time I canceled my wedding in a hospital waiting room while watching reruns of Roseanne. And it’s that weird episode where Darlene gets her period. Great.

  I shift on the couch so that I can look him in the eye when I ask the question that needs to be asked. I need to be able to tell if he’s lying to me, because simply reeking of Jagermeister isn’t going to get him off the hook. Not this time.

  “Tell me, Graham—because I can’t even begin to imagine what the answer is going to be—what Lana was doing at Epcot today? Hmm? Normally I would have blamed Eric for hiring the stripper. But Lana? That was no coincidence. You must have called her. You must have hired her. Why would you do that?!” I’m holding a hospital copy of the National Enquirer in my hand and using it to smack him on the arm. I don’t even care that everybody is watching. If the wedding is off, they’re going to want to know why. This way they get to hear the explanation straight from the horse’s mouth. The horse being Graham.

  Only, the horse doesn’t look nearly as guilty as I expected. He looks more stressed than I’ve ever seen him, sure. But for Graham, that’s not saying much.

  He plucks the newspaper from my hand and places it calmly back on the coffee table.

  “First of all,” he says, “Lana isn’t a stripper. She was just demonstrating her workout video.”

  “Are you defending her?” I shriek, earning a shush from the nurse at the nurse’s station. I lower my voice. “Because you’ve already defended Francine and Nadine this week, so I don’t have a whole lot of patience left if you’re going to start defending the woman you did God knows what with on that cruise ship!”

  An audible gasp comes from our family and friends. Eric snorts. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have said that much out loud. But, whatever. If Graham is the Craigslist Killer, everybody has a right to know.

  Graham’s face clouds over.

  “Second of all,” he continues, “Anything that happened between me and Lana on that cruise ship, was because you were too busy hitting on sixteen year old boys to notice what was right in front of you.”

  Another gasp from our family and friends. And me.

  “He looked much older!” I cry. “And that it so not the point. Jackson wasn’t here today at Epcot, was he? Jackson wasn’t shaking his big boobies around for me, was he? No. Lana was! So, I’ll ask you again. Why was she there?”

  “She was there, Sum, because...you were right.”

  “I knew it!” I say, slapping myself on the thigh. “Wait, what?”

  “Lana is Janice’s niece,” he says. “Janice invited her, not me. Janice has been trying to set the two of us up for years, and then she found out that we’d actually met on the cruise. So, you were right—they’re not all sweet innocent old ladies. Some of them are pretty damn manipulative, and some of them might, just like you said, be trying to keep us apart.”

  “If you think that’s bad,” chimes in Babette, “you should see what happens when you Electric Slide next to one of their boyfriends.”

  John looks at her with his eyebrows raised. I do the same. Then I look back at Graham.

  “So...you didn’t call her?” The huge knot in my chest is tentatively starting to loosen.

  “Of course not. Why would I do something like that to you? I love you. What kind of a person do you think I am?”

  I probably shouldn’t mention that thing about the Craigslist Killer.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have assumed the worst. I mean, I shouldn’t have assumed the worst about you. I should have stuck to assuming the worst about Janice and Francine. I never should have pressured you into babysitting my father, either. He’s an adult and this was your bachelor party.”

  “No,” he says. “It was my second bachelor party. I should have listened when you told me that one was enough.”

  “Your heart was in the right place,” I say. “If not for you, my mother would never have known that flashing, plastic penis necklaces existed.”

  Graham smiles. “I’m sorry that I brought up that thing about Jackson, by the way. That was low.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I can admit that I was a mess on that cruise.”

  “You really were,” says Graham, pulling me over for a hug. “So...are we still getting married?”

  The whole room seems to be waiting in anticipation of my answer. And by seems to be, I mean they are all leaning forward in their seats and staring at us.

  “Of course,” I say, feeling the relief wash over me. The tears that I’ve been struggling to hold back, start flowing down my cheeks. Only now, they’re happy ones.

  Graham keeps his arms around me, and we finish watching Roseanne.

  ***

  The wedding is back on.

  Granted, it was never officially off—that was all pretty much in my head—but still, it feels good. You know what feels even better? That the wedding is tomorrow!

  That’s right, tomorrow. We’ve made it through the week!

  Of course by, we’ve made it through the week, I mean Mom and Dad have each been to the emergency room, Dad has crashed an insanely expensive golf cart, and Mom and I were nearly eaten by an alligator. But that’s just life at Sunset Havens—never a dull moment.

  We picked up Dad from the hospital this morning, and we’re all piled once again into the Escalade, heading back toward Sunset Havens. Mom and Dad are sitting in the back row, fussing over each other. Dad’s life flashing before his eyes on Space Mountain, mixed with his near death experience at Epcot, seems to have solidified their marriage in a way that no amount of couples therapy could ever have achieved. I think they’re going to be okay.

  Graham and I are going to be okay, too. With both of us finally on the same page, there isn’t anything these nutty old women can do to further ruin our wedding. They tried, and they failed. Better luck next time, ladies. Better luck with a different guy, I mean. Obviously, Graham isn’t going to be attempting to marry anybody else at Sunset Havens ever again. He’s even offered to speak to them privately tonight to make sure that they know that he knows, and that all of this nonsense is over with.

  Life is good, and there are only two things left on the agenda—the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. Both are taking place tonight at The Lakeview. Most of the relatives that we invited to the wedding either flew in last night or are arriving today, and since we couldn’t invite all of them to the rehearsal dinner, we had to narrow it down to an even more select few.

  Graham’s Aunt Jo-Ann and Uncle Chuck have made the cut—mainly because they’re the folks John has been trying to convince for years to move to Sunset Havens. He’s basically using our wedding as one of those marketing ploys where you give away a free stay at a nice hotel, dinner included, and then try to sell people a crappy time-share. I should probably be more offended by this, but considering that Graham and I had sex in Aunt Jo-Ann and Uncle Chuck’s rental home, and John still hasn’t disowned us, I’m going to let this one slide.

  Also making the cut is Dad’s brother, Eddie. Eddie Hartwell lives in Iowa where he’s been studying and teaching Transcendental Meditation for the past thirty years. He’s very calm, cool, and collected. In other words, the polar opposite of my father. Graham has been dying to meet him.

  And then we have Mom’s sister, Mary. Mary and her husband own an antique shop in Pro
vincetown. In her spare time, she dresses up as Dolly Parton and performs at nursing homes. Whenever we get together, she’s full of positive energy and uplifting stories about the people she meets at her shop or through her volunteer work. It’s fun to watch her and Mom go head to head, with Mom trying her best to inject negativity into the conversation, and Mary shooting her down with one Chicken Soup for the Soul style anecdote after another. I still don’t think Mom has recovered from the time Mary said she let a homeless man spend the night in her guest bedroom.

  Dad and Eddie. Mom and Mary. I don’t understand how my grandparents managed to raise siblings on such opposite ends of the spectrum. Actually, I kind of do, since I wrote a research paper on it for my abnormal psych class back in college. Mom and Dad were not amused.

  But I digress.

  It’s going to be an interesting mix tonight. It’ll be good practice for the wedding, which is going to be an even bigger, even more interesting mix. Whenever I picture our wedding reception, I think about this time that I looked out the front door of the Blenderman house and saw about six million bugs gathered on the ceiling of the front porch. It was a really hot night, and the lights were on, and the bugs were just going ballistic. There were big ones, small ones, slow ones, fast ones—all kinds of species just thrown together and forced to interact. Some were sitting and kind of bobbing their heads to the music (“What Is Love” was playing in my head), while others raced drunkenly around, bumping into everything. A couple of bugs were attempting to swing dance to rap music.