Free Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? by Melissa Senate Page A

bully was bothering him, I stalked over, hands on hips. If Emmett crumpled up his math homework in frustration because of not being able to do his fractions, I uncrumpled the loose-leaf paper and explained what a lowest common denominator was. If I was locked in my bedroom, devastated that a boy didn’t like me and heard Emmett howling with laughter over Saturday-morning cartoons, I smiled.
    Once, I asked my mother if there was something wrong with me for caring so much about Emmett, when my friends wished their siblings would take a rocket to Mars.
    “Loving your brother is one of the best things you can possibly do,” my mother had said.
    I grabbed the phone and punched in Emmett’s telephone number. After the You know what to do recording, I said, “Look, I’m getting married and I need you to showup for a photo shoot I’m doing for Wow Weddings. ” I rambled on for a minute, then said, “So if you can come, great, and if you can’t, that’s okay too. Whatever.”

chapter 6

    O n Monday morning, Emmett Manfred was sitting in the reception area of WowWeddings, reading a battered paperback copy of Ulysses. The receptionist, Lorna, was staring at him. Salivating over him at 9:00 a.m. as though he were a bagel and cream cheese and a cup of strong coffee.
    The bagel and cream cheese will last longer, I wanted to tell her.
    “Eloise, your brother is here to see you,” Lorna said.
    “I see. Thanks.”
    He needed a haircut. His sandy-brown hair flopped in his eyes, which were huge and golden-hazel and both puppy dog and penetrating.
    Relief sagged through me at the sight of him. This past year, I knew he was okay, that he wasn’t dead in a ditch somewhere, that he wasn’t begging for change on a street corner or selling his body or involved with loan sharks or anything else I might have seen on Law and Order. I knewfrom the tone of the postcards he sent to my grandmother that he was absolutely fine.
    But here my baby brother stood, alive and well and his usual self, wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and frayed jeans and a very expensive-looking brown leather jacket.
    He nodded at me, put Ulysses in the messenger bag slung around his torso and stood up. “So I’m here.”
    “I see,” I said again.
    We stepped toward each other in an awkward should we make some kind of physical gesture movement? then decided being in the same room was, for the moment, enough.
    “Do you need somewhere to stay?” I asked. “Money?”
    “I’m just here, okay? No big deal.”
    “Fine.”
    “Fine.”
    Astrid came sweeping into the office, her assistant and Mini-Astrid at her heels. I introduced Emmett.
    Astrid smiled a smile usually reserved for strong circulation numbers. “Lovely to meet you, Emmett. You’re everything the Modern Bride’s brother should be.”
    “That’s quite a compliment coming from you,” he drawled, as though he were from Texas or had any idea who she was.
    Triple eyeroll.
    She smiled and gave him an official once-over. “I don’t want Devlin to change a thing. You are absolutely perfect as is for the shoot. Come, let me show you around our offices.”
    As Emmett flashed his dimples and opened the inner door for Astrid like the gentleman he wasn’t, I ran to my cubicle, called Perfect People and canceled my fake brother.
     
    Wow rented space in a photography studio on West Seventeenth Street. Emmett and I shared a cab and didn’t say a word to each other. He looked out his window; I looked out mine.
    “Thanks for coming, by the way,” I finally said.
    He glanced at me and nodded.
    “Do you remember Noah?” I asked him. “My fiancé? You met him a couple of times at Grams’s.”
    “Tall guy, right? Smart. Likes spinach.”
    “That’s Noah,” I said, smiling at the memory of his having two helpings of my grandmother’s spinach despite the fact that he hated green vegetables.
    “So what do I have to do at the photo shoot?” Emmett asked.
    “The photographer will direct you,” I said.