Free The Wedding Wager (McMaster the Disaster) by Rachel Astor Page A

that I was thinking about it, I couldn’t come up with one time that I remembered seeing her cry at all.
    Until that moment.
    Okay, it’s not like she was out and out bawling or anything, but her eyes were seriously glistening, so much so that she turned away for a moment and wiped a tear, I suppose thinking she was fooling me.
    I nearly broke down right then and there and if I hadn’t been wearing a dress that I was terrified of messing up, I probably would have.
    My mother sniffed across the room and tried to compose herself. “That is beautiful,” she finally said.
    “Thanks.”
    I stood there, not sure what to do so I took a bit of a walk around the room so she could see the magnificence of the train. The fabric was heavy, but not unbearable and I began to picture myself walking down the aisle to gasps and ladies wiping their eyes.
    I may have been getting a bit over my head with the thoughts of people fawning and crying over me, so when I snuck back into the next change room, I realized I needed a quick peek into the Disaster Diary to help bring me back down to scale. Sheesh, I was probably already a day late checking in considering the expansion of my head since Mattie’s dresses.
     
    Dear Disaster Diary,
     
    I absolutely love going to the airport. People completely excited about going to someplace exotic, or someplace warm when it’s winter. And then as people return, even though they’ve likely had a lovely trip, they are always happy to be back home, hugging loved ones or meeting up with friends they haven’t seen in a while.
    There is just so much promise and possibility at a place like that, which is why I always volunteer to pick up and drop off pretty much everyone I know. In all the excitement, I admit, I tend to get a little excited myself, which is why I may not always have my head on as straight at the airport as I normally would, you know, even for me.
    When I was about seventeen, my sister Rosie, my father and I went to pick up Mom from the airport. She’d just gone to visit her sister in Oklahoma. I was so busy watching all the happy faces around me that I may not have noticed all the things around me, including the exact spot where we were standing.
    Of course, with excitement, trips to the washroom tend to follow, and that day was no exception. I snuck off, hurrying so I wouldn’t miss my mother’s face when she came through the gate. Now everybody knows there’s an art to picking the correct bathroom stall. Many choices are obvious, you want to get the cleanest one possible, though at public places like airports, clean is often a stretch. I’d heard somewhere that people tend to gravitate toward the end stalls, so I’d gotten in the habit of choosing the middles, just to be on the safe side.
    That day was almost a miracle, the middle stall was empty and it actually looked decently clean. I quickly did my business and turned to flush. Then sighed. The stinkin’ thing wouldn’t flush.
    I pressed the button over and over again, really getting close to get some leverage as I pushed as hard as I could. Which was when, of course, it finally flushed with a whoosh so powerful it could have cleared a pool in six point five seconds.
    As I was starting to stand back up, the bowl began to refill just as violently as it had emptied and splashes of water sprayed up, tiny droplets of public toilet water sprinkling my face.
    I screamed, wiping at my face, as if that would do any good.
    I lunged for the door, pulling the slide lock as quickly as I could, desperate to get to the sinks and some soap. Makeup be damned, I was going to get my face clean.
    And that’s when things went from bad to worse.
    The lock wouldn’t budge. Like seriously wouldn’t give even the slightest bit.
    I began to panic.
    Okay… I began to panic more.
    I tugged and pulled and banged on that lock, already feeling the toilet bacteria practically growing on my face. I wanted to cry but there were other people in the washroom,