I have a system.
I want that established up front, before anyone tries to tell this story differently later, because I know exactly how it’s going to get told if I leave the narrating to anyone else in my life — Ash went a little intense about the wedding, ha ha, you know how he gets — and I would like the record to reflect that “intense” is just what competence looks like to people who’ve never made a color-coded spreadsheet in their lives.
The spreadsheet had four tabs.
VENDORS.
TIMELINE.
SEATING (DRAFT 6).
And a tab labeled simply DISASTERS, which was less a working document and more a journal of my own anxiety, updated nightly, currently sitting at eleven entries with forty-two days left to go.
“You’ve color-coded my wedding,” Lark said, peering over my shoulder at my kitchen table, where I’d set up what Beck had started calling Mission Control.
“There’s a key. You made a key, Ash.”
“Yellow is vendors who haven’t confirmed. Red is vendors who’ve confirmed but I don’t trust. Green is vendors I trust, which is currently just the bakery and possibly Theo, if he ever returns a single one of my texts about the rehearsal dinner menu.”
“You’re allowed to enjoy this a little less, you know. It’s still six weeks out.”
“Forty-two days,” I corrected.
“And I enjoy this exactly the right amount, thank you, which is to say, with my whole nervous system.” Lark laughed, dropped into the chair across from me, and reached for one of the color-coded tabs with the casual disregard of a bride who’d handed off ninety percent of her own wedding logistics to me approximately the day after she got engaged and had not once looked back.
“Tobias wants to know if his cousin can bring a date,” she said.
“The cousin nobody’s met.
He says, and I’m quoting directly, ‘just put her at a table, it’ll be fine.'” “Nothing about a wedding is ever ‘just’ anything, Lark.
That’s how you end up with seventeen people standing because somebody’s plus-one wasn’t accounted for and the caterer ran out of chairs.” I added a line to SEATING (DRAFT 6) anyway, because despite my own rules I was, apparently, a soft touch for anyone in love enough to be this casually unbothered by logistics.
“Tell him yes. Tell him I need her dietary restrictions by the end of the week or she’s getting whatever’s left over.”
“You’re the best, you know that?”
“I know that. I’d just like it reflected somewhere official, ideally engraved.”
Norwood let me into the house one morning with the specific weary patience of a man who’d already fielded six separate vendor calls before nine a.m.
and fully expected a seventh before lunch.
“Mr. Grey’s in the kitchen, attempting to be useful,” he said, leading me through the front hall.
“I’ve informed him three times that his version of useful mostly involves standing near the coffee maker looking concerned. He has not yet taken the feedback.”
“How bad is the concern, on a scale of one to the engagement party?”
“Considerably calmer, thankfully. Mostly he’s worried about repeating last time’s level of drama at a party in this particular yard. I’ve reassured him that level of drama is, statistically, unlikely to happen twice in one calendar year, but he remains unconvinced.” Fenrir looked up when we entered, two coffee mugs in hand, one of which he passed to me without asking whether I wanted it, which I appreciated more than I’d admit out loud.
“Ash. Tell me honestly — on a scale of one to disaster, how worried should I be about hosting this?”
“You survived an engagement party that ended with your boyfriend publicly revealing an eleven-year secret identity in this exact backyard. I think you can survive a wedding.”
“That’s not actually reassuring.”
“It’s the most reassuring thing I’ve got before nine a.m.” I checked my phone, the contractor’s confirmation text already sitting unread at the top of my notifications.
“Jack? He’s been here since seven. Climbed the treehouse before I’d even finished my first coffee.” Fenrir said it with the particular fondness of a man who’d apparently already decided he liked the contractor, which felt, in hindsight, like information I should have weighted more heavily before walking outside.
The venue walkthrough happened minutes later, which was how I ended up standing in Fenrir Grey’s backyard at nine in the morning, clipboard in hand, watching a man I’d never met climb partway up a ladder propped against the famous, recently-restored, structurally-sentimental treehouse like he owned the place.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Can I help you?” He looked down at me, unhurried, the specific calm of a man who’d never once in his life felt rushed by someone else’s clipboard.
“Depends what you’re offering.”
“I’m offering to ask who you are and why you’re climbing private property forty-two days before a wedding I am personally responsible for not letting fall apart.”
“Jack Wilder.” He came down the ladder in three easy steps, wiped a hand on his jeans before offering it.
“Contractor. I’m doing the venue prep — the arbor, the patio extension, and apparently this.” He nodded up at the treehouse.
“Fenrir mentioned it could use a second look before the wedding. Structural, mostly. Nothing dramatic.”
“Nobody mentioned a contractor to me.”
“Nobody mentioned a wedding planner with a clipboard to me either, so I think we’re even.” He smiled, easy, infuriating, the kind of smile that had clearly gotten him out of more trouble than it had any right to.
“You run point on this thing?”
“I run point on everything. It’s a personality trait at this point, not a job description.” I flipped to my TIMELINE tab, mostly for something to do with my hands that wasn’t pointing accusingly at his ladder.
“What exactly are you planning to do to my arbor?”
“Your arbor?”
“The wedding’s arbor. The one in the rendering I approved three weeks ago, which had very specific dimensions, which I am now slightly concerned you haven’t seen.”
“I’ve seen it.” He pulled a folded paper out of his back pocket, considerably more creased and considerably more annotated than the clean version I’d printed for my own binder.
“I’ve also got some thoughts.”
“Thoughts.”
“The dimensions you’ve got would put the arbor directly in the sightline of that oak tree’s root system, which means I’d either have to cut into roots that old tree’s been growing around for sixty years, or build you something that’s going to lean by next spring. I’d rather move it eight feet left, work with what’s already there instead of fighting it.”
“The rendering’s approved, Jack.”
“Renderings get revised all the time. That’s sort of the whole point of having someone on-site who can actually see the ground instead of just the paper.” He said it without malice, almost gently, which somehow made it more irritating than if he’d been condescending about it.
“I’m not trying to blow up your plan. I’m trying to keep your bride’s wedding photos from featuring a crooked arbor in front of a stressed-out, half-dead oak tree.” I hated, with the specific, fast-burning hatred of a person who’d just been quietly proven right by someone he’d decided to dislike on principle four minutes earlier, that this was an extremely reasonable point.
“Fine,” I said.
“Eight feet left. But I need updated dimensions by end of day so I can adjust the seating chart, the photographer’s shot list, and the ceremony program, all of which currently assume the arbor is exactly where I told it to be.”
“I’ll have it to you by three.”
“Two.”
“Two-thirty. I’ve got actual roots to deal with, not just metaphorical ones.” He was already turning back toward the treehouse, already moving on, already, somehow, completely unbothered by the fact that he’d just rearranged forty-two days of my carefully sequenced planning before nine-fifteen in the morning. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
“Nice to meet you, Clipboard.”
“It’s Ash.”
“I know,” he said, not looking back.
“I just like Clipboard better. Feels more accurate, for now.”
“He sounds insufferable,” Beck said that evening, when I called him specifically to complain, which had become something of a tradition between us whenever either of us needed to process a day without anyone correcting our perspective on it.
“He’s worse than insufferable. He’s insufferable and right, which is somehow a thousand times more annoying.”
“Sounds like someone got their carefully organized little world rearranged before lunch.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Beck, I called you to vent, not to be understood.”
“Noted. Continue venting.” I could hear him grinning through the phone, which only made me want to throw something at him from four miles away.
“What’s he look like, out of professional curiosity?”
“Irrelevant.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s a ‘mind your own business,’ which I’d think you’d recognize, given how often I’ve had to say it to you specifically.” I flopped backward onto my couch, staring at the ceiling, mentally recalculating the seating chart for the third time that day.
“He’s tall. Climbs ladders like gravity’s a polite suggestion instead of a rule. Moved my entire arbor eight feet without asking and somehow had a genuinely good reason for it, which I find deeply unfair on a structural level.”
“You like him.”
“I tolerate him. There’s a difference.”
“Sure,” Beck said, in the exact tone Ash had once used on Clancy, months ago, a tone I now recognized, with horror, as the universal sibling shorthand for I’ve already decided you’re wrong and I’m just waiting for you to catch up.
“Forty-two days, Ash. That’s a long time to tolerate someone.”
“It’s exactly the right amount of time to finish a wedding without losing my mind, which is the only timeline I’m currently planning around.” I closed my eyes, the spreadsheet’s four tabs already rearranging themselves behind my eyelids, a fifth one forming somewhere in the back of my mind that I had absolutely no intention of ever labeling out loud.
I labeled it anyway, just for myself, just for one private, irritated second before I shut the thought down entirely.
JACK WILDER.
Color: unconfirmed.
Trust level: pending.
Status: actively, infuriatingly, ahead of schedule.
I added one more line beneath it, smaller, in the part of the document that existed only in my own head and would never, under any circumstances, make it onto an actual spreadsheet: forty-two days is also, conveniently, exactly long enough to find out if “tolerate” was ever the right word to begin with.
Then I deleted that thought too, metaphorically, the way you delete a sentence you already know you typed correctly the first time, and went to bed determined to think about literally anything else.
It didn’t work particularly well.
But forty-two days, I reminded myself, was a long time.
Plenty of time to get my spreadsheet, and myself, back under control.