At Wits' End - Kenzie Reed Page 0,8

of Oregon? I wonder if I have time to Google that before the wedding ceremony starts.

Aceto growls and shifts his weight. Carrie’s eyes fly open wide with astonishment, and she leans over to look. “That’s not a cat in your purse, is it?”

I pat him protectively. “He’s considered good luck.”

“A black cat is considered good luck?”

The banging on the stall door gets louder. The door flies open. Jonathon and Mia tumble out and fall on the floor. April screams, a high, liquid wail of horror. Jonathon’s shorts are down around his ankles, Mia’s lacy pink dress is hiked up to her armpits, and they’re still connected.

Jonathon looks up at us, his eyes wide with shock.

“Dude,” he says mournfully.

Chapter Three

DONOVAN

I stroll casually through the front of the Wine Knot wedding chapel, hands shoved in my pockets, following the sound of angry voices in the hallway outside the bathroom. My dad, stiffly wrapped in a navy suit, looks as if he’s about to have a stroke, and my Balenciega-clad mother’s got that “I just sucked a lemon” expression. Aunt April’s shrieking at the Ribaldis, and her husband Phillip has his fists clenched and is squaring off against Sienna’s cousin Rocco, a stocky man in his forties. Rocco’s father, Vito, who’s in his seventies, is bellowing in Italian, and his wife is making some kind of hand-gesture that will probably cause all the female members of my family to grow hair on their chests.

The rest of the Ribaldi clan are crowded behind Rocco, with various people trying to hold them back – or, in some cases, urging them on. My sisters, Jamie and Toni, are trying to intervene.

I glance at my watch. Twenty minutes for everything to devolve into complete disaster. That shocks me.

I’d have given it five minutes, tops.

I hurry down the hall.

Mia, her face streaked with mascara and smeared with lipstick, limps out of the bathroom, wearing only one shoe. She hurries out the back door. Jonathan staggers out after her, struggling to pull up his shorts, his dick flapping in the breeze. Somewhere, a village is missing its idiot.

“Mia, wait!” he howls.

And hot on their heels is Carrie Hastings, that piranha in a pants-suit, snapping pictures with fiendish glee.

My gaze lights on Sienna, who’s backed up against a wall, eyes wide with shock, clutching her purse to her chest. I hurry towards her.

“There’s my beautiful bride!” I cry out loudly.

Sienna’s gaze snaps in my direction.

My mother and Aunt April turn to look at me, then back at Jonathon. “Jonathon!” April shrieks at her son. “Your pants!” Jonathon looks down, his face flushes red, and he quickly pulls them up.

I throw my arms around Sienna and hug her. She tries to wriggle out of my embrace. I lean down and breathe in her ear. “Just go with it,” I murmur.

“You are messing this up,” she loud-whispers.

I grin. “I think you’re all doing a beautiful job of that without me.”

Then I turn to Carrie Hastings and direct my wrath at her, my arm slung around Sienna’s shoulders. “You’re the one who made the mistake?” I demand.

“I did what?” she says indignantly.

She stares after Jonathon, who’s now running down the hallway in pursuit of Mia. His shorts fall down again, and he trips and falls to his knees. It’s a shame he wasn’t born in the golden age of cinema, because he’d have made an excellent fifth Marx brother. Or a Keystone Cop.

“I’m sorry, I’m the one who made the mistake?” Carrie quickly raises her camera and snaps a few more pictures.

“You got the name wrong in today’s paper. You said that Sienna was getting married to my cousin Jonathon. It should have been my name in there.” I turn to face my mother. “You told her that I was the one marrying Sienna, right?”

“I…” My mother swallows as if she just tasted something sour. “Of course I did.”

Everyone quickly joins in, chorusing their agreement. Of course it was supposed to be Donovan.

“You most certainly did not!” Carrie yells. “You said that it was Jonathon!”

“Sounds a lot like Donovan,” I point out mildly. “Easy mistake to make.”

“Then why didn’t you call me this morning when the story ran?” she demands of my mother.

“We’ve just been so busy.” My mother flaps her hand in pretend distress. “This was all so sudden.”

Carrie glares at her. “Sudden, and faker than an Instagram influencer’s tits.”

My mother wraps herself in her Greenvale Ladies’ League mantle of snottiness and scoffs, “Well, isn’t that a lovely way to put it.”

“You’re