The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

Anyone who has lived out there knows what those words mean.

Brandon called me Thursday night. “Kendra’s freaking out,” he said. “She keeps checking the radar like she can talk it out of coming.”

“It might miss us,” I said.

“It might,” he said, which is what everybody in Nebraska says when they know it won’t.

The Denver stylist had another wedding Friday night in Castle Rock and could not come up early. She planned to leave Denver at four Saturday morning and be at Linda’s by eight thirty.

“Four hours,” I said. “In that.”

“I know,” Brandon said. “Don’t say anything to Kendra.”

I didn’t. I did not say anything to anybody. I want that on the record too.

The freezing rain started a little before three on Saturday morning. It woke me, that ticking on the window that is different from regular rain, and I lay in the dark above my shop listening to it coat the town.

By six, the power lines along Main Street were sagging and shining under the streetlights. The trees in the park looked like they were made of glass.

At six forty, the state closed I-80 in both directions from the Wyoming line all the way to North Platte. I saw it on the 511 page while my coffee brewed. Semis were lined up at the truck stop three rows deep.

I texted Brandon. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he wrote back. “Dad’s taking the blade over to sand the church lot at nine. I’m going with him. Have you heard from Kendra’s mom?”

“No,” I wrote. “Why would I?” He did not answer that.

I heard later what happened that morning, from three different people, and the stories all lined up. The Denver stylist left at four like she planned and made it up I-76 as far as Sterling, Colorado.

The interstate was closed east of there, all the way to the Nebraska line. She sat in a gas station lot and called Kendra at six fifty. She was very sorry. The troopers were turning everybody around.

At eight thirty she called again. They were saying afternoon at the earliest. She offered to do a video call and walk the girls through the curls themselves.

Kendra, I am told, hung up the phone and sat down on her mother’s kitchen floor in her white robe and did not say anything for a while.

At nine o’clock exactly, my phone rang. I was at my kitchen table upstairs with my green dress hanging on the closet door. The screen said Linda Becker.

I had her number because she had bought a gift certificate from me once, for Kendra, the first Christmas. Kendra had never used it.

“Brooke,” Linda said, and then she could not say anything else for a second because she was crying. Not loud. The kind of crying where a woman cannot get her breath.

“Linda, are you all right? Is everybody all right?”

“Nobody’s hurt,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to call you like this.”

She told me about the stylist and Sterling. She told me Kendra was still on the floor, and the bridesmaids were sitting around the table not knowing what to do with their hands. Then she took a long breath.

“I know what she said to you at Thanksgiving,” Linda said. “She told me herself, and I told her it was a terrible thing to say. I’m asking you anyway.”