My Favorite Mistake Read Free

friends for being, shal I say, “thrifty.” “I don’t mean I can’t afford it. I mean I…I don’t think I’l ever get married…again.” But if that were true, why hadn’t I simply handed over the dress to the pushy woman?
    Cindy shrugged. “Fine. If you stil feel that way in six months, sel the dress on eBay. Knowing you, you’l probably make money on it.”
    I bit my lower lip. Cindy was right—even if I took the dress home, no one was going to stick a gun to my head and make me get married. Barry seemed to be as leery of walking
    down the aisle as I was. Although if one day Barry got the urge…
    I almost laughed out loud—Barry wasn’t the “urge getting” kind of guy. He was just as methodical and nonsensical as I was, which explained how we had contentedly dated off
    and on for the past two years without the drama that most couples endure. I was lucky. Luck- eee.
    “It’s a great deal,” Cindy urged in a singsongy voice.
    I looked at the price tag and wavered at the sight of the red slash through the original price of $2000 and replaced with the hastily-scrawled $249. I loved red slashes. It’s a great deal. And I probably could turn around and sel the dress on eBay for a profit. In fact, I might make enough to surprise Barry with plane tickets for a vacation. He’d been wanting to go to Vegas, and I’d been resistant, for reasons that now seem childish…
    As childish as me standing here obsessing about buying a gown simply because it resurrected too many memories…? Memories a wedding dress might exorcise…?
    “Okay,” I said impulsively. “I’l take it.”
    Cindy clapped her hands, then stopped, as if she were afraid that her celebrating would change my mind, and herded me toward the checkout counter.
    Only later, when a gushing salesclerk handed me the gown, bagged and paid for, was I seized by a sudden, unnerving thought:
    What if Cindy’s “self-fulfil ing prophecy” experiment rubbed off on me?
    2
    THE WHOLE “self-fulfil ing prophecy” thing was stil nagging at me when I got home and I realized I would have to get rid of something in order to make room for my impulsive purchase.
    Buyer’s remorse struck me hard and I cursed my weakness for a good buy. To punish myself, I laid out the brown suede fringed coat I had splurged on last spring but rarely wore, plus a pair of rivet-studded jeans and a white embroidered shirt that had seemed exotic in the store, but smacked of a costume when I stood before the ful -length mirror in my bathroom. I had never worked up the nerve to wear the outfit. As much as I loved the pieces, it seemed unlikely that the urban Western look was going to come back in style anytime soon, and if it did, I obviously couldn’t carry it off. But my friend Kenzie could, and since she now lived part-time on a farm in upstate New York, she would probably find a way to wear them and look smashing.
    Looking for other things that Kenzie might wear, I unearthed a sweater with running horses on it that Redford had given me and, after a moment of sentimental indecision,
    added it to the giveaway bag, as wel . Then I hung the wedding gown in the front of the closet because it was the only place the skirt could hang unimpeded by bulging shoe racks.
    The phone rang, and I snatched up the handset, wondering who it could be on Saturday afternoon. (I was too cheap to pay for cal er ID on my landline phone.) “Hel o.”
    “Hey,” Barry said, his voice low and casual. “What are you doing?”
    I dropped onto my queen-size bed whose headboard stil smel ed faintly of woodsmoke two years after the fire sale at which I’d bought it. “Just cleaning out my closet.”
    “I have good news,” he said in a way that made me think that if I’d said, “I just bought a wedding gown,” he wouldn’t even have noticed.
    I worked my mouth from side to side. “What?”
    “I just passed El en in the hal —you real y bowled her over at lunch yesterday.”
    I sat up, interested.