Circle the Date: A Novel

By Susie Beaty Green

The Wedding Business is Booming!

Best friends Lesley Manning and Patsy Gamble have it all figured out-especially when it comes to their dream job. They own a wedding planning business in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona, and there is a lovely rhythm to their lives. But when an unexpected client hires them to plan his wedding, things get complicated in a hurry.

This witty, high-spirited book explores what happens when relationships are challenged and unlikely roads of romance are explored. So grab a glass of wine, sit back, and Circle the Date!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491825174

Susie Beaty Green

SUSIE BEATY GREEN lives in a small, seaside village with her husband, children and pets. She is a regular guest columnist for Motherhoodismessy.com. Susie also ghost wrights. Circle The Date is her first novel.

Book preview

© 2013 Susie Beaty Green. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/04/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2518-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2517-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918178

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Patsy

Lesley

Acknowledgements

Susie Beaty Green

For Lisa

For Mike

Patsy

I’m in love with my pharmacist. I will also mention that, in the past, I have been in love with, a podiatrist I once saw, a radio personality whose show I listen to daily, a neighbor, gentlemen I have worked with, a poet and an artist whose sculptures make me swoon.

I fall in love easily, which, needless to say, creates an interesting and specific dynamic in my 18-year marriage.

I understand my nature. I’m fickle. I always have been. I develop little crushes. I often have dreams about a boy I went on a date with from high school or college and spend the next few days daydreaming about remembered flirtations. Maybe it has something to do with being in the wedding business. Romance is always on my mind. Plus, it makes me happy. I think.

Like any addiction (and I have no other way of categorizing this affliction). It makes me happy in the short term but, perhaps, unhappy in the bigger picture. I’ve never discussed this issue with a professional therapist, due mostly to embarrassment, although I do liberally use the free counsel of my best friend, college roommate, and business partner, Lesley Manning.

Lesley knows my patterns. For years I have called her at all hours of the day and night with obsessive-compulsive thoughts. These little crushes are no big deal. They are mild and have an average life span of maybe three weeks or so. My real addiction is always about Him.

Whenever I am particularly tortured by love, The Love I have never recovered from, I call Lesley and say, I’m in love with Gavin Monroe.

Gavin was a dreamy young gentleman whom I met my freshman year of college on a spring break trip and continued an unconventional dating scenario with until I got married. He was handsome, witty, fun, and thoughtful and, as the song suggests, got under my skin, like no one else ever has. Gavin had that rare ability to make me feel like I was the most important person in his universe. And even through our infatuation turned—true-love, he always maintained a healthy sense of himself and encouraged me to do the same. We were young, but we had so many elements of the recipe for a harmonious life together. I’ve never been able to shake wondering how it would have turned out for us.

All these 20 some years later, I can feel buoyed by the thought of his easy, unpretentious manner. The magical combination of self-deprecating humor and quiet self-assuredness, the way his hand felt on the small of my back while escorting me through a restaurant, and the remembrances of our time together can put me in an all-consuming mood about Gavin.

We truly courted. Being at colleges in different states and being students before the explosion of e-mail and texting, we called and even wrote letters—especially when my mother complained during my junior year summer home from school. She made it clear that she was pretty sure my glove-compartment-sized cellular brick phone was being used for more than just emergencies.

When I make these calls to Lesley, she responds with her Lesley-ish deadpan, mixed with just enough empathy that I am not made to feel like an idiot. So the conversation always goes something like this:

Hi. I’m in love with Gavin Monroe.

To which she responds, Still? It’s only been twenty—two years. Then she sighs deeply and continues, "But you didn’t pick him, you picked Tom, and Tom does love you in his own way, so stop thinking about it.We have work to do."

Today, she follows with this:

So go have a cup of coffee with your husband and meet me in the office in an hour. We have a new bride who I’m pretty sure is a close cousin of the devil and wants all her meetings first thing in the morning—she puts an intercontinental, upper-crust tone to her voice—"before we have used all our really exceptional ideas on anyone else."

Then she adds that a new groom is coming in at lunchtime and wants to set up the entire wedding. The bride is too stressed at work, but he has pictures from magazines to show us exactly what she wants. She continues, He just needs us to ‘recreate,’ he says. Oh goody. Just what I love, a busy groom who wants us to plagiarize other designers’ work so they don’t have to be bothered to be unique or creative. Cookie Cutter Bride and Groom. I give it two years, four months.

Just so you know, Lesley often nicknames our couples (and most of the time they are pretty spot-on). She also predicts how long marriages will last with eerie accuracy,but we’ll get to that later.

He’s just trying to give her exactly what she wants to ensure continued good pre-wedding sex, I add.

"But how will he ensure any good post-wedding sex if they are so boring they want Martha Stewart-esque arrangements full of white roses and hydrangeas and touches of hot pink? Uggggh. These are the ideas of boring people, Patsy. I bet he’s some boring Cookie Cutter executive who will bore her to death. Actually, he probably won’t bore her at all. She pauses to laugh at her own cleverness and then continues, After the reception filled with archaic-shaped arrangements of white roses and hydrangeas, they will spend their wedding night at the Marriott in matching monogrammed pajamas and barely rumple the sheets."

Lesley rattles this off so easily, it’s as though she’s rehearsed these speeches in her head, so when the occasion arises, it just effortlessly streams out like movie dialog. One of my favorite parts of my job is Lesley’s amusing running commentary on our clients.

Our job, Miss Lesley, is to produce a ravishing bride who genuinely believes she is the most beautiful creature who has ever donned a wedding gown; a groom with a glint in his eye that says he wants what is inside that wedding gown for the rest of his life;happy guests; and an even happier father and mother of the bride. Then, if we deliver pure success, which we always do, we get a little press and a reputation that ensures we stay in business and can put our own kids through college some day. Eye on the ball, my friend.

You’re right. This is how we work our magic, Lesley agrees. Damien Bride (cousin to the devil) will be in shortly. I’ll take her. You can go to the Parent Association meeting. You know I’d rather meet with the devil himself than go to the Parent Association meeting. Then I need to rush over to Mary’s class for her poetry reading. It’s better if you take Cookie Cutter Groom because then I can stop by Avery’s Cake Emporium and make sure they have found several Celtic recipes for the Ryan-O’Malley cake tasting with both families. Oh, by the way, Ryan-O’Malley. I give them twenty years. He’s the type who will leave her when she’s forty-five and start over with a twenty-two-year-old and have a new family.

Ever since Lesley’s painful and public divorce from Eric, she has honed in on a secret radar within her that can accurately predict the length of marriages. It’s uncanny. Really. Like the time she predicted the couple whose wedding we deemed Earth Wedding would break up within a year and we all rolled our eyes because their love credentials were flawless. Both were from wealthy families who graduated with Ivy League MBAs. They sloughed off their trust funds, met in the Peace Corps, and had been traveling third-world countries together for four years, establishing safe drinking water systems in the most desolate and disease-infected areas. They both wanted to adopt twins from a country they had visited, wanted to move to Vermont, set up sustainable land and teach organic farming at local Montessori schools.

I, of course, with my affliction for romance and my aforementioned weakness, developed a little crush on said Earth Groom and found him ruggedly handsome. I could not help myself from staring, a little too intensely, into his hazel eyes when he discussed his dedication to the planet and the importance of its health for generations to come. Personally, there is nothing I despise more than the outdoors, but I sure played along convincingly because his passion and intelligent insight into the future of the world kind of made my heart go pitter patter. His nice biceps didn’t hurt either.

What happened? Lesley stood firm that Earth Groom was not all he talked himself up to be and made a quick and decisive prediction that the marriage would implode in under a year. The magnificent wedding was set on a serene plateau in Sedona (guests arrived by helicopter, which was probably a huge red flag as to how authentic their green natures really were). Sunset in Sedona, however, as the blues of the sky and the reds of Arizona’s grand earth merge, is truly one of nature’s visual masterpieces. We had hemp tents sewn by artisans in Brazil (for fair wages, of course), organic agaves nectar cocktails, sustainable, locally grown cuisine, and party favors specifically purchased for each guest from among the couple’s travels, beautifully wrapped in handmade, recycled bags created by orphans in Peru. In addition, the couple made the donation of a grove of trees to be planted in the diminishing rain forest in the names of their Peace Corps advisors as a thank you for introducing them not only to each other, but to a lifestyle void of excess. The event was perfection, written up in Scottsdale’s local papers and two glossy bridal magazines that touted the flexibility and originality of, our company; our pride.

Then what happened? Six months in, Earth Groom was arrested for bringing… let’s just say more than coffee home from Colombia. Apparently his side business selling Colombian Organics was designed to help pay off the gambling debt he owed in Vegas, which he racked up while Earth Wife thought he was building homes for hurricane victims.

Right after that, our staff began a very complicated chart to track Lesley’s hits and misses. So far: No misses. If it would not be bad for business, she could work with couples on counseling themselves out of doomed marriages. After the tangled mesh of lies Eric told her during the last months of her marriage, she says she can smell the cheating pheromone.

Lesley

I love my best friend, business partner, and godmother to my child. Sometimes she drives me crazy. The crazy part started all the way back in college when she began poaching my curling iron on a regular basis in our dorm room. I kept my curling iron in a very specific place on a very specific plastic cosmetic cart, aptly named Mr. Cart. The day Patsy not only used my curling iron, sans permission, but left it on all day and burned a sizeable hole in Mr. Cart was the day the hate part of my love/hate relationship developed. Another time she allowed me to sleep in the gritty contents of a large box of Tide laundry detergent on the floor of our dorm room. Her story goes that I was quite intoxicated after a fraternity party, and I insisted on pouring my detergent out onto the floor and sleeping in it. Hard as she tried, she could not dissuade me, or so she says. It might have been my idea, but I still think she may have been able to coax me into bed. My skin was red, raw, and itchy for a week. I secretly believe that she was trying to teach me a lesson about drinking too much, prissy little miss goody-goody that she was. I can just imagine her tucking herself into bed in her pink silk pajamas, turning off the light, and saying, Nite nite, dirty girl. A night covered in soap might do you some good.

All these years later, we successfully own together in Scottsdale, Arizona. I am divorced from the most wretched, dishonorable man in the state, and Patsy is married to Tom. We both have eight-yearold daughters. Mary belongs to me and Maggie to Patsy and Tom. The girls are also best friends, or really, more like cousins.

Let me make it clear that although my ex-husband Eric is loathsome, pathetic, selfish, irresponsible, and nasty, he gave me Mary, whom I adore with my whole being and who is worth every ounce of pain Eric has ever caused me. So my business and my daughter are my life, and I feel quite settled in both roles. It’s not that I do both jobs spectacularly well every single day, but overall I feel like I’ve balanced my life, have come to terms with being a single mom, and accepted my situation.

Mary and I have a lovely rhythm to our lives that suits us well. I was blessed with a personality that seems to bloom where it’s planted, which I consider a great gift from above. Patsy was given a somewhat restless heart, which has caused her static