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  “I like plain vanilla.”

  “—there’s no excitement there at all.”

  Min blinked. “I was at work. There’s never any excitement.”

  “I’m talking about men,” Nanette said. “You’re thirty-three. Your prime years are past you, and you’re wearing white cotton.”

  “I was at work” Min said, losing patience.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her mother shook out Min’s blouse, checked the label, saw it was silk, and looked partly mollified. “If you’re wearing white cotton lingerie, you’ll feel like white cotton, and you’ll act like white cotton, and white cotton cannot get a man, nor can it keep one. Always wear lace.”

  “You’d make a nice pimp,” Min said, and headed for the dressing room.

  “Minerva,” her mother said.

  “Well, I’m sorry.” Min stopped and turned around. “But honestly, Mother, this conversation is getting old. I’m not even sure I want to get married, and you’re critiquing my underwear because it’s not good enough bait. Can’t you—”

  Nanette lifted her chin, and her jawline became even more taut. “This is the kind of attitude that’s going to lose David.”

  Min took a deep breath. “About David . . .”

  “What?” Her mother’s body tensed beneath her size four Dana Buchman suit. “What about David?”

  Min smiled cheerfully. “We’re no longer seeing each other.”

  “Oh, Min,” Nanette wailed, clutching Min’s blouse to her bosom, the picture of despair in the middle of a lot of expensive gold and ivory décor.

  “He wasn’t right for me, Mother,” Min said.

  “Yes,” Nanette said, “but couldn’t you have kept him until after the wedding?”

  “Evidently not,” Min said. “Let’s cut to the chase. What do I have to do to keep you from mentioning his name ever again?”

  “Wear lace.”

  “That will get you off my back?”

  “For a while.”

  Min grinned at her and headed for the dressing room door. “You are a piece of work.”

  “So are you, darling,” Nanette said, surveying her eldest. “I’m very proud of you, you know. You have a blotch of makeup over your eye. What is that?”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Min closed the door behind her. She unzipped her skirt, let it fall to the gold carpet, and studied herself in the gold-framed mirror. “You’re not that bad,” she told herself, not convinced. “You just have to find a man who likes very healthy women.”

  She unclipped the long lavender skirt from the gold hanger and stepped into it, being careful not to rip the knife-pleated chiffon ruffle at the bottom, and sucked in her stomach to get it buttoned. Then she shrugged on the lavender chiffon blouse and buttoned the tiny buttons, stretching the fabric tightly across her bust so that her white bra showed at the corners of the low, squared bodice. She shook out the sleeves, and the chiffon fell over her hands in wide double ruffles that she would drag through everything at the reception. The blouse also erupted around her hips in more ruffles at the side. “Oh, yes,” she said. “More width at the hip. Can’t ever get enough of that.”

  Then she picked up the corset, a blue and lavender watercolor moire tied with lavender ribbons. The fabric had been so beautiful when Diana had chosen it six months before that Min had hired the seamstress to make a comforter for her bed with it, and she looked at the narrow corset now and thought, I’m going to have to wear the comforter. This is never going to fit. She took a deep breath and wrapped the corset around her. It shoved her breasts up to a dizzying height and then failed to meet in the middle by almost two inches. Carbs. She thought vicious thoughts about Cal Morrisey and Emilio’s bread. Then she tried to smooth out the extra foundation without showing the bruise and went out into the dressing room to face her mother.

  Instead, she found Diana, standing on the fitting platform in front of the huge, gold-framed mirror, flanked by her two lovely bridesmaids, the women Liza called Wet and Worse, while the Dixie Chicks played on Diana’s portable CD player.

  “ ‘Ready to Run,’ ” Min said to Diana. “And so not appropriate.”

  “Hmmm?” Diana said, staring into the mirror. “No, it’s Runaway Bride.”

  “Right,” Min said, remembering that Diana had decided to score her wedding to music from Julia Roberts’s movies. Well, at least it was a plan.

  “I loved that movie,” Susie said. She looked blond, bilious, miserable, and, well, wet in corseted green chiffon, the loser in the bridesmaid dress lottery.

  “I thought it was ridiculous,” dark-haired Karen, a.k.a. Worse, said, looking sophisticated and superior in corseted blue chiffon.

  Min waved her hand at Worse. “Scoot over so I can see my sister.”

  Worse moved, and Min got her first look at Diana. “Wow.”

  Diana looked like a fairy tale come to life in ivory chiffon and satin. Her dark curling hair fell from an artfully messy knot into pearl-strewn tendrils around her pale oval face and her neck rose gracefully above the perfect expanse of skin revealed by a very low, square-necked bodice identical to the one flashing Min’s white bra. Her neckline had chiffon ruffles cascading over the beaded ivory corset that cinched her slim waist, and more ruffles fell from her wrists and flowed out from under the corset, parting to reveal a straight skirt flounced with more ruffles along the side like panniers and ending in a knife-pleated border that touched the toes of her satin buckled pumps. She turned on the platform to look into the mirror and Min saw the bustle of gathered chiffon at the base of her spine that erupted in more and more ruffles and pleats until the back of the dress took on a life of its own, quivering when Diana moved.

  “What do you think?” Diana said, no expression at all on her face.

  I think you look like a sex-crazed princess on heroin, Min thought, but she said, “I think you look beautiful,” because that was true, too.

  “You look gorgeous,” Worse said, straightening Di’s skirt, which didn’t need straightening.

  “Uh huh,” Wet said. Min wanted to feel sorry for her—it couldn’t be easy watching your best friend marry your ex-boyfriend, especially when you looked like hell in green—but Wet was so spineless that it was hard to sympathize.

  “It wouldn’t do for a morning wedding,” Diana said, touching the ribbon bow at her breasts. “It wouldn’t work for evening, either. But my wedding is at dusk. That’s magic time. It changes everything.”

  “You look like magic,” Min said, hearing the same strain in Diana’s voice that she’d heard on her answering machine the night before. “Are you all right?”

  Diana turned back to the mirror. “You wouldn’t be caught dead in this, would you?”

  “If I looked like you, I might.”

  Worse surveyed Min from head to toe, taking in the bursting corset and white bra along the way. “It’s not Min’s style.”

  “You think?” Min said. “Because I was going to wear the corset to the office when this whole deal was done. Could I talk to my sister alone for a minute, please?”

  Worse raised her eyebrows, but Wet escaped into the dressing rooms gladly, and when Min folded her arms and stared, Worse gave up and left, too.

  “What’s going on?” Min asked Diana, as the Dixie Chicks finished and Martina McBride began to sing the impossibly chipper “I Love You.”

  “Nothing,” Diana said, watching herself in the mirror. “Well, the cake, we’re having problems with the cake, but everything else is perfect.”

  “Is it Greg?” Min said, thinking, I wouldn’t want to marry a wimp no matter how cute and rich he was. If she ever got married, it’d be to somebody with edge, somebody who’d be tricky and fast and interesting forever—

  “Greg is perfect,” Diana said, fluffing the ruffles that somehow made her hips looks slimmer.

  “Oh, good,” Min said. “What about the cake?”

  “The cake . . .” Diana cleared her throat. “The cake didn’t get ordered in time.”