The Bridesmaid Read Online Free PDF Page A

back of his sleeve. Abby pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her jacket pocket. “Last-minute change for the Stewart wedding.” She handed over her mom’s scrawled note. “Thought I’d drop it off personally, but I didn’t know I was going to be treated to a rock show.”
    Noah laughed and looked down at the note. “Tell your mom I’m on it.”
    “Okay! Catch ya later!” Abby turned to walk out. There was a freshly iced batch of cupcakes sitting on the counter and she grabbed one on her way.
    “Hey! Those are for a birthday party!” Noah shouted after her.
    “Good thing I know you always make extra!”
    She walked outside and bit into the cupcake, smothering her lips with pink icing. There was nothing better than a postschool sugar fix. Not to mention a little postschool Noah fix. She was going to have the image of his air guitar solo burned into her brain for the rest of the week.
    Abby finished up her snack, tossed the wrapper in a garbage can and was about to get back in the van when something caught her eye. In the window of Sports Expert, the mom-and-pop sporting goods store a couple of doors down from the bakery, was a Help Wanted sign. A Help Wanted sign in the window of one of her favorite stores on earth. You can’t do this, Abby thought, her hand on the van’s door handle. Mom and Dad will kill you.
    But somehow that thought didn’t stop her from walking into the store and grabbing the sign out of the window. This was her shot. She was never going to escape the Dove’s Roost unless she started taking control.
    Barb Miller’s face brightened when she saw Abby come in. “Abby! What can I do for you today? We just got in a shipment of the new Adidas shorts. . . .”
    “Sounds great,” Abby said. “But first, let’s see what I can do for you.”
    She placed the Help Wanted sign down on the counter and looked up at Barb hopefully. Sixty years old and she still ran the Boston Marathon every year. She had sold Abby her very first pair of shin guards back in the day. This woman was her hero. “You want the job?” Barb asked, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Seriously?”
    “Seriously,” Abby said. “I’ll fill out an application, I’ll give you references. Whatever you need.”
    “No application necessary,” Barb said with a smile. She tossed the Help Wanted sign in the trash can behind the counter. “You’re hired.”
    That evening Abby sat at the table in the catering kitchen with her mother and father, putting together the favors for that Saturday’s wedding. This week’s bride had wanted to donate money to her favorite charity in lieu of favors, while her groom’s mom had insisted that her friends deserved to go home with some little goody in their hands. In the end the family had ordered two hundred silver heart frames and now Abby and her parents were stuck placing cards into each of them that read, “A donation has been made in your name to the Free Cable Society.” Abby’s mom was cutting the cards into heart shapes using a template she’d made from the frame glass, her dad was using an eyeglass screwdriver to unscrew the tiny latch that held the backs of the frames in place, and Abby was removing all the paper inside, replacing it with the cards, then screwing the frames together again. They were going to do this two hundred times in a row.
    Two. Hundred. Times.
    “What’s the Free Cable Society, anyway?” Abby asked.
    “Damned if I know,” her father replied. “People for gratis HBO?”
    “Free cable car service in San Francisco?” her mom put in.
    “Or maybe they want liberation for all the cable-knit sweaters of the world,” her father continued.
    Both Abby’s parents laughed.
    “Okay, you guys scare me,” she said.
    “I bet not as much as the thought of thousands of sweaters roaming free and wild!”
    Abby smiled and struggled to slip the frame-back into the little slot cut in the metal. She was too nervous to get her fingers to work properly. She had