One Bride for Five Mountain Men

He instinctively took a sharp right turn and barely missed a slow-driving SUV. Fuck. I hope that’s not the paparazzi, he thought. I gotta get away from this shit. A laugh escaped his lips as he thought about wrecking a paparazzi truck. Especially the truck that belonged to this one paparazzo that he

was sick of.

Agitation coupled with frustration was driving him to a point where he felt claustrophobic every time he was in the room with his bandmates. They refused to work hard—or work at all—and as always, he knew that as the lead guitarist and the main songwriter, the onus was once again upon him to come up with a full album’s worth of hit songs.

The record label was pressuring him for new material, and their agent was burning up his ear with his own demands, but Arsen had struggled to come up with anything. His fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel as he thought of the countless deadlines.

Neon lights from the billboards flashed by the corners of his eyes as he took another swig from the bottle. Fuck. His throat burned and he realized that he hadn’t eaten anything all day or maybe for the last couple of days. Who could remember? Time and hunger ceased to matter when you were high all the time.

“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” Singing along with Sinatra, his voice automatically found the harmony after years of handling backup vocal duties.

I should find a hotel. Sign in under an anonymous name and spend a few days by myself. The plan seemed sound to him. Maybe that will finally help me get my groove back. Or maybe I should just check myself into a rehab.

Arsen had thought about that a few times, but then rejected the idea as it would’ve simply created a huge stir in the media and spread panic among the record company executives. As it was, the members of Insurrection had enough public scandals going on at any given time.

Lights flashed into his eyes from a car across the road and he squinted, barely able to see where he was heading. One last sip remained in the bottle and Arsen grabbed it tightly with an intention to finish it in one go.

As he lifted the bottle to his mouth, he saw something zip across the street, maybe a dog or a cat, about twenty yards away from where he was. Arsen brought down his foot heavily on the brakes, and the whiskey bottle went flying from his hand as he hurriedly turned the steering wheel.

The wheels of the car lost traction and Arsen felt was if he were driving on ice. The car veered sharply, there was a big bang, and Arsen felt a sudden impact on his face. Then it all went blank as Arsen Ford, the greatest guitar player of his generation, passed into blackness.

“I’ve lived a life that's full. I've traveled each and every highway,” Sinatra sang to the empty, dark street.

Chapter 2

A little over fifteen hours before…

Half her mind was still lost in last night’s hazy dream. The other half was struggling to make sense of the rapidly spoken words that was the voice on the other end of the phone. The dream had been fantastic, though she struggled to remember the details. But she knew how it felt. Happy. The voice yapping away on the phone, her mother’s in this case, was anything but.

As she always did when talking to her mother, Rory went on autopilot. Give her enough yeses, and she’ll be content. Not happy, of course, because her mother was rarely happy. And almost never when it involved matters concerning her elder daughter. Elder by a whole nine minutes.

“Yes, Mother. I got the dress in one piece.” Rory opened a single eye in response to the sharp sunlight that had invaded through a forgotten gap between two curtains. She hated bright light in the morning.

“Yes, Mother. I will try it on today.”

Her bedroom was comfortable. Not luxurious, but homey. The same drapes, cushions, and soft carpets from when she moved in, still adorned the place. She sneaked out a yawn, stretched her left arm, and took a glance at the hideously pink bridesmaid’s dress that lay listlessly over the chair by the large French window.

“Yes, Mother!” Rory was annoyed at being asked the same question again. How freakin’ dumb does she think I am? she wondered for the millionth time.

She swung her legs off the bed and rubbed her feet softly against the carpet, a habit she had developed as a kid. Her mind constantly looked for an opening to cut short this conversation with her mother. There was no getting up on the right side of the bed when her mother was the one giving the wakeup call. Mary Loughlin—wife, mother, tormentor.

Rory hated what she saw in the tall mirror that stood by the side of her bed. She had no proof other than her own two eyes, but she was pretty sure that she’d put on a few pounds in the last month or so; maybe from too many drinks on vacation. She sucked in her gut, pushed up her chest, and tightened her jaw. A long sigh left her mouth as she realized that this couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

Are starving artists allowed to put on weight? She chuckled to herself, the thought ending as she wondered whether she could even call herself an artist anymore. Artists created pieces of art, through which they made statements of eternal value. She, on the other hand, was designing T-shirts to make ends meet.

At least my ass looks good, Rory thought as she tilted her head sideways. She had no clue how she was going to fit into the bridesmaid’s dress in time.

She sat back on the bed with a thud and rubbed her temples. As it was, she was dreading going to this wedding, and now she had to worry about fitting in this stupid dress too. Lizzy, her closest friend in Montcove, had implored her to try it out, but Rory just couldn’t. The dress symbolized what her own family was—old-fashioned, boring and uncomfortable.

Speaking of boring and uncomfortable...

“Everything is fine here, Mother,” Rory answered absentmindedly as she picked up the dress from the table, her thoughts turning to gloom as she glanced at what lay underneath. Last notice for tax payments and the annual homeowners insurance bill for this enormous house that her grandmother had left her. For weeks she wondered if asking her parents for help would be a decent idea.

She knew the answer to that.

“No, Mother, I don’t need any help with anything, but thanks.” Rory couldn’t let her parents get a chance to prove their point—that their elder daughter wasn’t able to manage things on her own. Even if it meant that she’d risk losing this house. No handouts. Something will turn up, she told herself.

“Mother, I gotta go now, take care of the shop…Yes! That silly little bookshop of mine.” I’d like to have one conversation with her where I don’t end up shaking my head in frustration, she thought.