KENDALL STOOD ABOVE the hole in the ground that her best friends, Tina and Ellie, had dug, and she sniffled as she held her wedding dress against her chest. On any other day she would have been completely embarrassed that a woman had just seen her standing in a public park in a black dress that made her feel like she was drowning in tulle, but she was too consumed with her own grief this evening to care.
“I don’t know if I can part with it,” she said softly, holding the dress even tighter against her. Tears spilled down her cheeks and dribbled off her chin.
“Yes, you can,” Ellie said. “Tina and I will help you.” Ellie bent over (her skintight dress almost ripping straight up the seam) and dropped the bottom of Kendall’s wedding gown into the ground. “There. See?” she said. “It’s not that bad.”
Kendall stared down into the hole at the beautiful white dress, now covered in dirt, and started to lose it again.
How could he have done this? . . . To her? She knew it was ridiculous, to think this last part. No one was immune to being dumped. But in her twenty-eight years, it had seemed like she might be the exception.
It was because she was beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful everyone aspired to be. Kendall had always envied girls who were just the right dose of pretty. She had a friend growing up who was like this. Joanna Jones. Joanna always had girls flocking to her for beauty and lifestyle tips. Boys asked her out constantly. Even jobs seemed to fall easily into her lap later in life. (It didn’t seem right that the workforce worked this way, but it did seem to work this way.)
Kendall was too beautiful. Which was like being too skinny. Or too anything, really. It was more of a hindrance than a blessing. Not that she could complain about this to anyone. No one wanted to hear a pretty woman complain about her looks! But if she could, this was what she would tell them: She’d had to be extra nice to women all her life because they automatically assumed she wasn’t a nice person. (Where on earth this stereotype came from she had no idea. Were most pretty women really not nice? Or did jealousy cause people to not treat them nicely, as her mother had once suggested, and then they were rude in return?)
She’d always had to ask boys out herself.
“I thought you’d never say yes,” one boyfriend admitted when she asked why he didn’t approach her if he thought she was cute.
And when applying to jobs she’d had to work hard to prove she wasn’t just a “dumb blonde.” Once, she’d been in the running for a marketing position at a top company in Seattle and had spent weeks preparing for her interview. She researched all about the company’s previous clients. She called a friend who used to work there to ask if she had any insight into potential interview questions Kendall might be asked. And even though she hated the fact that she felt she had to do this, she went shopping for a suit that wasn’t too flattering, but looked “nice enough” so there would be no mistaking she was at that interview to be taken seriously for her brains, not her beauty.
She’d been thrilled when she made it through the first round of interviews, but before her second interview, as she waited outside the CEO’s office to be called in, she overheard him telling a colleague that he was concerned she might just be a “pretty face.”
Kendall had stood up and walked right out. All her hard work had felt like such a waste of time. She wouldn’t work for someone who spoke about women like that.
But guys did not break up with girls who were too beautiful. At least in her experience. Until now.
“This was what you wanted,” Ellie reminded her, wrapping her arm around Kendall’s shoulders and pulling her in toward her busty chest.
“I know,” Kendall sniffed. “I know.”
She did want to bury the dress. She’d seen Tina and Ellie bury mementoes from failed relationships so many times. She’d heard them describe the relief. She’d assumed it would provide relief. That was why she had started this mock-funeral tradition back when they were all in high school.
Ellie had been going through her first serious heartbreak the summer of their sophomore year. “I want a box,” Ellie had said. “I want to put Tyler in a box and never open it up again.”
“That’s exactly how I felt after Henry broke up with me last year,” Tina had chimed in. They had all been at Ellie’s house, watching Sleepless in Seattle and eating ice cream right out of the carton in her living room.
Kendall had felt so useless. She’d been happily dating Joey Manning, a junior football star, whom she later amicably broke up with at the end of his senior year right before he went off to college. At the time, she couldn’t empathize with Ellie the way Tina could. And she was a doer. She didn’t like to feel useless! Especially when it came to helping her friends. Tina and Ellie were such good friends. They’d fully embraced her for who she was when they met at high school orientation, and they weren’t the least bit intimidated or jealous of her beauty. “Maybe a bit of your good looks will rub off on me,” Ellie had once remarked playfully.
“What if we did box him up?” Kendall remembered saying.
The girls had given her puzzled looks.
“Humor me, okay?” she said.
She made Ellie gather all the mementoes from her relationship with Tyler, then drove the three of them to Goodwill and had the girls wait in the car while she rushed in and picked out the most ridiculous black dresses she could find.
“What are these for?” Tina and Ellie had asked when she returned with them.
“To wear to Tyler’s funeral,” she replied excitedly.
She grabbed a shovel from a hardware store next and then drove to a local park, where she dug a hole in the ground and had Ellie bury all of Tyler’s stuff underneath a starlit sky.
While the funerals had obviously started as a joke, over the years, Ellie, who ended up becoming a therapist, had become convinced that they truly were the best way to deal with a broken heart, and when Kendall called her and told her what had happened, Ellie insisted that she have a funeral right away.
“So, what’s the problem?” Ellie said. “Are you thinking now you’d rather return the dress than bury it? That’s totally understandable. We can just bury the other small reminders of your relationship that you brought.”
“No, that’s not it,” Kendall said. “It was only a couple hundred bucks and it’s too late to return it.”
She’d found it online months ago. It wasn’t a wedding dress, just a stylish white dress that she had picked because she thought it would be perfect for the small ceremony. Kendall’s parents couldn’t afford to give her an extravagant wedding, so she and her Ex (Ellie had already reminded her twice to never speak or think of his name again. “He’s dead to us!” she told her in the car ride over) had kept their guest list to fifty people and planned to host the ceremony and reception under heated tents in the spacious grassy backyard of the house her former fiancé grew up in to save money on the venue.
“What’s the reason then?” Ellie asked.
Kendall blinked back tears. “It’s just that I don’t want to accept that it’s really over. I keep hoping he’s going to have a change of heart and call me to tell me he just had cold feet and that this whole thing was a mistake.”
Her Ex’s decision to jilt her didn’t make any sense. Just a week earlier they’d looked at houses together with a real estate agent in Seattle, where the two of them lived.
That afternoon, her Ex had pinched her as they stood in the spacious kitchen of the sunny yellow house in Fremont that the two of them liked best and said, “I couldn’t be happier, you know that?”
“Me either,” Kendall said, wrapping her arm around him.
There had been no signs.
She believed it was called ghosting, what he’d done. She’d heard friends at work use the term when describing what happened when men they’d been happily seeing suddenly disappeared from their lives without explanations. Kendall had always thought it sounded so horrible. She couldn’t believe men did such things! Now it had happened to her. The day before her wedding. Maybe this was karma for having escaped heartbreak her entire life.
She bet girlfriends from all walks of her life would see it this way—not Tina and Ellie, of course, or any of her true friends. But the former sorority sisters at UW who Kendall had seemed to upset when she dated one of the senior fraternity presidents her freshman year. And her single, female co-workers at Amazon, who had all been pining over her Ex his first day at the office, only to find out the next day that he’d asked Kendall out that morning. She’d heard several of them in the bathroom that afternoon talking about it. “Of course, he picked her. Every guy would probably want to date me too if I looked like that. Lucky bitch!”
Would they silently gloat when she changed her Facebook status from engaged to single?
Even if she never shared the details, everyone would know that Kendall had been the one who had been dumped because she’d been head-over-heels since the very beginning of the relationship. That was the only reason she agreed to go out with the man. She’d promised herself she wasn’t going to date anyone the year they had met. No boys! No distractions! A year for me. To find myself.
She had needed to find herself. She was twenty-eight, but she had no idea what made her really tick. Or what was most exciting to her about getting up in the morning. But then, one electric moment in an elevator changed that plan. Had her Ex sensed that he was marrying a woman who didn’t truly know who she was yet? Was that what this was about?
“But that’s why we’re out here,” Ellie said, pulling her back to the task at hand. “So that you do accept that this is really over. Acceptance is the first step to getting over the depression this breakup is bound to put you in.”
“Oh please, enough of the therapist mumbo-jumbo,” Tina said, jumping into the conversation. Her black bobbed hair blew furiously in the wind. “Why don’t we just call this whole thing off, and I’ll go find the prick. I swear if I ever see him again I will beat his—”
“Tina!” Ellie cut her off, flashing a look of disapproval. “You know the rules. This is a memorial. We are saying goodbye. No bad feelings. Be respectful of Kendall. This was her fiancé for God’s sake.”
“He just stood up my best friend the day before her wedding, and you expect me to do nothing?”
“What’s the point?” Ellie said, gesturing toward the ground. “He’s already ‘dead.’ We know once a man leaves, there is no hope for a resurrection. The relationship is over, Tina. Let’s help Kendall put it to rest.”
“Well, I would certainly feel better if I could let him know what would happen if he ever chose to miraculously rise up from his grave.” Tina pounded her fist in her hand.
“Do I need to remind you how supportive we all were at your last funeral when we buried your Ex?” Ellie countered. “Better to put Kendall’s reminders of the relationship under the ground now, so she can move on.” She nodded toward the hole they had dug. “Come on now, Kendall. Let’s do this.”
Kendall drew in a deep breath and with the help of Ellie, laid the dress to rest. Ellie patted Kendall’s back when she started to cry again.
“Sweetie, it’s going to be okay,” Ellie said. “You will find love again. I promise. I had to bury ten men before I met Saul.”
“We know,” sighed Tina flippantly. “We were there.”
Kendall proceeded to toss the rest of her reminders of the relationship into the hole—the pictures she had of the two of them together that she had kept in her wallet, the few ivory-and-black wedding announcements she’d brought in her suitcase, the heart-shaped Tiffany’s necklace she’d received as a one-year anniversary gift—and when she was finished, Ellie picked up the shovel and started to cover all of it up.
Kendall stood beside Tina and watched. Her whole body was shaking from the cold, the shock, the events of the past six hours, and she suddenly wished she had a warm jacket on instead of this ridiculous $11.99-thrift-store dress that Ellie had picked up right before the ceremony and insisted she wear.
“Black dresses are part of the tradition,” Ellie had said when Kendall protested about wearing it. The dresses they usually wore for such occasions were hanging up in their closets at the house in Seattle they all lived in together. “It’ll help you heal faster if you put it on, Kendall.” So, Kendall had.
When Ellie was finished covering the grave, she yanked a tissue out of her purse and brought it over to Kendall.
“All right,” she said. “We’re almost done. This is almost over.”
Almost over. What an understatement. The funeral might have been almost over, but the grieving process had just begun. There would be long sleepless nights, unexpected tears when she went to places the two of them had frequented together, an almost unbearable void in her life. Not to mention the walk of shame when she went back to work. Talk about fodder for the coffee room! She couldn’t think of that just yet.
Kendall cleared her throat, knowing it was her turn to speak. To close each of these mock-funerals, the heartbroken woman recited a one-line eulogy. It was the same line every time, a quote from Tennyson, but Kendall wasn’t sure she could get it out.
“You can do this,” Ellie encouraged her.
Kendall whimpered. “I’m not sure that I can.”
“Just try,” Ellie said.
Kendall blotted her eyes with the tissue and then tried to muster up the strength.
“It’s better to have loved and lost,” she started before choking up. Her tangled blond hair blew out of the loose bun it was in and flew in a million different directions like it was pummeling fate for what had happened, wanting to blame something, someone.
“Give it one more try,” Ellie encouraged, resting her hand on the small of Kendall’s back.
Kendall closed her eyes. “It’s better to have loved and lost,” she began again, “than to never have loved at all.” The words tasted bitter, and she bent over, wanting to vomit.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ellie said, trying to reassure her.
Kendall knew that Ellie was right—eventually she would recover—but right now, her heart ached with what could have been.
A couple of minutes later, Tina bent down and handed Kendall the flowers that the girls had brought to put on top of the grave. Pink peonies. Just like the ones that were supposed to be the center of Kendall’s wedding bouquet. Kendall laid them on top of the mound on the ground and broke down again.
She stayed there, crouched down, for what felt like forever, and then her friends helped her up to her feet.
“Come on,” Ellie said. “I noticed there’s a dessert restaurant right up the street. Let’s go get some cake.”
Kendall nodded, keeping her eyes on the grave as her friends helped her hobble to the car, knowing that her relationship was really over and wishing, more than anything, that that wasn’t the case.