Adapted from The Avocado Grove Emily

It took fifteen bridal stores to find it.  Grizelda went to all of them. 

"Trust me, only you will be paying attention to what you're wearing," Grizelda said.

Her sister was right.  Everyone's biggest concern - where were Grizelda and Eddie? 

Ally looks at her dress tonight, a floral with way too many flowers (she thinks after the third beer).  And she drowns in a river of collected thoughts and mucks around in the flood in her mind.  How Grizelda turned into Grizzly, but Grizzly plays.  Ally toasts the group around her sister who are all huddled on Ally's front porch waiting for the rain to pass.  Eddie's voice is in her head, "Stay and party."  She finds shelter under an avocado tree in the horseshoe of land across from where everyone gathers and wishes the little field was miles away and she couldn't watch good times.  She brushes at the specks of dirt on her new dress.

Ally hears her twenty-something self say to Frank, "What was it about the beer?"  And she remembers it wasn't the beer it was the other things long ago Frank said, how Eddie got close to saying he was having trouble with Grizzly without saying Grizzly's name, and what it was like to curl her fingers in her husband's hand and believe she would never be like her sister.  Ally would never be alone at a block party while everyone else seemed paired up, grouped up, or in some way on top of things and having a good time, like Marianne and the circle of men around Marianne, and the butterfly tattoo on Marianne's shoulder that after this last beer seems more alive than anything and more colorful each second Ally looks at it.  And even Grizzly flies and with broken wings and this she knows cannot be true. 

Grizzly chats it up with an Eddie look- a-like; Eddie and Grizelda together again.  They join with everyone else at the block party.  They laugh at her too.  It must be the beer.  She reaches for another.

It slides down smooth and Ally is cool all over, cooler than anything and anyone.  Frank is here.  Her eyes drift up into his.  If she stays for a little while longer in the bright evening, the giant moon swallows all rational thought.  Everything is perfect and like it used to be.  She closes her eyes and dances with Frank in the sky.