Total pages in book: 159
Estimated words: 149470 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 747(@200wpm)___ 598(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149470 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 747(@200wpm)___ 598(@250wpm)___ 498(@300wpm)
When you added in the flowers, the lighting, the refreshments for the dogs— which were being catered by the Pampered Pooch Café—as well as the refreshments for the human guests, which were being catered by someplace else, it all added up to a crazy amount. I knew because I helped my Aunt “keep her finances in order” so I had seen all the receipts.
So yeah—I wasn’t holding my breath that my Great Aunt would put me in her will and leave me independently wealthy. What with the designer doggy wardrobe and the canine nuptials I would be helping with, she was burning through her income as fast as possible. And me? Well, I was just trying to make ends meet until I could find another full-time job at a library with more stable hours. And in the meantime, I was going to get Princess Prissy from the groomers for her “big day.”
Thinking that this was going to be interesting to say the least, I drove my ancient Honda Civic over to The Pawfectionist—Prissy’s groomer.
The Pawfectionist—“small dogs our specialty”—was a free-standing building with a candy pink awning out front. The awning had pictures of cute little dogs in tiny tubs taking bubble baths and wearing shower caps and basically looking perfectly adorable. A sign in the window read, “By appointment only—no walk-ins please.”
It was the kind of place that charges you two hundred dollars to wash your dog and trim its toenails—a fee that Aunt Maizy happily paid because she said they did “such a good job on my babies” as she called her dogs. Most of them went there weekly and she had about seven of them, so you can bet the grooming fees added up.
But I wasn’t the one footing the bill—I was just there to get the dog. It wasn’t lost on me that my Great Aunt’s Pomeranian was getting married when I myself was unable to get my fiancé to set a date. Don always put me off, saying that he was too busy or too tired to talk about “logistics” of our own big day whenever I asked, so for the past year, I had mostly stopped asking.
This hadn’t stopped my mom from asking me about when I was going to get married, however. She wanted to see me all “settled and happy,” like my older sister, Taylor.
I love my older sister, but she’s kind of perfect, which makes it really hard to live up to the example she’s setting. She’s the CEO of her own company which makes energy drinks for women. Because, as Taylor says, “it’s such a male dominated market that we need a female-based product to even the balance.”
Her company is called “Kombucha Zoom!!!” and their marketing is all about empowerment and female success and self-actualization. I’ve tasted the energy drinks and they’re not half bad, if you don’t mind a medicinal aftertaste, which I guess the target demographic doesn’t, since they’re selling like crazy. Taylor was even approached by the Head of Acquisitions from Pepsi, who might want to buy the brand and take it national.
In addition to that, my big sister has an adoring husband named James who’s “in finance” as he says, and two perfect twin boys named Ansell and Ashton, which seems kind of mean since hanging monikers like that on kids is just asking to get them bullied. At least in my opinion.
So yeah—my big sis is doing okay for herself and I’m sure my mom would have liked to see me doing as well as she was. But since I lacked Taylor’s entrepreneurial spirit, (and also her five-foot nine willowy frame and long blonde hair,) it wasn’t going to happen.
While Taylor was a natural leader, I was always the quiet, chubby kid who would rather sit in a corner and read a book. I made excellent grades in anything English or language arts related and barely scraped by in any kind of math. So starting my own business was out of the question.
Which was probably why I was single and scooping doggy poo as my side gig instead of happily married to a gorgeous husband with two perfect children while single-handedly running my own company. Sorry, Mom.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that my life at that moment was not going as planned. Not that I planned to be abducted by aliens. But I digress—back to Prissy, the Pomeranian bride-to-be.
I pushed open the door of The Pawfectionist, which smelled like a mixture of wet dog and fancy floral spray, and gritted my teeth against the Yip-yip-yip! of their front doorbell. Instead of a regular bell to let them know when clients arrived, they had some kind of programmable thing. So of course the owner thought it would be cute to make the bell sound a tiny dog barking and the shrill sound always set my teeth on edge.