As Cheryl and Dana continue to plan for the wedding, and Ryan continues to wonder if he can take it any more, Jim steps up to offer his advice. “There is always a way out”, he says, and truer words have never been spoken. So when Cheryl and Dana start to talk about the wedding dress, Ryan pretends to get a page from the hospital, and he’s out the door before they can think twice. Jim has him in his grasp now.
While Andy is busy reading the bride magazines, Cheryl offers Dana her own wedding dress, which she happily accepts. There’s just one problem: Jim and Andy were so busy celebrating the Bull’s run in the playoffs back in 1991 that they forgot to get the dress preserved, and when the riots in Chicago began after the bulls won the championship, the dress was in Jim’s trunk. Jim’s car was one of those that was torched that night, and the dress was burned. The only thing in the box are ashes. He has to think quick so that Cheryl doesn’t find out that he’s been lying about it all these years.
The first approach is to talk to Dana and get her to realize that it’s her wedding, and that she doesn’t need Cheryl trying to barge in on her and force her tastes on her, and she certainly doesn’t need a hand-me-down wedding dress that is 10 years old. That seems to work, so Jim and Andy set in on Cheryl, and get her to not want to give her dress to the ungrateful Dana. Everything is going along well until Ryan needs to get out of dress shopping. When he sees Jim’s disembodied head saying “There is always a way out”, he tells Dana that Cheryl was just trying to help, and they really need to make up. Pleased with himself, they go back to the house, but that puts Jim (and Andy) back into the hot seat.
This time he doesn’t know what to do, so Jim heads up to the attic, and while he’s sitting on the roof with the dress box, crying because he doesn’t know how he’s going to get it, Cheryl comes out to find out what is keeping him. There she thinks he is upset because he doesn’t want someone else wearing her dress, that it will make things less special, and suddenly he has found the way out, so he runs with it, and everyone is happy – until Ruby comes downstairs and says she’d like to wear her mom’s wedding dress. But that is a ways off, so there’s time for him to think of another way out by then.
