Bristol Palin was supposed to get married this holiday weekend. She was supposed to marry Dakota Meyer after a whirlwind courtship and engagement – reportedly, Bristol and Dakota met sometime late last year, got engaged in March and set the wedding date for May. It happened pretty fast – maybe too fast. Maybe it was so fast, Bristol only recently learned that Dakota had a brief starter marriage and his ex-wife has some issues about the way he treated her (and continues to treat her?). So, long story short, the wedding was canceled. We learned about that last week.

But there are still questions. What happened exactly? Did Bristol know about Dakota’s starter marriage? When did she know? Did Dakota learn something about the Palins? Was he too gun-happy around children? Did they call off the wedding because they were afraid of another Palin family brawl? One of the best questions was: why did Sarah Palin still insist that the two families were going to get together on the day of the now-canceled wedding to celebrate the couple? That question has particular importance because it looks like Bristol Palin didn’t even show up.

It looks like there was one very important person missing from Sarah Palin’s Memorial Day barbecue: daughter Bristol, who was supposed to get married this weekend. Bristol, 24, was set to wed U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer on Saturday but canceled the nuptials less than a week before the wedding was supposed to take place.

Onetime Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah, 51, told PEOPLE that the couple’s families would still gather at the would-be groom’s Kentucky farm – where the wedding was supposed to take place – to celebrate the holiday. But Bristol has been posting Instagrams of herself back home in Alaska.

[From People]

I’m including some of Bristol’s Instagrams below. She made sure people knew that she was nowhere near Kentucky, posting the photos with messages like “enjoying this beautiful weekend in AK.” She really wants to put the emphasis on the idea that she called off the wedding, that she wants no part of making it look like there are no hard feelings. It’s interesting. I would imagine there is A LOT more to this story besides “cold feet.” Oh, and there are Twitter photos from the BBQ and people are analyzing the heck out of one photo where it looks like Sarah Palin is yelling at Dakota – go here to see.

Here’s an interesting sidenote: the blonde woman in one of Bristol’s Alaska-roadtrip photos is Marina Lupas, described as an “exotic model/video vixen.” Um…

Photos courtesy of Instagram.