The Less Than Perfect Wedding (16 page)

Hearing my voice, my sister twisted around, but didn't slow her struggles to break free. "Danielle! Why aren't you upset! There's the guy that cheated on you, and he isn't even bothering to hide it!"

I had expected my sister's version of the tale to be different; I often wondered what color the sky was in her little fantasy world. But this comment still seemed odd. I glanced towards the groom's side of the altar. Alex had taken a couple steps back to keep well out of range of my sister's wild swings, and was wearing a very confused look on his face. When I made eye contact with him, he shrugged his shoulders helplessly - he had no idea what was happening.

Next to him, Danny was also looking confused. Still on Danny's face, however, was a silly, stupid, ridiculous looking grin. I knew that grin well. That was the grin that Alex wore when he finally managed to get out of bed on a weekend, after I had woken up to him attempting to surreptitiously remove my clothing. That was the grin of a man who managed to sneak into the shower alongside me when I happened to be in a particularly good mood. In short, that was the grin of a man who had recently been laid.

I stepped up to Susan, praying that she would at least recognize me through her rose-tinted goggles. Fortunately, she managed to cease flailing about before clawing scratches into my face. I reached forward and grabbed her face between my palms. "Susan, I need you to listen carefully," I said, doing my best to keep my words slow and even.

Releasing my sister, I walked over to stand between Alex and Danny. I put my arms around Alex, one looping up over his shoulders while the other pressed against his warm chest. "This man?" I said. "This is the man that I'm marrying." I waved one hand disdainfully at Danny. "That man over there? That is his younger brother, and the best man."

For a long minute, I didn't think that Susan would understand this message, despite how clearly and bluntly I was attempting to present it. But finally, just as I was about to give up hope and consider ejecting her from the wedding, her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open into an 'O' of surprise. "The best man?" she repeated? "I only blew the best man?"

"Only?" Claire growled from behind her, and I saw my best friend's fingers tighten on my sister's arm.

"Yes, you didn't ruin the wedding at all," I jumped in before Claire decided to dislocate my sister's shoulder. "So now that everything is cleared up, can you please try to not cause any more drama during this wedding?"

Susan lowered her arms, finally relaxing. Claire and Judy cautiously released her, but as we all held our breath, she fortunately didn't rush forward, instead standing where she was. "Yeah, I won't bother Alex any more," she said to me. Her eyes were now on Danny.

"Thank you," I said with feeling, letting go of my fiance. I glanced over at Danny, on my other side, and noticed that he was still wearing that stupid grin. "Knock it off," I ordered him, whacking him in the arm with the flat of my hand.

At this moment, Sally came bustling up from whatever business she had been attending to. "All right, let's get on with this," she ordered, clapping her hands at us so that we all jumped to attention. "Bride? You're on the bench, pretending that you're still upstairs. Everyone else, to your places!"

We all dashed off, not willing to stay in place and be chastised by this diminutive but surprisingly aggressive woman. Alex hurried to stand at the front of the altar, gazing down at me from the height afforded to him by the steps. Even though he looked stressed, he still managed to shoot me a quick grin, and I beamed back at him. I couldn't wait to marry this man. And not just because it would mean that this wedding would be behind us.

Danny shuffled into place next to Alex, but he kept on leaning back, shooting gazes behind his brother's back towards Susan, at the other end of the line of bridesmaids. Claire stood next to Alex for the moment, her position as maid of honor putting her closest to me. Judy, beaming as always, stood at attention next to Claire, with my grumpy-looking mother and momentarily quiet sister filling out the far end of the line. Alex's parents took a seat in the first pew, sitting quietly together like two students waiting in school for an exam to begin. Bryan plopped down at the other end of the pew, putting his feet up as he lounged. Father Hemsley, who had been sitting at the back of the altar reading over his notes, stood up and scooted along in his robe to his place between Alex and Claire. He paused on his way up to swing his note-filled Bible at Bryan, connecting solidly with the layabout's ankle and making him sit up straighter and flash a hurt expression across his face.

Sally, standing down in front, nodded approvingly. "Good, you all know your places!" she approved. "Now, you'll stand there, the music will start up, and Danielle will be brought down the aisle by her father." She glanced around the nearly empty church. "Where is he, by the way?"

We all turned around. I had remembered seeing him here earlier, with Blossom, but now there was no sign of the man. "Late as usual, if he even bothered to show up at all," my mother sniffed before anyone could comment. "Probably up to no good with that whore of his-"

She was interrupted by the loud crash of the double doors that marked the entrance into the main hall of the church, shaking as something slammed into them. We all turned, but they had remained closed. "Damn," we heard a voice say from the other side, and then one of the doors was pulled open.

The Rehearsal, Part II

*

As we all stared, my father came stumbling into the church. He was leaning heavily on Blossom for support, and both of the pair couldn't seem to stop giggling.

"Don't worry! No worrying! We're here!" Blossom called, and then both she and my father dissolved into another fit of half-muffled laughter. They made it about halfway up the aisle before being forced to collapse into one of the church pews to catch their breath.

Standing up from my own seat in the front row, I headed down the aisle towards them. "What is wrong with-" I began, but as soon as I got within about five feet of the couple, I knew what was going on. Even from that distance, the smell of marijuana was overpowering; I feared that if I moved any closer, I'd find myself having to swim through it.

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed, waving my hands in a futile attempt to dissipate the stench. "You two are high!?"

"It's Saturday!" Blossom happily replied, as if this was meant to explain everything. My expression must have been enough to press her to elaborate. "Gotta celebrate the weekend! It makes you hungry for brunch!"

"Don't worry, we were smart!" my father added, raising one finger to tap at his nose and missing by several feet. "We waited until we were here to light up! Gotta drive safe!"

Sally was also advancing down the aisle, followed by Father Hemsley. They both made identical grimaces as they smelled the aromas circling my father and his mistress-turned-girlfriend. Father Hemsley muttered something under his breath. I wasn't a hundred percent positive, but I could have sworn that he commented something about "the Devil's lettuce."

I turned, lost and unsure, towards Sally. "There's no way that my father can rehearse like this," I said, hoping against hope that she would have some trick up her sleeve.

Unfortunately, Sally appeared just as thrown by this new turn of events as I felt. She reached up and stroked the black headset atop her head with one hand, though, and seemed to draw comfort from its presence. "Well, fortunately, your father doesn't have that tough of a job to do," she offered, attempting to swing back on track. "As long as he's in the right place to start, all he has to do is walk down the aisle and then take his seat. We can still run through the rest of the ceremony without him."

"Yeah, I can totally walk!" my father chimed in, supremely unhelpful. "Just gimme a second. Gotta get my weed legs back."

"Just stay there," I snapped at him over my shoulder as we headed back up to the front to continue running through the rehearsal. I caught a glimpse for an instant of the hurt expression on my father's face from this stinging remark, but I refused to allow myself to look back at him.

We resumed the walk-through of the ceremony, ignoring the giggles and occasional catcalls coming from my father in his seat at the back. Blossom, at least, had settled down on the pew beside her son. She remained fixed on the rehearsal as if it was a riveting play, leaning forward in her seat with her hands clasped, only occasionally letting out a giggle. Towards the edge of the stage, I could see my mother's face reddening in anger as she glared back across the church at my father, but Judy was rubbing her arm and whispering into her ear, somehow managing to keep her just barely under control for the moment.

I took my place at the front of the church, standing up on the altar next to Alex as the groomsmen fidgeted, Claire beamed, Danny and Susan inappropriately but silently flirted back and forth across the aisle, and Judy stroked my fuming mother's arm. Father Hemsley was muddling his way through the speech he had written for the occasion, but I was barely paying any attention. My eyes were on Alex as I was trying to imagine doing this the next day, wearing my white dress, about to pledge my devotion to him for the rest of my life. I couldn't wait.

Father Hemsley eventually wound to an end of his speech, and Sally once again took over the rehearsal. "Great, great." she cut in, snapping me back to the present moment. "At this point, rings. Best man, have you got those?"

We all turned to Danny, who eventually realized that we were waiting on him to act. "What?" he asked, dragging his eyes away from my sister with obvious effort.

"The rings," Alex prompted.

Danny continued to show off his blank expression for a moment longer, but then reached down and fiddled around inside his back pocket. "Yeah, I've got them," he said, pulling out a small brown envelope.

"No ring box?" I asked with just a touch of sarcasm.

Alex's younger brother didn't seem to notice. "Too clunky," he replied, his eyes already back on Susan.

Despite the distracted best man, Sally seemed to take the fact that he actually had the rings as win enough. "Great, and now the vows," she went on. "The two of you have your vows?"

My fiance reached up for his jacket pocket, paused, and then looked a little sheepish. "They're, uh, back home," he said. "I had to do some revisions, and I must have forgotten them." I sighed, wondering what Alex had needed to change.

"Well, at least I have mine," I chimed in, tapping my own pocket. Like a good wife-to-be, I had managed, somehow, to find time between all the other areas of wedding planning to compose enough words to make an attempt at summing up how I felt about the man standing in front of me. I had written most of my vows late at night, in fact, gazing down at Alex as he slept. I still didn't feel confident about the words being perfect, but I had sweated over them until I couldn't polish them any more, and I hoped that, after going through everything else with me, my words wouldn't be enough to scare Alex away.

"Yes, great, just remember them next time," Sally went on. I could tell that the poor, frazzled wedding planner was already looking forward to putting this entire disaster of a wedding in the past. "You recite the vows, kiss the bride, everyone claps, you head down the aisle-"

She paused, looking at us meaningfully. I was the first to get the hint, and I grabbed Alex's hand and dragged him down the steps and a few feet down the aisle towards the exit. "Everyone continues after you, pictures with the wedding party on the stairs, and then it's off to the reception," Sally finished. "Not so hard, right?"

"I got something that's hard!" we heard my father faintly call from the back of the church. We glanced up - I had to admit that I had forgotten that he and Blossom were still there. He had managed to get back on his feet, and was now shakily making his way up towards the rest of us.

"I can't wait for you two to be married," he continued, reaching the open space in front of the pews. "Although maybe the two of you don't need to be married, you know? What is love, anyway? It doesn't need to have some paper to prove it!" He sidled forward, put out his arm in an attempt to nudge Alex, but missed, due to the fact that he underestimated the distance and was still at least five feet away from my helpless fiance. "'Sides, marriage just makes her angry in the end," he confided to nobody in particular.

My father still had his mouth open, looking to say something else, but in a blur of motion, my mother dove across the stage. In an impressive tackle, she brought him to the ground, landing on top of him on the church carpet.