The Less Than Perfect Wedding (18 page)

As soon as we were inside, however, I could immediately hear yelling echoing up from the main chamber. I turned on Sally as she tried to physically push me up the stairs towards my dressing and prep room. "Sally, what's going on?" I demanded. "What's happening?"

Before my overwhelmed wedding planner could answer, however, we were interrupted by Claire, dashing up the stairs and looking as flustered as I'd ever seen her. "Oh, hey, Danielle," she said, skidding to a stop and risking a quick glance over her shoulder. "Um, how is getting ready for your wedding going?"

"Claire, what's going on?" I shouted at her.

Claire shot another look over her shoulder, back towards the main area of the church. "Things may have fallen apart, ever so slightly," she said after a moment.

Sally was still trying to push me the rest of the way up the stairs, but I planted my feet, clamped down one hand onto the banister as hard as I could hold, and fixed my gaze on my best friend. "Explain," I ordered her. And Claire started to talk. As she went on, my jaw slowly dropped. Eventually, I felt my legs going out from under me, and took a seat down on the hard, cold stone steps as I listened in horror to how my wedding was falling apart.

Apparently, ever since they had seen each other the day before at the rehearsal, Susan and Danny hadn't been able to keep their hands off of each other. The two of them had arrived together at the church this morning, and had immediately set about making a scene in front of everyone. From making out in the pews to trying to sneak into the back kitchen, traumatizing the caterers who were trying to get set up for the luncheon that would follow the wedding ceremony, they were making everyone feel quite uncomfortable.

While this had been rather frustrating, it hadn't managed to derail the whole wedding yet. No, Claire explained, that had come when, while searching for a slightly more private place where they could do terrible things to each other, Susan and Danny had managed to pull open the sticky door to the broom closet, right off of the main chamber of the church - and Rick and Blossom had all but fallen out, both of them completely naked and wrapped around each other.

"I guess love is really in the air," Claire cracked at this point, trying to salvage this story into a joke of some sort. I glared at her, rubbing my fingers against my forehead and completely ignoring Sally's gasp over possibly messing up my fingernails. Before Claire could keep talking, however, Sally looped her hands under my armpits and physically hauled me upright.

"Look, it will all be fine," she insisted as she tugged on me. "But you know what won't be fine? If you aren't in your dress in time for your own wedding! Now come on, we have to get upstairs and you have to get dressed!"

Reluctantly, I gave in to my wedding planner's insistence, but I also grabbed Claire's wrist and hung on as tightly as I could. "You're coming with me," I stated. "And keep talking."

Claire gave one last glance over her shoulder, flexing her arm slightly as if testing to see whether she could escape my grasp, but I made sure that I was holding on as tightly as possible. With a gulp, she continued sharing the morning's events.

To make matters worse, Susan and Danny hadn't been the only people present when they had discovered my father and his mistress getting busy - my mother had also been passing by (ironically, she had been complaining about how there was far too little romance in the air when the door had opened). Upon seeing what my father was doing, my mother flew off the deep end, and had charged towards him, screaming bloody murder and swinging at him with the nearest object she could get her hands on.

This object happened to be my mother's bouquet of flowers, the one that she was supposed to hold as a bridesmaid in the ceremony. Fortunately, the flowers didn't even have thorns, and thus caused little damage to my father as he scrambled to get up from the floor and cover up his nakedness. Unfortunately, my mother's frenzied swings had reduced the flower bouquet down to little more than a small, shredded pile of leaves and petals, and upon realizing that her weapon was fairly ineffectual, my mother had resorted to kicking instead, which had proved much more effective.

Finally, my father and Blossom had both managed to get up off the floor and pull enough of their clothing out of the coat closet to cover themselves up. At this point, my mother decided that she should switch over to verbal assault, and had begun screaming bloody murder at my dad, refusing to let him get a word in edgewise. "You are ruining this wedding!" my mother had screamed, throwing the sad remainder of her bouquet into my father's face. "You should just get out, and never show your face again!"

After a few minutes of this, however, my father had had enough. "If you want me to leave, then I'll leave!" he had finally thundered, overwhelming and cutting off my mother through sheer, wall-shaking volume. "But if I'm leaving, then I'm also taking my money with me! I refuse to pay for a wedding that I'm not a part of, where I'm not welcome!" And dragging a rather confused looking Blossom behind him, my father had stormed out of the church, with my mother still yelling even more obscenities after him.

As Claire had continued talking, Sally had managed to get me the rest of the way upstairs and into my changing room, and most of my clothes were off by this point. The dress was currently on the floor, halfway up to my waist, and Sally was still darting around me trying to get it the rest of the way on, even without my assistance. When Claire reached this point in her recounting of the morning's events, however, I sank down slowly onto the floor, landing in a heap of white gauze and fluffy silk.

In the mirror on the wall, I saw Sally throw up her hands helplessly behind me. Claire, on the other hand, carefully lowered herself down to her knees, taking care not to tear or rub her bridesmaid's dress against the floor too much. "Look, it's going to be okay," she said in a quieter tone, reaching out and patting my bare shoulder.

"It isn't," I stated, not making eye contact with her, already feeling the tears welling up, threatening to come pouring out and ruin my perfectly composed makeup. "It's ruined, just as I knew that it would be." I could have sworn that the room itself was darkening.

"No, it isn't!" Claire insisted. "Look, I sent Alex out to go try and track down Rick and Blossom, and I also sent Danny with him, so that he wouldn't be around your sister to cause any more trouble. Judy's watching your mother, and I've put Bryan on guard duty, since he's too lazy to desert his post. I think that if we take some of the flowers from all of the other bridesmaid's bouquets, we can make enough of one for Janice to hold, and it will look good enough for the pictures."

I shook my head. "It's more than just that," I choked out. I tried to reach up and flick the beads of water out of the corners of my eyes without disturbing my makeup too much. "This is the first time that our families are together, and even when it's for the most important event in my life, they still can't set aside all of their squabbles and pettiness for even a couple hours! They'll never be able to get along, ever again!"

Claire sighed. "To be honest, I don't think that your family can think about anyone besides themselves for more than fifteen minutes, so I'm pretty sure that this would have happened no matter what," she confessed. "They're just all too reactive. Around one or two other family members, they can kind of control themselves for a little while, but putting them all in one spot is basically a guaranteed disaster."

I tried to pull in a deep breath, choking slightly as I forced my lungs to stop jerking from the crying and to instead take in the air. Using my hands, I inelegantly pushed myself up to my feet, the dress sagging down to hang around my waist. Continuing to suck in deep breaths to hold back the tears, I turned around to face Claire and Sally.

"Do you think that I could have a few minutes?" I asked them, trying to straighten the dress sitting around my hips. "Just so that I could pull myself together?"

Sally started to open her mouth, looking as though she wanted to protest, but Claire scrambled to her feet and grabbed my wedding planner with both hands. "Of course, take all the time you need," she told me, turning Sally by the shoulders and marching her out of the room. "When you're ready, just stick your head out and call, and we'll be right there."

"But what about-" I heard Sally start, as Claire forced her out the door, but Claire shushed her.

"The poor girl's having a breakdown!" I caught Claire saying. "Give her a few minutes to get a grip! She's the bride - I think that the ceremony can wait a minute or two for her."

"Thank you," I called after them, and then pushed the door shut behind them.

As soon as the door was closed, I immediately jumped into action. I yanked the dress down, pulling it off to my waist and turning around, searching for the street clothes that I had worn into this room. Unfortunately, they weren't where I had set them, on the chair. I cursed violently. Claire was a step ahead of me! She must have grabbed them on the way out, sensing that I was considering making an escape and trying to prevent me from running. Instead, I was forced to stick with the wedding dress, as well as the tall heels that accompanied it.

Once dressed again in my wedding gown (which I now noticed was, although pretty, not very suited to running away), I peered around the room. Claire and Sally had left through the only door, and I wouldn't put it past Sally to be waiting immediately outside for me to say that I was all right, so that she could try and keep everything going according to her schedule.

But everything wasn't all right. It had all gone wrong, just as I had known, and I couldn't even handle trying to keep things together any more. I was done, and I was not going to stick around and watch things crash and burn any more.

*

Turning slowly in a circle, I spotted the window on the other side of the room. Aha! I quickly crossed over to it and hoisted it open, cringing as it let out a loud squeal of protest as I forced the old, sticky wood.

Despite its complaints, the window opened for me, and I stuck my head out and looked around. This was on the side of the church, and there didn't look to be anyone around who would spot my escape. There was a rather convenient drainpipe nearby, bolted onto the wall with regular U-rings that looked stable enough to hold my weight, and the ground below was covered in bushes that would hopefully be enough to break my fall if I slipped.

Fortunately, Claire had at least left me my purse. I tossed it out of the window, watching it land with a thump in a rose bush below. It didn't seem that far down, I thought. I carefully lifted my leg, pushing down the annoyingly frilly dress to try and see where my foot was about to land. Moving very slowly, I transferred my body from the inside to the outside of the window.

I reached across and grasped the drainpipe. Holding my breath, I let go of the windowsill, trusting the metal pipe with my weight. It seemed to hold, so I wasted no more time. I lowered myself carefully, being sure to test my weight on each bracket before trusting it to fully support me.

Despite the sturdiness of the drainpipe, I breathed a fervent sigh of relief when my feet finally touched the ground. The dirt below the window was soft and spongy, and my shoes immediately sank into the soft mulch all the way to the heel. When I tried to take a step forward, I nearly pitched face first into a rosebush.

Doing my best to keep my curses muffled, should any passerby wonder why the flowers had gained the ability to swear like a sailor, I struggled to escape. After a few minutes' futile effort, I gave up on the shoes, slipping my bare feet out of them and leaving them behind. I wrenched my purse out of the rose bush and tucked it under one arm.

Wincing as my exposed feet managed to encounter every sharp stick and rock on the ground as I walked, I crept behind the bushes, circling the church and hugging the wall to stay out of sight. The wall was leaving dirt and other stains on my dress, but it was already covered in several marks from the drainpipe and dragging across the dirt on the ground, so I didn't care too much any more. After making it around the corner, I realized that I was near the back parking lot. I hadn't known where I was trying to run away to, but I figured that a vehicle would help me get there a lot faster than on my bare feet. Of course, I didn't have any car keys, but as I dashed across the dew-soaked grass towards the asphalt of the parking lot, feeling a little silly as I held up the front of my dress so that I could run, I prayed that somebody would be getting into or out of their car and would be willing to give me a lift. Or maybe one of my more forgetful elderly relatives had forgotten their keys in the lock.

The sun was reflecting brightly off the parked cars when I reached the lot, but I couldn't see any movement. I squinted around, bouncing lightly on my feet as I tried to prevent the rough surface of the tarmac from scratching up my toes. Faintly, from the far end of the lot, I could hear the sputtering sound of someone trying to turn over a car engine. Salvation!

I hurried down the lanes of cars, most likely looking ridiculous as I high-stepped to avoid dragging my bare feet over the rough surface. At the far end of the lot, I spotted the car - a black Lincoln town car. I could faintly hear a male voice cursing inside as the engine complained, stubbornly refusing to turn over.

I ran up on the passenger's side, my hand grabbing for the handle. The door was unlocked, and I wrenched the door open, slid inside, and pulled it shut behind me in a single motion. Parts of my dress were probably caught in the door, now, but I was beyond caring about it at all now. "You have to get me out of here!" I said, turning towards the driver.