The Wedding Dress Yes (Crossroads Collection)

by Amanda Tru

  Hi there, it’s me, Woong.

  Mom says that even though it’s summer, I’ve got to practice my writing and a few other subjects. I told her I could learn all that when school starts again next fall, but she said the best way for me to stay out of trouble and be ready for the next school year is to do summer assignments. So I have workbooks and math and a reading list with eight different books on it. Mom doesn’t homeschool me anymore, at least not during the regular school year, but she still reads all these homeschooling blogs, and one of them said that kids need to write for half an hour every single day, and that’s what she’s told me to do.

  A full half hour of writing, even in the summer. Can you believe it? I think it’s an abomination if you ask me.

  I asked Mom what she wants me to write about, and she was all like, “You can write whatever you want, baby.” (Yes, she still calls me that even though I hate it.) Then she said, “The important thing is to just write what’s on your mind.” She says it’s good practice, but I don’t know that I believe her. I mean, what does she think’ll happen if I stop writing for a few months? Will I forget how to spell and use apostrophes?

  Oh, well. Sometimes you just do what Mom says because she tells you to do it. That’s what Dad’s always telling me anyway. He’s a pastor, in case you didn’t know, which makes me a pastor’s kid, and I guess some people think that pastors’ kids end up with these really bad reputations because their parents don’t let them do anything fun. But so far, I haven’t gone through a rebellious phase yet. Those were Mom’s words, by the way, not mine. She was talking to her sister about how she’s a little worried I haven’t hit my growth spurt yet, but maybe it’s a good thing I still haven’t gone through puberty because I haven’t gone through a rebellious phase.

  Have I told you about my aunt? She makes wedding dresses, which I guess is an all right job if you’re into that sort of stuff and nonsense. I think it’d be a little boring. I’ve actually never met Aunt Rhonda, but Mom tells me about her sometimes. (Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I’m not entirely sure the two of them get along so well.) Some of that might be on account of some folks in Mom’s family being mad at her because of who she chose to marry. See, if you didn’t know them, you might think my parents are just like other parents around here, but they’re not. They’re really old. Like, they have a bunch of grandkids. And my dad was alive when Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive. He even remembers that real famous speech he gave.

  So since my parents are so old, they come from that time when white folks and black folks weren’t supposed to date or fall in love or get married or stuff and nonsense like that, so some of Mom’s side of the family stopped talking to her when she got herself married to dad. But that was so long ago I don’t think they care now who she’s married to, but I’ve still never met my aunt, which is all I meant to tell you from the beginning.

  That’s all I can think of to say right now. I kind of wish Mom didn’t give me these school assignments all summer long. A year after I was adopted, she kept me out of school for a year, so I could do homeschool, because I was behind in certain subjects. I’m all caught up now that my English has gotten so good, but she still makes me do learning through the summer. She and Dad don’t have a lot of extra money lying around on account of him being a pastor and all, so Mom says the only way I can go to college without having to get into a lot of debt is if I work really hard now to get some scholarships. And the only way to get scholarships, she says, is to write a bunch of essays explaining why you’re good at school and stuff. So that’s why she has me practicing now.

  It could be worse, I guess. I’m not entirely sure how, but I’m sure it could.

  Did I mention today’s the first day of summer? I think it might be kind of a long one. Oh, well. There’s my timer, which means I’m all done for writing today.

  Talk to you later!

  Woong

  Second day of summer. And Mom’s still making me do my half hour of writing every day. She says I’ll get used to it before too long, but I’m not entirely sure how. When I asked her what I’m supposed to write about, she said I should talk about what I want to do this summer. Well, that’s pretty easy. I want to do my Wii (because Mom and Dad don’t have money to get me a PlayStation), and I want to go to the ice-skating rink with my best friend Becky Linklater because she’s going to teach me how to skate backwards.

  Other than that, I’d like to try to avoid too many homework assignments. One nice thing about when Mom homeschooled me for that year was that I got to sleep in, but now she’s making me get up early to get my room cleaned up on account of me leaving it pretty messy lately, so now I’m doing homeschool in the summer plus I’m waking up just as early as I did during the school year.

  It's an abomination if you ask me. A real abomination.

  So I’ve written now about what I want to do this summer, but my time still isn’t up, so I’ll just have to think of other things to say. I’d ask Mom for ideas, but she’s on the phone with Aunt Rhonda again. They’ve been talking a lot lately, which I guess you might expect seeing as how they’re sisters and all, but Mom and Aunt Rhonda don’t usually talk so much.

  I think I know what’s going on, though. See, Mom and Dad had their anniversary last spring, but they were both really busy with church and stuff and nonsense like that, so they didn’t get to do anything fun to celebrate. So they’re planning something this summer, and my mom’s idea of fun is inviting all the relatives over (that’s like a hundred people, and I’m not even exaggerating here) and do this sort of reenactment. I don’t think that’s quite the right word for it, but it’s that sort of thing where she and Dad will go to church and stand in front of a pastor (it’s got to be someone else besides Dad, though, obviously), and the pastor will ask them if they want to keep on being married and if they promise to keep on loving each other only and stuff and nonsense like that. It’s not a real wedding, so I can’t say I really get what the point of it is at all, but Mom sounds pretty excited when she talks about it.

  Which is all she’s been doing lately.

  And that’s why she started calling Aunt Rhonda so much. See, I’ve seen pictures from Mom and Dad’s wedding, their original one. They’re real old-fashioned kind of pictures too. Like they didn’t even have digital cameras back then. That’s how long ago it took place. Even though you might not believe it if you were to see her right now, Mom was real skinny when she and Dad got married for the first time (the real time I mean, not the reenactment they’re planning). And Dad says it’s what happens when you give birth to three kids and adopt and foster parent a few dozen more, except I think it might be because Mom’s baking brownies all the time, but anyway, the truth is that Mom can’t fit into her wedding dress anymore. Which you wouldn’t think is a very big deal except it is on account of her being a lady, and most ladies seem to think that they’re supposed to stay as skinny as they’ve always been.

  I’m just the opposite, actually, which is kind of funny if you look at it a certain way. I think I mentioned that I was adopted, and before I was adopted, I was living in an orphanage. But before I got to the orphanage, I had to live on the streets. This wasn’t in America, by the way, or I’m sure someone nice would have come and taken care of me, but this was all the way in Korea, and even though there actually are nice people there, I didn’t meet too many of them at first. So Mom and Dad don’t even know how old I really am. In fact, they had to invent a birthday for me, and even though I’m pretty sure that technically I’m older than the other kids in my class, I’m the smallest one by far.

  It's kind of annoying, really. Like Becky Linklater, my best friend, she’s strong enough that she can beat me in arm wrestling even though she doesn’t look like she could do anything even close. And Chuckie Mansfield, he’s the school bully, he weighs like forty pounds more than I do so you can imagine why I try not to get him angry with me. Thankfully he leaves me alone mostly now on account of him having a crush on Becky and Becky te
lling him to be nice to me, but before that happened, it was pretty rough.

  So anyway, all that is to say it’s funny because I sure wish I could gain forty pounds and be as big as Chuckie, but Mom wants to lose forty pounds, and don’t you think it’d be convenient if there was just some simple way for her to give me the extra weight she doesn’t feel like carrying around, and then maybe I could trade it in for some extra inches too on account of me being tired of always being shortest in my class.

  Well, back to Mom. Because she had all those babies and baked all those brownies, she can’t fit into her wedding dress anymore, and it made her so sad one night I even found her crying. So I told her she should ask her sister to make her a new dress because I don’t know a whole lot about Aunt Rhonda, but I do know she’s a wedding dress maker and kind of a famous one too. Like, once she even made a dress for a celebrity! I’d tell you the name, but I’ve already forgotten who it was, but everyone in the family thought it was a really big deal. But when I found Mom crying, she didn’t want to admit it was because she couldn’t fit into her old wedding dress for the reenactment ceremony, but I figured that part out myself. And so I told her she should ask her sister to make her a new wedding dress if it meant that much to her.

  So Mom called Aunt Rhonda the next day, and I heard them talking, and I guess instead of making a brand new dress from scratch, Mom wanted to see if her sister could just fix the one she’s already got and make it bigger. So you’d think that would solve the whole problem, but I guess there’s lots more for them to talk about because they’re on the phone together now all the time. Mom even invited her to come to Massachusetts for the ceremony, but I don’t know if Aunt Rhonda will. I guess her husband doesn’t like her traveling much for stuff and nonsense like that.

  Anyway, that’s just about time for today, but it’s really hard when Mom tells me to write anything I want, so I’m thinking that maybe tomorrow I’ll ask her for something more specific. Maybe it’ll count if she lets me just write the different ways I can beat up Chuckie Mansfield once I get bigger than him, but I don’t think she’ll buy it.

  Talk to you tomorrow!

  Woong

  Well, it’s still summer break, but it hasn’t been too bad so far. I finally got my room clean enough last night that Mom said I didn’t have to wake up early today, so this was the first morning it felt like real summer since school got out.

  Later this afternoon my real good friends Auntie and her little baby Emily are coming over for a visit, but I should explain a few things to you. First of all, she isn’t really my auntie, not the same way Aunt Rhonda is my aunt because she’s my mom’s sister. But Auntie’s Korean, and I’m Korean, and we’re both really, really close. (I knew her back in Korea, but that’s a really long story, and I actually already wrote that part of it out once before, so I don’t feel like doing it again.) But anyway, all that is to say that in Korea if you have someone who’s a little older than you and kind of like family even if they’re not technically related, you call them Auntie (or Uncle obviously if it’s a man.) Her English name she uses now that she’s here is Hannah, but I just call her Auntie.

  A while ago, Auntie had this sad thing happen where the doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to have kids. Not that she couldn’t adopt (because I don’t think a doctor could legally tell you that) but that she couldn’t get pregnant. She was really sad because if you’ve known Auntie as long as I have, you’d know that she really loves kids and that she’d basically be the perfect mom.

  Well, it was pretty sad at first for her and her husband. He’s my Uncle Simon, even though, like I explained before with Auntie, we’re not really related. I just call him that. He lives here in Medford now, and he’s the pastor at a Korean church, which is a great job for him on account of him loving to preach so much. Except his English still isn’t all that great, so he gets to do it all in Korean. Auntie speaks better English on account of Mom and me giving her lots of lessons when they first moved to America, but Uncle Simon was too busy working at his new church to learn as much.

  Anyway, it was really sad that God didn’t want to let Auntie have kids the normal way, but then they decided to do what my parents did and adopt. So they have a baby girl, Emily, except she’s not technically a baby anymore. She’s three now and talks a lot. She calls me Boom instead of Woong, which always makes Auntie laugh. It’s my job to watch Emily when Auntie comes over to talk and pray with my mom. And they’ve been doing a lot of that because something really happy happened to Auntie not too long ago, but then it turned into something really, really sad. Which reminds me. Have you ever noticed that some people just seem to have a bigger dose of sad things happen to them than others? Mom says it’s so they can show the world that God is with you even in the middle of hard things, but if I was one of those people it happened to, I think I’d have a mind to tell God he wasn’t being very fair.

  So what happened with Auntie and Uncle Simon was this. I already told you part of it, the part about how God didn’t want to let them have kids normally, so they adopted Baby Emily and were super happy. And she was really tiny when they brought her home from the hospital. Not like me because I’d been an orphan for years by the time Mom and Dad found me and brought me to Medford, but Baby Emily came home when she was only like two or three days old, and Auntie Hannah was actually there the day she was born.

  Anyway, here’s what happened to them more recently. Auntie and her husband wanted to adopt another baby so Emily could have a little brother or sister to play with, but it’s really expensive to find a baby on account of all the paperwork you have to pay people to do to make the adoption work. Then they got great news, and even though the doctors had told Auntie she wouldn’t ever get pregnant, she did! So we were all really happy (of course), and it was even going to be my job to help babysit Emily while Auntie was in the hospital getting ready to give Emily her little brother or little sister.

  I forget how long ago that was now, but then the sad part came just last night. Auntie Hannah went to get her checkup, and the doctor told her the baby’s got some sort of sickness. Mom wasn’t sure how serious it was, partly because the doctors just found out and partly because even though Auntie’s English is way better than Uncle Simon’s, she still doesn’t know all the medical words.

  So Auntie’s coming over this afternoon to talk and pray with Mom, and hopefully, then I’ll learn more about what kind of sickness we’re talking about. Because some sicknesses babies can get, and it’s just fine. Like Emily got an ear infection when she was real little, and all she needed was some Tylenol and antibiotics. But Mom said there’s some sicknesses it could be that would be really bad, so she says it’s real important for us to pray with Auntie hard and to be real kind. Which is kind of silly on account of me loving Auntie so much I’m always kind to her, but I could tell by the way Mom said it she’s a little worried.

  I’ll write more later when I have more details. Until then, I guess I better go pick up all the Legos in my room or else Emily’s going to mess them all up, and I don’t want to lose my temper and get grounded from the Wii again.

  Bye!

  Woong

  All right, so I know I already did my writing assignment for the day, but I’ve already used up all my Wii time, and Mom’s busy working in the kitchen, and Dad’s over at church teaching Bible study, so I guess there’s not a whole lot else right now I can do.

  Auntie came over this afternoon, just like she had planned, except I didn’t watch Emily. Auntie was so sad that she dropped Emily off at Uncle Simon’s office so he could watch her while he worked, and that way, she could spend more time talking with Mom.

  And by talking, I basically mean crying. It was really sad, by the way. Since I’m one of Auntie’s oldest friends (on account of us knowing each other back in Korea like I already mentioned), Mom said I could sit with her too, so I was there for the whole thing. And it was really hard because it doesn’t seem fair for God to let so many sad things happen to
people as good as Auntie and her family.

  So first of all, I should explain that the doctors really aren’t sure of everything right now. They have to do more tests, and I have no idea how in the world you can do a test on a baby that hasn’t even decided to get born yet, but I guess that’s what they do. But Auntie’s first test showed quite a few things that were really, really sad. Like her baby’s heart has a big hole in it. There’s supposed to be tissue there (not the Kleenex kind, the science kind), except there’s not. Which obviously isn’t good news on account of you need your heart to survive.

  And then she had a problem with her fingers on account of her hands being shut real hard, which didn’t sound all that serious at first to me until Auntie explained that it could mean there’s a problem with the baby’s genes. Oh, and that’s something I should have said sooner. They found out it was a little girl, which is really the reason they went to the doctor in the first place to see what they were having, but now that they realized she’s so sick and may not even have a working heart, it’s a lot harder to be excited.

  Which again gets me wondering why God would do something like that to people as nice as Auntie and Uncle Simon. I asked Mom about it at dinnertime, and she said she was wondering the same thing, but she knows God always has his reasons. I asked her if maybe she thinks it’s so we could all pray for Baby Grace (that’s her name, by the way, Auntie told us). I was thinking that maybe God gave Auntie a baby with a hole in her heart so that he could prove he could do miracles and fix the hole right up, and Mom said he certainly could do it, but that didn’t mean he would do it.