Mom lets out a low whistle.
Jason blushes.
James doesn’t.
“Pam! Nice to see you! Don’t you look stunning,” James says as he walks over to my mother and gives her a kiss on both cheeks.
The entire scene moves like someone has pushed a slow-motion button in the hallway.
James is kissing my mother.
And is he touching her hip? With his palm? Is he...
“James,” Mom says, her voice like warm butter. “So good to see you again.”
“Have any good statistics for me to use to improve my life?” he asks with a wink. “How about some good wedding stats?”
Mom blushes, and looks up, as if retrieving them from her mind. “Married men live longer than single men. That’s all I’ve got.”
“Is that true for women, too?”
Mom smiles and nods.
“Then I’m glad to hear my son and new daughter-in-law are giving themselves more time together by spending nearly seven figures of my money on this beast of a day!”
Jason, who is drinking a cup of coffee from the catering service, sprays it all over the trash can he’s standing next to.
As he turns to James with a look of empty shock on his face, a blood-curdling scream from the women’s prep room shatters the moment.
“YOU
INVITED
JESSICA
COFFIN
TO
MY
WEDDING,
MOM?”
28
Jason, having no choice in the matter, recovers quickly from James’ wedding-cost comment and rushes to the source of the sound. I look out the window and yes, indeed, there’s Jessica Coffin, a wall of long, straight blonde hair attached to the heart of a demon.
I abandon my mom and James and take off after Jason, if by take off you mean run like a sloth being transported by a snail.
This dress is so heavy I am sure that when I remove it at the end of the day I’ll just float up and be carried off into the clouds.
Marie and Shannon are face to face now, the bride screaming so loudly and inches from her mother’s face that it’s like watching wounded rage in pure form come out via fingertips and travel into Marie’s body. I swear a tri-colored arc of electricity leaps from Shannon’s eyes to her mother’s heart. The cycle is so complete, their screaming in synchronicity, that there’s a certain magic to it, a mellifluous quality that makes me stop and take in the sound.
Meanwhile, Shannon’s ex-boyfriend, Steve, is out there, looking at Jessica’s ass and pretending to talk to her, all while grabbing canapés from wandering waitstaff.
Brave man that he is, Jason inserts himself between Shannon and Marie, who each try to bring him over to their respective dark sides. Declan comes rushing through the doorway just as Shannon’s voice gives out and she picks up the bridal bouquet, arm pulled back like a baseball pitcher, aimed straight for her mother.
“You wouldn’t!” Marie screams.
“TRY ME!”
Declan is across the room and holding Shannon’s elbow with a mobile grace that makes it seem staged.
“You can’t see the bride before the wedding!” Marie scolds. Her hair is wild and flat on one side, and mascara flakes from the nine layers she uses to get eyelashes longer than most people’s actual hair freckle her face.
“Watch me,” he shouts.
“You can’t!” The pitch of her voice drops two octaves, as if the hounds of hell have been dispatched from her vocal cords. Muffin and Spritzy start barking back. It’s 101 Dalmatians all over again, and Marie is looking like Cruella herself, only instead of collecting puppies, she’s collecting tartan.
Jason shuttles her out of the room quickly, giving Declan a look that says, I think this is the first of many such situations. Soon they’ll have a protocol. But for now, we’re all first-timers here.
Shannon is bent in half, her corset loosened, her carefully coiffed curls spilling around her face like sentries in crooked formation as she sits in a chair now and cries like the world has ended.
Marie tries to enter the room, but I block her with the door, using it as a half-closed shield.
“What are you doing?”
“Protecting my bestie.” I close the door all the way and stand there, knowing I need to act as a bouncer at my best friend’s wedding to protect her from...
Her mother.
It’s finally come to that.
Forty-five minutes before the ceremony.
“What are you doing here?” Shannon asks, her voice a mixture of half-horror and half-relief as Declan drops to one knee and looks at her, eyes filled with the kind of love most people spend three lifetimes trying to find.
“I heard you screaming. What did Marie do now?”
“She invited Jessica Coffin to the wedding.”
An uncharacteristic set of emotions marches across Declan’s face. “Why doesn’t she just drop a ring in your coffee for you to swallow while she’s at it?”
“I know! She invited the woman who almost ruined our getting together, and who is my biggest online bully, to the most important day of my life!”
“Honey, this isn’t the most important day of your life. It’s the first day of the long series of days that will, if I have anything to say about it, be one day after the other of the most important day of your life. Right up until the day we die together, well into our nineties, after I give you the best orgasm ever.” The way he looks at her as he speaks is like watching love come to life.
She sniffs and laughs, all giggles and twitches. “That’s one hell of a bucket list you have, Declan.”
“I never back down from a challenge.” He pulls her up and kisses her temple. She lets out a shaky breath, then cries softly.
“I don’t want this,” Shannon whispers.
“Don’t want to marry me?”
“God, yes I want to marry you! But this? The pompous pageantry of it? No! Mom’s completely taken over and no matter how hard I try to stand up against it, I can’t win.”
He holds her while she cries, then says in a deep, determined voice, “Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.”
“What?”
“Bow out. Fold.”
“Our wedding isn’t a game of poker!”
“It sort of is, Shannon,” he insists. “Is this—” He gestures around the room and outside “—how you imagined our wedding would be?”
“Hell, no.”
“Do you want this?”
“Do you?”
“No. But I’ll go along with it because I love you.”
“I don’t want any of this! I would have been happy getting married on one of the Harbor Islands with just family and close friends! Or eloping in Vegas!”
“I can arrange both. You pick which one.” Declan reaches into his tuxedo jacket pocket and pulls out his phone. “We can be gone in twenty minutes.”
“What? You’re joking.”
“You know me. I don’t joke when it comes to making something you want happen.”
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Shannon would have said no to eloping if what happened next had not unfurled.
Marie begins banging on the door, insisting to be let in and hissing about Jessica Coffin’s importance in high society and how Shannon needs to learn to put petty differences aside for the sake of a higher purpose—
At the exact moment Jessica herself moves just enough to be seen through the windows to the courtyard, chatting with Shannon’s ex-boyfriend, Steve.
And his mother, Monica.
“Is that Steve?” Declan roars as he spots the ex, the sound so forceful it makes an empty coffee cup on a table shake. “Your mother invited STEVE?”
“My God,” Shannon whimpers. “I give up. I just give up.” She turns to me as I lean hard against the door, my fingers sweaty, thumb joint aching from holding on to the doorknob to stop Marie from coming in.
I look beyond the trio outside and see another face across the wa
y, peering through the glass in the men’s dressing wing.
Andrew.
He’s here. My body blooms with a kind of anticipatory pain, the knowledge that we can’t be together juxtaposed against the happiness I can’t control when I see him. The twinning of those two emotions leaves me in a perceptive state, the edges of everything I see a little too bright.
“What do I do, Amanda?” Shannon pleads, her face dotted with the splotchiness of sadness and fear.
I need to fix this.
I want to fix this.
I should fix this.
But I can’t fix this.
Andrew was right. This isn’t mine to fix.
“Hon, you’re on your own.” I exchange a look with Declan that makes it clear I chose the right words. “I love you, and I’ll lie for you. I’ll block a door for you. I’ll hold Jessica down while you rip out her hair extensions, but I can’t decide for you.”
She looks outside at the triad of destructive distortion.
Looks back at the door, which is rippling with the force of Marie’s blows.
Then, eyes only for Declan, she says, “Do it. I don’t care how you do it, but let’s escape. Now. I am not going to be ridiculed by Jessica Coffin on the one day where I am supposed to be the positive center of attention. Mom has gone too far.”
“I’ll give you all the positive attention you need,” Declan declares, kissing her. He’s on the phone in seconds, delivering orders.
“Are you really going to run away from your own wedding? Like in The Graduate?” I marvel.
She looks around the room, then outside, then down at her body. “It’s not really my wedding, though, is it? Mom ran roughshod over everyone. Declan has a point. Sometimes the best way to fight is to leave.”
“Give up?”
“No. Just...not engage. She’s turned this spectacle into something that doesn’t actually need me or Declan to even happen. We could make cardboard cutouts of ourselves on wheels and it would take her an hour to notice the difference.”
I can’t help but laugh sadly.
“Do you think that would really work?” Shannon asks with such innocent hope that I laugh harder.
“If it did, you and Amy and Carol would have tried it by now.”
Declan gives me a tight look. “Will you lie for us?”
“Lie?”
“I think I have a good cover story for escaping.”
“Escaping your own thousand-guest wedding? The story better be damned good.”
He whispers his plan in my ear.
I suddenly sound like a hyena in labor. “You what?”
“Marie will buy it. Let’s just play on her biggest weakness. Give her what she’s dreamed of,” Declan explains.
I’m floored by what he whispered. There is no way this plan is going to work. None.
I look outside to see that Jessica has separated herself from Steve and Monica and is now taking pictures of everything, then tapping on her phone. Uploading? Probably to various social media sites with hashtags that will follow Shannon for months.
#doghater leaves a bad taste in my mouth, too.
“I’ll do it. I’ll lie. But you’re crazy if you think Marie’ll believe this.”
“Don’t say a word. Go along with it. Pretend just long enough for us to escape. Just...trust me,” Declan says in a voice filled with so much authority that I can’t help it.
I do.
“There will be a point after we leave when she will try to squeeze the truth out of you. Don’t cave in,” he demands.
This is unreal.
“You’re serious! You’re ditching your own wedding?”
Shannon is beaming. Beaming! She looks happier than I’ve seen her in nearly a year.
And Declan is a man with a mission.
She walks over to me, where the door is thumping and Marie is muttering compromises in the background, something about stopping all the sex toy shops if we’ll just come out there.
I kiss Shannon on the cheek and whisper, “Go for it. I’m here. I’ll fix whatever mess is left.”
And with that, I let go of the doorknob.
Marie comes flying into the room, disheveled, followed by a very addled Jason.
“Marie! There you are!” Declan reaches for her and sweeps her into a huge hug, followed by a kiss on each cheek that makes him seem like James. “We were wondering what happened to you. Come on, now! We need to get this wedding going. You need to get moving!”
“I—what?”
Jason shoots Declan a sly look.
“We’re behind schedule! The ceremony starts in forty minutes. You need to get with the program,” Declan adds, giving Shannon a secret wink.
“What is he—he’s the one who—I wasn’t delaying anything!” Marie sputters.
“Then get moving!” He spanks Marie on the ass, the slap making a snap! sound that echoes all the way to Pinterest.
And with that, he saunters out of the room.
Like a boss.
The ceremony starts like any other wedding ceremony happening on that same Saturday in July across the United States. The classical pianist begins the pre-ceremony music, giving guests the chance to settle into their spots. From the glass doorway I see familiar clusters along the fifty rows of twenty white chairs, each row decorated with festive flowers that Jordan has lovingly created, the Scottish feel evident.
Each row of twenty white chairs is bisected by the aisle, and as the ushers lead people to seats, with the bride’s and groom’s guests all mixed together, the wedding takes on a beauty and order of its own.
There are Shannon’s distant relatives from the Midwest. Marie’s yoga students are all together, Agnes in beautiful, bright-red glory with a hat attached to her pin curls that might well have been original when Jackie Kennedy wore the same kind. Corrine is next to her in a Coco Chanel-inspired get-up, too. A ton of Anterdec employees dot the crowd. Some high school friends. Greg, his wife, Josh and...is that one of the strippers from the piano bar with him, in a suit?
And hundreds and hundreds of people Shannon and Declan don’t know.
Declan’s at the altar with the minister, Terry next to him. James is in the front row, and I see my mom right behind him, obliviously sitting next to Jessica Coffin, who is admiring Spritzy and talking animatedly to my innocent mother, who appears to be inviting Jessica to take pictures.
Great. That’s like asking Dorothy Parker to write a poem about you.
Someone sets Chuckles on the ground at the back of the large garden display, right in the center of the aisle he needs to walk down. Like a game lion, he takes large, slow steps, scanning the crowd to the left, then to the right, as if to say, That’s right. You people are my subjects.
And then he hisses.
And then a dog barks.
And after that? Five minutes of my life just disappear.
Muffin, who is in Jordan’s arms, shoots across the laps of all the guests in his row and tackles Chuckles, who takes the direct hit of a two-pound vibrating teacup Chihuahua with what appears to be a bad case of psoriasis as an attack on his sovereignty.
The cat and dog begin a tumbling log roll that takes them back towards us, and various members of the crowd stand to see the source of the ruckus. The pianists, bless their hearts, keep going.
“Chuckles!” Jason grunts, trying to pin down the exact location of the Muffin-Chuckles fleshfest. Out of the corner of my eye I see my mother come running over with James.
The barking and hissing make it impossible to understand the human commands people are delivering, and then an animated purse make its way into the melee.
“Don’t hurt my Muffin, you vile cat!” Jordan screams as Muffin sinks her teeth into Chuckles’ back leg, Muffin’s leash tangling with the flower basket attached to Chuckles, tying the two together in a kind of cross-species bondage that is just so wrong.
“Don’t ruin the kilt!” Marie shouts.
Spritzy, who is so tightly zipped into the purse t
hat only his head pokes out, yaps and barks until Chuckles attacks him, Muffin’s leash tangling all three into one big mess.
They make their way right past me, and I drop my flowers and bend down, running in almost a bear walk to catch them, oblivious to the large metal hook embedded in an enormous cement planter.
The cheery display of peonies and geraniums—a flash of red, white and purple—blurs as a significant portion of my dress catches on the hook at the same time as I watch the clump of two dogs and one furious cat roll through the open pool gate and into the deep reflecting pool.
I try to run faster but in my panic, I just pull and pull, fighting against whatever hand is holding me back, determined to get to the animals, who are now sinking. One of the heels of my shoes snaps off and my ankle leans to one side, making me lose my bearings as all my weight pulls and I fall.
RRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPPPPP
I stand and run to the edge of the pool, looking at the thrashing water, then stop as I feel a cool breeze in places where one normally does not.
A thousand gasps and a hundred giggles fill the air like bubbles in a swimming pool.
I am naked to the waist.
Completely naked.
In public.
“Amanda!” my mom shouts. Her voice sounds like it is coming from underwater. Two thousand eyes are on me, eyeballs reaching across the courtyard to slime their way along my skin, blinking like headlights, chanting like gnomes. Someone has flayed me, scraped all my skin clean off, leaving blood vessels and tendons, fat and muscle, flesh and bone exposed for the world to critique and catalog, to condescend and shame.
Worse.
To look at, then walk away, a silent judge without comment. Without explanation.
Being frozen in place means prolonging the humiliation, the horror cloud of the crowd lingering over me like the storm no town wants, but every town eventually gets.
Jessica Coffin just holds up her phone and taps.
And taps and taps and taps.
There is only one thing I can do right now.
I jump into the water to save the little beastly mammals who cannot save themselves.
Sinking down to their level is no problem. Holding my breath is. I’ve forgotten to take in a huge gulp of air and now I feel the weight of that mistake as thirty pounds of dress sink me down, down, down to a scratching furball of pain.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 199