by Sam Westland
Sally led me back out of the main hall of the church, up a set of stairs and down a small hallway to a side room with several mirrors on the walls. "This is your changing room," she explained. "When you get here tomorrow morning, you'll head straight for this room, where you can get changed into your dress. I'll make sure that it's waiting here."
I nodded; this seemed straightforward enough. "What next?"
"Next, you simply wait," Sally replied. "You've basically got one of the easiest jobs in the wedding. The music will quiet down, you'll come out of your dressing room, your father should be waiting at the bottom of the stairs to walk you out when 'Here Comes the Bride' starts up, and he'll drop you off at the front. From there, just remember to say "yes" at the right places!"
I peered around the room. This all seemed very easy and logical, I wanted to point out. To me, that almost guaranteed that something was going to go wrong.
*
Still upstairs, I realized that I wouldn't be able to see the rest of the rehearsal. "I don't have to stay up here, right - I can come down and watch the rest of the rehearsal?" I asked, in what I felt was a very reasonable tone.
Despite this, Sally sighed, as if I was requesting that she singlehandedly lift up the church and rotate it ninety degrees so that more light would come in the windows. "Fine," she eventually acquiesced, giving in as I stared at her. Perhaps she was trying to segregate us off, to keep us apart from each other to avoid fights.
I followed my wedding planner back out of my changing room, down the stairs and back into the main room of the church. As we entered, however, I could already hear the yelling and other undeniable sounds of a commotion. And as soon we entered, I could immediately guess the source.
While we had been upstairs, Susan had finally arrived, late and hung over as always. However, as soon as she had reached the front of the church, she had laid eyes on the groom and his groomsmen - and flown off the handle.
"You pig! You jerk! Why are you still here?" my sister was yelling, making a valiant attempt to physically attack the groom's party. Judy and Claire were managing to restrain her, each of them holding onto a shoulder. Susan wasn't strong enough to break free, but her arms were still swinging wildly, as if she was hoping that one of the groomsmen would decide to walk within range.
"Susan!" I shouted, making her twist about as I stormed up the aisle. "What in the world are you doing?"
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.
*
"Mom!" I screamed, as my mother raised her fist as she crouched on top of my momentarily stunned father. Behind us, Blossom, still only halfway up the steps of the altar towards us, let out a piteous wail.
Most of the rest of us were stunned, frozen in place. Alex, however, somehow managed to avoid the paralysis that afflicted the rest of us, and he darted forward, grabbing my mother's hand before she could sock my father in the face. With a grunt, he hauled her back, lifting her bodily off of my father and depositing her roughly on her feet.
"Stop it!" he bellowed. "What is wrong with you? Are you really this bad at self-control that you can't go a single day without attacking your ex-husband in some way?"
We all stared at Alex as he shouted, but I felt more shocked than anyone else. This was the first time that I had really seen his facade really crack, had seen him get angry over the irrationality of my family. His face flushed, he loomed over my mother as he yelled.
Moving forward, Judy pulled my father back to his feet as Blossom arrived. Bryan was a half step behind, although I wasn't sure what he was planning to contribute. For a split second, I feared that Blossom, after seeing this attack against her lover, would attempt to retaliate by striking my mother. One smoldering glare from Alex dissuaded her from this idea, however, his fury manag
ing to penetrate her inebriated state.
Alex took a deep, shuddering breath, closing his eyes and rubbing one hand over his face and through his hair. The passage of his hand left his hair in odd tufts, but nobody laughed; this wasn't the time for hilarity. After slowly exhaling, Alex turned to Sally. "Are we done with this rehearsal?" he asked.
Sally nodded quickly. "I need to talk to you and Danielle about the reception, but the rehearsal here is over," she volunteered.
My fiance nodded. "Good. Everybody but Sally and Danielle, get out. Show up on time tomorrow, be on your best behavior, or so help me, I will not let you be a part of this wedding." He swung around, his finger pointed out at us. The other groomsmen just stared at him - they hadn't done anything wrong, and their wide eyes showed that they weren't used to seeing this side of Alex. But my family members leaned back from that pointed finger like it was a loaded gun.
"You will not be a part of this wedding," Alex repeated. "You will not be allowed into the wedding ceremony, you will be turned away at the reception, and you will be removed from every guest list." Speech done, he lowered his finger, glaring around at the group to drive his point home.
Without a word, the rest of the wedding party filed out of the church, nobody making eye contact as they shuffled up the aisle. Alex, Sally, and I watched them go. With a slight sigh, I noticed that, although he hadn't spoken a word, Danny was following close behind my sister, and his eyes appeared to be locked onto her ass swinging back and forth in her jeans. Despite Alex's speech, I suspected that their worthless excuses for short-term memories would lead to them getting into trouble very soon.
Finally, after the door had closed on them, Sally turned to us. "I, um, I just need to go over the order of announcements at the reception," she said. "The limo should take you two from the church to the banquet hall for the reception, and then everyone else will join shortly as they drive over. We'll have a short period, about twenty minutes, of appetizers while the guests arrive, where they can move around, socialize, and find their seats. After the appetizer and before the main course, we'll have your parents give their toasts. After dinner, the two of you will have your first dance, and then we'll have a short period while the staff clears tables. After that, I'll come let the two of you know when it's time to cut the cake."