The Less Than Perfect Wedding

by Sam Westland

  *

  "That's enough!" I heard a younger, higher-pitched voice pipe up from behind Janice. I watched in amazement, pulling in deep breaths, as Susan emerged, stepping up between the fighting parents.

  "What's the matter with you two?" she continued. "You two should have stayed married, you're both the same - in that you always ruin everything!"

  By this point, I had regained my breath, but I didn't interrupt. No one did, in fact. A hush had fallen over the crowd, Rick already looked slightly ashamed, and Janice was standing with her mouth hanging fully open, unable to believe that her younger daughter was calling her out. I was barely able to believe it myself. After all the brattiness she had demonstrated, Susan was going to turn around and be the hero of the hour?

  It seemed so. "Mom, this isn't about you!" Susan lectured, pointing an accusing finger at Janice. "This is supposed to be a day to recognize love-"

  For a moment, I wondered why Susan wasn't mentioning her older sister, the bride. But then I noticed Danny, standing behind Janice at the same place from where Danielle's sister had emerged, his eyes fixed to her, and I had a slightly better idea of why Susan didn't want this wedding ruined.

  "-and you two are doing nothing but poisoning it with hate!" Susan went on. "At least Dad is willing to try and move past this, even if he was stupid enough to bring his new girlfriend to the wedding in front of you, but Mom, you're just clinging onto how your own marriage failed, and refusing to give anybody else a chance!"

  Susan stopped, sucking in a breath of air, as the other actors on the altar stood in place, transfixed by this diatribe. "You should all be ashamed of yourselves!" she ended. "Now go to your places, be quiet, and let's get on with this stupid thing!"

  It may not have been the perfect speech, but it did the trick. I stood in the middle of the aisle, still staring, as Janice shuffled back to her place in the lineup of bridesmaids with her head down and her gaze aimed at her feet. Rick, on the other side of the stage, looked back and forth for a moment as if he was trying to remember where he was supposed to be. I managed to catch his eye and jerked my thumb back towards the entrance, where he would meet Danielle and walk her down the aisle. He nodded, his gaze not quite meeting mine, and hurried past me.

  Susan was still standing in the middle of the raised altar at the front of the church, her hands on her hips and shoulders flung back. For once, I had to admit that she didn't look like her normal spoiled, bratty self. She looked imperious, fierce and intimidating. For once, I didn't want to roll my eyes at her, or maybe slap her. Her face turned to me.

  "Well?" she said, daring me to challenge her. "Let's get this wedding over with!"

  I nodded. Never before had I agreed with Danielle's younger sister more. "Yes, please!" I agreed fervently. The bridesmaids were taking their places, and the groomsmen were also meandering into position. I climbed the two steps at the front of the chapel up to take my own place as maid of honor, but when I glanced to my left - I saw only Danny, the moon-eyed best man.

  Oh yeah. I'd almost forgotten. "Has anyone seen Alex?" I asked the wedding party at the front.

  The back door to the chapel room opened, but it was only Sally, hurrying up towards the front with worry splashed across her features. She ducked slightly as she ran, as if trying to attract less attention, or maybe in case someone decided to throw a pie at her for this disaster of a wedding. She came to a stop in front of me, breathing heavily. "Claire, I went up to-" she began, looking up at me, but then stopped, realizing that every eye in the church was now on her.

  I stepped down to stand next to her. "Sally, what is it?" I asked, keeping my voice low and calm with every last, frayed ounce of willpower that I possessed. I could feel that final thread slipping away, no matter how hard I clung to it. Father Hemsley had also stepped forward to see what was holding up the wedding. I briefly wondered where he had been hiding when the mother and father of the bride were duking it out. Some priest he was.

  "Claire, Danielle's gone," Sally whispered to us. "I think she ran away - the window's open."

  This time, I didn't bother to keep the curse inside my head. I had assumed that stealing Danielle's street clothes and shoes would be enough to keep her here, but I had clearly underestimated her determination - or perhaps her desperation. Sally's eyes had widened even more at my vulgarity, and Father Hemsley sucked in air between his teeth in chastisement, but all of that was below my notice now.

  For a good minute, I just vented, throwing out curse after curse. I was wickedly pleased to see how some of the other relatives gasped. After I had exhausted my extensive vocabulary, I had to admit, I felt much better. I took one more deep breath, and then let it out. Calm, tranquil. Time to move on.

  "Sally, how long will it take the caterers at the reception to get the food set up and ready for people to eat?" I finally asked.

  The question seemed to momentarily shake the woman out of her panicked fugue. "If I call them right now, they should have most of it out pretty fast," she replied. "But why?"

  I waved one hand around at the surrounding ensemble. "We've got no bride and no groom," I pointed out. I turned next to Father Hemsley, who was still staring at me with an expression probably reserved for the Antichrist himself. "Father, I hate to do this to you, but I think that it's time to throw in the towel," I said. "Wedding's off. Sally, I'll make the announcement to everyone here, and then we'll just have them head right over to the reception. No reason these people can't at least get a decent meal."

  Both Sally and Father Hemsley wore identical expressions of dismay, but neither of them had a better idea, and they both hurried off to their respective jobs, Sally to call the caterers and Father Hemsley to open the back doors of the church, and presumably to apologize to God for not having anyone to present to Him for eternal bonding after all. I watched them both scurry away, and then climbed the steps so that I was standing at the front of the altar. I raised my hands to catch everyone's attention, trying not to grind my teeth.

  "Hello! Listen up! I'm afraid that this wedding isn't going to happen today!" I called out once the friends and relatives had quieted down and given me their attention. "Now, you'll all still get fed, but we are going to leave the church in an orderly fashion right now and go straight to the reception. Thank you, and I'm sure that both Danielle and Alex are incredibly sorry that you came here for nothing!"

  I stepped down from my spot in the front of the altar after making this announcement, but I could already see relatives from both sides of the wedding party pushing their way towards me through the crowd of people now beginning to slowly shuffle towards the doors, angry expressions on their faces. Janice and Rick were both attempting to reach me, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught Susan pulling Danny out of a side door by one arm. In the precious few seconds before the relatives reached me, I yanked out my phone, punching Danielle's contact so angrily that I nearly broke a nail on the screen.

  Maybe Danielle and Alex had made the right decision by deciding to give up on their families cooperating. But knowingly or not, they had stuck me with cleaning up their damn mess, and I was going to make sure that I gave both of them a very loud, very angry piece of my mind.

  The Aftermath, Part II

  *

  "And I hope my voicemails managed to convey some level of the anger that I was feeling," Claire ended, finishing up her tale of how my wedding had fallen apart.

  I let out a long sigh, releasing the breath that I hadn't realized I had been holding in. "How was the reception and the rest of the wedding?" I asked.

  Claire shrugged one shoulder. "Surprisingly calm, actually," she said. "A lot of speculation about what had happened to you and Alex, of course, and there were some awkward moments when Sally forgot that you two weren't there and tried to quiet people down for toasts, or call everybody together to cut the wedding cake. But aside from that, the food was still delicious, the band still performed, and everyone ended up having a pretty decent time even without the pair of
you."

  My best friend then raised her finger to point at me, and I saw that an angry glint had re-entered her eyes. "Now, I want you to tell me what the hell the two of you did!" she ordered.

  Over our honeymoon, Alex and I had discussed what we would tell our friends and family when we returned. We had briefly entertained the idea of telling them that we had been kidnapped, or that Alex secretly worked for the CIA and had been called away on an international spy mission of top importance, and he had chosen to take me with him on a glamorous globe-trotting adventure. Despite the allure of these fantasies, however, we eventually, reluctantly, settled on telling the truth.

  Now, I quickly sketched out what had happened, telling Claire about my escape down the drainpipe, my discovery of Alex attempting to start his uncle's car in the parking lot, how we had read each other's wedding vows and realized that we truly didn't need our families' acceptance as long as we had each other, and how we had decided that, instead of using our honeymoon tickets to run away from each other, we would use them to get away from our stressful issues and to reconnect with each other.

  "And all of this somehow managed to work out?" Claire asked when I finished my tale.

  I nodded emphatically. "Alex!" I called, raising my voice so that it carried into our bedroom. He emerged a moment later, coming over and popping down next to me on the couch, his hand sliding around my shoulder as he settled in. I smiled and scooted closer so that I was pressed up against him, and we both beamed at a bemused Claire.

  For a moment, I thought that our combined happiness would overwhelm my normally cynical best friend; I caught the edges of her lips struggling not to quirk up into a smile. "So what are you two going to do, now that you're back?" she asked, trying to stave off any outward display of happiness. "Are you going to try and go through with getting married again?"

  Alex and I briefly exchanged glances. This had, of course, been another topic of conversation on our honeymoon. "We are going to get married, yes," I said slowly. "But I think that this time, it's going to be a much smaller ceremony. No big wedding, no fancy reception, no extravagant dresses, and definitely no big family gathering."

  "So who'd be invited?" Claire questioned suspiciously. I knew what she was really asking, however.

  "Don't worry!" I calmed her, reaching out and patting her arm. "You're the one who kept our last disaster of a wedding under control, so I think you may be the only guest at our next attempt!"

  "I don't know, maybe we should also ask your sister," Alex cut in. "It sounded like she also did a pretty good job of trying to protect our wedding." He must have been listening around the corner, I realized, to know what Claire had been saying about how the wedding had crashed and burned in our absence.

  Claire looked uncomfortable. "That might actually be a little weird," she spoke up. We both stopped and looked at her, wordlessly waiting for her to expand on this statement. "Since you two have been gone, she's kind of attached herself at the hip to Danny. Or maybe at another part..."

  As it turned out, there were a few more parts to our wedding that Claire hadn't shared with us in her highlight reel. One of these facts was that Danny and Susan had taken a car to the reception together, and had arrived twenty minutes late and both sweaty and stinking. They had made it through the appetizer course and halfway through the main entree before they had both hopped up from the center table, excused themselves, and made a beeline for the coat closet at the front of the banquet building. They had been discovered by a rather unfortunate bellhop, but this apparently still wasn't enough to shame them into emerging for another ten minutes.

  "And since then, as I understand, they have been all over each other," Claire finished. "It would be kind of sweet, I suppose, if they had come together for more of a reason than that your younger brother's horny and your younger sister will do anything to keep attention on herself."

  "I'll tell you what," I said, reaching out and patting Claire on the hand. "We'll see about having a big family gathering - after the ceremony is over and completed. That way, there won't be anything else for them to ruin."

  Beside me, Alex nodded at this new idea. "We really should have just planned on that from the beginning," he laughed. "I didn't ever need the big wedding in the first place, but I ended up feeling that I had no choice but to go along with it."

  I spun around, turning to face him. "Wait a minute. You didn't want the big wedding? Because I didn't want the big wedding!"

  We stared at each other. Claire finally voiced the question that we were all thinking. "So who wanted the whole nine yards in the first place?" she asked.

  I slowly traced back the steps in planning the wedding. I had based the number of orders for the catering company off of the guest list, which had been based off of the combined numbers of family members and friends that I had thought up, combined with Alex's list. And the approximate sizes had been based on the capacity of the church. Now, who had suggested that church to me in the first place...

  "Of course," I sighed, finally connecting all the dots. "It always comes back to my mother." For just a moment I felt that familiar ache of long-seated resentment rising up in me, just like it had during the wedding plans. I closed my eyes and tightened my hands into fists, trying to ignore the pervasive feeling.

  This time, however, Alex quickly put his arm back around me, his hand massaging my shoulder. As I leaned against him, I felt the resentment flow away, leaving as though it had never existed in the first place. I could feel the cool, comforting weight of my engagement ring, tugging ever so slightly at my ring finger. After removing it every time I wanted to go swimming in the ocean on our honeymoon, I was once again feeling aware of its weight.

  A similar glint came from Alex's hand as it hung down from my shoulder. We might not have gone through with the wedding, but he had still decided that it was time for him to start wearing his wedding band that he had picked out. He had lifted it from Danny before making his escape attempt. I told him that he didn't have to wear it until things were official, but he hadn't taken the gold band off.

  "I'm going to be wearing this thing for the rest of my life," Alex had responded when, lying together in our bed, I had raised the question. "I might as well get used to it now."

  A moment later, his eyes took on a wicked glint. "Besides, some of those other women by the pool keep on checking me out," he commented with a cheeky grin. "I figure that it's best to make things clear before they make any more advances!"

  I had responded by tackling him off the bed, laughing even as I bore him down onto the ground in a wash of pillows and blankets. Despite the joke, however, he hadn't taken the ring off, and it was comforting to see it on his finger every day.

  Back to Susan's Wedding...

  *

  So, I suppose that's everything, and we're pretty much caught up to today. It should now be clear and obvious why I'm standing here at my sister's wedding, gazing across the altar from my spot in the row of bridesmaids at my husband, watching him rock nervously back and forth on the heels of his dress shoes.

  What's that?

  It's still confusing?

  Here, it should make a little more sense in just a minute.

  With a bang, the side door of the church, next to the altar, opened up. Danny came hurrying in, his hair mussed and the tie hanging out of the vest of his tuxedo. His eyes widened further as he realized that everyone else was already seated, in position, and staring at him. Even Susan had paused, halfway up the aisle, and I was pretty sure that I could see her eyes narrowing to angry slivers beneath her veil.

  "Dude!" I heard Alex hiss, his quiet voice nonetheless carrying in the silence. "Where the hell have you been, man?"

  Instead of answering, Danny just waved a hand at his older brother to brush away the question. He quickly bounded up the steps to the altar to stand next to his brother.

  I moved in closer, straightening the young man's tie and doing my best to smooth down his hair a little with my hands. Danny rolle
d his eyes at me, but I ignored the flippant expression and concentrated on trying to get him looking somewhat decent before my sister made her appearance.

  Finally, he was at least a little bit more presentable, and I stepped back. Father Hemsley had shuffled forward from his seat at the back of the altar, and was now giving Danny a stern look of his own.

  "Cutting things a little close, aren't we?" the priest asked. "I hope you weren't committing anything that might be considered... sinful." Clearly, Father Hemsley hadn't forgotten about Danny's actions during my wedding. To be honest, I didn't blame him, and I still wasn't sure why my sister had chosen to hold her wedding in the same church as mine. Didn't she understand how bad luck worked?

  For once, however, Alex's younger brother didn't fire back a hot retort, but instead merely lowered his eyes and shook his head. Before any of us could say a word more, we heard the music start up again.

  When Danny had burst into the chapel, the organist had paused in his rendition of "Here Comes the Bride." Silence had fallen over the room, broken only by the muttering of various family members in the crowd. But now, stuck halfway down the aisle, Susan turned around and made a very ferocious (and somewhat inappropriate) gesture back at the man, and he hastily resumed playing.

  With the music going once again, Susan continued her stately advance. My father walked next to her, their arms clasped together, but he paled beside her gigantic white dress. The frills and ruffles that covered every inch of Susan's dress did an excellent job of concealing the tiny baby bump, I had to note.

  As well as smiling, nodding, and waving to everyone in the aisles as she passed, my sister must have been internally timing the song in her head. She managed to reach the altar just as the organist's song drew to a close. She exchanged a quick cheek peck with our father, and then ascended the steps to the altar as he found his seat next to Blossom in the front row.