The Less Than Perfect Wedding

by Sam Westland

  Finally, I was able to pull in a deep, sucking breath and see somewhat through the tears covering my eyes. I wiped these tears away as well, adding even more stains to my makeup and to my dress. "Oh man," I got out. "I needed to do that. But you're right - my sister's crazy. My whole family's crazy!"

  "It's not just your family!" Alex countered. "You might not have seen it as much on my side of the family yet, but it will come. The Wilsons are better at disguising it on the surface, but underneath, there's just as much insanity as in your family!"

  I shrugged. "But I don't want to even go back to them. Screw them all, they can stay there, enjoy all of the food at the reception, and squabble with each other until they pass out." I glanced out at the convenience store sitting in front of us. "I'd much rather be here with you than back there with all of them."

  "We don't have to stay here, though," Alex pointed out. He reached over, lifting the honeymoon tickets off of my lap. He looked down at them for a minute, and then back up at me. I could see the glimmer of an idea forming in his eyes. "Sally had you pack your bags ahead of time for our honeymoon, didn't she?" he asked in a considering tone.

  I nodded. "Yep, and she told me that she was going to send them ahead for us, just to make sure that everything went perfectly," I replied. I was pretty sure I knew what my fiance was thinking, and I was fully on board.

  As we stared at each other, matching smiles grew on both of our faces. "Are we really going to do this?" I asked softly.

  In response, Alex twisted the key to bring the car back to life, putting it into gear with a fierce tug. "We already have to explain to both of our families why we decided to run out on the service," he said. "And that's going to be very stressful, I can tell right now."

  "So," he continued, turning onto the highway and heading south, towards the airport, "I think that I need some time before that, so that I can lower my stress level. Maybe some time someplace warmer, with some ocean breezes, some sand that I can lay down on. Maybe someplace where I can relax and enjoy a cool drink as I gaze out at waves."

  "Maybe someplace where I can work on my tan," I chimed in. "Someplace that has a nice big bed where we can sleep together, and where we don't have any obligations and can spend all day lounging around, without any punishment!"

  Both of us were grinning widely by this point. "Yes," Alex said softly. With one hand on the wheel, he reached out towards me with his other hand. I took it, our fingers intertwining and nestling together. "Yes, I think that's the best thing to do."

  He had to pull his eyes back to the road, but he gave me one last quick smile, gazing into my eyes, and I smiled back. And for the first time in a long time, my smile was genuine, not concealing any stress or worry. Yes, there would be hell to pay in the future, when we had to talk to our family again. But that would come later. Indeed, who said that it had to come around at all?

  The Aftermath

  *

  Two weeks later, when we stepped off the return flight from Hawaii, I felt like a completely different person.

  Sure, on the outside, my hair was a few shades lighter while my skin was a few shades darker. All of my long hair had become a bit of a burden, so I had decided to trim it shorter, keeping it just barely above my shoulders. Judging from how quickly Alex had tugged me back our private suite upon seeing my new haircut, he definitely approved.

  But even more than my changed exterior, I felt more relaxed and ease than I could ever remember feeling previously in my life. I could still remember how I used to have a near-constant little knot of worry and anxiety sitting in the back of my head, and that frustration was usually also mirrored in the pit of my stomach. But now, there was now nothing but calm. I felt like nothing could ruffle my feathers; nothing could get under my skin.

  Of course, part of this relaxation was due to the new policy that Alex and I had adopted towards our cell phones. As soon as we had pulled out our phones after the flight, they had been buzzing with frantic, panicked, and angry texts and messages. I had been about to lift my phone to my ear to play back the voicemail messages when Alex had interrupted, reaching over and yanking the phone physically out of my hand.

  "Hey! What are you doing?" I had gasped as he hurriedly hit the 'end' button.

  "No phones!" Alex had responded, waggling the device at me. "At least, no contact with any of our family members or other people from back home! We are here to relax, and theres no way that we'll be able to do so if we have to deal with all of the mess from back home!"

  At first, I could barely resist the urge to check on my phone every time it buzzed. But I had forced myself to ignore it, and just as my smart, capable fiance had predicted, the calls and texts had tapered off as our two weeks of vacation went on."Most of the problems will work themselves out," Alex had predicted, and indeed, this seemed to be the case.

  Of course, even the perfect peace cannot last forever, and mine barely made it past our arrival at our apartment. To this day, I'm still not sure how people managed find out so quickly that we were back, but we had barely gotten our luggage into the apartment, dropped off in the hallway and left to be dealt with later, before there was a knock at the door. It didn't sound like a friendly knock. It sounded as if the person on the other end of those knuckles had a definite grudge to settle.

  Flopped down together on the couch, Alex and I exchanged glances. "You deal with my family, I'll take yours?" I offered hopefully.

  He shook his head. "Not a chance. We each get to fight our own families."

  With a struggle, we both climbed up from our comfortable seats and headed to confront the person pounding on our front door.

  When we opened the door, however, the angry face on the other side didn't belong to either of our family trees. As soon as the door had started moving, Claire had pushed forward, knocking it further open and pushing her way inside. Hands on her hips, one foot thrust forward in a bracing stance, she glared at both of us. "Finally!" she exclaimed. "Do you have any idea how much things have fallen apart since you two decided to run out on your wedding?"

  "It's nice to see you too, Claire!" I greeted her, injecting as much cheeriness into my voice as it could hold. Claire's eyes widened at this unexpected reaction, but Alex chuckled, rubbed my back briefly with one hand, and then picked up one of the suitcases and began carrying it off to the bedroom. "Can I get you something to drink?" I continued, walking away from the front door and back to our living room.

  Claire declined my offer of a beverage, and instead settled uncomfortably onto the couch. I sat down on the other end and turned my gaze on her, doing my best to keep my expression calm and benevolent. "Now, why don't you start from the beginning and tell me what happened?" I said.

  My best friend was clearly a bit unsettled by my calm, but she began talking. I said nothing, merely waited and listened.

  Just as I had guessed, Claire had suspected that I was considering bolting when she was telling me about what had happened on the morning of my wedding. She had seen my street clothes laid out on the chair as I was changing into my wedding gown, and had decided that it was best to grab them and bring them outside to curtail any wandering thoughts. "I really hadn't thought that you were desperate enough to run away in the actual wedding dress, though!" she added. "I did have someone outside the door. How did you even get out?"

  "Drainpipe," I elucidated.

  My best friend rolled her eyes at this. "Great. I should have put somebody outside below your window, I suppose. Anyway, it actually took us a while before we even noticed that you had disappeared. We were sitting outside your room for a while, trying to figure out how to break the news to you."

  "What news?"

  "Well, I suppose that it makes more sense now," Claire said as an aside. "But the big problem was that the groom was missing! We couldn't figure out where Alex had disappeared to, and we didn't know how to tell you that your fiance had run off."

  "And then when you went into my room, you found that I wasn't there either," I fi
nished.

  "Yep. To be honest, I guessed almost immediately that you and Alex had run off together, decided not to deal with your families any more. I would have been happy that you two had finally stepped away, if you hadn't left me in the lurch as the maid of honor presiding over a failing wedding!"

  At this, I did feel a bit of deep-seated guilt. No matter how I tried to justify what had happened to myself, the truth was that Alex and I had both turned tail and fled instead of owning up to the gigantic disaster that our wedding had become. But as Claire continued to talk, I came to realize that, in a long-overdue stroke of good luck, many of the disasters had turned out to be blessings in very, very deep disguise.

  *

  You know what? I've been talking for a while. For the sake of the story, I think I should let Claire tell this next part from her perspective, since she was there at the service and I was not.

  Claire's Story

  *

  Even before I had reached the main area, as I was descending the stairs from Danielle's dressing room, I knew that something was going wrong. Something in the air felt off. I risked a glance over my shoulder, wondering if my best friend was still okay, but decided to instead go out into the main area, hoping that this was all just a misplaced sense of dread, that somehow things would turn out all right.

  Sally, a couple of steps ahead of me, had stopped a few stairs from the bottom of the staircase, and was speaking urgently into her plastic headset. Danielle and I had agreed privately that she looked ridiculous with the thing, like a dog trying to talk into a cell phone. Still, she had dispensed walkie talkies to most of the other catering and event staff, and now received updates from them every few minutes. So I suppose I have to begrudgingly admit that it isn't all bad. But still. No grown woman should be speaking into a headset like that unless she works in a drive-thru.

  As I reached Sally's step, she turned to me, her eyes wide. "Claire, we have a problem!"

  There it was. I knew it was coming. I ought to go to Vegas. "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "The groom's gone missing!" Sally turned and looked desperately up the stairs towards Danielle's room, as if hoping that maybe Alex would emerge, wanting one last talk with his bride-to-be before the wedding. "Should we go up and tell her?"

  I considered Danielle's current stress level, and then thought about how the news of Alex's disappearance would impact that. "No, no, I'm sure that she's got plenty on her mind already," I replied. I was trying to keep my tone soothing. I didn't know if it worked. "Why don't you go down and check his room again, and I'll duck out into the main area and see if he's just out there?"

  Sally nodded, looking slightly less stressed now that someone was giving her orders, and dashed off towards the groom's dressing room on the other side of the church. I tried not to picture a wagging tale coming out of her dress. After she had left, I made my way down the rest of the stairs and headed out into the chapel room of the church.

  Most of the guests had arrived and were sitting in the pews, engaged in the normal chatting and craning of necks to see who else was here. At the front of the chapel, standing up on the altar, Alex's groomsmen were in a huddle together, chatting about some guy thing. Probably sports, I guessed. Typical. I wanted to roll my eyes, but there wasn't time. Instead, I made a beeline for them.

  "Hey guys," I greeted them, elbowing and shouldering my way into their circle. Just one of the dudes. "Have any of you seen Alex?"

  My insertion into their conversation caught them off guard. I caught the end of a comment, "no, man, Danny doesn't know what he's getting himself into, that girl is totally bonk-" before they cut off and turned to look at me. "Not in the last few minutes," one of the guys finally replied.

  I forced my eyes not to roll. The effort hurt, but I needed an answer. "Okay, then, where did you last see him?"

  One of the groomsmen waved his hand towards the entrance into the church. "Over by the entrance. He was maybe helping one of his relatives come in?" Answer given, the men began ambling away, pulling out their smartphones in the classic guy move to show that the conversation was over.

  I turned to head towards the entrance of the church, but paused when I suddenly heard Janice's voice, cutting through the crowd. Trouble. "Where is that stupid man?" I heard her asking to the room at large.

  I spun around, my eyes searching across the bride's party on the other side of the altar. I spotted Janice after a moment, standing back behind the other bridesmaids, her arms crossed on her chest as she leaned against the back wall of the church. She was the very picture of frustrated disinterest. Without even thinking, I began taking a step or two towards her, but I then forced myself to turn away, heading for the front entrance. Janice was a perpetual thorn in everyone's side, yes, but getting the wedding back on track by locating the missing groom was more important. Not my problem.

  I sprinted down the aisle, cursing my choice of high heels over flats and ignoring the curious gazes that I attracted from the various friends and other family members that were filling the pews. Skidding to a stop at front door, I turned around, looking for somebody to question.

  Unfortunately for the young man dressed in all black with a walkie talkie clipped to his belt, he was the first person unlucky enough to make eye contact. I hurried over to him, rudely pushing in front of the elderly woman who was attempting to ask him something about when the church had been built. "Excuse me," I cut in. "Have you seen the groom run past here recently?"

  The young man looked a little shocked to be interrupted, but he stopped talking to the old woman and gazed skyward for a moment as he thought. I tried (and failed) not to stamp my high heel in frustration as I waited. "Yeah, he went out to the parking lot," he said after a moment. "I think he had to park one of his relatives cars. Uncle Rodney, maybe?"

  Thanking him with a wave of my hand (more than he deserved), I turned towards the lot. However, as I was about to dash out into the lot in search of Alex, I heard a loud scream echo out of the church from behind me. Once again, I was torn - should I go out and search for the missing groom, or did I stay behind and try and keep the wedding from falling apart in his absence?

  Dammit. Why did this always fall to me?

  *

  I sent one last, despairing glance towards the parking lot, but I couldn't tear away from my duties. I yelled an especially violent curse out loud, mentally whispered a prayer that Alex was just helping a relative and had lost track of time, and then hurried back up the steps and into the church once more, my feet screaming at me with every step.

  Inside, in the thirty seconds or so that I had been absent, the situation had somehow markedly deteriorated. Previously, there had been muttering and people looking slightly confused about why the wedding was taking so long to get started. Now, everyone's attention was on the front altar, where, like dramatic actors on a stage, Danielle's mother and father were standing on opposite sides and shouting across at each other.

  I noticed Sally standing near the back of the chapel room, looking shocked and unsure of what to do. I reached out and grabbed her quickly before she could slip away.

  "Hey, duck up and talk to Danielle!" I ordered the poor, confused looking wedding planner.

  She looked back at me, her eyes wide. "What? What do I say?"

  I wanted to yell at the poor woman, to shake her by the shoulders until some sense came tumbling into her head. She's the wedding planner - she should be better prepared to handle the wedding going wrong! Instead, I racked my brain for something to downplay this catastrophe. "Just tell her that her parents are squabbling, but I'm going to sort it out," I decided. "The wedding might be delayed for a little bit. But everything is fine!"

  Sally nodded, turning away and hurrying out towards the stairs leading up to Danielle's dressing room. I turned my attention back to the front of the chapel. One small problem down, one much larger one still to tackle. As if on cue, Janice's pitch suddenly jumped an octave at the front of the room.

  "Oh god, Janice,
what the hell are you doing?" I muttered to myself as I hurried back up the aisle, trying to work out how in the world to break this up. It would probably be bad to start throwing punches. But at least I didn't have to wonder about the reason behind the fight for too long - Janice's voice carried clearly out over the crowd and to my ears.

  "It's just like all men, isn't it?" she shrieked. "You're never responsible for anything! You always think that it's better to just give up and run away!"

  Rick, on the other side of the stage, was looking rather frustrated that he was caught in this very public exchange. Despite this, however, he was standing his ground. Normally, I'd cheer for him for standing up to his bitch of an ex-wife, but this was the absolute furthest from the right time to be doing so. "I didn't run away - I'm paying for this entire wedding! Even though you keep on heaping more and more expenses on top, just trying to hurt me!" he roared back, waving his hand around at the various wedding decorations as if to show how much he had given.

  "Oh, yeah, trying to make up for your absence by throwing money at the problem!" Janice threw the words back in his face. "Because that's totally the same as being there for your child!"

  "This isn't about Danielle, and you know it!" Rick yelled as I hurried forward up the aisle, wishing fervently for my aching legs to move faster. "This is about you being upset that our marriage failed-"

  "Over that damn whore!" Danielle's mother screamed. Clearly, Janice and Rick were in their own world; Blossom was sitting in the front row on the bride's side of the church, and I felt a moment of pity at her completely crushed expression. Somehow, I didn't think that Blossom ever quite realized how she fit in to the rather complicated situation between Rick and Janice.

  "It's not her fault!" Rick protested, not hesitating a second in his firing back at his ex-wife. I shoved an older lady (great-aunt Gertrude, maybe?) out of the way as I charged. "You were done with me long before she ever appeared!"

  Finally, after what had seemed like an eternity, I had managed to fight my way up the aisle and reach the front of the church. Panting, I leaned on the front pews for a moment, trying to catch my breath so that I could stop this. To my astonishment, however, there was someone else who spoke up before I could say anything.