Once and for All(4)

And I knew my mom, and only my mom. Not only did I look just like her—same features, dark hair, and olive skin—but I sometimes felt like we were the same person. Mostly because she’d been disowned by her own wealthy, elderly parents around the time of the mud pit marriage, so it was always just us. After my dad bailed, she sold the cabin and moved us into Lakeview, where, after bouncing around a few restaurant jobs, she got a position working at the registry department of Linens, Etc., the housewares chain. On the surface, it seemed like a weird fit, as it was hard to find a convention more commerce-driven than weddings. But she had a kid to feed, and in her previous life my mom had been a debutante and taken etiquette classes at the country club. This world might have disgusted her, but she knew it well. Before long, brides were requesting her when they came in to pick out china patterns or silverware.

By the time William was hired a year later, my mom had a huge following. As she trained him, teaching him all she knew, they became best friends. There in the back of the store, they spent many hours with brides, listening to them talk—and often complain—about their wedding planning. As they learned which vendors were good and which weren’t, they began keeping lists of numbers for local florists, caterers, and DJs to recommend. This expanded to advising more and more on specific events, and then planning a few weddings entirely. Meanwhile, over lunch hours and after-work drinks or dinner, they started to talk about going out on their own. A partnership on paper and a loan from William’s mother later, they were in business.

My mom had a fifty-one share, William forty-nine, and she got her name on the door. But the legalese basically ended there. Whatever foxhole a particular wedding was, they were in it together. They made dreams come true, they liked to tell each other and anyone else who would listen, and they weren’t wrong. This ability never did cross over to their own love lives, however. My mom had barely dated since splitting with my dad, and when she did, she made a point of picking people she knew wouldn’t stick around—“to take the guesswork out of it,” in her words. Meanwhile William, who had been out since about age eight, had yet to meet any man who could come close to meeting his exacting standards. He dealt with this by also leaning toward less than ideal choices with no chance of long-term relationship potential. Real love didn’t exist, they maintained, despite building an entire livelihood based on that very illusion. So why waste time looking for it? And besides, they had each other.

Even as a kid, I knew this was dysfunctional. But unfortunately, I’d been indoctrinated from a young age with my mom and William’s strong, oft-repeated cynical views on romance, forever, love, and other keywords. It was confusing, to say the least. On the one hand, I lived and breathed the wedding dream, dragged along to ceremonies and venues, privy to meetings on every excruciating detail from Save the Date cards to cake toppers. But away from the clients and the work, there was a constant, repetitive commentary about how it was a sham, no good men really existed, and we were all better off alone. It was no wonder that a few years earlier, when my best friend Jilly had suddenly gone completely boy-crazy, I’d been reluctant to join her. I was a fourteen-year-old girl with the world-weariness of a bitter midlife divorcée, repeating all the things I’d heard over and over, like a mantra. “Well, he’ll only disappoint you, so you should just expect it,” I’d say, shaking my head as she texted with some thick-necked soccer player. Or I’d warn: “Don’t give what you’re not ready to lose,” when she considered, with great drama, whether to confess to a boy that she “liked” him. My peers might have been flirting either in pairs or big groups, but I stood apart, figuratively and literally, the buzzkill at the end of every rom-com movie or final chorus of a love song. After all, I’d learned from the best. It wasn’t my fault, which did not make it any less annoying.

But then, the previous summer, on a hot August night, all of that had changed. Suddenly, I did believe, at least for a little while. The result was the most broken of hearts, made even worse by the knowledge that I had no one to blame for it but myself. If I’d only walked away, said no twice instead of only once, gone home to my bed and left that wide stretch of stars behind when I had the chance. Oh, well.

Now my mother downed the rest of her drink and put her glass aside. “Past midnight,” she observed, taking a glance at her watch. “Are we ready to go?”

“One last sweep and we will be,” William replied, standing up and brushing off his suit. As a rule, we all dressed for events as if we were guests, but modest ones. The goal was to blend in, but not too much. Like everything in this business, a delicate balance. “Louna, you take the lobby and outside. I’ll check here and the bathrooms.”

I nodded, then headed across the ballroom, now empty except for a few servers stacking chairs and clearing glasses. The lights were bright overhead, and as I walked I could see flower petals and crumpled napkins here and there on the floor, along with a few stray glasses and beer cans. Outside, the lobby was deserted, except for some guy leaning out a half-open door with a cigar, under a NO SMOKING sign.

I continued out the front doors, where the night felt cool. The parking lot was quiet as well, no one around. Or so I thought, until I started back in and glimpsed one of Deborah’s bridesmaids, a tall black girl with braids and a nose ring—Malika? Malina?—standing by a nearby planter. She had a tissue in her hand and was dabbing at her eyes, and I wondered, not for the first time, what it was about weddings that made everything so emotional. It was like tears were contagious.