And April’s parents hadn’t stopped glaring at him all afternoon.
Jack shut off the microphone and jumped off the makeshift stage, rubbing his hands together because really, he had no idea what to do. Torn between wanting to see April and wanting to flee this pit of tension and hostility—funny, considering a happy, supposedly joyful wedding would take place in this room tomorrow night—he stood back and waited for a decision to fall from the sky and smack him in the face. But like always, he waited for no reason because nothing happened. April continued filling miniature shot glasses with birdseed and yellow drink umbrellas because her mother had deemed all her previous work worthless and tossed those sucker-looking things into the trash. A small collection of gold balls lay heaped in a mound inside the trash can—like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if the pot of gold lay on top of a collection of discarded coffee cups and yesterday’s Chinese takeout.
The trash smelled awful. Someone needed to take it out.
Jack’s eyes drifted away from April as he took in Kristin placing and replacing name cards around white linen-topped tables. Her mother reassembled gigantic arrangements of cream-colored lilies and white roses, proclaiming that the local flower shop was inept and completely without taste and for the love of God could they not tell the difference between a freshly cut flower and one that had clearly been refrigerated for more than a day? The level of outrage on this particular point left Jack perplexed, but then again he wasn’t a chick and maybe this is what women worried about.
For maybe the millionth time in his life, he silently thanked God for making him a man.
He also silently begged his Maker for a little grace. In about four seconds, he would need it.
“So did everything sound okay to you? Because if you had something different in mind we could always change things up a bit.” Kristin hovered over a pile of multiple types of ribbon mounded on one of the round tables. She chewed her lip, heavy on the concentration, as she glanced up for the briefest second.
“It sounded great.” Her enthusiasm equaled a disappointed meteorologist’s pronouncement on the perfectly normal weather during non-hurricane season. It’s pretty. Not a cloud in the sky. Nothing to report here. Not even a single death. “The only thing I didn’t hear you play was ‘Open Arms.’ It’s on your set list, right? That’s the song we were listening to when Sam first asked me to be exclusive. You have to sing it.”
“Open Arms”? By Journey? The “Open Arms” that was about thirty years old and had probably been played more at weddings than even “Wind Beneath My Wings”—which he drew the line at and would continue to draw the line at until the end of time? Or until the end of this particular wedding since this was the last and final time anyone would refer to him as a wedding singer ever again.
But . . . “Open Arms”? Surely she was kidding.
“Um, no. I didn’t see that one on the list I was given. Maybe somehow it got left off.”
“Well, make sure you add it. Sam would be so disappointed.”
From a few yards back, April laughed. She tried to cover it with a sudden hacking cough—one that Kristin bought but Jack could spot as fake even if he hadn’t been standing ten feet away from her. Right then, Jack decided to close the distance. Maybe it was a small kinship he’d felt with her since their little date last night. Maybe it was because she felt like the only familiar person in the room. Maybe it was just that at this particular moment in time they shared a private exasperation with Kristin. Whatever the reason, he felt like being around her. Even if her parents flung imaginary daggers at his chest as he approached.
He picked up a birdseed cup. “Now, are people supposed to drink those or hand them out to the birds? Which, if you want my opinion, seems to skirt the line of encouraging alcoholism among God’s winged creatures.”
“Thank you for sharing.”
“And then another thing—”
“Put that down, Jack. The last thing I need is for you to spill it. Then I’d have to clean it up and start over.” April looked up at him, a look of pure exhaustion on her face. Still, he didn’t miss the edge of a smile. “Except for your lovely rendition of ‘Open Arms’ that I simply can’t wait to hear tomorrow night, you’re finished with rehearsals. So why are you still hanging around? A sudden need to fill birdseed cups?” Before he knew what had happened, she grabbed a stack of twenty-five or so and shoved them in his hands. “I’ll take that as a yes, so here you go. Finish these in the next fifteen minutes and I’ll buy you some ice cream.” As soon as the words left her lips, her eyes widened as though she couldn’t believe her impulsively bad idea.