I looked at my watch. “An eyelash can take fifteen minutes?”
“It can take an hour, as far as anyone down there knows.” He smoothed a wrinkle I couldn’t even see out of his pants, then adjusted his red bow tie. “I wouldn’t have pegged Deb as a cold-feeter. Shows what I know.”
“What did she say to you back there?” I asked him.
He was listening to the noises beyond the door, alert, I knew, to the aural distinction between crying and getting makeup done. After a moment, he said, “Oh, she asked about true love. If I believed in it, does it last. Typical stuff pre-ceremony.”
“What did you say?”
Now he looked at me, with that cool, confident countenance that made him, along with my mom, the best team in the Lakeview wedding business. “I said of course. I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t. Love is what it’s all about.”
Wow, I thought. “You really believe that?”
He shuddered. “Oh, God, no.”
Just then the door opened, revealing Deborah, makeup fixed, eyelash in place, dress seemingly perfect. She gave us a nervous smile, and even as I reciprocated I was more aware of William, beaming, than my own expression.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
He held out his hand to her and she took it, letting him guide her down the stairs. The makeup lady followed, sighing only loud enough for me to hear, and then I was alone.
Down in the church lobby, my mother would be getting the wedding party into position, adjusting straps and lapels, fluffing bouquets, and straightening boutonnières. I looked back into the anteroom, where only a pile of crumpled tissues now remained. As I hurriedly collected them, I wondered how many other brides had felt the same way in this space, standing on the edge between their present and future, not quite ready to jump. I could sympathize, but only to a point. At least they got to make that choice for themselves. When, instead, it was done for you—well, that was something to really cry about. At any rate, now the organ music was rising, things beginning. I shut the door and headed downstairs.
My mother picked up her wine. “I’m going to say seven years. Long enough for a couple of kids and an affair.”
“Interesting,” William replied, holding his own glass aloft and studying it for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll give it three. No children. But an amicable parting.”
“You think?”
“I just get that feeling. Those feet were awfully cold, and asking about true love?”
My mom considered this. “Point taken. I think you’ll win this one. Cheers.”
They clinked glasses, then sat back in their chairs, each taking a solemn sip. After every wedding, when the bride and groom were gone and all the guests dispersed to their homes and hotels, my mom and William had one last ritual. They’d have a nightcap, recap the event, and lay bets on the marriage it produced. Their accuracy in predicting both outcome and duration was uncanny. And, to be honest, a little unsettling.
To me, though, the real test was in the departure. There was just something so telling about that moment when everyone gathered to see the bride and groom off. It wasn’t like the ceremony, where people were nervous and could hide things, or the reception, which was usually chaotic enough to blur details. With the leaving, months of planning were behind them, years of a life together ahead. Which was why I’d always made a point of watching their faces so carefully, taking note of fatigue, tears, or flickers of irritation. I didn’t make a wager as much as a wish for them. I always wanted a happy ending for everyone else.
Not that the clients would ever know this. It was the secret finish to what was known in our town of Lakeview as “A Natalie Barrett Wedding,” an experience so valued by the newly engaged that both a spot on a waitlist and a huge fee were required to even be considered for one. My mom and William’s price might be high, but they delivered, the results of their work bound in the four thick, embossed leather albums in their office sitting room. Each was packed with images of glowing brides and grooms getting married in every way possible: beachside, while barefoot. Lakeside, in black tie. At a winery. On top of a mountain. In their own (gorgeous, styled for the occasion) backyard. There were huge wedding parties and small intimate ones. Many billowing white dresses with trains, and some in other colors and cuts (signs, I’d found, of second or third marriages). The difference between a regular wedding and a Natalie Barrett one was akin to the difference between a pet store and a circus. A wedding was just two people getting married. A Natalie Barrett Wedding was an experience.
The Deborah Bell Wedding—it was company policy that we referred to all planned events by the bride’s name, as it was Her Day—was pretty much par for the course for us. The ceremony was at a church, the reception at a nearby hotel ballroom. There were five bridesmaids and five groomsmen, a ring bearer and a flower girl. Their choice of a live band was increasingly rare these days (my mother preferred a DJ: the fewer people to wrangle, the better) as was the dinner brought out by waiters (carving stations, buffets, and dessert bars had been more popular for years now). The night had wrapped up with fireworks, an increasingly popular request that added a permitting wrinkle but literally a final bang for the client’s buck. Despite the earlier dramatics, Deborah had run to the limo clutching her new husband’s hand, flushed and happy, smile wide. They’d been kissing as the door was shut behind them, to the obvious disapproval of the reverend, who had then dabbed his own eyes, his wife patting his arm, as the car pulled away. Good luck, I’d thought, as the tail lights turned out of sight. May you always have the answers to each other’s most important questions.