Owen and Lucy had gotten married inside the basilica on the college campus where Lucy’s father taught. It was a huge wedding, and not at all what Lucy would have wanted if she had stopped for even a minute to ask herself what she actually wanted. But she was working for the Today show at that point, up at four a.m. just about every day, and she and Owen lived half a continent away from where they were having their wedding. Lots of women get married before they really know themselves, but Lucy didn’t have a mother to impose her own taste on the affair, and her father had no taste to speak of. If it had been up to him, he would have walked Lucy down the aisle wearing green wool pants that bagged at the knees and his lucky houndstooth jacket.
Instead of a mother, Lucy had Olive Steppenfeld. Olive was earning her PhD in medieval studies, and she was toiling away on a dissertation entitled “These Boots Are Made for Walking: The Unencumbered Wench Takes Flight—Medieval Woman on Foot to Canterbury.” She’d been working for Lucy’s father for years, running his household, balancing his checkbook, coordinating his calendar, and he’d handed her his youngest daughter’s wedding-planning responsibilities as a reward for her overall competence and attention to detail. Olive had a blank check, a disengaged bride hundreds of miles away, and the gut sense of a thirty-eight-year-old Midwestern spinster that she would never get the chance to plan the wedding she’d been dreaming of all her life. It stands as a credit to Olive’s formidable life force that she went ahead and ran with it.
To this day, all Lucy could remember was the initial phone call, when Olive had said to her, “The chapel is so brooding and dark, and it’s going to be October, I’m thinking red roses.”
“Red roses would be good,” Lucy said.
“Red roses, excellent,” Olive said, the way you say something when you’re writing it down.
“What color are your bridesmaids going to be wearing?” Olive asked. “I was thinking maybe jewel tones.”
“I’m not having bridesmaids. I’m keeping this simple. My sister is going to be my maid of honor. You can talk to her about the color of her dress.”
“Okay, I’ll get in touch with her,” Olive said, and then she made a sound like she was writing something down on a list. “A few of the faculty members who work with your father have little girls. They are dying to be flower girls. Can I say yes on your behalf?”
“Of course,” Lucy said, and then she had to hang up because they were two minutes to live, and there was a gray-haired man walking slowly back and forth behind the news correspondent holding a big sign that said STOP THE FLUORIDE CONSPIRACY.
The first, and only, clue to what lay ahead was the invitation. Lucy didn’t see it until her friend Aly called her.
“Are you serious with this thing?”
“What thing?” Lucy had asked.
“The invitation to your wedding.”
“I haven’t seen it.”
“You haven’t seen it?” And with this Aly started laughing—cackling, really—through the phone.
The honour of thy presence is hereby requested at the marriage of
Lady Lucy Miranda Ringwald
and
Sir Owen Jeffrey McIntire
on the eleventh of October in the year of Our Lord two thousand and nine at half past the sixth hour in the eventide in the Basilica of Our Most Benevolent Lord Feasting and revelry to be held at the great hall until dawn
In Lucy’s defense, by the time she laid eyes on the invitation, the wedding was five weeks away and she still hadn’t settled on a dress. She’d been promoted again at work, she was about four months away from developing a duodenal ulcer, and she was in no position to begin to micromanage her wedding. Besides, she and her father had agreed: It was to be a typical understated, ecumenical university wedding. Olive was simply handling the details.
Lucy got dressed in her old bedroom and rode over to the church in a limo with her father. When they arrived, Lucy looked out the windshield and saw this: Two straight lines of male undergrads, armed with what appeared to be real swords, dressed in silky purple pantaloons. They were on bended knee, heads bowed, with their swords before them. When Lucy stepped out of the limo, a bugler, standing on the steps of the church, began to play reveille, and the swordsmen stood in unison and clanged the tips of their weapons overhead, making a tunnel for Lucy and her father to walk through.
Once inside the vestibule, Lucy watched through the small square window as an altar boy, dressed like he was on his way to a Renaissance fair, swung a smoking thurible down the aisle, arching it over the heads of any of the seated guests that he could reach. The church itself was filled to capacity with all of her father’s grad students, both current and former, every last faculty member, as well as the college’s groundskeepers, the food-service personnel, and the janitorial staff. It was true Lucy had known most of these people all of her life. She just hadn’t expected to see them all at her wedding.
The flower girls, all eight of them, were wearing floor-length dresses and those pointy princess hats. Two were in ruby red, two in emerald green, two in amethyst purple, and two in sapphire blue—jewel tones; to be fair to Olive, they were all in jewel tones!—and they each had yards of tulle and shiny satin trailing along behind them. Lucy’s sister, Anna, was waiting for her at the end of the aisle wearing a tasteful knee-length dress of deep blue and looking deeply apologetic. (Later, at the reception, Anna told Lucy, “By the time I saw the whole setup, it was too late. I tried to make the flower girls take off those crazy hats but they all started crying.”) “I’m going to kill Olive,” Lucy whispered to Owen when she finally made it to the altar, where he was standing.
“Just breathe,” said Owen. “I’m in love with you, and we’re getting married.”
The bagpipes kicked in when they stepped out of the church. Olive had always wanted bagpipes at her wedding, and doggone it, she had made it happen. She’d found a bagpipers’ club a few counties over and promised them dinner at the reception and as much alcohol as they could drink. The sound filled the campus and made it all the way to Main Street. The locals thought the police commissioner had died, and more than one called the police station to inquire about it.
The flower girls were jubilant. The flower girls had never had a better day in their entire lives.
Now it was nine years later, and it was their anniversary. Owen had made reservations at an expensive Italian restaurant, he had lined up the sitter, and he had brought home a dozen red roses. Red roses were their anniversary joke, but Lucy still loved them. She couldn’t hold Olive Steppenfeld’s lunacy against red roses forever.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Owen said to her once they sat down.
“Thank you.”
“I like your new hair,” said Owen.
“I did this two weeks ago, you know.”
“Did I forget to say something about it?”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “But that’s okay.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“Is it weird that when I think of our wedding day, all I can remember are bagpipes?”
Owen’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it and then flipped it over.
“I wonder how Olive is doing?” he said.
“Last I heard, she was co-chairperson of Dad’s old department.”
“Good for her.”
“I still want to kill her,” said Lucy. “I would kill her if I thought I could get away with it.”
“She meant well,” said Owen.
“No, she didn’t.”
“You’re right. She didn’t mean well,” Owen admitted. “But I do believe she couldn’t help herself.”