How to Plan a Wedding - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Robin Braudwell

Then, my mother did a strange thing: she asked my father if he remembered to get the napkins for the reception. My father raised his head. He was a gentle man, and his grief was intense. He told her no. The room was quiet. My mother took responsibility seriously, and any lapse was subject to severe admonishment. At that moment, I hated her smoothly painted lips and her frosted hair and her cardboard questions.

But my mother did not yell. She did not scream. She did not ask my father why he always made her life so difficult. Instead, she got up and sat in his lap. She took his hands, still wet from his tears, in her own, and whispered something in his ear. Just before she put her head against his, I saw the look that softened her features. It was the same look I had seen when Bonnie was with Glen Dyer.

"Bonnie," I said suddenly. "Do you really love Glen Dyer?"

Bonnie looked at me. Her gray eyes were swimming.

"Yes," she said.

And a part of me believed she did and a part of me believed she only thought she did, and I thought about the difference between these two things and how, maybe in love, there is really no difference at all.

I wrote down everything for Bonnie. I wrote about the slant in the hill at the cemetery and the sideways smile on Glen Dyer's face when he spoke and the vibration of his lips when he kissed me. I wrote about the way Glen Dyer leaned and how my fingers curled in his hair. I told her not to marry him. I told her she was better than that, she didn't need his wagon hitched to her star.

I wrote all of these things down on a yellow piece of paper from one of the notepads in my father's office. I wrote them down and folded the paper, first in half, then in fourths, then in tiny eighths. I walked through the house.

I passed Bonnie's room, where she was wrapping the gifts to give her bridal attendants that night at the rehearsal dinner.

I passed Minnie, in her pink Sunday dress and hose without shoes, who was testing which of the stairs was the highest she could jump off without breaking her ankle.

I passed my mother and father, both strangely calm, flipping through the thin book of pictures from their wedding, which I knew had taken place in the tiny courtroom on the town square up in Franklin. The only family to attend was my father's sister because, for reasons unknown to me, neither side approved of the match.

I walked down to the creek that ran behind our house and placed the note I had written in the water. The creek was not deep or fast, and it took a few moments for the current to catch the paper. But then the note began to float slowly away, bobbing, bobbing, until it disappeared behind a tree. The paper would be like a boat. It would run along, I knew, to the Harpeth River, to the Tennessee, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, where the sand is white like bleached wood and the shrimp jump magically into fishermen's boats. My father once took our family there for a month by the sea, and Bonnie taught me the trick of floating on my back in the water.