Six weeks before my wedding, my mother called to remind me that she and my father had already told everyone they were not coming. “Don’t make us look like liars, Wendy,” she said, and her voice had the quality it always had when she had already decided something, smooth and even and carrying no uncertainty whatsoever, the voice of a woman who has always found the world cooperative. This is how it had gone: Derek asked me on his mother’s porch in March, one knee, fireflies crossing the pasture behind him like small traveling witnesses.
The ring was one he had saved eleven months for, and I said yes before he finished the question, before he got to whatever the rest of the sentence was going to be, because the answer was already assembled and had been for some time.
I called my parents twenty minutes later, my hands still shaking against the phone. My mother picked up on the second ring.
Congratulations, she said, flat, like reading a number off a receipt, and then she asked the date. September fourteenth, I told her.
It was the only Saturday the venue had remaining and the deposit was already down.
Silence, long enough for me to hear the kitchen faucet running in the background of whatever room she was in. That’s Courtney’s Bali launch week, she said. I knew.
My younger sister had been posting countdowns on Instagram for two months, a luxury wellness retreat, half a million followers, a brand deal, a content calendar, the whole production of a life organized entirely around being watched.
My mother said it the way she said most things about Courtney, with a quality that did not quite frame it as important but somehow required everything else to rearrange itself around it. I told her the venue would not hold the date.
She told me Courtney had five hundred thousand people waiting for that trip. Then she said, “You have what, maybe two hundred guests?” and she did not wait for me to answer before saying she would talk to my father.
I sat on the porch of the farmhouse where Derek had just asked me to marry him, with the ring on my finger and the fireflies still moving through the grass, and thought that maybe this time, just this once, they would choose me.
My father called that evening. I was making pasta. Derek was at the kitchen table.
I put the call on speaker, not from any particular strategy, just habit, and I am glad now that I did because a witness matters.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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