Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [96]
The mother of the groom was mollified, the bride, having been informed of the arrival of the cake topper, was persuaded to leave her room, and Paul somehow managed to get everyone to the garden for the rehearsal. Margaret did not like the location that had been set aside for the string quartet, so four chairs, a potted fern, and two silk dogwoods were moved from the center of the fan-shaped rows of seats to the front, near the podium. Catherine thought there should be a microphone for the officiant, and wondered how much trouble it would be to round one up before tomorrow.
Nonetheless, Paul, with his clipboard and precisely orchestrated schedule of events, managed to keep everyone on task until Margaret started complaining about the heat, and why no one had thought to erect a shade canopy to keep the guests out of the sun, and whose idea was it to have an outdoor wedding anyway? Then the videographer realized that—speaking of sun—at two o’clock in the afternoon, he would be shooting directly into it, and Cici pointed out that if they moved the wedding arch they would lose not only the frame of the mountain and sheep meadow background that Traci had insisted upon, but the entire line of the bridal procession.
It was at this point that one of the groomsmen started baaing to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride.” Traci was in the middle of screeching at her mother that this was all her fault, that she was the one who wanted a sheep-farm wedding and that she should have known where the sun was—and when she heard the baaing, she went suddenly stiff. She turned, eyes blazing and cheeks flaming, and marched over to the offender—who by this time had smothered both his singing and his giggles and was trying to look innocent—and told him flatly he was out of the wedding.
As it turned out, the sheep imitator was not just a grooms-man but the best man, and also the groom’s brother. Jason informed Traci that if his brother was out of the wedding, so was he, to which Traci retorted that that suited her fine, at which point Margaret turned on Catherine and demanded that she control her daughter, and after that, it was pretty much a free-for-all.
“After all this work,” Cici muttered to Paul, “she is marrying that jerk if it’s the last thing she does on this earth.”
“And I am not moving a single chair,” warned Paul darkly.
Cici waded into the melee, shouting for attention. “Ladies! Gentlemen! This is a wedding! We should be cooperating, not fighting!” She looked for help to the officiant, who, well into his third apricot-tini, merely smiled beneficently. “What if,” she suggested to Traci, “the videographer shot from behind the podium, which means he would be away from the sun? And you’ll be doing the wedding photographs in the morning, so you’ll still have your shot of the mountains and sheep, just like you wanted, with no sun in the way.”
The videographer agreed that he could shoot from behind the screen where the musicians were stationed, which would make him as unobtrusive as possible, and Traci reluctantly conceded accord.
They lined up again, boys on one side and girls on the other, all of them glaring across the lawn at each other, looking more like the Jets and the Sharks from West Side Story than the friends and family of a happy couple about to be united forever in the sacrament of marriage. The groom was persuaded to take his place at the head of the aisle, joking with his best man and sipping from a bottle of beer, as Traci, in jeans, a T-shirt, and a shoulder-length tulle veil, made her way down the aisle on the arm of her father, whom Cici could not have picked out of the crowd until that moment.
All proceeded smoothly until the officiant rehearsed the vows, beginning with “Do you take this woman?” And the groom, grinning, nudged his best man and replied, “Let me think about it.”
Traci turned to him, snatched the beer bottle from his hand, and poured it over his head.
In the stunned silence that followed, Cici muttered, “I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her with my bare hands.