Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [161]
“Okay, then, I looked like a dork.”
“You looked like an angel. Mum’s favorite picture of you—the one she had as a screen saver on her computer—that was taken on my wedding day!”
“I know. Talk about embarrassing!”
“Oh, shut up. At least this time it’s one of your cool sisters getting married.”
“Too right.”
Hannah was indeed delighted. She’d chosen her own dress, from a proper shop, and not some namby bridal salon, and her own shoes, with a two-inch heel, and she hadn’t had to have her hair painfully teased into King Charles spaniel ringlets. And today, there was definitely mascara. Three whole coats.
At the back of the church, Dad had pretty much stared at her, and when he finally spoke, he had said, “Blimey, Hannah, you look about twenty-one years old!”
“In a good way?”
“There is no good way for a man’s sixteen-year-old daughter to look like a twenty-one-year-old!”
She’d stuck out her tongue at him, in a reassuringly childish way.
“But you look gorgeous!”
“Thanks, Dad.”
Dad had looked from one to the other of them, and for a horrible moment, Hannah thought he might start to cry and set them both off.
But he didn’t. He looked all proud and coughed a bit, shook himself a little, and started to concentrate hard on the music.
So, Lisa thought, as she neared the end of her journey toward Andy, here we all are. And here I am. I never thought I’d be here, but here I am. And thank God I am.
MARK SAVED HIS FIRST GLASS OF WINE FOR AFTER HIS SPEECH. HE held it in his hand, to help keep him steady, as he stood up to deliver his toast. He’d jotted a few things down—even Googled “father of the bride speeches” on the computer, but he’d decided to be brief and off the cuff. Now he wasn’t so sure that had been the sane approach, and he rather longed for some cue cards. He didn’t do this often, and when he did, he had a model or some drawings in front of him as prompts and never had to say anything that might at any moment make him cry, so this was new territory. He felt his neck redden, as he began to speak, the first few words sounding, to him, shaky and uncertain.
“It’s always a bit of a relief to be the first speaker. I daresay I should be funny, but I think I’m going to go with sincere, and I hope first that you’ll indulge me in that, and second, that the groom and his best man have a lot of jokes up their sleeves to make up for me and my sobriety.
“Stepfather of the bride is a rather special position to be in. Stepfather to a teenage girl was another story altogether, and perhaps not one for this speech! We’ve had our moments, me and Lisa. You don’t love your stepchildren, when you get them. You want to, because you love their mother and she loves them, but you can’t, of course. In fact, they rather get in the way, in some situations you might imagine!” Everyone laughed. “You sort of have to fall in love with them—you grow on each other, gradually. Sometimes like roses, sometimes like mold. And then one day, whoof, you find that you love them, and that you’re a part of this weird, wonderful blended family—isn’t that what they’re calling us these days? And I wouldn’t change it. Nor would Lisa want to change hers, her new one, I know. I might not normally have expected to get to walk my stepdaughter down the aisle, but I did today, and I want to thank her for that privilege. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful, and radiant, and she did a far better job than me of keeping step with the music. That was a little jaunty for me—I’d practiced doing it to “The Wedding March”—altogether more sedate! Nor might I ordinarily have expected to get to speak. That, I also do by default, and that, I have to tell you, I wish were otherwise. Your mum would have given anything she had to be here with all of us today, with you today, Lisa. I hope she sort of is, somehow. She would have been making this speech, if she had been, and she would have been a thousand times more eloquent than me, because she always was. She’d have been funnier, too, of course. She was