to set a date.”
“Okay, the third Saturday in October. That sounds good.” He pries his shoe off his foot, then peels off his black dress sock and sniffs it.
Watching him, I have to remind myself that I am head over heels in love with him. So what if he behaves, on occasion, like a caged primate at the Bronx Zoo?
You find him endearing, faults and all. You really do.
You have to, because the moment his little quirks cease to be endearing, it all goes to hell in a handcart.
“I told you my feet were going to stink,” he tells me before tossing the sock in the general vicinity of the laundry in the corner, which I hope to God is dirty.
I smile to show that I have absolutely no problem with stinky feet. No problem at all.
I’m in love, dammit.
“About the wedding…” I say as he bends over his other shoe.
“Yeah?” The other shoe comes off and he’s sniffing that sock now.
Okay, I’m sorry, but he just crossed the line from endearing to freakish.
“Jack…cut it out.”
“What?”
“Please stop smelling your sock.”
“I’m just seeing if it stinks.”
“The other one did. What are the odds that this one doesn’t?”
He makes a face and it sails through the air after its partner. “Zero.”
Mental Note: you are in love with this man. Quirks others might find unappealing—disgusting, even—are charming to you. Going to hell in a handcart is not an option.
I allow myself a moment to get back into a romantic frame of mind before saying again, “If we do go with the third Saturday in October—”
“I thought we just agreed on it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“The number-one place we’d want to have it at is booked all the other Saturdays in October, actually, and by now it’s probably booked that day, too. There aren’t that many other decent places to choose from, so…”
Oops.
I said too much, starting with the word booked.
But instead of asking the obvious—how can you possibly know that, if we’ve been engaged less than an hour and we’ve spent every moment of that time together?—Jack asks, “What number-one place is that?”
“Shorewood Country Club. In Brookside,” I add at his blank look.
“We want to have our wedding in Brookside?”
“My hometown,” I clarify, realizing there must be a crack enclave in the South Bronx also called Brookside. No wonder he’s mixed up and wearing that are-you-out-of-your-mind? expression.
“We never said that,” Jack informs me as he sneaks another glance at the television, where an ESPN reporter is animatedly recapping some game.
“I know we didn’t say that. We never said anything because we never talked about it before,” I point out.
I neglect to add, That’s because you once said something along the lines of “getting married is for assholes.”
Pardon his French.
“I just assumed we’d get married in Brookside,” I say instead.
“Why?”
Realizing a crash course in Nuptials 101 is in order, I patiently explain, “Because weddings are usually held in the bride’s hometown. Kate and Billy’s was in Mobile, remember?”
To Jack’s credit, he doesn’t point out that there’s a tremendous difference between a charming Gulf Coast city and a tiny blue-collar town south of Buffalo on Lake Erie.
To his discredit, he says instead, “Well, since we happen to live in New York, where there are millions of decent places to have a wedding, why wouldn’t we just get married here?”
I’ll admit this gives me pause.
Because, when you come right down to it…he has a point.
Why not just get married here?
Back when I was certain I would eventually marry my ex-boyfriend, Will McCraw—which, unbeknownst to me, Will McCraw never once considered—I assumed the wedding would be right here in New York.
That’s because Will didn’t like Brookside. He didn’t like my family, either, I suspect, although he never said it. What he did say, frequently, and in their presence, was that he didn’t like Brookside. Pretty much in those words.
Just one of the many reasons I suspect that all those novenas my mother sent my way for years were probably her pious Catholic answer to voodoo. If there’s any truth to the power of prayer, my messy breakup with Will can be attributed to Connie Spadolini’s direct pipeline to God. Imagine what she could accomplish if she converted all that maternal energy to global causes.
“Well?”
Oh, yeah. Jack is still wondering why we shouldn’t just get married here in New York. “Cost, for one thing,” I say. “Do you know how much we’d pay for a sit-down dinner for three hundred in Manhattan?”
“Three hundred?”
I have his full attention now—and he certainly has mine, because it looks as though I may have to administer CPR any second.
“Tracey, you’re not serious about that, are you?”
“A sit-down dinner? Well, we can look into a buffet, but sometimes it’s more cost effective to—”
“No, I’m talking about the head count. Come on. Three hundred?”
“I have a huge family, Jack. And then there’s your family, and all our co-workers, and our friends from New York, and our high-school friends, and college roommates…”
“And don’t forget my old Cub Scout den leader or Jimmy the doorman,” he says dryly.
I decide this is probably not a good time to mention that Jimmy the doorman was on my initial guest list—the one I pared down from just under five hundred to the aforementioned three, and with considerable angst over every cut.
“Hey,” he says suddenly, “if we had it here in New York, I bet a lot of your family wouldn’t come.”
I bristle at that. “So we want to have the wedding in the most inconvenient place as possible? Is that your point?”
“No. That was definitely not my point. Forget
