My room is the only one on the house’s third floor. Our Crown Hill home was built in 1904, which becomes extremely clear on the hottest and coldest days of the year. The moment I saw it, I fell in love with this octagonal space on one side of the house, a small capped tower called a turret. Asher thought it was creepy, so she relinquished her oldest-kid-picks-first privileges and let me have it.
Downstairs I find a post-wedding scene I’m all too familiar with. My mom is at her laptop, her wedding bun loosened into a casual ponytail, switching between our post-wedding survey and one of her endless spreadsheets. My dad is scrutinizing the massive calendar chalked on the board that is one wall of our kitchen. Each square contains the most important details for each wedding: names, location, start time, number of guests.
“Do we have an updated guest list for the Wheatley-Ishikawa wedding?” he asks. He’s weekend-dad chic in khakis and a short-sleeved button-down, sipping coffee from a mug Asher and I got him for Hanukkah years ago that says 00 DAYS WITHOUT A DAD JOKE.
“MOB just sent it over,” Mom says without glancing back at him. MOB: mother of the bride. “They’re at one ninety-three, and the venue is capped at two hundred. I told her that—”
“For the fourth time,” Dad fills in.
“Yep, and she swears they won’t go over. Although she did ask if a child counts as a whole person or half a person.”
Even I can’t help laughing at that. But this is the problem with the two of them working together and from home: they are never not working. They were able to grow the business when they brought on Asher full-time, and now at any given point, there are twenty to thirty weddings in progress.
“Morning,” I say, heading to the cupboard for Edith’s food, which I pour into her bowl while she flicks her perfect gray-striped tail back and forth.
“Morning,” Dad echoes. “Guess your new look wasn’t permanent?”
I feign a gasp. “Are you saying I couldn’t pull it off?”
Only a faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, indicating he’s deeply absorbed in his task.
I refill Edith’s water dish, too, uncapping the bottle of dental additive and tipping the recommended dosage into the cap. For a few seconds, I peer into the cap at the mint-green liquid. The right amount, and yet the worry is always itching at the back of my brain. No matter how many times I do this, I’m terrified I’ve accidentally added too much. If I give this to her, I’d be poisoning her. Which is why right after I pour the capful into her water, I turn the entire bowl over the sink and watch it swirl down the drain. I can’t risk it.
Before the meds, before therapy, sometimes I’d repeat this ten times in a row. Today I only have to do it twice.
“Feeling okay?” Mom says, and I know she’s talking about yesterday, not about my OCD. “I’m sorry we couldn’t come with you, but you understand. We figured you were in good hands with Tarek.”
“I get it,” I say, because I do, and it’s too early in the morning to think about Tarek’s hands. I peel open a cup of Greek yogurt and take a seat with my back to the wedding calendar. Although this way I’m staring straight at a framed Seattle Times article about B+B that ran a decade ago. THEIR BRIDE AND JOY, reads the headline that graced the front page of the lifestyle section. Asher and I are wearing veils, midlaugh as she leads me in a dance move.
A week after that photo was taken, my parents sat us down on the living room couch, Mom rubbing an invisible smudge from her cat-eye glasses while Dad forced a smile. The stress of B+B had been a little overwhelming lately, they said, what with living in the same place they worked, and my mom was going to stay in her sister’s guest room for a while.
A while—a phrase I assumed meant a week, maybe two.
I examine my parents’ grainy newspaper faces the way I always do, but I don’t see any signs of strain. And although my mom moved back in six months later, I never stop searching for the same thing in their real-life faces, even if I’m not sure what it would look like.
“I hope Naomi and Paul weren’t too upset about the lack of harp,” I say.
“We found a harp playlist on Spotify, but it wasn’t quite the same,” Mom says. “We definitely missed you.”
She has this astounding ability to guilt-trip me without saying she’s disappointed. If I hadn’t gone to urgent care, I’m sure I would have gotten a lecture about how I’m smart enough to read an ingredients list before popping something in my mouth, how I shouldn’t have done something so risky as attempting to eat a piece of cheese before a performance.
I become immersed in excavating my yogurt with a spoon, searching for the promised fruit on the bottom. There’s never enough of it.
Dad rests a hand on the seat across from me. “Mom and I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“The follow-ups?” On Sundays, I usually help Mom with post-wedding surveys, which means I also know when one of our weddings ends in divorce. Almost a quarter of the couples we’ve tracked aren’t together anymore, and I have a theory that the pricier the wedding, the likelier the marriage is to fail.
Divorce. The dirtiest word in wedding planning. The thing I was certain my parents were heading toward before my mom’s suitcase reappeared in the hallway, before they told Asher and me they’d been seeing a counselor and they were so happy Mom was coming home, so happy everything could go back to normal,
