Linda Grady-Troia

Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike. Tolstoy didn’t know mine. Then again, if he was talking about extended families, happy might not be the right adjective for mine. Not that we’re unhappy so much as ... well, judge for yourself. Let me tell you about my husband’s cousin’s daughter’s wedding day.

The whole thing started pretty much the way Dave and I expected. We had to pick his parents up so we left for the late afternoon wedding before noon. As anyone with an extended family knows, sometimes the shortest route from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side runs through Staten Island. Traffic was light so we got to my husband’s boyhood home early, and thus found Minnie still shredding her grocery receipts.

My mother-in-law has this little hand-cranked shredder, looks for all the world like a pasta machine. You feed the paper in at one end, turn a crank, and it comes out at the other end like so much linguine.

She was embarrassed to be caught at it. She knows full well her only son thinks it’s ridiculous to shred grocery receipts. She probably knows I think it’s ridiculous too, but I’m only the daughter-in-law – my opinions don’t count.

“You wasting your time with that again?” Dave asked.
“I’m just being careful,” she said defensively.
Some speaker at the Seniors’ Club monthly luncheon a couple of months back had

warned all the members about identity theft scams. I wasn’t at the luncheon so I don’t know if it was a reasonable discussion of a possible problem or paranoia mongering on a par with the promos for the ten o’clock news. Doesn’t make a whole lot of difference with Minnie. The world is a dangerous place to Minnie, with assorted perils held at bay only by her eternal vigilance. Scam artists, supergerms, terrorists, millenniums, minorities, it doesn’t matter. Minnie never met a fear she didn’t love, and she’s currently convinced somebody roots through her trash looking for credit card receipts and her

social security number, hoping to steal her identity. If I were stuck with Minnie’s identity, I’d be trying to get rid of it, but that’s another story.

“They don’t print the credit card number on the receipt,” Dave said. He’d checked the first time we’d come across her doing this. But the receipt shows that Minnie paid by credit card, so she figures it’s not safe. Maybe knowing what brand of canned tomatoes she buys – whatever’s cheapest – is supposed to help the imagined thief. Maybe her preferred brand of spaghetti sauce is the password for her debit card. Only Minnie won’t use a debit card because she can never remember a password or a PIN number.

“Claudia had three unauthorized charges on her Visa bill last month,” Minnie informed him. “Three! She had to call the bank.”

“And what happened?” Dave asked.

“Well, they credited her account,” Minnie admitted. “But she was very upset, and they had to send her a new card. Three charges! All from someplace called Urban Outfitters in Manhattan. Claudia hasn’t been to Manhattan since 1964.”

Dave shot me The Look, shaking his head, while I considered Claudia’s grandson, whom I’d recently seen after giving Claudia a ride home from a family party. I’d been stuck driving her because everyone knows the shortest route from Staten Island to the Upper West Side runs through Brooklyn, and how far out of the way could Bensonhurst be? Grandson Tony had politely taken my coat when I’d asked to use the bathroom, and the tunnel toll I’d carefully counted into the pocket had been missing when I needed it. I had an educated guess who’d been using Claudia’s credit card. No point telling Minnie this. Her sister’s grandchildren were on a level with the Seniors Club luncheon speakers and Bill O’Reilly – unimpeachable.

“Where’s Dad?” Dave asked.
“Upstairs bird watching,” Minnie said.
When Dave Sr. “watched birds” from the upstairs window instead of in the back

yard, he was generally using his binoculars to spy on the neighbors.
“Anything interesting?” I asked after we’d both gone upstairs and greeted him.

“No. Just a few sparrows. I thought ....” He was distracted by a UPS truck in the Pittman’s driveway, peered through the binoculars, probably trying to read the label on the box being delivered. It was too small, even with the magnification, I guess, because he turned back quickly. “I thought I spotted a red-winged blackbird, but I’m not sure.”

“Or a brown-shirted delivery man,” I muttered. Dave shot me The Look again but I knew I was on the side of Dave Sr.’s bad ear, and he never wore his hearing aid in the house, preferring to crank up the TV volume and ignore anything Minnie said that he didn’t want to hear.

This was really what I disliked about visiting my in-laws, the need to make sure I was on Dave Sr.’s bad-ear side, or to have to comment on Minnie’s eccentricities with the Look rather than a choice word or two.

“Where’s Davy?” Dave Sr. asked. “Didn’t he come with you?”

Our son is not named David, after his father and his grandfather. A childhood as “Junior” had left my husband determined that our kid would have his own name. William David had been a compromise to appease his grandfather, but said grandfather had yet to call him “Will.”

“At college,” Dave said.
“Didn’t he come home for the wedding? He was invited.”
If Dave Sr. was that sure Will had been invited, I would lay even money Minnie

had called her sister to insist on it. Unless the sister had called Minnie to complain that Will wasn’t coming and that we were too cheap to give a second wedding gift. But in that case Dave Sr. would have known Will wasn’t coming. No, it had to be Minnie again, trying to instill the level of family feeling she thought her grandson ought to have.

“From Boston?” my Dave said. “No. He didn’t come. How’s Louise?”

We were stuck, Dave and I, coming out from the city and picking up my in-laws, and taking them back into the city to this wedding because Dave’s sister had backed out at the last minute, which we had, of course, expected. Louise generally said she would be the one to drive her parents someplace, since she lived two blocks away. And then she

generally backed out at the last minute for some bogus reason. Expecting her to actually drive would be like expecting a politician to tell the truth.

She said, this time, that she had a cold coming on. And perhaps she did. Or perhaps it was just her usual allergy. Louise is allergic to germs. Or rather, Louise is allergic to the idea of germs. There would be some hundred people at this wedding, and who knew what kind of stray microbes might be floating around in the air, ignoring everyone else and waiting to zero in on Louise.

The proper term for Louise’s allergy is obsessive compulsive disorder, and she can’t – I’ve been told – help it. I should – and I know it – be more sympathetic. It’d be easier if she didn’t take such obvious pleasure in her condition

It is a biochemical condition. I have no doubt about that. She was on some medication for a while that rendered her close to normal. She went off it after a few weeks.

“She didn’t like the side effects,” Minnie explained. Dave and I exchanged The Look.

“What side effects?” asked Dave.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Minnie was vague, but I had a pretty good idea what side effect Louise hadn’t liked.

“Sanity,” I suggested when Minnie was out of hearing. “That’s what Louise didn’t like.”

That was catty, I know. Dave told me it was, and there was only one thing I could say in my own defense. “Miaow.”

It’s not like I say these things to any one but Dave, who says equally catty things back to me. And it’s not like either one of us confines our venom to my husband’s family either. I just haven’t gotten to mine yet. Give me time.

But I was telling you about the day of my husband’s cousin’s daughter’s wedding.

We were late, of course. We’d been early to pick Minnie and Dave Sr. up, and they were dressed and ready to go early, but first Louise had to be called to see if she needed anything, which entailed a long phone conversation between Minnie and Louise

about whether or not echinacea really helped with a cold and if so if it helped after you started showing symptoms or only before. And then Dave had to drive to the drugstore for an extra box of tissues, a bottle of Vitamin C, and a new thermometer because Louise was sure her old one was malfunctioning since it stubbornly refused to show she was running a fever.

And then, despite Dave and my both asking twice, Minnie decided, after we’d gotten on the highway, that she had not in fact brought all the medications Dave Sr. was going to need over the next few hours and that she had better also bring the next dose of something she was on in case we got stuck in traffic and were late getting back, so that we had to get off the highway and backtrack.

Dave Sr. stayed in the car while Minnie went into the house, so my Dave and I were reduced to the Look again, while I rehearsed mentally the comments I would make later, something about Minnie’s ability to create new, undreamed-of crises by her very efforts to avoid the ones she inevitably foresaw. Dave was probably doing the same.

I never believed in the concept of “soul mates” before I met Dave. I thought the whole idea was the stuff of fairy tales, like love at first sight and happily ever after. Even now I suspect that romanticists who use the term generally have something in mind a bit more elevated than a shared misanthropic sense of humor. Dave is the only human being I have ever met who finds the rest of the species as ridiculous as I do, and if that doesn’t make us soul mates, well then I don’t want one. I’d rather have my Dave.

So we sat in silence planning what we’d say to each other when we were next alone and waiting for Minnie to pack pharmaceutical supplies sufficient for a three-day weekend to get her through a five-hour wedding.

The delay got us stuck in traffic on the way in, however, so that the garage down the block from the church was full and we had to park in one two blocks away, and Minnie insisted she and Dave Sr. didn’t want to be any trouble so Dave shouldn’t double around the block to let them off right in front of the church. They could walk from the garage with us, but that took twenty minutes because Dave Sr. had to keep stopping to comment on every change in the neighborhood from the last time he’d been there 50

years before, and Minnie had to keep looking around in case somebody was going to mug her in the middle of the afternoon on a busy street, and both of them went out of their way to stumble over every uneven bit of sidewalk and piece of discarded trash so they could tell us how dirty and poorly maintained Manhattan was and that’s why we shouldn’t live there and had they mentioned that their neighbors the Phelps were moving to Florida and their house would be on the market soon.

Since we were late I fully expected to walk into the middle of one of the sort of interminable wedding masses favored by my in-laws’ extended family. As far as I knew none of them ever attended church except for weddings, funerals, and baptisms, but no one wanted to look impious enough to skip the longest possible service for any of those events. I hoped we’d be late enough to miss the sermon. I always feel there’s nothing quite as uninspiring as a twenty minute lecture on how to have a happy marriage from an unmarried celibate.

As I said, we were late and I was hopeful, but it turned out the groom was even later than we were. Instead of finding the ceremony half over we found the bride, her parents, and the entire wedding party – minus the groom — still in the church vestibule, huddled nervously around some guy in a tux – the best man as it turned out – who was yelling irritably into a cell phone.

“Left!” he bellowed. “Left! Toward the park. Not back toward the river!” “Who the hell hired a dyslexic limo driver?” muttered the bride’s father.
“You did,” snapped his wife, but in turning toward her husband to issue this less-

than-welcome reminder, my husband’s cousin Teresa spotted our group entering. “Aunt Minnie! Uncle Dave!” She tottered towards us, resplendent in her beaded mother-of-the bride get up and a pair of backless high-heeled stilettos. Whoever said that form should follow function didn’t make much of an impression on modern shoe designers.

“I thought we’d be late,” Minnie said.

Teresa sighed dramatically. “The limo driver who picked Robert up didn’t know his way around Long Island, and then there was an accident on the bridge and now ...

how can anyone get lost in Manhattan?” Teresa didn’t seem to be enjoying her daughter’s big day.

The bride, on the other hand, seemed to find the whole thing funny. She wasn’t concerned about the possibility of being left at the altar because she was, in fact, already married, she and Robert having vacationed in Las Vegas a few months earlier and having been married in one of the wedding chapels there. I wasn’t supposed to know this. Nor was I supposed to know Terri and Robert had been living together for over a year. And Teresa and Pete would have been horrified if they had suspected, as I did, that Terri found her fiancé’s misadventures this amusing because she was stoned out of her head.

My son Will was my source for all this information, having been stuck – his word for it – hanging out with Terri and Robert at the family Christmas dinner. He’d claimed to have been stuck, but the amount of information he’d wheedled out of his second cousin, and the joy with which he recounted it, reminded me strongly of his grandfather’s “birdwatching,” and I’d found myself wondering if there was a genetic basis for male- pattern nosiness.

At any rate Will had claimed he couldn’t be bothered coming home from Boston for this particular family gathering because it was, in fact, a second wedding. “Aunt Teresa thinks her grandkids’ll be bastards if Terri and Robert don’t get married in church,” Will had told me, “and Uncle Pete just wants to make sure Terri and Robert get wedding presents from everyone whose kids he’s had to give presents to.”

Personally I thought Uncle Pete was not (another miaow here) the only person who was concerned with the number and amount of gifts that might result from a church wedding. The bride herself had called me to ask for my sister’s address.

“It can be so hard meeting people when you first move to New York,” Terri had gushed. “We’d love to include them.” (I guess in my husband’s family’s terms Terri was an expert on moving to New York, since she — and Robert — now lived on the Upper East Side, after having grown up on Staten Island, which is in New York in name only.)

I gave her my sister and brother-in-law’s address, wondering all the while what had spurred this seeming generosity. Terri’s next question tipped me off. “Do you know how you address the envelope when they’re both doctors?”

That must be why she wanted to invite them, two doctors equaling lots of money and a big wedding present in my greedy little second cousin-in-law’s greedy little mind. She didn’t realize, of course, that my sister is only a resident in pediatrics with med school loans equal to the national debt of some of the former Soviet Republics.

Patty had dropped out of college after one year for a marriage that hadn’t lasted. No good can come from marrying your theology professor, especially when he’s a seminary dropout. Too many wild oats as yet unsown, if you get my drift. When the marriage ended, Patty had worked a variety of dead-end jobs to support herself and her son, and ended up as a nurse’s aid. It hadn’t taken her long to come to the conclusion that she was brighter than most of the doctors ordering her around. Hence she’d gone back to college, part time at first, full time once Michael was in school. She’d worked her ass off, and gone on to med school. Now she was probably older, and had a larger collection of educational loans, than any other resident at any hospital in New York.

My brother-in-law is also a doctor, but a Ph.D., not an M.D., and he was currently teaching in the City University system, having turned down a more lucrative job at a more prestigious school to follow Patty to the residency she got. Give him reasonable credit for that, but don’t overdo it. Phil, originally from a small town in Montana, is a professor of Urban Anthropology, and he hoped to research and write about ethnic subcultures while in New York, since as all Westerners know, New York is overrun with ethnic subcultures. The book he had in mind might, with a little luck, position him for better job offers down the road. Since I knew this, and since I wished Phil good luck in the endeavor (after all, my kids might eventually get married and be looking for wedding presents), I had not disillusioned Terri about my sister and brother-in-law’s financial status. I knew I was in for several years of snide remarks about a wedding present considered too small, but I figured the wedding and the reception would provide Phil with some valuable research. Plus I’d have somebody to hang out with for the day. Not

that I find my husband’s extended family trying or anything. Or at least not a whole lot more trying than Patty, who seemed to have taken a course in Doctor’s Arrogance 101 somewhere in her medical education. But she was my sister, and I didn’t see much of her, given her resident’s schedule. And I had some gossip from our side of the family to discuss. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back in the church vestibule, the ushers were all busy yelling suggestions at the Best Man’s cell phone and running out to the sidewalk to check if there was a limo in sight. No way Minnie and Dave Sr. were missing this, what with my mother-in-law predicting traffic accidents and the limo driver’s getting arrested for the illegal turns he was likely to make, while my father-in-law pumped his niece Teresa with questions designed to elicit information about what they were paying the limo company. I told my Dave he was welcome to stay with his parents, but I was looking for my sister and I wandered off down the aisle – unaccompanied by an usher since they were all busy -- till I found Patty. I caused a bit of a stir among the congrgation in that no one else had come down the aisle in a while. Since most of the guests knew nothing about the Las Vegas wedding or the dyslexic lost limo driver, they were beginning to wonder who hadn’t shown up, the bride’s relatives ready to blame the groom for jilting their little Terri, while his family assumed she was having cold feet. Patty had a slightly different concern.

“Thank god,” she said upon seeing me. “I was beginning to think we had either the wrong day or the wrong church. I didn’t recognize a soul.”

I explained the various delays and since I was overheard by one set of Dave’s cousins in front of Patty, and an aunt behind, whispers repeating the explanations began to spread out like ripples in a pond when a stone’s been dropped. Not wanting the next thing I had to say to be similarly disseminated, I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Did you know Dad’s got a girlfriend?” I demanded.

“A new one?” Patty asked.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw an usher finally seating the groom’s mother, while two guys in tuxes – the late-arriving groom and his best man – scuttled down the side aisle toward the altar. Their very efforts to be inconspicuous caused every head in

the church to pivot towards them in unison, like spectators at a tennis match. Distracted as this made me, I still managed to blurt out, as the organist blasted into an off-tempo version of Mendelssohn, “New one? Was there an old one?”

Patty said something, but I missed it. The priest and altar boys scurried out from the vestry, Robert and the best man took up their expectant position at the front of the church, and every head but mine swung around toward the back of the church. Me, I turned to face Patty. “What?” I demanded.

“Tell you later,” she hissed.

“Shove over,” I heard Dave mutter urgently as he pushed into the pew next to me just in front of the mother of the bride’s entrance. When I turned toward him I saw Minnie and Dave Sr. sliding into the pew behind him, with whispered apologies to the aunt who had to shove over from the prime spot she’d staked out earlier. Under other circumstances I might have pushed Patty into telling me what she knew and I didn’t, but I sure as hell didn’t want my in-laws overhearing any part of that conversation. It would have to wait till I could corner her somewhere alone at the reception.

So the wedding finally began, some half hour late, and went along pretty much the way such things go along, at least to start. The priest did seem to be rushing a bit, but he probably had some other commitment later that afternoon and was trying to make up for lost time. So everything was fine till he got to the bit about whether any one knew of any reason why these two should not be joined in Holy Matrimony.

Now I didn’t know the best man at all, Robert’s college roommate someone said, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I’ll assume he was probably a reasonably well- organized guy under most circumstances. I will take it as a given that he had, when getting dressed that morning, carefully arranged into the various pockets of his rented tux all the accoutrements he needed to carry – wallet here, cell phone there, ring carefully placed where he could get it when it was called for. In fact if either the bride or the groom had had a young male relative of appropriate age to have served as a ring bearer, none of what happened might have happened. But they didn’t.

Thus it was the best man who had the ring. No big deal, right? But having used his cell phone to talk the errant limo driver in, and then having stowed said phone quickly before dashing down the aisle to take his place for the ceremony, it seems he had put the phone in the same pocket as the ring. He had also forgotten, in the rush to reach his proper position, to turn his cell phone off.

Thus when the priest got to the moment in the ceremony when he demanded that any one who had anything to say speak now or forever hold his peace, at that exact second when he paused ritually for the response he never expected to get ... well, no doubt you’ve guessed. The cell phone rang.

It was not one of those fancy, pop song rings, nor a few bars of Beethoven. It was a generic ring that might have been anybody’s, and the acoustics in the church were such that it was hard to tell, at first, quite where the noise was coming from. So for a moment everyone froze, startled, then about half the congregation patted a pocket or fumbled in a purse, while the other half looked around for the guilty party. I swear the groom’s mother actually glanced up at the ceiling as if she suspected Heaven itself was calling in some objection to this wedding.

The priest was the first to recover. No doubt he had more experience with wedding ceremonies – if not with marriage – than the rest of us. “It’s probably nothing,” he announced, “but given the timing, maybe somebody better answer that.”

By this point the best man had figured out it was his and he yanked it out of his pocket and answered it with such alacrity that he failed at first to realize he’d snatched the ring up as well. Hence he didn’t realize he was dropping the ring until it was already falling. It flashed in the photographer’s strobe light as the best man squeaked “Yeah?” into his phone. It bounced once on the sacristy step with a “plunk,” twice on the marble floor, “plink, plonk,” and landed on the carpet runner, where it made no sound but began to roll, wheel-like, up the aisle.

“This is a really bad time,” the best man squawked.
The ring lost momentum. It wavered, it wobbled, but it kept rolling. “I said I’d bring the beer,” the best man yelped.

The ring’s path wandered into an inward-leaning spiral, right in line with the pew where Dave and I and Patty and Phil were seated.

“I’ll call you back,” the best man said, and disconnected.

The ring came to a rest. I know it’s impossible, on the thick carpet runner, but everyone I’ve since spoken to who was in the church swears it made a slight but distinct “thud.”

There was a moment of absolute silence and then the bride – I think I’ve already mentioned that given what I knew of her habits I suspected she was stoned – the bride began to giggle.

Once she had broken the ice, so to speak, other people started to giggle, to chuckle, to laugh, to guffaw. Everyone but the poor embarrassed best man, whose cheeks turned bright pink as he jammed the phone back into a pocket.

Dave – who is at times a bit of a ham -- slid out of his seat beside me and picked up the ring. He held it up for everyone to see before striding up the aisle holding it out to the best man, who stepped forward to take it. Somebody applauded his quick thinking, and in a moment most of the congregation was both chuckling and clapping. At this point the bride was laughing so hard she was staggering.

I should take a moment here to lay out a few details of the scene. It was a particularly lovely wedding. Somebody on the groom’s side was a floral wholesaler and the arrangements were especially beautiful – and especially big. In addition to the flowers on the altar, there were two of those large arrangements on pedestal stands, one on each side of the sacristy, so that the bridesmaids on one side and the ushers on the other were standing in front of masses of blossoms and greenery. There were peach- colored rose buds carefully coordinated with the bridesmaids’ peach-colored dresses, which were echoed by their dyed-to-match peach-colored backless high-heeled sandals, from the front of which peeked out their matching peach-colored pedicured toenails.

Perfectly coordinated, perfectly lovely, and perfectly impractical when the bride, wearing similar white sandals, got to the point where she was laughing so hard she sort of fell off her shoes.

The maid of honor wasn’t laughing quite as hard, but she was wearing the same type of shoe, so when the bride staggered into her, she staggered into the first bridesmaid, who staggered into the second, like a human Rube Goldberg contraption.

Dave by now had reached the front of the church, where he handed the ring with a flourish to the best man, who stepped forward to receive it, his whole face now the color of a ripe tomato.

The third and final bridesmaid, seeing the others toppling toward her one by one, braced herself for the impact. Hence the second bridesmaid, when she staggered into the third, sort of bounced off her and took a step back for balance, knocking into the large floral arrangement, which began to totter.

Dave turned smartly – with great panache I might add — to return to his seat. Some of the congregation were still applauding.

The priest, seeing the flowers wobbling precariously, sidestepped, but bumped the best man, who was returning to his spot after retrieving the ring, so that he bumped the groom, who bumped the bride, who was still trying to recover her balance. The train of her wedding gown had twisted around when she had first stumbled, so this time, staggering again, she tripped on her own dress and fell towards Dave, who had paused to take a bow in response to the applause.

Because of the laughter and the applause, he did not hear the commotion behind him. Because he had turned back toward his seat before the flowers tilted, he hadn’t seen the commotion behind him. And because he was in the midst of his bow, he was already leaning forward off balance. It would have taken only a glancing blow to knock him down, and he received quite a bit more than a glancing blow. He was on the receiving end of a collapsing bride. He never even got his hands up to break the fall, and his head hit the marble floor with a resounding crack. The bride landed on top of him, and the wobbling flowers finally fell. The tinkle of broken glass echoed through the church and the laughter ended as abruptly as if someone had just switched off a tape player.

The best man, who by now had blushed a sort of overripe eggplant color, uttered a choice expletive. Since I am still, narratively speaking, in church, I won’t repeat the

word here, although it was echoed a moment later, with a bit more vehemence, by the priest.

Of course my first impulse was to rush to my fallen husband’s side. But, of course, everyone else in the church had a similar impulse to rush to the scene of the accident. The result was a traffic jam in the aisle, a hubbub of voices, complete and utter pandemonium. I couldn’t get through to Dave; I couldn’t see what was happening; I couldn’t hear any snatches of conversation that contained any useful information.
Several members of the congregation seemed to think that a useful response to the emergency consisted of standing in the aisle taking photos or videos, since eventless who hadn’t brought cameras had camera phones. Many of those who weren’t taking photos were making cell phone calls to describe the debacle to friends who didn’t know the bride and groom well enough to have been invited. I finally retreated to my pew and stood on it to see what was going on.

The groom and the best man were untangling Terri from the train of her wedding dress and hauling her to her feet like a crew of Amish farmers raising a barn. Once erect, she winced as she tried to put weight on what turned out to be a broken ankle and collapsed again, clutching at the sleeve of Robert’s rented tux, which tore. Robert grabbed at her, pulled her back from falling on Dave again. At least I presumed that’s what he was pulling her back from. I couldn’t see Dave, who had not risen to his feet even once his cousin’s daughter had been hoisted off him. There was a Dave-sized hole in the crowd, however, and the priest was bending over something in the middle of the hole with a look of concern on his face.

“Dave!” I called. “Dave!” If there was any response I couldn’t hear it.

Somebody tugged on my dress from behind and I turned to find my mother-in-law peering up at me. “Is he dead?” Minnie asked. For once she didn’t sound delighted at the prospect of the tragedy she foresaw as probable, but I wasn’t happy to have her plant the idea in my mind.

“No,” I said firmly.

The crowd of guests was still milling around in the middle aisle, but the side aisles had emptied out a bit, and when I turned to edge out of the pew on that side, I realized my sister was there. Patty! I’d forgotten all about her. Patty was a doctor! I grabbed her shoulder as I climbed down from the pew. “C’mon, we need to check on Dave.”

She’d been sitting there bemused, but she shook her head at this point.
“I don’t think my malpractice insurance covers ... .”
I didn’t give her a chance to finish. “I don’t care about your insurance. I promise

I won’t sue you. C’mon.”
I all but dragged her past Phil and out into the side aisle. I shoved the few people

there out of my way, dragging my sister behind me. “Doctor coming through. Doctor coming through.”

Dave was still crumpled on the floor when we got to the front of the church, a scattering of seed pearls from Terri’s torn veil strewing his navy suit so that he looked as if he’d been salted. The priest was jabbing at his shoulder tentatively, and every one else was still crowding around the bride, who was moaning – a bit melodramatically I thought – about her ankle.

“Sir,” the Priest was saying as he poked Dave. “Sir, are you okay? Can you get up?”

“Finish the ceremony,” Theresa was yelling from somewhere beyond the wedding party. “Pronounce them husband and wife!”

“Terri, Honey, what is it?” Robert was yelling.
“My ankle, my ankle.” Terri sobbed.
The priest started shaking Dave by the inert shoulder. “Sir! Wake up!”
The best man, his head swiveling between the fallen bride and the unconscious

Dave, blanched, his face turning a sort of ashy grey as he surveyed the havoc he’d wrought.

“He shouldn’t shake him like that,” Patty said of the priest’s increasingly frantic efforts to rouse the unresponsive Dave. But she still hadn’t shifted into full doctor mode and made no move to intervene, and I finally lost patience.

“Jesus Christ! Would everybody just shut the hell up!” I bellowed loudly enough to render myself instantaneously hoarse. But alas, not loud enough to make any impact on any but the few people immediately near me. One of them, however was the priest, who was distracted from shaking my husband and possibly aggravating the head injury Dave possibly had.

“Don’t you dare blaspheme in my church,” he snapped at me.

“Don’t you dare shake my husband,” I responded. “And any way, you used even stronger language yourself a few minutes ago.”

“That was different. I cursed, but I didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”

He looked about ready to lecture me on the difference between blasphemous and scatological obscenities, and which was more offensive in what context, but at this point Dave’s cousin Theresa had worked her way through the crowd and grabbed him by the vestments.

“You have to finish the wedding!” she demanded. Then, turning to her daughter and the guy who was already her son-in-law in the state of Nevada if not in the eyes of the Catholic Church, she continued giving orders. “You two, get back in place.”

“My ankle,” Terri whined. “I can’t stand on it.”

“I don’t care,” her mother said. “You’re going to be properly married if I have to prop you up myself.”

“I can’t finish the ceremony with this guy lying here,” the priest put in. “Dave!” Theresa barked, “Get out of the way, damn it.”
“He’s out cold,” the priest said.
“How come she can curse and I can’t?” I asked.

Theresa let out an exasperated sputter like a kettle coming to a boil, stepped over her still prone daughter, and grabbed up the shattered remains of the vase from the late, lamented floral arrangement. It was the bottom piece and enough of it remained intact to

hold a cup or so of water. She stepped back over Terri, she shoved Robert aside as he knelt by the side of his injured bride so that he fell against Terri who let out an even more melodramatic howl, and she elbowed the priest out of the way. Then she upended the fragment of vase, dousing my husband where he lay with cold, slimy flower water. I know it was cold and slimy because it splattered all over me as well. Dave whimpered a bit but he didn’t come to.

Stupid, annoying, and melodramatic as Theresa’s action was, it did have the welcome effect of splattering Patty’s pink silk suit as well. I’m not sure if this is the appropriate spot to mention that she later sent Theresa the bill for her dry cleaning. But the shock sent her into full arrogant medical mode. You know the style: I’m a doctor and you’re not so I’ll assume you’re an idiot until proven otherwise.

She shoved everybody back with a preemptory sweep of her arms. The priest stepped on the best man’s foot and somebody knocked into Terri’s ankle, causing her to shriek in pain yet again. Patty knelt by Dave’s side, pulled an eyelid back to peer into his eye inquisitively, stood up and held out an open hand to the best man. “Cell phone,” she demanded in a tone that allowed no possibility of denial.

He handed it over. She called for an ambulance.

Theresa suggested using one of the limos, still hoping to get Dave out of the way and get her daughter married off. Pete argued against it on the grounds that he’d be billed extra if Dave bled on the upholstery. Minnie sidled up to the priest and tugged on the arm of his vestment, suggesting he give Dave last rites. The maid of honor and the bridesmaids clustered in a semicircle behind Terri, suggesting ice packs and aspirin and — too late to do any good — flat shoes. Robert knelt at her side, muttering pointless reassurances, while the best man edged up to all parties in turn, stammering heartfelt apologies, which were universally ignored. Everybody talked, no one listened, it was like a convention of megalomaniacs, or so it struck me. But alas, the only person I could have shared this insight with lay unconscious at my feet.

Patty finished speaking to the dispatcher and dismissed the ambulance/limo argument. “Can’t move him without a neck brace,” she declared as she turned to Terri. “Which ankle?” she snapped.

Terri held out a foot. Patty knelt again and poked at it while Terri whimpered.

“Broken,” Patti said. “You need X-rays and a cast. You can get to the emergency room without an ambulance, though.” She waved commandingly at Robert and the best man. “You two, carry her out to the limo.” The two of them positioned themselves to hoist the injured Bride.

Theresa thrust herself between her prostrate daughter and my imperious sister. “Don’t you dare!” she snapped at Robert and his best man, who froze, unsure of which woman to obey. Pivoting on her stillettos, the mother of the bride faced off with Patty. “The wedding,” she insisted. “They have to finish the wedding.”

Patty graced her with a glance that would have wilted a cactus, but Theresa was unmoved, so with a weary sigh, Dr. Patty agreed that the priest, the best man, and the maid of honor might ride in the limo too. “You can finish the ceremony at a red light for all I care,” she said.

The sound of the ambulance sirens outside the church drowned out parts of Theresa’s response, so perhaps I’m being unfair, but the bits I heard seemed to have something to do with the need for all the guests to actually see Terri and Robert get married lest some of them be inclined to renege on gift-giving in the instance of a marriage they had not actually witnessed.

Patty couldn’t have been less concerned if Theresa had been describing the techniques of Navaho rug weaving — although it was at this point that I noticed that Phil, ever the anthropologist, had moved up to the front pew, pulled a small notebook out of his jacket pocket, and was recording his observations. Dave, Sr. had joined him and seemed to be providing commentary and answering questions. I knew that when my Dave woke up he would be amused at this — two types of nosiness synchronizing in perfect harmony. Impatient to tell him, I started up the side aisle, intending to hurry the ambulance crew along.

This turned out to have been a mistake. Patty took charge the moment they came into sight, summoning them to the front of the church and ordering the milling guests out of the main aisle with both volume and authority that would have done credit to a drill sergeant. Everybody moved, but no one was willing to stay seated in the pews like this was a normal church service. Consequently most of them moved straight across the empty pews into the side aisles, so that once again I was trapped in a milling crowd. By the time I got to the back of the church, Dave was in the ambulance, the doors were closed, and it was pulling away.

So there I was, standing on the sidewalk, watching an ambulance carry away the love of my life, and I didn’t know how badly he was hurt or what hospital he was being taken to.

“Think!” I muttered to myself. “Think!”

I don’t doubt that the thought process that follows, which took me two or three minutes, will seem so self-evident to you, dear reader, that you will wonder at my denseness in being so slow about it. I have two points to make in my own defense: First, I was under fairly extreme stress at the time. And second, Minnie had followed me out to the curb, and the steady stream of comments outdid even her usual standards of pessimism. It’s all very well to know on the intellectual level that her evaluation of any situation has about as much chance of being correct as I have of picking the winning lottery numbers every day for the next six weeks. It’s another thing entirely to ignore her when she’s giving voice to my own worst fears.

“My poor Davey! He’s so young to end up in a wheelchair!” Minnie keened.

I tried not to listen. “Patty took charge inside,” I reasoned, “and she’s not here on the sidewalk, so she must have gone in the ambulance with him. Patty’s a resident at Manhattan Hospital,”

“He may never speak again!” Minnie moaned.
“I need to get to Manhattan Hospital,” I deduced. “But Dave’s got the car keys.” “He could be dying this very minute,” Minnie wept. “He could be calling for his

mother with his last breath!”

It flashed through my mind that if he was calling for his mother instead of me, his wife of almost thirty years, it might well have been his last breath if I’d been there to hear it, because I’d be inclined to murder him. But he would not be calling for Minnie when he came to; he’d be calling for me, and I needed to be there. I needed a cab.

But to get a cab I needed money, which meant I needed my purse, which meant I needed to go back into the church because I’d left my purse in the pew.

The church door was blocked at that moment however, as Robert and Pete carried Terri out between them. They were followed by the priest, who was trying not to follow them, but who was being propelled from behind by an insistent Theresa.

“I can’t leave the church unlocked,” the clergyman insisted.

Theresa was obviously not paying attention. “You can finish the ceremony in the emergency room,” she was saying. “She’ll have to wait. You always have to wait.”

“And the altar boys. They’re not supposed to leave till I give them permission.”

“She could be bleeding all over her wedding gown and they’d still make her wait.”

I edged past them and pushed through the crowd that was spilling out of the church behind them. The photographer continued to snap away like this was part of the original plan, and the video guy was elbowing him out of the way for a better shot himself. No doubt he had “America’s Funniest Home Videos” fantasies dancing in his head. No one was left in the church but the altar boys, who were sampling the sacramental wine, and the best man, who seemed to be in shock, wandering in erratic circles around the sacristy, pale and woebegone, muttering to himself.

I couldn’t find my purse. I knew I’d been spending too much time with Minnie when I began to wonder if someone might have stolen it in the chaos, but after a few minutes of wandering from pew to pew, confused about exactly where I’d been sitting when the whole thing started, I found it under one of the kneelers with the strap broken and a clear imprint of a man’s heel stamped into the leather. I grabbed it and started back up the aisle when the best man came up and clutched my arm.

“It wasn’t my fault!” he said, peering into my face wild-eyed.

I patted his shoulder reassuringly with my free hand, trying at the same time to wiggle out of his grip. “Of course it wasn’t,” I agreed.

He was completely unglued and wasn’t easily wiggled away from. “I told Joe I’d bring the beer. He didn’t need to call.”

“Of course he didn’t.” I stopped patting his shoulder and started trying to pry his fingers free.

“She didn’t need to confiscate my phone,” he said.
Now I was confused. “Who?”
“That lady in the pink suit. She took my phone.”
Patty of course. In the confusion she’d neglected to return the cell phone. “I’ll

make her give it back,” I assured him.
“Will you? That’d be real nice of you.”
“Sure I will. Just let go of my ... .” I jerked myself free and hurried back out to

the sidewalk, not stopping to worry about the fact that the best man came trailing after me, leaving the altar boys to get drunk if they so chose.

Guests were milling around on the sidewalk aimlessly, blocking passersby and discussing whether or not to proceed to the reception site. “They’ll have to pay anyway,” someone said to general assent. “We may as well go eat.”

At the curb, Pete was arguing with the limo driver. “I know it’s not where we said we were going, but it’s where we’re going now!” The video guy knelt at his side, aiming the camera up at the argument. He was either trying to get a more dramatic shot or trying to stay out of the way in case punches were thrown, which didn’t seem unlikely.

The priest was still trying to escape Theresa’s clutches. “And there’s evening service,” he all but wept as the mother of the bride tried to shove him into the limo, where Terri, her foot on Robert’s lap and her veil sliding off, must have been feeling better because she was giggling again. Maybe she was distracted from her pain by Robert’s hand up her dress, which was being recorded for posterity by the photographer.

Dave Sr., meanwhile, had joined up with Minnie, who was literally wringing her hands. He was patting her back comfortingly while continuing to provide running

commentary to Phil, who was still taking notes. I was reassured by this. If Phil was with Minnie and Dave I could take off for the hospital without them and not worry about them being stranded at the church. Phil was a responsible sort. He’d see that they got somewhere. Alas, things were not going to be that simple for me. Dave Sr spotted me trying to hail a cab. If a cab had been at hand, I still might have managed my get-away, but cabs, on this lovely Saturday evening, were as scarce as during a rainy rush hour. My in-laws, both of whom move at the pace of tectonic plates when you want them to hurry, were, in this instance, at my side so fast they might have qualified as sprinters in a senior Olympics.

“Leaving without us?” Dave Sr. asked, as Minnie attached herself firmly to my right elbow with a grip of iron.

“Oh no,” I lied. “I was just – Taxi! – just trying to find a cab before I – Taxi! — Damn!”

A cab zipped right past the three of us to pick up another departing wedding guest. Maybe he didn’t see me trying to hail him. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with Minnie clinging to my arm – she did look a bit demented. Maybe the other guest looked like a better tipper or was dressed in a style that made her seem less likely to be going to Brooklyn.

“Don’t you want to get the car?” Minnie asked.

“I don’t have the keys,” I told her, scanning the streetscape for another cab. I thought about dashing around the corner to try and get one on the avenue, but Minnie would neither release my arm nor move with her previous speed. So we headed, the three of us, toward the corner at a pace that allowed half a dozen speedier groups leaving the church to flag down half a dozen vacant cabs.

With Minnie clinging to my arm, the block seemed to get longer and longer, and the corner with its taxis seemed farther and farther away. I looked around behind me hoping that against all odds a cab might appear from that direction. I saw Theresa shoving the best man into the back of the limo while the poor priest tried to extricate himself from the front seat, an endeavor doomed to failure as the photographer and the

video guy were blocking his way while arguing over camera positions. Pete seemed to have decided on a more effective line of argument with the limo driver – he was peeling bills off a roll.

And then, from an illegal parking spot behind the limo, MD license plates glinting in the setting sun, came my brother-in-law Phil in my sister’s Saab.

“You need a ride, Gail?” he asked as he pulled up alongside me and my attached in-laws. “Patty went in the ambulance with Dave.”

I could have blessed him. I would have blessed him if Minnie had shut up long enough to let me.

“We have to get to Davey,” she babbled. “He could be dying.”
“I don’t think so,” Phil reassured her. “Patty’s with him. But c’mon, hop in.” Hopping into a Saab convertible is no easy matter for three people, two of whom

are in their eighties with arthritic knees and bad backs. It’s a two door car and for reasons that were clear to Minnie, if to no one else, she and Dave Sr. needed to be in the back seat. I suppose I should have argued with her, but as I’ve already noted, whatever logic circuits my brain might possess under calmer circumstances were malfunctioning at the moment. I let Dave Sr. open the passenger side door, pull the seat forward, and begin the slow and arduous process of folding himself into the small back seat while Minnie gave instructions and advice and speculated on all the horrible things that could be happening to my Dave. She was still clinging to my arm as she did this, lest I decide to break free and take off on my own. In fact, she was tugging on my arm so intently I had to pull up against her grip to avoid being toppled over on top of her.

This was not enough to distract me from the ongoing saga of the group at the limo. Theresa had managed to coax the almost catatonic best man into the back seat, but the priest had escaped from the front through the clever expedient of suggesting to the two contending cameramen that they would both fit if he, the priest, got out. Meanwhile, up the street came a second limo, the one that had delivered the bride and her family to the church on time. Because there had been a Saab convertible with MD plates illegally in one of the two parking spots in front of the church, the earlier limo had had to pull out

and around the block when the late arriving limo showed up with the groom. The on- time driver must have been double-parked around the corner or something until such time as the ceremony should have ended and he should have been needed. He showed up expecting to collect half the wedding party and haul them to the reception site, and he tried to pull into the spot vacated by Phil and the Saab. A Saab, however, is much smaller than a stretch limo, and it being a Saturday evening in Manhattan with parking spaces in great demand and short supply, the extra feet of parking space had been taken up by the garbage-truck-sized SUV that had wedged in behind the Saab. The limo didn’t fit in the remains of the spot, so the driver pulled in at an angle, the back of the car sticking out and effectively blocking the street to any vehicle wider than a motorcycle. The driver got out to see what the delay was and whether he should drive around the block again until the wedding party was ready for him, but was immediately sucked into the continuing discussion between Pete and the first limo driver about whether he would take the wedding party to the emergency room instead of the hotel ballroom. That negotiation had become far less acrimonious once Pete had started waving twenty dollar bills around, but that didn’t mean anything had been settled. The newly arrived driver saw no problem with a change in destination and was perfectly willing to go to the hospital, not without a bribe, of course, but for a far smaller one. But of course the injured bride was already ensconced in the previously parked car, and the previously involved driver was not happy about being underbid, so the discussion quickly became nasty again.

The priest, meanwhile, attempting to effect his escape back up the steps into the church, had been spotted by Theresa, who had flung herself after him and latched onto his elbow much the same way Minnie was still clinging to mine. “The wedding, the wedding,” she was intoning, “You have to finish the wedding!”

At this point, a middle-aged man in work clothes came out of the tenement next door to the church, took in the entire confused scene, focused on the priest being coerced in the middle of it, bellowed “Father Harrigan!” and lumbered over to the rescue.

Then the driver of a U-Haul rental van, coming up the block but unable to negotiate the amount of street left free by the partially parked limo, lost all patience, and began to lean on his horn, first in staccato bursts and then, when nobody moved fast enough to satisfy him, in a steady blare.

To add to my own confusion – as if things were not in general confused enough – Dave Sr. succeeded in maneuvering himself into the back seat and Minnie went to join him. Because I’d been ignoring them I was ignorant of this until such time as she let go of my arm suddenly, with no warning. Because I’d been pulling upward against her slow steady downward tug, when she released my elbow my forearm, with no thought of it on my part, flew up, causing me to strike myself sharply in the chin.

Nobody noticed, of course, so I was – for the moment at least – spared any embarassment, but it amused me that Dave and I would have matching bruises. Realizing that made me eager to share the joke with him, so I looked over to see how Minnie was getting on with climbing into the back seat.

Not too well. She’d attempted to climb in head first but had somehow become entangled in the front seat shoulder belt. As I watched, but before I could step forward to help, she tried to back out and start again, but missed the curb stepping back and began to fall. Not wanting two injured family members to deal with, I lunged forward to catch her just as she grabbed onto the car door to catch herself. This brought the corner of the door and my cheekbone into jarring contact, but between us the door and I kept Minnie upright.

I, however, did not remain upright. Up until that moment I’d always thought the bit about seeing stars when someone in a novel gets hit in the head was a literary cliché. It’s not. Little pinpoints of light danced in front of my eyes and I found myself sitting awkwardly on the sidewalk while Minnie, who still hadn’t noticed, had another, more successful try at folding herself into the car.

I clambered gracelessly to my feet, tearing a stocking in the process, thrust the seat back before Minnie was quite ready for me to do so, causing her to yelp like a cat

whose tail has been stepped on, and flung myself into the front passenger seat of the Saab. “Let’s go!” I barked at Phil.

Minnie kept up a constant stream of complaint from the back seat about not being able to locate the seat belt, not being able to fasten the seat belt, and Dave Sr. not being willing to use his seat belt but I ignored her as I ignored my own seat belt. The first was probably a good idea. The second, as it turned out, was not.

I’ve mentioned, I think, that my brother-in-law was originally from someplace out West. I don’t think I explained that the someplace is a town called Horesham Pass, Montana, although Phil says the town’s youth generally called it Horse’s Ass, Montana. That’s Montana as in “We’ve experimented with no speed limits, and we don’t enforce ‘em too strictly even when we have ‘em.” And in Horesham Pass, Montana, two pickup trucks on Main Street at once constitute a traffic jam. Drivers in Horesham Pass may need to swerve around the occassional four-footed animal in the road, but a pedestriam would be a sight as unexpected as a bison on Lexington Avenue. Phil may not have lived there in ten years, but even if you can take the boy out of Horse’s Ass, you can’t take ... well, you get the idea. Phil still drove as if he were home on the range. And while I’d been in a car with him at the wheel before, I’d never been in that situation in Manhattan. If I had, I would have known enough to fasten my seat belt. In fact, I might well have fastened my seat belt, braced a foot against the dashboard while being careful not to obstruct the airbag, closed my eyes, and prayed.

Now I don’t want to suggest that Phil is a bad driver. He’s a very good driver in his own way. True, he peeled out from the curb like an Indy 500 driver exiting a pit stop and he didn’t stop to glance behind him, but nobody was coming up behind us because the limo was still obstructing the U-Haul. The U-Haul’s driver was still leaning on his horn, so Phil probably knew that. And he cleared that pedestrian at the corner by a good two inches as he accelerated into the turn as the light turned yellow. If she fell, it was probably the gale force wind of our passing.

Minnie shut up in the back seat, and it takes a lot to shut Minnie up. Dave Sr. let out what may have been a whimper of fear. Then again, it may have been a sigh of

appreciation. My Dave tells me his father was an “interesting” driver himself in his youth.

It was three blocks cross-town and ten blocks downtown to the hospital. Phil made it in just under five minutes, and he did it without sideswiping a bus or hitting anyone. He did cause one jogger to accelerate through a crosswalk at a pace that might have set a world record if anyone had been timing her, and I don’t know what language the cab driver he cut off was yelling in, but I’m pretty sure I heard every obscenity that language has to offer. We would have made the trip without incident if an ambulance had not been pulling away from the emergency room entrance just as Phil was accelerating into that final turn. Phil jammed on the brakes so hard they smoked, and I, who never did get around to that seat belt, banged my forehead on the dashboard.

So now, in addition to my stress levels, I was probably slightly punch-drunk. I guess I’m probably beginning to sound a little defensive here but I like to think that, under normal circumstances, I’m a reasonably sane woman. I do not, under normal circumstances, leap out of barely stopped vehicles in the middle of traffic, abandoning my in-laws – mother-, father-, and brother-in-law – to deal with irate ambulance drivers, traffic cops who appear out of nowhere when you need them least, and whatever damage Phil might have done to his brakes by his driving. But that’s what I did. The pedestrian entrance to the Emergency Room was in sight, and I was going to get to my Dave as quickly as possible through whatever obstacles fate might throw in my way. I heard Minnie calling to me as I slammed the car door but I never looked back.

I have raised one son to near-adulthood, and have therefore some acquaintance with hospital emergency rooms. I knew more or less what the routine would have been if I’d been walking in on a Sunday morning with a toddler running a fever of 104, or if I’d arrived on a Saturday afternoon with a Little League catcher who’d been too determined for his own good about blocking the plate. But the injured party was not with me here, and I dashed breathlessly through the automatic doors and then stopped dead, unsure how to find out where he was.

There was a sign-in sheet, of course, from which names would be called at a glacial pace, and there was an intake nurse, naturally, sitting at a desk behind a glass panel rather like a bank teller. If I’d been coming in with a sick kid, I knew I would have signed the sheet and waited my turn to speak with her. But she was dealing with a very young, very frantic mother who had a very unhappy infant squalling in her arms, but who did not have a whole lot of English vocabulary to answer the nurse’s questions. The nurse kept pointing at something and the mother kept shaking her head and spouting torrents of Russian or Estonian or something. They had obviously been at it for a while, and would be a while longer, and I suspected any attempt on my part to interrupt would not be well received, even if I could manage to make myself heard over the baby’s racket. I wasn’t seeking medical assistance for someone just coming in through this entrance any way; I was seeking information about someone who’d arrived by ambulance some minutes ago. I looked around for some one else to ask.

That’s when I spotted the security guard. He was leaning, bored, against a side wall, paying more attention to the ceiling-mounted TV than to the dozen or so miserable people scattered around the waiting area waiting. The Yankee game was on. I couldn’t tell if the volume was turned down completely or whether the announcers were simply being drowned out by the baby, but the closed captioning was scrolling across the bottom of the screen and the little score thing at the top indicated a Yankee runner on third and two outs in an extra-inning game. I guess the security guard was a Yankee fan, because he mouthed a fervent “Yes!” as the ump called a ball.

I approached him. He did not turn from the baseball game, but I guess I registered in his peripheral vision. “See the nurse,” he said.

“I just wanted to know if ... .”
“The nurse.” He was implacable.
But then, so was I. “It’s my husband,” I started to explain. “He ... .”
The batter on the small screen stuck out, the inning ended, and the guard cursed

under his breath. Then, finally, he turned from the beer commercial to me. “You have to speak to... .” Once he finally took a look at me, preparing I think to tell me yet again to

wait my turn with the nurse, he stopped, startled, seeing something he hadn’t expected to see. It went through my mind that I probably wasn’t looking my best. “Your husband?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He should have been ... .”
“Is he here?” The guard glanced around the waiting area, alert now.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I explained. “See, he was ... .”
This guy was not interested in my explanation. “Did he follow you?”
“Dave?” I asked. “No, he was with my sister, and ... .”
“Your own sister? The bastard!”
As I’ve mentioned, I was not at my sharpest mentally at this point, and I couldn’t

figure out why being accompanied in the ambulance by my sister made Dave a bastard. Nor could I figure out why the security guard wouldn’t meet my eye while he was talking to me. He wasn’t even checking on the TV to see if the baseball game had resumed. He was watching for something over my shoulder, so I turned too. The young mother with the whimpering infant was still talking to the nurse. An old guy with a walker was making slow progress across the waiting room toward the sign-in clipboard. Everyone else was still slumped unhappily in a chair. I turned back to the guard.

“My sister was taking care of him,” I started to explain.

The guard still didn’t look at me. “Oh, I’ll bet she was,” he said, and then he started to say something else, but there was a commotion behind me, and I turned to see that the infant had thrown up all over its mother, so that she was now wailing while the baby, feeling better I guess, grinned beatifically. All I caught of the guard’s question was a single word, which I thought was “arm.”

“No, his head,” I replied. “He hit his head.”

I figured the guard must not be able to hear me clearly either, over the ongoing fuss behind us, because his response was “Good for you!”

That made no sense. “It was an accident,” I explained.

The guard patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Don’t you worry about that,” he told me. “We know about those things these days.” Even as he spoke, however, his eyes

continued to dart around the waiting area as if he expected some sort of crime wave to erupt among the waiting patients any moment.

I had all intentions of asking him who knew about what things these days, but somebody hailed me from across the waiting room. “Gail, there you are!” I could make out the words over the barfed-on mother’s impassioned complaints in whatever language she was speaking, but before I could turn to see who was there I found myself shoved behind the security guard as if I were the first lady and he was a secret service agent ready to take a bullet for me. “Is that him?” the guard asked.

I was pretty sure it wasn’t Dave, but had no idea who it was. I endeavored to peer around the security guard’s rather broad shoulder to find out. A large group was filtering into the emergency room waiting area, led by Theresa, with the priest still firmly in tow. This pair was followed by the entire wedding party, including the best man, who seemed to be recovering from his earlier state of catatonia largely by means of the devoted attentions of unattached bridesmaids. Then came both limo drivers who, having finished arguing with Pete, were now busy arguing with each other. Pete and Robert brought up the rear, carrying Terri between them. Robert’s jacket sleeve, which had torn earlier when his bride had grabbed at it in falling, was now almost completely detached.

“My god,” my guard muttered. “He hit your daughter too?”

“I don’t have a daughter. I have a son. And that’s not ... that is to say, nobody hit ... .”

I did finally get what mistakes in judgment the security guard had leapt to, and I did begin to try to explain where he was mistaken, but the noise level in the waiting area, which had gone up exponentially when this large group had invaded, rose another notch when Theresa attempted to push past the wailing mother to get her daughter registered. The mother may not have had an English vocabulary adequate to explaining her infant’s digestive troubles, but she had one quite adequate to expressing her opinion of Theresa’s attempt to cut in front of her.

This put my security guard in a bit of a bind. On the one hand, intervening in the argument was the sort of thing he was paid to do, and from force of habit he took a

couple of quick strides toward the two irate women. On the other hand, he was still under the impression he needed to protect me from somebody, so that after those two steps he stopped in his tracks, visibly torn. He sort of oscillated, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he kept reevaluating which duty was more urgent, which way to move.

Then the automatic doors opened again and in stormed Minnie, and she was not happy with me. She had just extricated herself from the backseat of a two-door car, however, which seemed to have aggravated her arthritic knee, so she stormed in slow- motion and with a pronounced limp. In the ongoing uproar I could make out only the occasional word or phrase: “How could ... some nerve ... my son ... .”

Slow as she may have been, she was faster than her husband. Dave, Sr., after his stint in the back of the Saab, and a close encounter with the back of Phil’s seat when he braked for the ambulance, needed assistance walking, which Phil was kindly providing. They came in somewhat after Minnie, although she was still only halfway across the room. Phil also was not happy with me, and as soon as he spotted me, he unceremoniously deposited my father-in-law in the nearest empty chair and headed my way.

This decided the security guard. Theresa and the angry mother were still yelling at each other but there seemed no risk of immediate violence on that side of the room, and the priest had undertaken diplomacy there. I found myself with a close-up view of my would-be protector’s back again as he interposed himself between me and Phil, who had interposed himself between me and Minnie.

There was a sudden drop in the noise level, the priest having enlisted one of the limo drivers as a translator for the poor woman with the sick baby. Phil came to a halt in front of the security guard; Minnie came to a halt behind Phil.

“Now,” said the security guard over his shoulder to me as he kept a wary eye on my brother-in-law, “Is this your husband the violent cheating bastard?”

I drew a deep breath and opened my mouth to launch into a full explanation, Phil drew a deep breath and opened his mouth to launch into a vehement denial, and Minnie

took a deep breath and opened her mouth although I have no idea what she intended to say. I think we all may have even gotten the word “no” out before Phil’s cell phone rang. He reached for it but the security guard, although he too must have heard the phone, took Phil’s reaching into his pocket the wrong way and reached for the gun I only just then realized he was wearing. This was, after all, a big city emergency room on a Saturday night. Phil froze, I froze, and Minnie, bless her little arrhythmic heart, fainted dead away.

“Oh great,” came Theresa’s voice from across the waiting room. “The whole damn family just keeps collapsing on me.”

It is an unflattering detail of my character that I find it so difficult to give Minnie credit for ever doing anything helpful under any circumstances. However, it’s also an aspect of my character that has been clearly demonstrated by now, so there’s no point in denying it. Minnie’s fainting was the most useful thing she had done all day, and difficult as it is for me to say it, it sorted out the whole situation more quickly than any garbled explanation of the facts that I might have managed would have done. This was the sort of emergency that the emergency staff knew how to handle.

The resident called out from the back to see to Minnie turned out to know Phil from whatever sort of socializing medical residents and their spouses do in whatever bits of spare time they have. He quickly persuaded the security guard that Phil was neither my husband nor an imminent threat to law and order in the hospital. Thus in no time flat my mother-in-law was on a stretcher being attended to, while Dave Sr. was seated in a cubicle somewhere out of sight where he could fill out forms and hand Medicare cards over to whomever it was who needed to see them, and more important to me, where I didn’t have to take care of him.

The limo driver who spoke the distraught mother’s language, whatever it was, had succeeded in convincing her that the intake nurse was not trying to send her out into the night with an ill baby but was rather pointing her in the direction of the separate pediatric waiting room. He even offered to accompany her and translate there.

This left the intake nurse open for Theresa to register Terri and be assured the wait to see a doctor would be minimal.

The only problem was I still didn’t know where Dave was. Phil’s phone call had not, as I’d hoped, been from Patty. Nor did the resident who knew her and Phil know where she might be; he hadn’t seen her.

By now I had accumulated allies in my quest, however. Phil insisted he’d heard Patty instruct the ambulance crew that this was the hospital she wanted. Dr. Mehta promised to keep an eye open for Patty in the bowels of the emergency room. Even if he forgot at some point, Minnie, when she came to, would undoubtedly remind him, loud and long. And my personal security guard, as I’d come to think of him, and the screening nurse both assured me wherever Dave was, if he was inside the walls of this hospital he’d show up on the computer system eventually. I could do nothing but sit in the waiting area and wait.

And as long as I was sitting there waiting, it seemed I may as well attend the wedding ceremony. Theresa was restaging this as her daughter waited to have her ankle x-rayed. The priest insisted on starting over after this long a gap in the proceedings.

“Dearly beloved, ...” he began.
“I don’t see why you can’t just pick up where you left off,” Theresa interrupted. “It’s not like I’m going to do the mass here,” the priest said.
“I thought you were in a hurry.”
“Just as long as you don’t expect me to pay for two weddings,” Pete interjected. “Mom,” Terri put in, “Just shut up and let him get on with it.”
Theresa burbled with indignation, but quietly enough for the priest to get on with

it, and the rest of the wedding party gathered around Terri, enthroned in her chair with her foot propped up, in as close a semblance to their original positions as they could manage.

The ceremony proceeded to the point at which at had been interrupted before. Everyone in the wedding party held their peace. The tiny congregation, made up of Phil, the non-translating limo driver, the other patients waiting for a doctor, the security guard and admitting nurse, and me of course, we all held our peace. The priest opened his mouth to proceed and the doors to the treatment area of the emergency room opened. A nurse with a clipboard called Terri’s name.

“Just a minute!” howled Theresa.

The nurse didn’t care what she was interrupting. “This second or she loses her place and goes to the bottom of the list.” she said.

Robert, ignoring his mother-in-law’s howls of protest, scooped up his bride and carried her off over the threshold to see a doctor. Theresa grabbed the priest’s elbow and tried to follow but my security guard blocked her way.

“Immediate family only,” he said.
“I’m her mother,” Theresa snapped.
The guard nodded but budged not, “And this is a father but I don’t think he’s her

father,” he said. “Plus only two members of the family per patient.”
Theresa huffed but the guard was unmoved, so she dropped the priest’s arm and

instead wagged an index finger at him as if she were training a dog. “Stay!” she told him. Cowed, he sank into the nearest chair without a word. Theresa shot an admonishing glare at her husband, and Pete, obviously understanding her intent, moved into a seat closer to the priest. Only then, with a last, disdainful glance at the security guard, did Theresa take off after her daughter and son-in-law.

We all sat. Minutes dragged on. The security guard wandered back to the corner where he could watch the Yankee game, which also dragged on into extra innings. At one point the priest stood up furtively and took a sneaky step toward the door. Then he quailed under an imperious glance from Pete (who was probably quailing inside imagining what Theresa would say if he let the cleric escape before Terri was married enough to suit her mother). The priest adjusted his vestments as if that was why he’d risen, and slumped into the chair again.

The clock ticked on. The Yankees lost. And then a second security guard entered through the outside door and announced that there were two stretch limos parked illegally and that they would be towed if they weren’t moved immediately.

Only one of the limo drivers was still there, of course, the other having wandered off translating. Now they may have been squabbling like siblings earlier, but we all know most fighting siblings will present a united front if either is attacked by an outsider.

Maybe there’s a similar honor code among limo drivers. Or maybe the guy was just worried about his boss’s reaction if either limo got carted off to stretch limo jail. In any case he leapt to his feet and launched into an account of the problem and of his co- driver’s absence. While his account was impassioned and – as far as I could tell – accurate, it was also so vehement as to be incomprehensible.

The priest intervened. I don’t doubt part of his goal was to be helpful, to defuse the situation, to clarify matters to the befuddled security guard. But he also kept glancing over to see how much attention Pete was paying and offering to go find the second limo driver himself, leaving me no doubt escape was also high on his agenda.

Alas for the poor father. Once he’d grasped the problem the guard told the driver to move the one limo while he, the guard, went to find the second driver. Those two exited together, but the priest, trying to edge out behind them, caught sight of Pete, rising from his chair with the expression of a rotweiler spotting a french poodle. The priest sank back into his own chair with a sigh and we all went back to waiting.

It wasn’t too long after that that Theresa reappeared in the doorway to the back of the emergency room and waved her husband over. My security guard intervened.

“Only two family members per patient,” he declared loudly.

“Oh, of course,” Theresa agreed with a readiness that aroused the suspicions of anyone who know her. But of course my security guard did not. “I just need to get the insurance card from my husband. I don’t have mine with me.”

Pete rose from his seat at this point and started to say something about Terri not being on something – probably not on his insurance policy any longer as she’d been out of school and working for several years by this time. But his wife’s glare shut him up in mid objection and he joined her in a corner where they muttered and mumbled and schemed about something. Even someone who didn’t know either of them could tell they were up to no good, and the guard kept a wary eye on the proceedings. But Theresa, when she was done, simply gave the guard a beatific smile and sailed back through the doors into the inner sanctum. Pete came over and sat next to me.

“You want to get back there to find Dave, right?” he asked me in a whisper.

“Well, yeah, but ... .”

Pete didn’t care what buts I held. “So I’ll distract the guard and the nurse and you grab the father and get back there. Terri’s in the third cubicle on the right waiting for her cast.”

When I hesitated Pete added the clincher. “Terri says she thought she saw Dave in the radiology suite.”

I knew damn well that might be untrue and Pete knew damn well that I knew that, but he also knew I would have to check it out. “Okay, let me get set,” I said, and I shifted my seat to sit next to the priest.

“You want to get out of here, right?” I asked him quietly.

He turned to face me, drew a deep breath, and opened his mouth to launch – I assumed – into a long-winded explanation of all the reasons he needed to get back to wherever he was supposed to be. “It’s not that I don’t want to offer spiritual support to the family in their time of ... .”

I cut him off. “Yes or no, Father. You want to get out of here?”
“Yes!” he yelped.
“Shh!” I hissed.
We both looked around. My security guard’s suspicions may have been aroused

by Theresa and Pete’s whispered conference, but they revolved around Pete, so that’s whom he was keeping a wary eye on. Pete was leaning back in his chair with his eyelids drooping as if he were about to take a nap, but a glint of brown under his lashes showed he was in fact watching me, waiting for me to signal him we were good to go.

“So let’s get this wedding out of the way,” I whispered to the priest.
“How?” he demanded.
“When I give the word, follow me,” I said, and I gave Pete a nod.
He yawned, he stretched, he stood up and stretched again, then he ostentatiously

looked at his watch. “Listen,” he said loudly, and the assembled wedding party all turned to look at him. The security guard braced as if he expected Pete to lead a mass charge back into the bowels of the hospital

“What’s he doing?” the priest whispered.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “but get ready.”
“This is pointless for us all to stay here,” Pete said. “Why don’t you kids head on

over to the reception? Hell, I’m paying for it anyway.”
The bridesmaids and ushers all leapt to their feet and broke out into a babble of

voices, agreeing, disagreeing, asking questions and offering suggestions. Pete dropped a meaty hand on the remaining limo driver’s shoulder. “Can you fit all of them in your car?” he asked.

I couldn’t actually hear the driver’s response over the general noise level, but if my lip-reading skills were any good at all, he said yes. Pete, however, did not react as if the driver had said yes.

“What do you mean, another hundred bucks? Why you thieving little piece of ... I ought to ...” He swung his arm as if he intended to flatten the guy.

The driver of course did not wait to be flattened. He slid sideways out of his chair, under Pete’s arm and took refuge behind the best man. “Crazy!” he yelled. “He’s crazy!”

Pete danced around the best man, trying to get at the driver, while the driver in turn clung to the best man’s tux jacket and pushed him this way and that as a shield. The poor best man, who was not having a good day, must have been wondering why he’s ever agreed to be involved in this wedding at all, and the maid of honor and the bridesmaids all began to squeal and shriek. The security guard had to leave his post by the door to intervene, and I grabbed the priest’s arm. “Let’s go,” I said. We were through the door into the back before anyone noticed, and Theresa, who had her head stuck out from the curtains surrounding Teri’s cubicle watching for us, hauled us in like a couple of trout.

Teri was ensconced in a wheelchair, leaving Robert free to stretch out on the gurney in the room, one arm propped under his head and the other stretched out to hold his bride’s hand. The torn sleeve of his rented tux flapped in the breeze of our precipitous entrance. Theresa, with a grip of steel, began to position me and the priest in what she

considered the right spots. I attempted to detach her. After all, my goal in abetting this scheme had been to locate my husband. Theresa’s goal, however, had been her own.

“I need to find Dave,” I whispered.

“And you will,” She hissed back. “Just as soon as these two are married. We need two witnesses. Two! Me and you!’ Without releasing her clamp like grip on my forearm, she turned to the priest. “Okay, Father, let’s go. Quickly please.”

“Well, if you remember,” Robert interrupted, “We did go to Vegas last fall, and we are, in fact, already ... .”

Theresa whirled on him, although she maintained her grip on me and on the poor priest, so that I stumbled into the gurney and priest stepped on my toe. Theresa didn’t notice.

“You know, your parents live in California,” she told Robert. “Which puts you at my house for all major holidays. And I can make every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every Easter and Mother’s Day and Fourth of July pretty damn miserable. Now shut up till you have to say ‘I do!’ And stand up.”

He rose from the gurney obediently.

She nodded curtly at the priest, who obediently fumbled – one handed, as Theresa was still cutting of his circulation in the other wrist – in his robes for the prayer book. She let go of him when he couldn’t find the correct page one handed, but she didn’t let go of me.

He began to speed-read the ceremony. He got, once again, to the by now dreaded line: “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” He took an apprehensive breath. No one spoke. He began the next line and the curtains around the cubicle were yanked open. “There you are,” my sister’s voice was heard to say.

From behind her, my security guard was heard to say “There you two are. Think you’re clever, don’t you?”

And from beyond the curtains of the next cubicle Minnie’s voice quavered out: “Gail? Gail, are you there?”

Theresa started wailing before I could gather my scattered wits to answer: “No one’s objected, Father. Finish the ceremony. Please!”

Then, from behind the curtains of the cubicle on the other side another voice chimed in loud and clear. “I object!”

“Dave!” I cried, recognizing the voice. “Where are you? How are you?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” Patty said dismissively, and she yanked open the curtains between the two cubicles to reveal my husband, looking as chipper as it’s possible to look stretched out on an emergency room gurney in a hospital gown with a lump on one’s forehead the size of a golf ball.

“Where have you been?” I demanded.
“The pediatric emergency room,” he announced. “Amusing the kiddies.” “Disrupting the staff.” Patty put in.
“Why were you ...?” I started to ask, looking bewildered from my husband to my

sister.
“I called from the ambulance,” Patty said, “to say I was coming in with a patient

with a head injury. They assumed I meant a juvenile patient. I mean, I’m a resident in pediatrics, so it was a reasonable assumption.”

“Forget that,” Theresa interjected. “Why ... ?”

Dave ignored her. “The pediatric neurologist says I have the brain of a ten-year old.”

“He said you were acting like a ten-year old,” Patty corrected him. “Whatever,” Dave shrugged.
“But why ...?” Theresa began to wail again, more weakly.
“Dave? Dave, is that you?” Minnie called.

“Mom?” Dave looked around. “Is that you?”

“Listen,” my security guard stepped forward into the cubicle, “you people have got to get out ... .”

Patty interrupted him. “It’s okay,” she assured him. “They’re all family.” “Dave?” Minnie squawked, “Where are you?”

“And just who do you think you are,” the guard demanded of Patty, who was, of course, still in her pink wedding suit.

“Mom?” Dave called. “I’m here, Mom. Where’re you?”
“Right,” the guard said sarcastically. “And I’m the King of England.”
“But why ... ?” Theresa was too dejected to finish her plaintive query. She finally

let go of my wrist and slumped wearily against the now empty gurney in the cubicle, which began to roll towards Dave.

Robert, who had been standing by the wheelchair getting married, endeared himself to his future mother-in-law forever by leaping the intervening two feet to catch her and keep her from falling. “Mom!” Teri yelped concernedly, “Are you okay?”

“It’s okay,” a new voice said as the curtains on the other side of the cubicle were pulled back by Minnie’s earlier rescuer, Dr. Mehta, to reveal not only himself, but also Minnie, struggling to rise from her gurney, but managing to get herself entangled in the sheet covering her. “Gently, gently,” Dr. Mehta hastened to her side, assisting her to sit, before turning to the security guard.

“It’s okay,” the doctor assured him with all the authority his white coat and hospital name tag bestowed. “They’re all family.”

“But why?” Theresa sobbed.

Robert, further raising his stock in Theresa’s eyes, turned belligerently toward Dave. “Yeah,” he demanded. “Why? What objection do you have to our getting married?”

“I wasn’t objecting to your getting married,” Dave said with dignity. “I was objecting to being left out. After all, I’m the guy who retrieved the ring.”

“The ring!” Robert yelped. “Danny still has the ring!”

Everyone looked around at each other, unsure what to do. But Dr. Mehta was the guy with the white coat and the M.D. name tag, which in this setting meant Dr. Mehta was the guy in a position to make things happen.

“This Danny, he is in the waiting room, yes?” he asked.

“The whole wedding party is in the waiting room,” Robert told him. “And Teri’s father.”

“And Patty’s husband,” I added. “And Dave Sr. is around someplace.”
Dr. Mehta nodded. “Okay,” he started to say, “we’ll just ... .”
But then an orderly stuck his head into Teri’s cubicle. “They’re ready to do your

cast now,” he announced.
“Which treatment room?” Dr. Mehta asked.
The orderly looked startled but, again, the white coat and M.D. tag did the trick.

The orderly obediently said, “Room three oh two.”
“Right,” Dr. Mehta said. “Now here’s what we’re going to do.”
Treatment room three oh two was not that big, and it took a little maneuvering to

get everyone in, but Dr. Mehta managed it. He did have to agree to let Minnie off the gurney and into a wheelchair, and the technician who was actually making the cast had no objection to rings being exchanged over her head while she worked but would not let Robert slide the garter off over her still-wet handiwork so that it might be tossed. So the bridesmaid who caught the bouquet had to content herself with making eyes at the best man.

I hear the reception was a blast, even if the wedding party didn’t arrive till half an hour before the end. Patty insisted Dave stay in the hospital overnight for observation, so we didn’t make it. Minnie and Dave Sr. did, and some out-of-town cousin got stuck driving them home and ended up sleeping on their sofa. But Patty pulled a few strings to let me spend the night in the chair next to Dave’s bed, and I woke up from a brief doze at two a.m. to find him awake and watching me.

“You okay?” I asked.
“Just fine,” he said. “Just thinking.”
“About what?” I wanted to know.
“Weddings. Marriage. Family.”
“Oh yeah? And what do you think about weddings and marriage and family?” He grinned. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll show you.”

So I did.