Chapter 1: The Second Screen
The lights dimmed right as my father stood up with his speech cards.
I remember that, because Dad had been practicing for three weeks. He’d read it to my mother in the car, to the dog, to the guy at the dry cleaner’s. He had five index cards in his shaking hand and his reading glasses halfway out of his breast pocket.
Then the twelve-foot LED screen behind the cake lit up with a black-and-white blur.
It took me a second. A grainy fan shape. A little curled bean in the middle.
An ultrasound.
“Can I have everybody’s attention!” My brother Marcus was already on the stage, holding the DJ’s wireless mic. Nobody had seen him walk up there. “Sorry, Dad. This’ll just take a second.”
Dad lowered his cards. One hundred and forty guests turned their chairs.
Brittany climbed the two steps behind Marcus in her ivory satin dress, the one that from across the room looked exactly like a second wedding gown, and put her hand on her stomach.
“We just couldn’t wait anymore,” Marcus said, grinning his big boyish grin. “We’re having a baby!”
The room exploded. People actually screamed. Brittany’s sorority friends rushed the dance floor. My aunt Patty stood on her chair. Somebody’s phone flash went off, then twenty more, all pointed at the stage, at the screen, at Brittany crying perfect, photogenic tears.
I sat at the sweetheart table in my strapless lace gown with a fork still in my hand.
Owen’s fingers found mine under the tablecloth.
“Breathe,” he said quietly.
“I’m breathing.”
“You’re not.”
I wasn’t. I was looking at the cake. Four tiers, white buttercream, sugar peonies that had taken the baker two days. We were supposed to cut it in eight minutes. The photographer had told us exactly where to stand.
Now the photographer was on the dance floor with everyone else, shooting Brittany.
“Is this okay?” Marcus called into the mic, laughing, looking straight at me. “Jenna, you’re not mad, right? It’s a happy day! Double happy!”
A hundred and forty faces swung toward me.
What was I supposed to say? Yes, I’m mad that you’re having a baby?
I smiled. I know I smiled, because I’ve seen it in the videos since, and it looks like someone holding a smile up with two fingers.
Brittany took the mic from Marcus.
“Sorry, Jenna,” she said, with a little shrug, one hand still spread over her flat stomach. “Babies don’t wait for weddings.”
People laughed. People laughed.
My father was still standing beside the head table with his index cards. He slid them back into his jacket, very carefully, the way you’d put away something that might break.
That’s the moment I’ll never forgive. Not the screen. Not the dress. My dad, putting his cards away.
“Okay,” Owen murmured. “Okay. What do you want to do? We can cut the cake now. We can go outside. I’ll get you out of here, I swear, just tell me.”
I set my fork down.
My mother was hugging Brittany. My aunt was hugging Marcus. Brittany’s mother was crying into a cocktail napkin. On the screen, the gray little bean pulsed in a slow loop, because somebody had made it into a video. Somebody had edited it, and added a soft fade, and brought it on a flash drive to my wedding.
Somebody had planned this.
Across the room, half-hidden behind the AV booth at the back wall, the sound tech was staring at his laptop like he wanted to crawl inside it.
He was the only person in the whole ballroom not looking at the stage.
He was looking at me.
I stood up.
My train caught on the leg of the chair, and Owen bent and freed it without a word. The lace dragged across the floor behind me as I stepped down off the little riser.
“Jenna?” my mother called. “Honey, come up here! Come take a picture with the parents-to-be!”
I didn’t go to the stage.
I went to the back of the room, toward the booth, toward the one person who wouldn’t meet anybody’s eyes but mine.
