Chapter 4: Hit the Road
The piano hit first. That bouncing, unmistakable opening. Then the horns.
“Hit the Road Jack.”
For one long second, nobody moved. Then my cousin Danny, God bless him, started clapping on the beat. Then Owen’s college roommates. Then, like a wave rolling back from the dance floor to the bar, half the room.
Brittany stood frozen on the stage in her ivory dress, staring at the crowd like it had turned into strangers.
“Are you kidding me?” she said, to nobody. “Are you kidding me?”
Marcus took her elbow. His face was the color of the napkins. He looked at me once, and I couldn’t read it, and then he steered her down the steps and through the parting crowd.
The tissue-wrapped cannons stayed where they were. Tony quietly laid them on the floor behind his table.
Brittany’s mother hurried after them with her purse. My mother stood in the middle of the dance floor with both hands pressed to her cheeks, as if she was trying to hold her own face on.
I handed the mic back to Tony. My hands had started to shake, finally, now that it was over.
“I need a minute,” I told Owen.
“Go. I’ve got the room.”
I found Marcus in the hotel lobby, alone, sitting on a velvet bench by the elevators. Brittany was outside. I could see her through the revolving door, on her phone, pacing, her dress glowing under the portico lights.
I sat down next to him. My gown took up most of the bench.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
“She planned it at your engagement party,” he said finally. “When Mom made the toast and everyone cried. Brittany said, ‘Nobody’s ever going to cry like that for me.’ I thought she was kidding.”
“The cream dress?”
“A test. To see if you’d fold.” He rubbed his face. “You didn’t, so she went bigger.”
“And you just went along with it.”
“She said you’d never make a scene.” He laughed, a terrible little laugh. “You never do, Jenna. You never have. That’s what she was counting on.”
I sat there in my wedding dress and let that land.
He was right. I never had. My whole life, I’d been the easy one. The one who didn’t need much, who smoothed things over, who let Marcus have the bigger room and the newer car and the last word.
“Did I just ruin my own wedding?” I said.
Marcus looked at me for a long moment.
“No,” he said. “I think we did. You just stopped us.”
He stood up, straightened his loose red tie, and went out through the revolving door to his wife.
When I got back to the ballroom, the lights were up, and Dad was standing at the microphone. Owen had asked him. Dad had his index cards out again, and his reading glasses on, and his voice cracked on the first line, and he kept going anyway.
It was a beautiful speech. Everybody cried. I cried hardest.
We cut the cake. We danced until midnight. I went to bed believing the worst part was over.
At 7:12 the next morning, Owen shook me awake.
He was sitting up against the headboard of the hotel bed in his T-shirt, holding his phone, and his face was gray.
“Don’t freak out,” he said. “But you need to see what Brittany posted.”
He turned the screen toward me.
It was the ultrasound. Beside it, a photo of me on the stage in my gown, holding the mic, mid-sentence, my mouth open in a way that looked furious.
The caption said: “Thrown out of my sister-in-law’s wedding for sharing our miracle. Pregnant and humiliated. Some people can’t stand anyone else being happy. 💔”
It had four hundred shares.
And the first comment, with eighty-one likes, was from my mother.
“Praying for you, sweetheart. ❤️”
