The Wedding Beat Read Free Page A

taxi to go see a matinee of
Mamma Mia!
when Jill showed up early for a running date.
    “She said her name was Janice,” my father insisted.
    “Why would she say it was Janice when it’s Jill?” I said through clenched teeth.
    “Maybe her sister’s name is Janice,” my mother offered unhelpfully.
    “Her name is Jill!”
    “Does her family call her Janice?” my dad persisted.
    “HER NAME IS JILL! ONLY JILL!”
    I do not want to yell at my parents. I do not want to yell at my parents.
I repeated the words in my mind like Bart Simpson scrawling on a chalkboard.
    “Bernie’s in the hospital,” my mother announced while I was still stabilizing my heart rate. Bernie Perlstein was my grandmother’s husband. Her fourth, but who was counting? I was dizzy from the abrupt change in topics. A conversation with my parents was like living out a Dada manifesto.
    I tried to remember how recently I had spoken with Bernie. A World War II veteran and former airline pilot, he was a proud but generous man and devoted to my grandmother. He’d seemed fine at Thanksgiving, but I recalled that he was being treated for a blood-protein problem.
    “He had an accident,” my father said nonchalantly. My father never said anything nonchalantly. My parents don’t do understated. This was not about blood proteins. Something was terribly wrong.
    “I told Grandma not to let him drive,” my mother said, hinting at the potential peril I risked whenever I ignored her advice.
    “Was Grandma with him?” I asked as a hundred other questions came to mind. My chest constricted, imagining my grandmother amid broken glass and twisted metal. She was eighty-two and still ran three miles every morning. (She wore bikinis until she was eighty.) She was dauntless and irrepressible—and the only person in the world who loved me unconditionally.
    “They should be releasing her from the hospital soon,” my father said.
    “Don’t worry,” my mother fluttered. “The car is fine.”

Chapter Three
Let Dead Fish Lie
    M
imi Martin is not crying over popped balloons.
    Ugh. I backspaced and tried again. I was still on the first line of my column after hours of typing and deleting but mostly worrying about my grandmother, whom I hadn’t been able to reach despite numerous attempts. I sat hunched over my laptop, which was going to do wonders for my posture if I was lucky enough to also make it to eighty-two.
    Tears weren’t the only thing falling at Mimi Martin’s wedding on New Year’s Eve.
    Worse.
    When Mimi Martin met Mylo Nikolaidis on his private yacht, she thought he was a catch. And after their wedding last week, there was one less fish in the sea.
    Barbara’s stricken face flashed before me.
    My brain refused to function. On a good day, my writing process was more pain than pleasure. This was not a good day.
    Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I tried not to think about Thomas Mann. I tried not to think about Jill. I wanted to call her, but I knew that I shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t.
    So I called Hope instead. Hope was my in-case-of-emergency person, and this was an emotional emergency. But her voice mail was full. Probably because I had been leaving messages all day. I returned to staring at my computer screen.
    Inadequate.
    Not just my lede paragraph. My life. Who was I to expound on marriage? I was a fraud. It was only a matter of time before people figured it out. There would be a write-in campaign from outraged readers. My editor would purge my columns from the database. And who was going to want to go out with an unemployed journalist who lived in a studio apartment and had a fourteen-inch neck? My cell phone rang.
    “Are you spiraling?” asked my brother, Gary.
    “No,” I lied.
    “Well, stop,” he said, then laughed. I had e-mailed him after my parents’ news flash and also detailed my New Year’s debacle. Deferring to the three-hour time