I Give It a Year
“To the happy couple,” my mother said sweetly.
She was standing at the head table with a champagne glass raised high. Her blonde hair was perfect. Her pale pink dress was perfect. Her smile was perfect.
Everyone lifted their glasses. One hundred and twelve people. My college roommates. Ethan’s buddies from the garage. My great-aunt Rose, who’d flown in from Tucson. The DJ, who’d turned the music down so everyone could hear.
Then my mother leaned into the microphone.
“I give it a year,” she said. “Ethan, honey, she’s too good for you.”
Silence.
Total, perfect silence. The kind where you can hear the ice melting in the water glasses.
Then somebody laughed. A nervous, high-pitched laugh from the back of the room. Then a few more people laughed. They thought it was a joke. Some mother-of-the-bride humor. A little roast.
It wasn’t.
I knew it wasn’t. I knew it the way you know your own mother’s voice when it’s being kind and when it’s being cruel. When it’s sugar and when it’s poison dipped in sugar.
I was sitting next to Ethan. My hand was in his. I felt his fingers go still.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t look at him. My face was burning so hot I thought my veil would catch fire.
Ethan didn’t flinch.
He stood up slowly. He picked up his own glass. He raised it toward my mother, and he smiled at her. Not a fake smile. Not an angry one. Just calm. Steady. Like a man who’d been hit before and knew how to take it.
“Thank you, Linda,” he said. “I’ll remember that.”
He drank. He sat back down. He squeezed my hand.
And the DJ, bless him, turned the music back up.