Summer Wedding, Hillsborough County

It was warmer on the bus than it was outside, and they lowered the windows while the bus driver figured out where the wedding was. A hundred chairs were set out in the field facing the giant sycamore. The crowd had left a large gap in the chairs on the aisle where the worst of the sunlight hit. Then the violin started, and the flower girls came with their small baskets and the bride, holding her stomach.

“Doesn’t she look stunning?” someone in the crowd said.

“She looks about to burst!”

Officiating the ceremony was the band director from the University of Tampa. He gave a very stiff reading of “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”, by E. E. Cummings. “Apparently,” someone else said, “he used to be a conductor on Broadway!”

Then the vows were made, and the Stefana lain, the rings placed, and the blessings, too, and the people all went to the bar.

“At our age,” the bride said, “they told us it could take eight or nine months. We got there on our second try! Yes, of course, I’ll have a glass of champagne or two. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Warm wool rubbed up against bare shoulders, and the groom said how he’d completed his residency just down the road but had never known this place existed. “Surprisingly affordable,” he said, “and did you know it was founded in the early 1900’s, by a group of suffragettes?”

Downstairs the chef peeled apart sardines with her fingernails while the lamb cooked in the oven and the chorizo burned on the stove. Several large trays left the kitchen carrying small pieces of toast with a green fava bean spread, and the band director spent the hour chasing around after them.

Two full cases of white wine were quickly finished, and cash littered the counter. They used a glass to stop it from blowing away. The band played in the covered driveway, and the ground there was also littered with cash. The bride’s uncle said, “They don’t do this in Greece, in Greece they throw plates!” “Opa,” the manager of a jazz club said, “I prefer the cash.”

The manager introduced his girlfriend, the hostess at his club. “My friends,” she said, “all knew he was the one when I found someone who could sleep in later than I could!”

A tray of shrimp passed warmer and warmer each time. Glasses sweated, and the ice melted quickly at the bar. The groom’s father began fanning yia-yia with a pillow.

“It was a lovely ceremony,” the bride’s mother said, “though we never see humidity quite like this out in California.”

Then, the guests all took their seats while the bride changed her shoes, and the doors to the dining room were propped open. The band sighed, and the maid-of-honor offered her rendition of “Always” by Irving Berlin. The young cousin over at table seven clapped the loudest. At table thirteen, all the way in the back, the jazz club friends shared stories about late, late nights and long laughs, the bride’s old boyfriends, her tiny apartment, and that first night the groom came in and saw her perform.

Plates carried out empty came back heaping, and the anesthesiologist went up for another gin and tonic. The manager and the hostess scrapped the last of the peas onto one another’s plates. The chef wiped her brow and collected what was left of the shrimp onto a single platter and made up more of those toast pieces with the fava bean spread.

Drumsticks clanked, and the people rose, and the uncle led them all in the Kalamatianos,nd the people danced, and the band played on and on.

There was a loud pop, and the bartender ran into the kitchen. “You have to see this,” he said,
“that’s the transformer blown along with half the powerline!” It went up in magnificent sparks, and all the lights went out, and the band stopped, and the firemen were called. The bus, still idling in the lot, turned its headlights on, and the band started up again, and the people went back to dancing. The photographer got a picture of the bride with the fireman. The fireman set up a small generator and some lights around the room and sat for shrimp, fava bean toast, and some of yia-yia’s Baklava.

“This feels like a memory,” the uncle said. “This all feels like a wonderful memory!”

They ran out of fresh glasses and so the bartender asked that the guests reuse their old ones. The group at table thirteen helped collect the old glasses and even washed some themselves. Meanwhile, the bride and groom danced together for a few songs until she had to sit down, and the maid-of-honor danced with her husband, too, and when the young cousin saw how she was not dancing alone, he situated himself in a corner with his third piece of baklava.

When the band finished their final song, the people all clapped, and the bus pulled around. The bartender grabbed the mop to go after a spill, and the flower girls in their pajamas were carried out on someone’s shoulders. What was left of the baklava was picked at by a staggering bassoonist, and the anesthesiologist took his last drink in a soda can.

Then, the bartender came running in from the kitchen to find the firefighters over at table eight. “You’d better come quick,” he said, “and tell me one of you’s also a paramedic.”

It was the groom himself that stepped in, and when it was over, the bride held it in her arms, and, softly, she began to sing.

On the bus, the band director asked him for a sip of the anesthesiologist’s soda. The wisps of conversation faded, and a cool breeze rolled through the open windows, the men with their jackets all rolled into balls, the children sleeping on their laps. “What a perfect couple,” someone whispered, “and how lucky it is that they found each other after all.”