Page 59 of Our Big White Lie
I just giggled.
Ava materialized with two plates of cake, and she eyed us both. “Okay, which one of you is being snarky?”
Marco and I were immediately talking over each other, declaring our innocence.
My wife just rolled her eyes and sat down. “Just… eat your cake, Tori.”
I dropped back into my chair and bumped her shoulder. She bumped back.
Marco chuckled. “All right, you two. I’m going to go find some more booze.” He paused. “Is your grandma here, Tori? I should ask her to dance.”
I burst out laughing. “Only if you put on your devil horns!”
“Darling, they’re in the car. Don’t tempt me.”
The three of us laughed, and he left to find alcohol and his husband (and hopefully not the devil horns or my grandma).
Alone with our cake, we watched our guests celebrating our wedding. We glanced at each other and smiled, and we bumped shoulders again.
This was perfect. Maybe the circumstances that had led to us planning the wedding weren’t, and they would always add a bittersweet layer to this day. But the day itself had been amazing.
Our friends and family were here to celebrate us. Ava’s mom got to live out her dream of being the mother of the bride.
And this was the first day of the rest of my life with the woman I loved.
Absolutely perfect.
EPILOGUE
Ava
Two years later.
Mom made it to about a month before Tori and I celebrated our first anniversary. She’d been going strong for a while, but things took a hard turn eight months after the wedding. Though Mom had recovered from the acute infection and was released from the ICU, her oncologist had gently told us she wouldn’t be with us much longer. Shortly after that, she’d gone into hospice. The hospice nurses had been amazing, keeping Mom as comfortable as possible while also doing everything they could to see the family through.
In the end, she held on for a few more weeks than we’d anticipated, and we’d all tearfully said she’d run on pure stubbornness just to make sure she got to meet my oldest brother’s newest baby. Nikki had Ariel on Tuesday, brought her to see Mom on Wednesday, and Mom was gone on Thursday. The day she met her grandbaby, Mom was in great spirits with a ton of energy, which the hospice nurse quietly told me was not uncommon—some people rallied just before they passed, and the nurse wanted us to be ready.
We were as ready as we could be, and though the day Mom died was hard, it was also an end to her suffering. She told me during a lucid moment that she was at peace, knowing that all of her children were happy.
“You take care of that wife of yours,”she’d told me with a tired smile.“You hit the jackpot with her, you know.”
Squeezing her frail hand and fighting back tears, I’d nodded.“I know. Believe me, I know.”
I really had hit the jackpot, too. Not only was Tori the best friend and best wife I could ever want, she’d been my rock during the last few months of Mom’s life. She’d helped take care of her so my siblings and I weren’t stretched so thin. She’d held me while I’d cried more times than I could count. She’d fielded calls with the funeral home and everyone imaginable even while grieving herself. She’d handled a lot of the planning when my dad or my siblings and me just couldn’t deal with it. And at the memorial service, she’d broken down crying at the huge framed photo of Mom, beaming in her green mother-of-the-bride dress.
I would never in a million years have wished my mom’s illness on anyone, but if any silver lining came out of it, it was me realizing that the woman of my dreams had been right there in front of me all this time. Maybe it should’ve been a clue when she’d been willing to go through all the motions of a wedding just to ease my guilt and make Mom’s dream come true.
We’d quietly celebrated our first anniversary not long after Mom’s funeral. I wondered how many other couples cried while they cut into that frozen top layer of their wedding cake, laughing through their tears as they celebrated and grieved at the same time. We’d eaten it off plates from the china set my parents had bought us, and though it tasted terrible—Mom warned us it would—it was still a perfect celebration.
That night was one of many that cemented my love for Tori. She’d been here for me during some of the worst moments of mylife, and she’d been the reason for some of the best. I couldn’t imagine going through the last few weeks of Mom’s life or her funeral without Tori, and I couldn’t imagine going through all the day-to-day boring parts of life without her either.
Maybe we hadn’t started our romantic relationship in the most typical way, and maybe we’d never tell a soul besides each other how things had begun, but I was grateful every single day that we’d landed here.
A few days after the wedding, with Marco and his husband as witnesses, we quietly got married for real at the courthouse downtown. Afterward, we celebrated with a boozy lunch at a café Marco and Tori frequented, and there we’d sealed our pact of silence with mimosas and amazing food.
What else could I do but spend the rest of my life trying to be everything this amazing woman deserved?
Today, two years after we’d said,“I do,”I wanted to make our celebration special. I wanted it to be about us. About how much I loved and adored her, and how much I appreciated what a rock she’d been during one of the most difficult things I’d ever endured.
