Page 65 of How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?
Emma and I laugh silently, as she bends over and kisses me on the forehead.
* * *
‘Do you take this woman to be your wife? Will you love her tender, leave her all shook up every night and never leave her with a suspicious mind?’ Elvis asked us, his lip curled up, strutting a pose I hoped his jumpsuit would forgive him for.
‘I do,’ Tom replied.
‘What about you, little lady?’
‘Don’t I get the song-title vows?’ I asked him.
Tom grinned at me. If we were paying for actual Elvis then I wanted the full shebang. You don’t come to Vegas and not get the full bells and whistles. Elvis had better be dancing later too.
‘OK then… Will you promise to love this hound dog? Show him the depths of your burning love and not leave him lonesome tonight? Uh-huh-huh,’ he asked me. I was pleased to get the extra uh-huh-huh.
‘I do,’ I replied, giggling.
I remember Elvis had phenomenal hair and a real commitment to a genuine quiff, but he had a slight paunch so was more burger-eating Elvis towards the end of his career. Let’s get married, Tom had joked. I had brought him along as a plus-one to an accountancy conference in Vegas. It was a working holiday where Tom promised me we could go and see Cirque du Soleil as long as I let him wear a tux one night and pretend to play blackjack like he was one of Ocean’s Eleven. We were at a breakfast buffet that seemed to cater for all food groups and mealtimes as there was a man in a cowboy hat next to us eating lasagne and salad at eight in the morning.
You’re mad, I told Tom.Nothing would give me greater joy than making you my wife, he replied. I assumed he was still drunk. I was sitting there with a three-egg omelette and a cup of coffee, no make-up, and my hair pulled back from my face.Nothing would give me greater joy than doing something completely spontaneous and random. Think of all the people we’d annoy back home. Your mother would never forgive us. We can have a party back home to please the elders. Come on. I’ll buy the clothes, pick up some rings and a bouquet. We need witnesses. I’ll find those too. Come on, Gracie, let’s live a little. I want to get married by Elvis and hang out with you forever. I smiled.
Tom ended up wearing a bottle-green velvet suit he’d picked up from some vintage shop near our hotel and he accessorised with white Converse. It was very Tom. He had style about him. He wouldn’t have worn some bog-standard, charcoal regular-fit suit from Marks & Spencer. Just buy me something white, I told him. He went vintage with that too. It was a sixties shift with lace. Tom said he liked how it had history to it, like it’d been worn before by another bride. There was love in its threads. And dust, I joked, and what looked like a suspicious stain on one of the arms. The witnesses were two people called Jim and Martha who were from the Coventry branch of my then accountancy firm. I still send them Christmas cards. Jim wore a Hawaiian shirt and we all went out for a prime rib and shrimp dinner after, in a restaurant that had a half-mile-long salad bar I still rave about to this day. Tom used to jest that he only married me because only I could get that excited about unlimited croutons and ten kinds of salad dressing.
‘Then without further ado, and in the power vested in me by the good state of Nevada and the power of the god that is Elvis Presley, you may now leave here, husband and wife. You may kiss this little missy here, my friend…’
‘Thank you very much.’ Yes, in my delirium, that sentence came out of my mouth in an Elvis style except it didn’t sound like Elvis. I sounded like a Welsh person with wind. Tom laughed, so very loudly, and then we kissed. He dipped me as he did it and I shrieked. Martha took a brilliant picture on her phone and it was the one we framed and sent out to everyone back in the UK so they could shout at us. You didwhat?My mother still questions the legality of that day. God, that was a good day. Elvis sang ‘Viva Las Vegas’ and ‘Always On My Mind’. We danced. In a room that was a velveteen dream, that matched Tom’s suit, where there were people waiting outside for their turn. We were married.
* * *
‘Jag and Emma. You’ve come here today, in front of your family and friends, to declare your love and commitment to one another through marriage…’
I come back into the room. All the little nieces are cross-legged at the front of the room, Jag’s father is sobbing uncontrollably, and there is an emotion on my mother’s face. I think it may be relief. Emma and Jag look joyous; it was the small ceremony they both wanted. I know that feeling all too well. To cut through all that wedding bullshit and just have you and him, standing there, together, the focus on all the right things. Though I am pretty sure Emma would have screamed blue murder if she’d been made to wear a used and suspiciously stained dress.
‘… And so I am very proud to pronounce you husband and wife.’
As sisters, we all explode into applause, Lucy more so than the rest of us, and both Emma and Jag kiss sweetly and fold their bodies into each other, him whispering something into her ear.
‘YES, EMMA!’ Lucy shouts. My mother casts her a look. We are not rowdy people, Lucy. Lucy doesn’t care. Meg wolf whistles. Beth is overcome by hormones so sobs and shares tissues with Jag’s family. Oh, Emma. I can’t deny that feeling inside me, that swell of emotion. It’s pride, it’s happiness, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel all those small fractures in my heart sting a little. Love is shit like that. How it can spark the whole spectrum of emotion in a second, how it has such tremendous range. I try to stop myself from crying, from sobbing but I can’t. A small hand reaches up and wipes a tear that rolls down my cheek.
‘Mama, are you OK?’ Maya asks me. ‘Are you sad?’
Her eyes look up at me and study my face.
‘Far from it. It’s a good day.’
Emma and Jag proceed to leave the room in a round of applause, our small group following them, and I stand Maya on a chair next to me as she rests her head on my chest.
‘So what did you think?’ I ask her. ‘How did you enjoy your first wedding?’
‘Why does she have to obey him?’ she asks. ‘I don’t understand that word.’
‘It means she’ll do what he says.’
‘Sod that,’ she replies. Jag’s mother, who is in earshot, smiles broadly.
‘You don’t think you’ll get married one day?’ I ask. I can’t think back to a time when I was Maya small but I did remember we played weddings a lot when we were little. We used my mum’s net curtains and sateen bedspread and she’d shout at us for dragging it down the stairs. Being the tallest, Emma was always the groom. Maya’s look, however, reads horror.
‘Can I marry you?’ she asks me.
