Chapter Eight #3
She rounds us all up and tells us to make our way toward the patio. They want to do the toasts before we eat.
“Stay with your uncle,” she tells me, squeezing my arm with force.
“Ouch,” I squeak, rubbing the spot above my elbow.
“Oh, enough of this,” Bill says, shooing my mother away. “Go make yourself busy, Linda. She’ll be just fine.”
I shoot him a grateful look, and he threads my arm through his, giving my hand a gentle pat. I can feel eyes on me from every direction as we make our way across the lawn.
—
To understand this engagement party, it’s crucial to understand the one that came before it.
Shannon had long since dropped out of university to move home and be closer to Dan, who was now working in local government. The two of them had been living with my parents, saving up to purchase their first house.
Around this time, Dan began voicing his desire to become mayor someday, toying with the idea of running for town council. My sister was, of course, his unpaid campaign manager and First Lady-in-waiting. The two of them hit the local campaign trail with enthusiasm.
They needn’t have bothered. There were ten town council seats and eleven candidates, and one of those candidates was a well-known golden eagle from the area.
Seriously. It was a political statement from a local activist group, trying to protect some woodland on the edge of town.
Though legally an animal can’t serve on a municipal government, let it be known that Dan only beat the eagle by fifty-seven votes.
Anyway, he was elected. As an illustrious member of town council, he was now being paid to give people his opinion—a job he was previously more than happy to do for free—and just a few weeks later, the two of them were engaged.
While Dan was out most nights hobnobbing with the town’s elite, Shannon was planning the wedding of the century, a job I was roped into with such regularity that I started to wonder if it was me she was marrying.
Dan had many opinions on how he wanted things done but was more than happy to leave the doing of these items to someone else.
As a town councilor, he had more important things to think of now.
I was home for the week to help Shannon prep for the party.
By that point relations between Dan and me had been strained for several years.
He thought I was an annoying brat, and I thought he was a selfish prick.
The two of us could barely get through a single family function without trading insults the second Shannon’s back was turned.
The day before the party I was meeting some friends for lunch, waiting at the bar for the others to arrive.
Two men had parked themselves at the bar on the opposite corner from me and were catching up over a beer while waiting for their chicken wings, each filling in the other on the details of their lives and their kids’ soccer schedules, until they moved on to a story that had been making the rounds through town hall this week.
Had he heard that Councilwoman Howard was having an affair?
I opened my phone and started typing out the details to Shannon, who I knew would delight in this tidbit of gossip.
She and I had already lost hours discussing Councilwoman Howard—the realtor Shannon worked for had sold a house to her last year, and she often attended the same events as Shannon and Dan, including a recent charity golf tournament where she got drunk and called her husband a prick in front of the entire table.
That can’t be true, the second man said. It is, the other insisted. His information had come from a verified source. The affair was with another council member, on town property. They were working late together on some big planning proposal. They’d been caught in the parking lot.
The mention of the planning proposal made my blood run cold. Dan was working on a project that sounded a lot like that. And he’d been pulling quite a few late nights.
The wings arrived, and the conversation moved on, but my heart was racing.
My first instinct was to reject it—Councilwoman Howard was married, and more than a decade and change older than Dan.
But other details pressed on the edge of my mind, ones that felt all too relevant now.
Dan had worked more late nights than I would have thought necessary for a town councilor, and recently, he’d lost all interest in the wedding, something Shannon would chalk up to the stress of his new job if anyone mentioned it at the family dinner table.
But you could tell it bothered her. There was a neediness to her interactions with Dan that seemed recent to me.
I spent lunch counting down the minutes until I could leave, and then raced back to the house, hoping to find Shannon alone.
I came face-to-face with Dan instead, when he walked through the front door just a few minutes after me.
We were the only two people home. I asked him about his day, and then his planning project, and all the late nights he’d been pulling.
He condescendingly told me they were working overtime to get everything done before the deadline.
I said: Really? I heard it’s because you’re fucking Councilwoman Howard.
I knew it was true as soon as I said it out loud.
His denial sounded so lame. I told him to tell Shannon before the party, or I would.
The next morning, the house was buzzing with activity, everyone rushing around to get ready.
It was clear Shannon knew nothing, she was too serene.
I tried in vain to talk to her, but she brushed me off, flitting away for a hair appointment with her bridesmaids, then strategically arriving late to make her grand entrance.
—
I spent the afternoon staring daggers at Dan from across the lawn, not that he noticed—he didn’t dare look in my direction.
It incensed me that he wasn’t more bothered about any of it.
If anything, as the day went on his confidence grew, and by the time the toasts rolled around, Councilman Dan was out in full force.
He got up in front of the crowd and made the most nauseating speech I’d ever heard, locking eyes with me when he talked about the importance of family. I checked my watch. It was 6 p.m. I’d told him he had twenty-four hours, and I meant it.
I interrupted his speech and dropped the bomb.
—
“Thank you so much for coming,” Shannon says, calling everyone to attention with a knife against her champagne flute. Dan stands silently at her side. Muzzled for today.
“It really means so much to us that you’re here this afternoon,” she continues.
“I can’t imagine taking this next step in our lives without all of you.
We had planned to do a few toasts, but the food is almost ready and it makes no sense to keep you waiting.
Instead of raising a glass to us, today I’d like to raise a glass to you.
To friends and family,” she says, the champagne flute gliding up in front of her.
Mom stands incredulous, her mouth hanging open, a confirmation that this wasn’t the plan.
“To friends and family,” the crowd obediently repeats, followed by a smattering of hear hears!
“OK, great,” she says quickly, stepping forward and pulling Dan along with her. “Now let’s eat.”
The entire group seems to let out a collective sigh of relief. The danger has passed. The wedding is officially back on track.
—
Shannon point-blank refused to even speak to me after the engagement party drama. I thought she was screening my calls, but eventually I realized that she’d actually blocked my number, and all my efforts to explain myself had been in vain.
I went analogue, sending her letters and flowers and birthday cards in the hopes that she’d acknowledge me, and when she didn’t, I eventually took the hint and just gave up.
If Shannon didn’t want to talk to me for a while, that sucked, but it was understandable.
I wasn’t sorry. I’d serve my time knowing I’d caused some misery to save her from a lot more, and trusted that someday she’d understand that and we could start again.
But when I heard she and Dan were back together, any remorse I felt withered and died. If she wasn’t talking to me, fine. What she didn’t realize was, for a while there, I also wasn’t talking to her.
At that point, I’d been practically banished from the family, avoiding going home so I didn’t further embarrass my parents and put them in the middle of our cold war.
I’d naively thought that Shannon was picking up the pieces and moving forward with her life.
What she was really doing was penning the plot twist in the story of Shannon and Dan.
He’d made a big mistake, but they’d worked through it and come back stronger.
Dan was humbled by the experience; Shannon was strengthened by it.
What a load of shit. The only thing that changed about their relationship was that Dan stopped fucking someone else on the side—and even that I can’t be sure of. He, somehow, had been absolved of his crimes, while I lived on in infamy.
—
The rest of the afternoon unfolds without incident. The Grill Kings—my dad and our two neighbors—do an admirable job of the barbecue. Mom’s many salads and sides garner much praise.
Shannon, meanwhile, is in her element, moving from group to group, preening at the gifts and compliments being showered on her from all directions. Not for the first time, I wonder if that’s what this whole getting married thing is really about for her—a second chance to be prom queen.
—
By nightfall the crowd has dwindled to almost nothing. Anyone with kids has left to attend to bedtime, and the party elders head off around the same time. “Also to bed,” Aunt Irene says with an impish grin.
Dan and about six of his crew are still playing drinking games out on the lawn, content to let their wives and children head home without them so they can carry on the evening.