Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Ava
“ O kay.” Mom plunked a huge stack of magazines and binders onto her kitchen table. “I got these from your aunt—she said they helped a lot in planning Ginny’s wedding.”
Tori and I, both seated across from Mom, glanced at each other and then stared at the pile.
“I’m kind of afraid to ask,” Tori said, regarding the stack warily, “but… what is all that?”
“Wedding vendors!” Mom chirped. She started sorting everything into smaller stacks. “Florists. Photographers. Videographers. Officiants. Caterers. Bakers. Makeup artists. Hair stylists. Printers for invitations and programs. Musicians. Deejays.”
My head swam. Oh, God. We had to make all those decisions?
Hire all those people? I was tempted to ask if we could just do a backyard potluck—or hell, elope somewhere—but I caught up and remembered why we were doing this.
I wanted to give my mom this experience while she still had time.
That meant pulling out all the stops so she could be the mother of the bride.
It meant being an adult and making all these decisions, no matter how overwhelming the whole task looked right now.
And I’d thought compiling a potential guest list had been tough.
I’d spent half the evening last night going through everything from my social media friends lists to high school yearbooks, jotting down anyone I thought I wanted to—or should—invite.
Whose feelings would be hurt if I didn’t?
What if I invited five people from a particular group and accidentally overlooked a sixth?
What if I invited someone I barely knew and completely neglected to ask someone who was close to me?
As overwhelmed as I was, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if I forgot someone important.
Which I had—Mom had looked over my list and texted me with three different close relatives I absolutely should have remembered.
Holy crap, planning a wedding was stressful. And that mountain of binders was kind of terrifying.
“Uh. Okay.” I shifted in my chair. “Wow, that’s a lot. We, um…” I turned to Tori. “Where do you think we should start?”
She eyed the stacks of literature like they were coiled snakes. “Maybe we should start with our budget.” She opened the spiral notebook in front of her to a blank page.
“Good idea,” Mom said. “Let’s start there. What are you girls thinking?”
“Okay, well…” Tori absently tapped her pen on the notebook. “We figured we have a budget of about five thousand. Seven if we’re willing to use credit cards, but I’d rather avoid that if we can.”
I nodded. “Same.”
“Your father and I can contribute twenty thousand,” Mom said as casually as if she were just offering to buy lunch.
“Twenty—” I blinked. “Mom, that’s an insane amount of money! We don’t need to have something that big.”
She gave a dry little huff. “Let’s see what you think when we start adding up all the numbers. It won’t go as far as you think.”
I wrinkled my nose. Tori actually looked a bit green.
“Let’s, um…” I cleared my throat. “Look, we don’t need anything huge and fancy. You and Dad are super generous, and I appreciate it, but let’s maybe… see if we can stay under that amount? Like way under it?”
“I’m onboard with that,” Tori said without hesitation. “Plus, I’ve seen what people can do on shoestring budgets. It makes it more special and personal, you know? Like DIY stuff and hiring friends?”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Mom said. “But don’t think you have to go inexpensive on something. This is your wedding—if you want it, we will make it happen.”
I fought back a wince. Tori and I had enough to fund a reasonably nice wedding, and the less of my parents’ money we spent, the better. “I’m sure we can keep it to our budget. I don’t want to spend?—”
“Ava. Honey.” Mom took my hand and squeezed it. “I only have one little girl. I never thought you’d even want a wedding, but now that you’re having one, I want to splurge.”
My throat tightened. “But… I don’t want to go nuts over… I mean, it’s just one day, you know?”
“It is. But it’s a big, important day.” Mom glanced at Tori. “I want you both to have the day that makes you the happiest. If that means writing a few checks…” She waved a hand. “I don’t care.”
My head swam. Crap. Where was I supposed to draw the line now? I didn’t want to cheap out on this, but I also didn’t want to spend all my parents’ money on something that wasn’t real.
Tori collected her thoughts before I did. “Okay, so that gives us a budget ceiling . We know how much we potentially have to work with, but we can still be frugal about things.” She paused. “Like, the officiant—maybe we could ask Marco?” She turned to me. “What do you think?”
“Oh! He’d be perfect!”
“Marco?” Mom asked.
“My other best friend.” Tori smiled. “He can perform weddings.”
“You met him last summer,” I told Mom. “He came to the Fourth of July barbecue with his husband.”
Mom’s eyes lost focus. “Was he… which one was he? The one with the tattoos?”
“No, that was Josh. Marco was?—”
“Oh!” Mom straightened. “The one who burned his finger lighting fireworks!”
I snorted. “Yep. That’s Marco.”
“Oh, okay. Well, he’s lovely, so if he wants to do it, then…” Mom put the officiant information on a chair so it was out of the way. “One less thing to worry about.”
“Assuming he’s onboard,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure he will be.” Tori was already typing out a text. “I’ll grab coffee with him tomorrow and see what he says.”
“Perfect. Do you know what he charges?”
She gave a haughty scoff. “He’ll get wine and cake, and he’ll like it.”
I giggled. “Fair enough.” That man was forever in Tori’s debt.
An actual therapist would’ve made bank charging for all the hours she’d spent listening to him and giving him advice, and she’d saved him an absurd amount of money by fixing both his and his husband’s laptops.
He’d invoice us for this at his own peril.
Okay, we would pay him if he actually charged us anything, but we’d also give him grief about it until the end of time.
Marco wasn’t clergy—he wasn’t even religious—but he’d done whatever paperwork the state required so he could officiate some of our friends’ weddings.
He was also super close to Tori; he’d probably be thrilled to marry her, and having him do the honors would no doubt mean a lot to her whether this was real or not.
Worked for me.
With an officiant potentially squared away, we started working our way through the stack of potential vendors.
I’d always known weddings were a ton of work, but it blew my mind how many decisions had to be made.
We had to figure out a color scheme and then filter every other decision through that—the invitations, flowers, décor, the damn napkin rings or whatever.
“Oh my God ,” Tori muttered. “Why is this all so complicated? ”
“Because it’s a wedding,” Mom chirped. “You do all the grunt work now, and it pays off in a beautiful party and gorgeous photos.” She winked at Tori. “It’ll all be worth it—trust me.”
Tori and I both made disgruntled noises, which got a laugh out of Mom.
As we went on, the decision-making wasn’t terrible.
Though I felt guilty about it, the fact that this wasn’t a real wedding seemed to make it a lot of it easier.
If Tori and I had been doing this for real, I wondered if I’d have been more pressed about things like favors or the font on the invites.
Without the Real Wedding of Damocles hanging over me, none of it seemed quite as consequential as it probably should have.
Something to keep in mind when I got married for real, now that I thought about it: were these little details really worth that much stress?
Because I’d been to a lot of weddings, and I couldn’t have recalled the favors, napkin rings, wineglasses, or invite fonts from any of them to save my life.
Maybe they just weren’t that big of a deal.
We decided on a fairly simple color scheme of hunter green and burgundy with crème accents. There were a couple of caterers that were reasonably priced and sounded amazing; we’d reach out to them this week and arrange tastings.
Several bakeries offered incredible tiered cakes, and we both immediately fell in love with one that had icing roses wrapped around it from top to bottom.
That place wasn’t cheap, but we all agreed that we could splurge a little on the cake.
Especially since we’d all eaten some wedding cakes that were definitely… not good.
There was a whole pile of photographers, and three were both excellent at what they did and explicitly stated that they were queer-friendly.
A fourth was added to the list after Tori perused her portfolio and found multiple same-sex weddings…
plus additional photos of the photographer marrying her own wife.
The whole time, Tori kept listing vendors in her notebook, and everything seemed a bit less daunting when I saw how few names she’d actually written down.
The magazines and binders made it seem like we needed to comb through dozens upon dozens, but really, it didn’t take much to whittle each list down to a handful of names.
Some were out of our price range. Some just weren’t what we were looking for.
In short order, we’d curated lists that were much less intimidating than I’d expected.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
“What about bridesmaids?” Mom looked over her glasses at each of us. “How many are you each thinking?”
“Uh…” My heart pounded. “I, um…” I cleared my throat. “I don’t… I don’t think I want bridesmaids.”
She turned to me, surprise etched all over her face. “Not even a maid of honor?”
I pretended to consider it, then shook my head instead of blurting out “Absolutely not a maid of honor.” I braced, expecting her to try to persuade me, but she just turned to Tori.
“What about you?”
Tori shrugged. “My sister will be a million months pregnant by then, so she’ll probably be glad I’m not making her wear a bridesmaids dress.”