Page 86 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director
‘Outsourcing your wedding vows. Very efficient.’
‘Shh, Venus is up.’ Lily glanced around, meeting Reba and Gracie’s eyes, as though by triangulating their gazes they could somehow prevent this whole thing from falling apart into a disaster to be gleefully covered by the tabloids and TikTok reaction videos.
Venus, a vision in her hand-stitched gown, flashed a nervous, slightly tipsy grin at the crowd. The pearls sewn into her hair glowed gently in the light of the golden hour. ‘Hi, everyone. Babe, can you turn off your meeting?’
Desmond tapped his smart glasses again. ‘Sorry. All yours.’
‘There you are.’ Venus laughed, slightly giddily, and Lily wondered if she’d sourced some additional chemical help fromthe medicine cabinet in the dressing room tent. ‘Wow. How does a girl follow that. I … um, love you. Ever since that first day we met in the lobby, and we got our helicopters mixed up. I knew it was meant to be. And, um …’
Venus stood there, the most stunning bride that Lily had ever seen, and yet the most conflicted. Beneath all of it – the wealth, the decor, the glamour – was a gap that not even a bottomless bank account could bridge. Venus took a deep breath, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her unsmudgeable lipstick smudged away, and she stared down at it, frowning.
Lily’s heart squeezed as she considered all the futures that must be running through Venus’s mind. All of it with the wrong person. A person who didn’t even care. A person who wouldn’t wear a silly bolo tie for you or help you paint flower murals on your shop or humour your requests to bang out the solo from Supertramp’s ‘School’ on their personalised pianola.
Lily’s walkie-talkie crackled.
‘What do I say?’ muttered Rainbow Soleil, who was swaying in front of the flower arch like a piece of half-time hippie entertainment.
‘Nothing,’ said Lily. ‘But we’ll have the band on standby. Just in case.’
‘Roger that.’ Rainbow Soleil continued swaying.
‘And um …’ repeated Venus, but with a newly revelatory tone, as though she’d just returned from a quick trip to another planet. ‘No. No. I … can’t do this,’ she said, taking half a dozen steps back in her custom-made wooden flip-flops. ‘I don’t. I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be the blue stripe in a blue and white toothpaste tube. I want to be the meteor. I want to be me.’
‘Called it,’ whispered Reba.
Lily barely managed to keep from shouting out, ‘Go Venus!’
But she had to remain an impartial professionalism. Or atleast seem that way. All right, so it wasn’t the best look that Lily’s marquee wedding had stalled at theI dopart of the ceremony, but she’d rather have a runaway bride on her books than a disastrous divorce. Her whole goal was to bring happy couples together in celebration, after all – not force them to go through with a major life decision just because the vendor deposits weren’t refundable.
But what now? There were hundreds of guests sitting about, most of them with a vested financial interest in this whole affair. And there were only so many helicopters to go round.
Lily’s heart was pounding. She could salvage this. It was all about the guest experience, after all. She just had to act fast.
‘Babe, no,’ Desmond was saying, not particularly emphatically for someone whose bride had just turned him down at the altar. Probably because he was splitting his attention between this and a Discord chat group.
Drawing herself up to her full height and setting her jaw, Venus hurled her bouquet of California poppies at his head. Desmond ducked. The bouquet hurtled on, arcing exactingly towards one of the bridesmaids. The bridesmaid, ordinarily part of a class that was exceptional at catching wedding bouquets, flinched and stepped aside.
‘What? I don’t want the jilted juju to rub off on me,’ whispered the bridesmaid to her brethren. She whipped out a bottle of hand sanitiser and scrubbed her hands clean. Then she followed this up with a bottle of moon-charged water.
‘Venus! Think of the market cap!’ shouted Venus’s mother (whom Lily recognised from the financial pages of the newspaper), fiddling with her phone. ‘Ugh! How am I meant to see the stock ticker when there’s no 5G?’
Lily had moments before chaos erupted. First she had to check on Venus, and then she’d sort out the crowd.
She grabbed Mort’s arm. Of all the people here, she knew hewouldn’t let her down. ‘Mort, can you tell the band to play? I’ll be back in a minute.’
Mort nodded, his dark eyes a gentle port of solidarity amidst the madness that Lily knew was about to ensue.
For the second time in as many weeks, Lily hurried after Venus, who’d fled with the dedication of a horror movie final girl sprinting away from a serial killer sporting a chainsaw. Lily found her seated on the drooping bough of an elegantly decorated eucalyptus tree draped with string lights and sprigs of tiny tie-dyed flowers. She looked like a forest fairy who’d emerged from the woods, curious about human traditions. A forest fairy whose eye makeup wasn’t as waterproof as its manufacturer liked to claim.
‘I’m sorry,’ Venus said, dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief Lily gave her. (She’d taken it from Mort’s breast pocket.) ‘The thought of going through with that was just …’
Lily sat down beside her and let Venus lean her head on her shoulder. ‘I get it.’
‘I know it doesn’t have to be forever. I know divorce is a thing. I know that people in unhappy marriages go overboard on yachts all the time.’
‘Um,’ said Lily.
‘But I don’t want that to be my life. I don’t want to be dragged along by inertia, saying yes to something just because I feel like I should, and then spending who knows how many years trying to find the right time to stop it.’ Venus sighed. ‘Is he still on a conference call?’
