Chapter 6: Echoes of Another Wedding

Thursday, July 17, 1986

As we expected, the morning was fairly leisurely. We were up by nine local time, but that was eleven back at home, so we basically slept in. That was likely a good thing.

After meeting up with Angie and Paige, who’d also slept well, we had breakfast together. No one was in a rush to do anything, so we lingered at the breakfast table a bit before finally getting going. Our first planned event wasn’t until five, when we would meet much of the wedding party for dinner. This wasn’t the rehearsal dinner, though. That would be tomorrow. Instead, this was, in Paige’s words, ‘the calm before the storm.’

The ‘storm’, in this case, was twin bachelorette parties. Lizzie and Janet were going out separately with different groups of friends. Our couples were split as well. I was in Janet’s group, while Jas was in Lizzie’s. Paige and Mel were also in Janet’s group. Mel joked that it was proof that Janet had forgiven her for Mel’s long-ago mistaken belief that Janet was cheating.

I had no idea what they were doing for their parties, nor how late we would be out. Neither of them had struck me as the hard-partying type, but that was then and this was now. If there was ever a time to break loose, one of these stereotypical pre-wedding nights on the town would be it.

Tomorrow would start out like today. We had nothing in the morning. The first official activity was at two in the afternoon. That was the rehearsal. Luckily, they would be able to have it at the Lucie Stern Community Center, where the wedding would be. I’d been to one rehearsal that was held in the couple’s backyard, since the venue was unavailable. It worked, but it was fairly awkward, all things considered.

We hadn’t worked out these details ourselves, and I made a mental note to get on it. I was nearly certain Emerson Unitarian Church would be available for rehearsal, though. That would greatly reduce the drama.

Or, at least, we all hoped it would.

I think we soon-to-be-married people would benefit from this experience. It was handy to have someone else’s wedding first. We could take notes and figure out what we were forgetting.

Since we weren’t doing anything for the wedding, the six of us decided to head up the road just a bit and visit Stanford Shopping Center. It was a nearly prototypical outdoor mall, and had been a major high-end shopping destination in the San Francisco area by the 2000s.

Today, though, it was a study in contrasts. Neiman Marcus had just moved in, giving the center serious credibility, but it also still had a Woolworth’s department store. I hadn’t seen a Woolworth’s after about 2000, nor could I remember seeing one in this life.

It was, by and large, a fun afternoon. The only truly odd moment came around two, when we turned a corner and I spotted a jewelry store I’d last visited in the 1990s.

Jas spotted the look on my face. She looked from me to the store, then back to me.

“What’s up, fiancé? You don’t normally look startled by jewelry stores.”

I smiled a bit, nodding.

Paige jumped in before I could say anything, and said, “It has to be something from long ago. Meaning ... years in the future.”

A second later, she said, “Ow!” and glared at Angie.

“Someone had to do it,” Angie said, grinning.

I said, “First off, it’s ... it’s nothing bad.”

“Which means it could be something bad,” Jas said.

“It does,” I said. “Remember the ring I didn’t want Grandmother to give me?”

“Yes...” Jas said, then stopped and looked thoughtful.

“This is where we had it remade,” I said.

“Oh, hell!” Angie said. “It definitely could have been something bad!”

“Eh,” I said. “The ring was never the problem. It was fine. It wasn’t even symbolic of the problems. No issues there. It’s just ... yeah. It does mean something.”

“Should we go look around?” Jas said. “Or is that the wrong idea?”

“It sounds good to me,” I said.

So, we window-shopped at the store where, years later and a universe away, a somewhat naive and entirely too optimistic Steve, and his perhaps-too-optimistic-as-well bride-to-be, went in to have a ring remade. One could always argue that this version of me was also naive and overly optimistic, but I thought my feelings were, by and large, fairly rational.

If nothing else — and ‘nothing else’ was unlikely to ever apply — I had a far better support network this time. If Jas went ‘Psycho Raging Anger Monster’ on me, three of the most important women in the world to me would know about it when I did. I would never hide that from Angie, Paige, or Jess. The three of them would either help us fix whatever was wrong or would help us separate as gracefully as possible.

The odds were low, though. Jas just didn’t have the emotional baggage my ex-wife had carried. Camille and Francis were far better parents than hers had been, and that made a ton of difference.

People change, of course. Marriage, by its nature, is a declaration that some changes are beyond the pale.

I could say that one cannot promise to always love someone just because you love them now. That, by itself, was true. They might change, you might change, and the things you loved about them might change.

But the sort of love one commits to in a marriage isn’t the sort of love that is a condition. It’s the sort of love that is a decision. The commitment isn’t to stay the same, it’s that you’ll do the work to keep the relationship strong. That you’ll love them, even if you don’t like them at the time.

We would see, of course. We had years — decades! — in front of us. Inevitably, we would change. I expected to change more during this life than I had in my first.

But I meant for us to grow old and gray together. And I hoped, one day, we would join each other again after we had left this world and, together, find out what happens next.

I tried calling Jess before and after lunch (at a little cafe), but didn’t get her either time. I tried once more before we left the center and finally got her.

She’d called Nancy back and said they had a great conversation. Nancy seemed to have realistic expectations, according to Jess, but some solid ideas. Without actually seeing her, it was hard to judge, but Nancy had potential to do plenty of things, not just act.

And, speaking of being seen, Jess had finally had her long-awaited audition. According to her, she overheard the director telling the casting director, ‘I really thought we had this and wasn’t sure why we had to waste time with one more audition. Now, I know. This is going to be tough!’

We both found that simultaneously encouraging and daunting. It might come down to a coin flip. But, for Jess to trigger a coin flip over what had been a set decision was already a good thing.

Dinner was at a place that couldn’t help but make me laugh. Lizzie and Janet had picked Rosie’s Thai Garden for dinner. In another time, my best friend at the time (one I would likely never meet in this life) and I had dubbed it ‘Thai Bowling One’. There were, at the time, at least two Thai restaurants in bowling alleys in the Silicon Valley area. Rosie’s was one of them.

It was fortunate that we were fairly familiar with a wide variety of cuisines. Thai was far less of an option in College Station than it was out here.

Lizzie and Janet both looked and sounded great. If there were cold feet, I wasn’t seeing any sign of them. Nor were the others, judging from their reactions.