vows

ADAM CARTER

“I do,” the bride said, “not know.”

“What’s that?” the groom asked. The gratuitous smile he greeted their weddinggoers with as he walked down the beach and up the aisle desperately clung to his face, but the flamingo boutonnière pinned to his neon green suit jacket shook as if to take flight.

The preacher, caught up in ritual, didn’t catch the addendum.

“I now…,”

“Why does everything have to be so binary?” The bride cut off the preacher mid-pronounce you. “Right or wrong. Yes or no. Do or don’t.”  

The maid of honor let out a nervous snort, while the groomsmen dug their flip flops into the sand. The groom’s mother, seated alone in the front row, still wore the 100-yard stare she’d adopted when the bride hula’d down the aisle to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies.

The groom well knew his love had never been sold on marital tradition. She preferred to make her own. She had danced down the sandy aisle for her wedding procession in a green sequined flapper dress with accompanying Uppity Women Unite! button pinned to the strap—attire salvaged from garage sales: her something old.

She proudly displayed a bruised eye she had earned in a Jiu Jitsu tournament the weekend before. Contrary to her maid of honor’s protestations, she had declined to mask it with makeup.

Her something new and blue.

The coup de grace, however, was the garter, a surprise gift from his mother.

“I made this for you,” his mother had said. “It came from my own wedding dress. Something borrowed. For my son’s fiancé.”

The groom had cringed at his mother’s use of the possessive, but the bride seemed to take it in stride. “Thanks, mom,” she had said, granting his mother the term of endearment she regularly  requested but had yet to receive. “I’ll wear it with pride.”

Rather than tucking the garter away, high and out-of-sight, the bride had dyed the frilly white garter black. She now wore it as a choker.

“Life certainly can be confusing.” The preacher nodded solemnly. The groom wondered if he was referring to the bride’s appearance or her inquiries. “But today is a day for commitments, not questions.”

The bride raised her non-dotted eye.  “There’s always time,” she said to the preacher. Then, to the groom, who was offering a sandalwood ring to the empty space between them, “for questions.”

 The groom’s mother tsk tsk’d as if she had read it once in a book and then saved it just for this occasion. She’d declined the suggestion to dress casually, and her son saw that the combination of overheat from her wool hat and over-rouge from her vanity now made her look like a Raggedy Anne gone wrong.

“I have a question.” The groom returned his attention to his love—every sequined and black-eyed inch of her. He slipped the wedding ring back into his Bermuda shorts. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“I do.”

Adam Carter is a Master of Fine Arts graduate from the University of South Florida. While in Tampa he founded Writers with Conviction, a creative writing program at the Zephyrhills Correctional Facility. He currently lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he works as a State Public Defender. His writing can be found in Midwestern Gothic, New Southern Fugitives, and most recently in The Rumpus. You can follow his work on Twitter @CarterInIndiana