The Road to Amazing (26 page)

The weather was still good, so we
decided to hold the wedding out on the deck after all. Nate, Ruby,
Gunnar, and Otto immediately went to work like little house elves,
sweeping up the needles and branches, then positioning chairs from
inside to go along with the chairs and benches already out there.
When they finished, people somehow instinctively knew to take their
seats (possibly because we were already running an hour and a half
behind schedule, and everyone was, like, "Get on with it
already!").

Inside the house, Min, Kevin, and I
watched as the last few people sat down. We'd all cleaned up a bit,
but Kevin and I weren't wearing tuxes, just nice pants and
button-down shirts, and it's not like Min was wearing a robe or
anything.

Finally, Min turned to us and asked,
"Ready?"

We both took deep breaths, then
nodded.

Together, the three of us walked out
and stood in front of everyone, with the backdrop of Puget Sound
off on the right. Out in the distance, the rays of the sun shone
down through the clouds like stalks of golden straw.

Hey!
I thought.
I was right about the
weather after all!
But I was smart enough
to know that five minutes before marrying someone is probably not
the best time to rub their nose in how you were right and they were
wrong about something.

Otto was already sitting
in front of the gathering with his guitar. Right on cue — even
though we hadn't
given
him a cue — he started playing and singing.

This time and place I'm
here to say I love you

This time and place is all
that we can know

This time and place we
stand together face to face

I live within your eyes
this time and place

As I listened to Otto sing, I
remembered how impressed I'd been by his musical talent all those
years ago at summer camp. But honestly, when I'd asked him to sing
at our wedding, I'd forgotten how good he was. It was funny how one
of the first things I'd noticed about him was that he was a
natural-born performer, and now, nine years later, he was a famous
actor.

Some people say the past
is like a river

That sweeps us forth into
who we're supposed to be

But as for me, the past is
gone forever

So don't come talkin' to
me 'bout destiny

I didn't recognize the song Otto was
singing. Then I remembered he was a songwriter too, and I realized
he must have written the song for us, for our wedding.

Other people say our
future's in the heavens

And the stars converge
into some grand design

But as for me, I don't
need no lucky sevens

And I don't need spinning
moons to make up my mind

As Otto sang, I looked out at the
faces of the crowd — Nate and Ruby, sitting together, and Gunnar,
grinning like he'd just discovered a new animal phylum. Vernie was
seated with an older man, someone it took me a second to place:
Walker, the guy Min and I had met in the ruins of Amazing the day
before. Did she have a date or what?

Leave the past
alone

Let the future
be

'Cause this time and
place

You're here with
me

This time and place I'm
here to say I love you

This time and place is all
that we can know

This time and place we
stand together face to face

I live within your eyes
this time and place

I'm really glad we're here
... this time and place

When Otto finished, I could tell
people were impressed with him, and probably also flattered that a
TV star had deigned to sing for them. I wanted people to applaud,
but it was a wedding, so no one did.

Min stepped forward. "Welcome to the
wedding of Kevin and Russel," she said. "My name is Min, and we're
happy you finally made it. You all passed the test!"

Everyone laughed —
really
laughed — and I
realized that picking Min to be our officiant had been another
great call on Kevin's and my part.

"My mother is annoyingly wise," Min
said to the crowd. "And when I was eleven years old, I asked her
what it means to be married. She thought for a second, then called
into the other room and asked if my father would bring her magazine
into the kitchen for her. A second later, my father trundled into
the room with her magazine, kissed her on the top of the head, then
left again. When he was gone, I said to my mom, 'Well?' 'Well,
what?' my mother said as she casually paged through her magazine.
'I asked you a question about marriage,' I said, 'but you didn't
answer it!' And she said, 'Oh, I answered it.'"

The crowd was one collective knowing
grin.

"I thought about what my mother had
done, the point she was trying to make," Min said. "Finally I asked
her, 'But what if he'd told you to get your own darn magazine? What
if he'd stomped into the kitchen with a scowl and thrown the
magazine down onto the table?' And of course my mom smiled and
said, 'That would have been what it means to be married
too.'"

Now everyone on that deck laughed,
including me.

"So Kevin and Russel?" Min said,
turning to us. "I'm sure you both already know that no marriage is
perfect. But my wedding wish for you is that you have very little
scowling and magazine-throwing, but lots and lots of
head-kissing."

I smiled at her, then at Kevin too.
Min wasn't a touchy-feely type, but she sure knew how to rock a
wedding anecdote (even Vernie looked impressed). It was interesting
how, after everything that could possibly go wrong with our wedding
had gone wrong, now everything was suddenly going right. But I
guess there's some kind of lesson there, something about how we
spend most of our lives getting all bent out of shape about things
that don't matter in the least.

Min faced the crowd again and said,
"Russel and Kevin have both written their own wedding
vows."

We have?
I thought.
This was what
I'd told Min weeks ago, and I'd even jotted a few things down
somewhere. I'd been planning to finalize my vows over the weekend,
but I'd been so distracted by everything that had gone on that I'd
forgotten all about it. It's not like we'd thought to do a
rehearsal. As a result, I had no idea what I was going to
say.

I looked out at the crowd
again, hoping to be filled with inspiration. But whereas before I'd
seen the smiling faces of Gunnar and Vernie, now I saw the mugs of
everyone else: my parents, my uncle Joe, and Mr. Ingram, one of my
dad's co-workers. They were smiling too — well, Mr. Ingram wasn't,
and he even looked down at his watch — but it wasn't the same. Even
if her mouth was curved upward, my mom had a nervous twitch.
Meanwhile, my dad was smiling
too
broadly. Maybe it was the gay thing. Had my Aunt
Helen ever been to a same-sex wedding? Had she ever seen two men
kiss, even on TV? Maybe she had, but none of these people had ever
seen me kiss Kevin, not even my parents.

So much for everything
going right in the ceremony
, I
thought.

Kevin must have seen the panic in my
eyes, because he immediately pulled out a three-by-five card,
indicating that he'd go first. As nervous as I was, I couldn't help
noticing how damn handsome he looked in his button-down shirt, and
how he had such gentle eyes. But before he even glanced at his
prepared card, Kevin lowered it. He was going off-book
too.

"Russel," he said, "all
weekend long I've been worried that something would go wrong at our
wedding, and you told me not to worry. Well,
everything
went wrong. So basically
I was right and you were wrong."

People laughed, and I
thought,
So much for not rubbing your
groom's nose in his mistakes in the middle of a wedding!
But at the same time, I was pretty sure he was
going somewhere with this.

"Except I
wasn't
right," Kevin
went on, "because this wedding is perfect exactly the way it is.
The only way our wedding wouldn't be perfect is if it didn't
happen. And now that it's happening, I have a chance to tell you
how much I love you, and how much I want to spend my life with you.
Earlier today, you said you wanted an amazing life. This is my vow
to you: I promise to do everything in my power to give you
one."

What Kevin had said was really sweet,
and he still looked damn handsome, so I smiled. Unfortunately, I
still had no idea what I was going to say in return — despite the
fact that every single person on the deck was now staring at me,
including Kevin.

I thought about the
conversations Min and I had been having this weekend, and the talk
that Kevin and I had over in Amazing. What had all that been about?
Something about getting older? No, wait, maybe it had to do with
kids. Or
House Hunters
? Suddenly I couldn't remember.

I've said all along that my concerns
about the wedding were just little quibbles, barely worth
mentioning — nothing neurotic, and definitely not anything
approaching cold feet. But even I didn't know that for sure. Maybe
I'd been lying to myself.

Now I
did
know for sure.

I guess my view of weddings had
changed one more time: it wasn't about us saying anything to our
friends and family, or our friends and family saying something to
us. It was about that moment when I realized — finally and for sure
— exactly what I felt for Kevin, and what he and I meant to each
other.

Or — and maybe this is the real truth
— our wedding was about all these things together, all of them at
the same time.

Given how I was having this moment of
clarity, and given that the wedding had all seemed to come together
at the last moment — the sun came out! Gunnar arrived with the
guests! Min's wedding anecdote was hilarious! — I expected to open
my mouth and have the perfect words flow right out of
me.

But I still couldn't figure out how to
put it all into words.

So instead, I leaned
forward and gave Kevin a kiss on the head. Then I said,
"Here's
my
vow: a
lifetime of that."

It was only after I did it
I realized that for a person who had a tendency to over-think
things, it actually
was
the perfect thing to say.

Appreciating the nod to her story, Min
immediately perked up. "Hey, that works for me!"

"Me too," Kevin said, his smiling face
somehow even more handsome than before.

"And so," Min went on, "by the power
invested in me not by God or government, but by Kevin and Russel
themselves, I now pronounce you married." She looked between us,
then winked and added, "Go to it, boys."

Kevin and I leaned in for a kiss, deep
and lingering, my Aunt Helen be damned.

At that, Min held her arms out around
us and said to the gathering, "I now present two husbands, Kevin
Land and Russel Middlebrook!"

As if there was ever any doubt. I told
you at the beginning I was a reliable narrator. It was your own
damn fault if you didn't believe me.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

After the ceremony, Kevin and I talked
to our parents first, mostly due to the whole
having-given-birth-to-us thing. They said all the right things, and
I was actually glad they'd come. We mingled with the other guests
too. My Aunt Helen couldn't wait to kiss me on the cheek — and she
had actual tears in her eyes. How great is that?

While Kevin and I accepted the
congratulations of the crowd, our close friends went into house elf
mode again, pouring drinks and ushering everyone into the area with
the food spread.

At one point, I passed Nate who was
popping another bottle of champagne.

He stopped me to say, "That was really
great. Especially the kiss on the head. I think this might be the
best wedding I've ever been to."

"Really?" I said, blushing, even as I
realized it was one of the first things Nate had said all weekend
that I'd understood perfectly right from the start.

* * *

Not long after, I pulled Otto aside,
and I was about to tell him how great his song had been, but he
spoke first.

"That was fantastic!" he said.
"Russel, I'm so happy for you. Seriously, I spent the whole
ceremony with this stupid grin on my face. Thanks so much for
inviting me."

"Are you kidding?" I said.
"You
had
to be
here." I wanted to say more, to tell him how important he was to
me, but once again I couldn't find the right words. After all, Otto
was my ex, and in certain alternate realities, I could see marrying
him and not Kevin. In fact, I almost said to him, "I hope you know
you're going to be married someday too," but I quickly realized how
condescending that sounded. Besides, I hated when a person had some
life event, a marriage or a childbirth, and they suddenly acted
like the universe had bestowed this great wisdom onto
them.