Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Read Online Free PDF Page A

unusually warm for early January, almost fifty degrees, and the playground was packed with children in puffy down jackets. Summer was in the sandbox, making Elmo pies from a plastic mold of the Sesame Street character, surrounded by toddlers wielding brightly colored shovels and pails and dump trucks. One little girl was filling her doll’s hollow head with sand.
    Jane tossed me a bottle of tropical fruit-flavored antacids. I chomped on two as fast I could.
    “Me want!” Summer demanded, sticking out her hand at me.
    “Sweetie, this isn’t yummy. It’s yucky!” I grimaced. “Ewwww!”
    “Ewww!” Summer repeated. She grabbed a fistful of sand and teased her mother by bringing her hand to her mouth. “Ewww!”
    Natasha wagged her finger. “No eating sand. No, no, no.”
    Summer laughed. “Yes, yes, yes!”
    Yes. Yes. Yes. That was exactly what I’d said to Noah when he proposed.
    I said yes—three times. So I must have meant yes.
    And very soon I was expected to write a five-hundred word article for Wow Weddings about why I said yes. Why I Said Yes! was a regular monthly feature in the magazine, another of Astrid’s brainstorms for increasing readership. The articles were written sometimes by celebrities but often by ordinary people about why they fell in love and said yes to their marriage proposals. Astrid wanted articles by both Philippa and me to accompany our feature.
    Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.
    Blank page. Blinking cursor.
    I said yes because…
    Blank page. Blinking cursor.
    Part of Philippa’s job was to weed through the thousands of Why I Said Yes! submissions that came in to Wow every month, choose three and submit them to the articles editor, who’d select the best one or scrawl a no on all three and send Philippa back to the mail sack. Part of my job was to read the approved column, design a cutegraphic to accompany it and choose an interesting quote to bold for a sidebar. Soon after I started at Wow, Philippa received a submission from a bride-to-be in Texas named Laura R. ( Wow was big on initials only for last names.) Laura R. had been seeing her boyfriend for a year when he was called to service for the army and sent off somewhere awful to fight. He proposed to her in a letter on her birthday, and she wrote back one word: YES! He’d sent her a makeshift ring, a piece of scrap metal he’d fashioned to contain a pretty pebble. He never came home from the awful place, and his parents had given her back the YES! letter with the diary he’d been keeping, which described how happy he was that she’d said yes, how he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there to come home to Texas and marry her and start a family.
    I’d sobbed through her entire article. That evening, I’d spent hours at home creating a graphic worthy enough to accompany her column. And then Astrid had decided to reject Laura R.’s submission. “It’s too depressing,” she’d insisted. “ Wow ’s readers want happy endings. They’re anticipating happy endings for themselves. Not war and death.”
    Astrid also nixed Yes! columns by pregnant brides, overweight brides, gay brides, unattractive brides and blue-collar brides (unless they were marrying up).
    “ Wow ’s mission is to preserve the fairy tale,” Astrid scrawled in red atop the nixed columns. “Fairy tales are about dreams. Not reality. Wow Weddings magazine is about dreams.”
    I dream you disappear! I prayed with closed eyes during editorial meetings or whenever I heard her heels clicking down the hallways of the Wow offices. But then I would open my eyes and she’d still be there. Therefore proving herself wrong. Wow Weddings was really about reality.
    Why I Said Yes! by Eloise Manfred.
    Twice in the past week I’ve said yes, yes, yes without a moment’s hesitation when I meant I don’t know, I’m not sure, let me get back to you:
    When my boyfriend, Noah, proposed marriage.
    When my boss, editor in chief of this very loser magazine, offered