Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Read Online Free PDF

me a free dream wedding in exchange for selling my soul as Star Trek Bride.
    “Just call me Uhura,” I moaned to my friends. “I can’t wait to see the futuristic gown I’ll be walking down the aisle in to a guy I’m not even sure I should be marrying. Lord knows what he’ll be wearing. A space suit, maybe.”
    “Ura,” Summer repeated. “Ura. Ura.”
    She made a new Elmo pie; a little boy, a toddler around her age, came over to inspect it.
    I held up my left hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at the beautiful ring I’d thought I wanted so badly. Now all I thought I wanted was to give it back. Why, why, why?
    “Eloise, you’re just going through the adjustment of living with a guy,” Jane had said the morning after Noah popped the question. “And you’ve got a bad case of commitment jitters. I think you really do love Noah, but he’s committed now, and so you’re scared. It’s the opposite of what happened with Serge and that little proposal fiasco.”
    She was referring to two and a half years ago, when the very nice guy I’d been dating suddenly proposed and I’d said yes because I wanted It so badly—to be loved, to feel safe in the world. But I didn’t love Serge and I’d known it. My friends had known it. If I’d told my grandmother about the engagement, she would have plucked the ring off my finger and mailed it back to him.
    I was afraid of commitment? Huh?
    “Eloise,” Jane said, sifting sand through her fingers, “I really think you did mean yes. To both Noah and the freewedding. I think it’s your fear of commitment creating your cold feet, and not your real feelings. I said this before, but I’ll repeat it—I think you said yes to the free wedding so that you couldn’t easily take that ring off.”
    But…
    “You know what else I think?” Jane said as Summer jumped on her Elmo pie. “I think your sudden Tums addiction has more to do with your family than with Noah.”
    “How about those Mets!” I responded.
    “Me out!” Summer said, heading for the shallow steps. She stopped as a man placed a toddler next to her in the sandbox. The little boy put up his arms and said, “Da-da. Da-da.”
    Summer put up her arms, too, and said, “Da-da.”
    The man smiled uncomfortably, as every man did when Summer called him Da-da, which she did to every man, everywhere. In elevators, on the street, in restaurants. Every man was Da-da.
    “Where Da-da?” Summer asked Natasha, her green eyes curious.
    No matter how many times Summer asked Natasha that question, the same strain tightened Natasha’s beautiful features. “Your daddy’s in California,” Natasha replied, as she did every time. And satisfied, as she was every time, Summer continued playing. She climbed out of the sandbox and ran smiling to the slide.
    Natasha waited at the end of the slide to catch Summer. “At least I think he is,” she whispered to us. “He’s not i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-e-d,” she spelled out. She shook her head, then smiled up at Summer. “Come down to Mama!”
    The father of Natasha’s baby had broken up with her when she told him she was pregnant. His name was Sam and he lived in California, and for reasons I would never understand, he wasn’t interested in knowing his child.
    How was that possible?
    This was a question people had tried to answer in my own life. Your father was never the settling-down sort. Your father’s creative. Your father’s this. Your father’s that.
    Your father is a piece of shit.
    No one ever said that, but a long time ago, I’d begun to think that was the reason Theo Manfred had walked out on his family, never to be seen or heard from again.
    The problem with that line of thinking was that you didn’t want to think of your father as a piece of shit. You wanted to think of him as a hero.
    As Summer ran around the jungle gym and back up to the top of the slide with a “Me do! Me do!” and tried to make her way down alone, I wondered what she’d say when people asked where