Kevin’s Wedding

    My brother Kevin got married a couple of days after I returned back to New York. My cousins and my grandmother all came up for the event. After the rehearsal dinner, I borrowed my father’s sports car and drove my brother and cousins to a get-together my friends were having at Fiddler’s Green. But first we had to drop my grandmother off at her hotel.

  When we got to the hotel, my grandmother tried to find the door handle to get out and my younger brother, Tommy, started cracking jokes about how I was playing with the door locks because I was an alcoholic and drunk and find those kind of things funny. Surprisingly, my grandmother, who thinks every sneeze will result in pneumonia and has twenty placebo pills that she takes every day that she thinks keep her alive, dismissed it. After she went into her hotel, I chastised Tommy for saying something like that to someone like our grandmother. Of course, to him, that’s what made it funny.

  The next morning was the wedding. Kevin had given each of his groomsmen a flask with our initials engraved on them. His one request was that we each bring them on the day of the wedding. While we were getting ready my father picked up my grandmother from the hotel and brought her back to the house. The limo came to pick us up and we were supposed to leave, but my flask was missing. Looking desperately for it, Tommy said he thought he saw it in the living room. There it was on the coffee table, right in front of my grandmother sitting on the couch, with my initials facing her. Embarrassed, but without much recourse, I was forced to grab my flask in front of my grandmother before we left for the church. Cute, Tommy, very cute.

  The wedding went well. His bride, Tammy, looked beautiful. Kevin started crying when he saw her. Which made others get choked up. Even Pat ‘the Bunny’, who was generally sarcastic and funny. After the ceremony, the limo took the wedding party back to Tammy’s parent’s house for photos. We got a lot of the guys photos done quickly, but the photographer told us it was going to be awhile before they needed us again while they took the girls photos. Tammy’s dad told us to grab some beers while we waited, so Tommy and I each grabbed a beer and wandered around the property talking. While walking down the driveway, Tommy said, “Hey, I gotta use the bathroom, can you hold my beer?” Without thinking I said sure, no problem. He ran off and as I looked up, my grandmother was walking up the driveway. There I was double fisting beers while my brother pointed and laughed through a window.

  Erin was my date for the wedding and she met me at the reception. She was the perfect choice because she had met my cousins and grandmother from North Carolina, and my family and family’s friends from her trips to Vermont. She really was like family.

   After the wedding, I saw more of Kevin than I did before he was married. He was spending a lot of time at my parent’s house. I thought it was odd and thought it was culture shock. They were living in Tammy’s parent’s basement apartment. We had dinner at Tammy’s parent’s house before and they were really religious and proper. My family was not. Maybe Kevin didn’t feel comfortable spending his free time there. I highly doubt it was because he wanted to spend as much time with me before I was gone for good. But who knows…