Now and for the Last Time

3 장

"I love a third wedding," Wooyoung said happily, as we stood by the pool, watching guests take their seats. "Everyone is so relaxed. I feel like we should just specialize in them."

"Not enough business in it," my mom, always the realist, told him. "Plus you'd missed the nervousness of young brides. It would be a waste of your gift."

"True," he agreed, as his eyes followed an older guy in a tight suit who was about to sit in one of the front rows of chairs reserved for family. Wooyoung was the most hyper-aware person I knew. I realized I was holding my own breath until the guy's wife took his elbow, pulling him farther row. "Speaking of young brides, I spoke to Julee and she's confirmed for first thing Monday morning for preliminary."

My mom sighed. "You know I hate rush job, Wooyoung."

"The wedding is in August. It's April."

"Late April," my mom grumbled. "Which would be fine, if it was a third wedding. but it's not. It's high society, and high maintenance, which means we should have started planning a year ago."

"You're leaving out high budget," Wooyoung pointed out.

"Money isn't everything." I waited a beat for what I knew was coming next. Sure enough: "You can't put on a price on your sanity."

"But if you could, they'd pay it."

They both fell silent as another guest started for the front row. It would be only a matter of minutes before Wooyoung pulled out the pre-printed RESERVED cards (in his almost calligraphy-like handwriting, aka the official font of a Soojung Bae Wedding) and put them on the seats. He usually tried to resist, refraining  from any extra clutter in a venue, even nicely printed cards. But you could never underestimate the Moron-ness. That was another one of my mother's rules.

"Twenty-minutes," she said, flicking her wrist to check her watch. "Put down a few cards, just so we don't have to police. Suzy, can you take BRR?"

I nodded, pulling out my phone to double check it was on silent. Back Row Right was often my spot at events like this one, when there was a walking factor involved. It was a variation of our three approaches: she launched the wedding party, I keep tabs as they were moving, and  Wooyoung was positioned up front. There, he'd be ready to spring into action in case someone fainting, rings being dropped or forgotten altogether, or flower girls and ring bearers going crazy mid-ceremony. (Which often happened, although only one time all at once, at an event we now referred to as The Disaster.)

Now we broke, each taking our positions. This event, the Eunjung Oh Wedding, had been in the works for the last nine months, and Wooyoung was right: it had pretty much been a breeze. The bride was in her fifties, the groom his seventies. They had plenty of money and few specific requests, other then wanting the wedding to be at the Gwangju County Groove, where they'd met on the tennis court. The groove was handling food, they'd hired our preferred DJ, and the whole thing was expected to wrap up by ten p.m. sharp.

The only wrinkle had come from the bride's daughter, Bora. When she'd gotten engaged a couple of weeks ago, she decided she, too, had to have a Soojung Bae Wedding Complicating things was the fact that she and her fiance were getting married in mid-August before moving across country at the end of summer for a medical residency, so everything had to happen ASAP. Normally, with the waitlist and my mother's obsession with organization, we didn't take on anything that came close to last minute. But Eunjung Oh had been so easy, and they were spending so much money, that Wooyoung, at least, had surrendered. Which was, well, forty percent of the event.

I walked to the back of the rows of chairs I'd helped set out a couple of hours earlier, taking my place on the aisle. As usual, there were a few people clumped in the back row, which was sure to annoy Wooyoung, who liked his audiences uniform. "What are they thinking? It's not like they're going to called on to participate," he'd huff. In extreme cases, I'd even witnessed him pulling his rank and reseating people, although that only happened when he was feeling especially pissy.