I didn’t know he was the groom’s brother. Had I known, I might have kept my mouth shut. If I had kept my mouth shut, maybe Rebecca wouldn’t have been crying at eight thirty in the morning on her wedding day.
“Yeah, I hear she’s quite a piece of work.”
That’s all I said. I said it because I’d heard from multiple sources that Rebecca’s mother-in-law-to-be was, in fact, quite a piece of work. I said it to the guy giving me a ride from the hotel to the rehearsal dinner. I said it because he was talking trash about the groom’s mother. What I didn’t know was that the groom’s mother was also his mother. He used her first name, for crying out loud! How was I supposed to know? And how was I supposed to know that he was going to report my comments to his family as evidence that Rebecca had been spreading gossip about her future mother-in-law? When his mother, being the piece of work that she is, heard about my comment, she flipped her shit.
So Rebecca called me at eight thirty the next morning to find out exactly what I’d said to her brother-in-law-to-be about her mother-in-law-to-be. Meanwhile, I, after a late night with my old high school friends, rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out where I was and why my best female friend in the world was crying. After a couple minutes, clarity started seeping in from the edges.
“That was the groom’s brother?” I asked.
“Um, yeah,” said Rebecca.
It was my turn to flip my shit.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Steve,” said Rebecca, holding back tears. “You’ve been caught in the crossfire. I’m going to deal with this. You enjoy yourself.”
It would have been easy for her to blame this catastrophe on me. I even encouraged her to do so—let me be the scapegoat so she could get on with her wedding day. She could even have kicked me out of the bridal party. But Rebecca decided to do the harder, braver thing. Not just for me, but for the sake of addressing long-standing problems with her mother-in-law-to-be. I did as much damage control as I could, but Rebecca fought the real battle. On her wedding day. Just because I’m stupid and she’s brave.
It didn’t surprise me. She’s like that. The surprise is that Rebecca has remained my friend for twenty-five years.
We met in journalism class our sophomore year of high school. We shared a wry, wicked sense of humor, a love for writing, and similar taste in music, but we argued about things like politics and religion. Since I was male, adolescent, and evangelical, I did a lot of pontificating, smirking, and accusing. She didn’t. She listened patiently, gave her opinions, and rarely got frustrated with me. Her worst reaction ever consisted of not speaking to me for an hour when I said something especially nasty. When I apologized to her later that day at a pep rally, she laughed and told me to forget about it.
As we floated through college, graduate school, and miscellaneous jobs, our lives diverged more and more. But she always called me on my birthday. She always went out of her way to keep in touch. She was always the first to call when everyone still returned to our hometown for Christmas. She participated in my wedding without wreaking the chaos and devastation that I did at hers.
She got divorced around the time I got married. It would have been easy for her to indulge in a single lifestyle and ignore her married friends. That’s what I would have done after suffering through a difficult breakup—I would have turned my back on people with families. Thank God Rebecca isn’t like that. She welcomed my wife as a new friend. She embraced our children. She asks for pictures. We’re both busy now, but when we connect on the phone, she listens more than she talks.
