Cancel the Wedding, Queen Moves On novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Corridor
On her wedding morning Etta hears her fiancé and her maid of honor through a door, films it, and walks down the aisle with the veil on and a plan.
The veil comb snapped at 11:40, twenty minutes before I was supposed to get married.
I held the two halves in my palm and laughed, because that was the kind of morning it was.
Everything had gone right until then.
The flowers had come on time and my grandmother Pearl had cried exactly once.
Two hundred and forty people were filling a stone church on Benefit Street.
"Faye will have a spare," I told Pearl.
Faye always had a spare.
She was my maid of honor and my best friend since the seventh grade, and she had planned every minute of this day.
Pearl lowered her enormous glasses and looked at me over the top of them.
"Your friend left the bridal suite twenty minutes ago," she said. "Her phone's still on the chair."
I picked it up and carried it down the vestry corridor in my bare feet, holding my skirts off the stone.
The groom's room was at the end, with the door open a hand's width.
I heard Preston's voice before I reached it.
It was his warm voice, the reasonable one he used on waiters and on my grandmother.
"Four hours, Faye. Then it's a ring and a dinner and you can stop pouting."
"Say it again," Faye said, and she was smiling.
"I'm marrying her at noon, and I'm coming to you tonight. Nothing changes."
I stopped moving.
I did not decide to lift my phone. My hand did it, the same hand that has held a tuning lever since I was nine.
Through the gap I saw his honey-blond head bent over her.
I saw her hand in his shirt and her pink mouth on his collar.
"She'll find out," Faye said.
"Etta?"
He laughed, low and fond.
"She tunes pianos, Faye. She hears what she's told."
The phone showed a red dot and a counter climbing past thirty seconds.
I did not make a sound.
I thought I might be sick on the stone floor, and then I thought I would not give them that either.
Someone's hand closed on my elbow from behind.
"Don't," said a calm voice.
Cecily Wexler stood at my shoulder in a silver gown with her pearls at her throat and her chignon perfect.
She was Preston's mother, and she was looking at the gap in the door, not at me.
She had seen it, and her face did not change at all.
"Whatever you think you saw," she said, "you did not."
"Cecily, they're in there."
"Every Wexler man has a Faye, my dear. It means nothing. A wife is a different position."
She said it kindly.
That was the worst part.
"You are a sensible girl," she went on, and straightened one of my curls with two cold fingers.
"You will fix your face, walk down that aisle, and be Mrs. Wexler by lunch."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you will have embarrassed two hundred and forty people, and you will tune pianos in a rented room for the rest of your life."
She patted my arm and walked back toward the sanctuary with her heels clicking.
I stood there with Faye's phone in one hand and mine in the other.
Behind the door, Preston said something and Faye laughed.
I thought about hitting it open.
I thought about throwing Faye's phone through the stained glass.
Instead I looked down and saw I was still holding the two halves of the broken comb.
I pushed what was left of it into my hair so it would hold.
Then I set Faye's phone face down on the windowsill, where she would find it later.
Pearl was waiting at the end of the corridor with her glasses pushed up on her head.
She looked at my face for two seconds.
"What did the little weasel do?" she asked.
"I need you to sit in the third pew," I said. "And I need you to keep your hearing aids on."
"Oh, baby. I turned them up."
The organ started.
Faye came flying around the corner with her bouquet and her lip gloss freshly done, a little out of breath.
"There you are!" she said, and took both my hands. "Oh my God, Etta, you look unreal. Are you ready?"
I looked at her.
I looked at the collar of her dress, where a faint smear of her own pink had been wiped almost clean.
"I've never been readier," I said.
She fixed my veil and kissed my cheek.
I let her.
My father's old uncle gave me away, since my father could not.
I walked the whole aisle with my chin up, and two hundred and forty faces smiled at me.
Preston stood at the front in his perfect morning coat, with his perfect teeth.
He took my hand and squeezed it, and his thumb stroked my knuckles the way it had for two years.
"You look beautiful," he whispered.
The officiant cleared his throat and began to speak.
He got through three sentences.
Then I took the microphone off its stand, and the whole church heard me say it.
"There won't be a wedding."
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