Each bridesmaid has her own list, perhaps not quite as long as my maid-of-
honor one but equally fancy and handwritten. Ami even drew checkboxes so
that we can record when each task is completed.
“Some people might call these lists a little overboard,” I say.
“Those are the same ‘some people,’ ” she replies, “who’ll pay an arm and a leg
for a wedding that is half as nice.”
“Right. They hire a wedding planner to—” I refer to my list. “ ‘Wipe
condensation o the chairs a half hour before the ceremony.’ ”
Ami blows across her ngernails to dry them and lets out a movie-villain
laugh. “Fools.”
You know what they say about self-fullling prophecies, I’m sure. Winning
makes you feel like a winner, and then somehow... you keep winning. It has to
be true, because Ami wins everything. She tossed a ticket into a rae bowl at a
street fair and walked home with a set of community theater tickets. She slid her
business card into a cup at The Happy Gnome and won free happy hour beers
for a year. She’s won makeovers, books, movie premiere tickets, a lawnmower,
endless T-shirts, and even a car. Of course, she also won the stationery and
calligraphy set she used to write the to-do lists.
All this to say, as soon as Dane Thomas proposed, Ami saw it as a challenge
to spare our parents the cost of the wedding. As it happens, Mom and Dad
could aord to contribute—they are messy in many ways, but nancially is not
one of them—but for Ami, getting out of paying for anything is the best kind of
game. If pre-engagement Ami thought of contests as a competitive sport,
engaged Ami viewed them as the Olympics.
No one in our enormous family was surprised, then, when she successfully
planned a posh wedding with two hundred guests, a seafood buet, a chocolate
fountain, and multicolored roses spilling out of every jar, vase, and goblet—and
has shelled out, at most, a thousand dollars. My sister works her ass o to nd
the best promotions and contests. She reposts every Twitter and Facebook
giveaway she can nd, and even has an email address that is aptly named
AmeliaTorresWins@xmail.com.
Finally convinced there are no misbehaving sequins, I lift the hanger from
where it’s suspended from a metal hook attached to the wall, intending to bring
