Wedding Vows
Eric Vrooman
I promise this marriage will last longer than our previous two.
I promise to cherish you even when you come home late from the bar and swamp the bed, or flick your lighter when you want me to drive faster, or eat the center of a pan of brownies. And I promise not to file for divorce if I catch you showing your “Cherry Jackpot” tattoo to some guy at the bar. Even if it’s almost four in the morning and I had to bring the kids in their pajamas.
I promise to “bend like a sheaf of field grass,” as the good Reverend says, not “snap like a twig.” This Reverend focuses on the positive, like the fact that we fixed that mold situation rather than going on the Caribbean cruise. We can build on stuff like that. Even it means I never get to meet Sammy Hagar or see whales blow off steam.
There’s about a quarter as many people as there were the first time, but the ones here, they’re about as true as friends get. How many former bartenders would travel 600 miles to Reno on a Thursday night? How many former girlfriends would agree to watch our kids?
I’ve been hit in the head with a crowbar twice now and had my spleen removed, and you had that tummy lift, but underneath all this middle-age crap, we’re still the same two kids who fell for each other doing whipits in the walk-in cooler at HoJo’s. And that dress looks as good on you now as it did for wedding number two. I like the bow in the back, even if makes it hard to sit in.
This time, we got it right. No ’80s band with a Cure obsession. No live goldfish on the buffet tables. No kids hyped-up on fudge. Just us, our closest friends, and Aunt Caroline’s collection of stuffed angels.
If we do get married a fourth time, I promise not to hire my cousin or anyone desperate enough to hock their camera for a few spins on the roulette wheel. In fact, if there’s time after the buffet, I may swing by the casino and string that little crappola up with my cummerbund. Choke him until his eyes look like double zeroes.
As for work, I promise to get some. It’s not really my fault that I’m allergic to paint or that bounty hunter gigs are so unpredictable.
There’s other stuff I could work on, though, like not trying to get people at service counters to agree with me. And pretending their opinion is more important than yours. Especially about stupid stuff like whether pie crust should have sugar crystals on it, or whether your blouse is cut too low.
As for parenting, I promise not to hand Luke or the Zeb-meister over to you if they’ve got a poopy diaper. And I promise not to overuse the TV and Pack ‘n Play as “babysitters.” They’re great kids, even if they can really be stinkers. Like when they use the leaf blower in the living room or wipe feces on the dog.
And I promise to wrap this up soon. Or now. I told you I was about to wrap it up, so the throat-slicing motion wasn’t really necessary. I was trying to open my heart, like the good Reverend told me, and now I’m having a hard time blowing like a grass sheath. A really hard time. So, I guess what I’m saying is, whatever you got to say right now…well, it had better be good.
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Eric Vrooman has taught creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College and Tulane University. His short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, The Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.