I folded my notes and put them in my bag. And I let her finish.
“So, to Claire,” Vanessa said, raising her glass. “From the mom who chose you.”
A few people clapped, the way you clap when you don’t know what else to do.
Then the lights dimmed.
And the big screen behind the head table, the one meant for the slideshow later, lit up.
Vanessa turned around.
Her face went white.
Here’s what Vanessa didn’t know.
Three weeks before the wedding, Claire had called me and said, “Mom, I need your help with something, and you can’t ask me what it’s for.”
She wanted every photo and every video I had. Every one. From the day she was born.
I spent four nights on the floor of the spare room scanning shoeboxes. I sent her nine hundred files. I assumed it was for the slideshow.
It wasn’t for the slideshow.
Claire had found out two weeks before the wedding that Vanessa was planning to “say a few words.” She’d heard it from Greg, who thought it was a lovely idea.
Claire told her father no. Clearly. In writing.
Vanessa told Claire it was “her day too.”
So Claire stopped arguing. And she made a video. And she gave it to the DJ — who happens to be my nephew, Danny — with one instruction:
If anyone who isn’t on the list picks up that microphone, play this the second they put it down.
The screen said, in plain white letters:
Before my mom gives her speech, I want to give mine.
Then the photos began.
Me, twenty-nine, in a hospital bed, holding a red-faced baby and grinning like an idiot.
Me asleep in a hard plastic chair next to a little bed with chickenpox spots on the pillow.
Me at the school gate in the rain. Every year. Same coat for five of them, because that was the year money was tight.
