The Last Suppers

N
ever cater your own wedding reception. It’s bad luck, sort of like the groom seeing the bride before the service. Death or destruction could result. Not to mention ruined cake.

Thirty minutes before I was due to get married for the second—and last, I’d sworn—time, I was trying to check on stuffed mushrooms as I listened to directions from Lucille Boatwright, head of the Altar Guild, about how to walk. Sixtyish, with an aristocratically wide, high-cheek-boned face framed by silver hair curled into neat rows, Lucille made the decisions about how the weddings were run at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, no matter what you read in the prayer book.
Sway and pause, sway and pause. Goldy, are you paying attention to me?

At that moment, I would have given anything to see Tom Schulz, bad luck or no. But the groom-to-be was not around. Perhaps he’d had a call on his beeper. The Sheriff’s Department of Furman County, Colorado, put great stock in Tom; he was their top homicide investigator. Still, it was hard to believe the Sheriff’s Department would call on him on this of all days. While Lucille yammered on, I longed for a comforting Schulz embrace before the ceremony. Suddenly our parish’s newly hired organist sounded the opening notes of the first piece of prelude music: Jeremiah Clarke’s
Trumpet Voluntary.
Lucille Boatwright stopped
swaying and pausing, whisked the platter of mushrooms out of my hands, and bustled me out of the church kitchen.

In the hall, Lucille crisply ordered a group of whispering women back to work in the kitchen. Then she scurried to retrieve my garment bag from the church nursery. The Sunday School rooms had no privacy, she informed me briskly, and the bride traditionally dressed in the church office building, even if that antiquated edifice was undergoing a
horrid
renovation. And speaking of
horrid:
I asked if anyone had been able to get into Hymnal House, another church-owned building, where Tom’s and my wedding reception was supposed to be held. Unfortunately, the old house across the street was locked up tight. Lucille’s stalwart body bristled inside her scarlet suit. She shook the perfect rows of silver hair and announced that Father Olson was
supposed
to have opened Hymnal House this morning. She herself had had to open the priest’s office building when she’d arrived. Imperiously, she pointed to the empty, unlocked office building, ten yards from the side door of St. Luke’s.
Goldy! Pay attention! Twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes.

Great. No groom, no historic Hymnal House dining room, no food being set up. And no caterer; I was trying to be the bride. Clutching my garment bag, I hopped gingerly across the walkway. Gray flagstones and buckled wooden steps led to the St. Luke’s office, a squat century-old building that originally had served as a stagecoach way station between Denver, forty miles to the east, and points west. Small squares of thick-glassed windows peeked out from the thick paneling of vertical unpeeled pine logs. Now the office building formed part of a national historic district along with the buildings from the once-famous Aspen Meadow Episcopal Conference Center across the street: rustic, log-built Hymnal House and cavernous Brio Barn. I glanced at the higgledy-piggledy boarding-up job that was the only indication of the pipes that had exploded in the office during a hard freeze this February. At the old conference center, Brio Barn was also falling apart, but the office emergency and its renovation had taken priority. Our parish
priest, Father Olson, had told me historic districts ate money the way catering clients gobbled hors d’oeuvre.

Once I’d pushed through the door to the office, I couldn’t see or hear a soul, much less catch the strains of prelude music, all of which had undergone the required approval of Father “Please-call-me-Ted” Olson. The only noise reaching my ears as I hastily wriggled into my new beige silk suit was from a family of raccoons scratching in the attic over the office.

I concentrated on a dozen tiny pearl buttons that made me wonder if I should be serving smoked oysters instead of smoked trout. From a purple satin bag looped around the suit’s hanger, I carefully removed and then snapped on a stunning double-strand pearl choker on loan from an upcoming Episcopal Church Women’s fundraiser. Marla Korman, my best friend and matron of honor, had somehow convinced the churchwomen that letting me wear the two-thousand-dollar bauble would be great advertising for their upcoming jewelry raffle. When she’d proffered the necklace, Marla had waved a plump, bejeweled hand and boasted to me about the unique advantages of her fundraiser: easier than a bake sale, and a thousand times more profitable.

I looked around for a mirror. Where
was
Marla, anyway? I sighed; there wasn’t time to worry about what was out of my control. My mind raced over post-wedding details that would have to be altered if no one could find the keys to Hymnal House. If we had the receiving line and photographs at the church, that would still give my helpers enough time to set up the food in the Hymnal House dining room—once they forced their way in.

Poking a pearl-topped pin to secure a brimmed hat to my unruly blond hair, I imagined parishioners’ comments on my bridal appearance:
Shirley Temple dressing up as Princess Di.
I shuddered and visualized the reception food. All the lovely platters and heavy chafing dishes had been hastily left in the church kitchen when the helpers couldn’t get into Hymnal House. Whether the hotel pans would survive the transport across the bumpy ice and gravel of the
church parking lot, across the bridge over Cottonwood Creek and Main Street, and up the walkway to the conference center was questionable. One unexpected bump on the gravel, and the smoked trout with cream cheese could spew everywhere. An inept move could send a layer of the carefully constructed cake on a slide into the frigid creek. And if Father Olson droned on about the loveliness of marriage—about which he knew nothing—the Portobello mushrooms would be history.

The low door into the slope-ceilinged office building bumped open.

“As
usual,
Father Olson is
late,”
Lucille Boatwright declared, her ice-blue eyes ablaze. “We can’t keep you over here any longer. If Olson wants to give you the premarital blessing, he’ll have to do it in the sacristy.” She looked me up and down. “Father
Pinckney
never would have been late. Never in
fifteen years
was Father Pinckney late for
one
wedding.” Blandly conservative Father Pinckney, now retired and living in his native South Carolina, had attained hero status among the older generation in our parish. Despite the fact that the charismatic Father Olson had become our new rector three years ago, Lucille and her cohorts had, for the most part, managed to ignore him.

She lifted her chin. It was wide and dauntingly sharp, and boasted a shuddering dimple. “The bridal bouquets have arrived.” She narrowed her eyes at the pearl choker. “Did Olson say he was picking up the groom? It looks as if they are
both
late.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. I bit my lip, then stopped when I realized I was wearing lipstick, not my custom. “I don’t know their transportation arrangements, sorry. I haven’t seen either since last night. We had a small supper after the rehearsal here at the church….” I did not mention to Lucille that after that supper, Tom Schulz and I had undergone our last premarital counseling session with Father Olson. The session had not gone well, which I put down to nerves. But telling anyone in our church a tidbit of personal information was tantamount to publishing it in the local
newspaper. This was especially true if you prefaced your comments with,
This is confidential!