“Why?” I finally manage. “We have another few weeks and your mother—”
“Has blown this wedding up into an event, and I get it. I know why she did it, but you never wanted any of this.”
“No.” I shake my head and stare down at my hands smoothing the sheet. “I didn’t.”
“Neither do I, to be honest.” He laughs harshly. “It’s not just this wedding she takes over and inflates. When she’s stressed, she plans. Graduation parties. Baby showers. Hell, you should have seen what she did to our neighbor’s bar mitzvah.”
His lips twitch with an approximation of humor. “And you know we ain’t even Jewish.”
A rusty laugh warbles in my throat. “So you want to what? Elope? Deprive her of her greatest production yet?”
“She can still have her wedding production.”
“Minus the doves,” I interject. “I still draw the line at birds.”
“But today,” he says, leaning down until our noses align and we’re staring into each other’s eyes. “Would be ours.”
“Ours,” I breathe, savoring the possessive on my tongue.
“We tell as few people as possible. Everyone still gets the big wedding and the cake and the—”
“Big band. She hired a big band.”
“Ahem, yeah.” He can’t suppress a rueful smile. “The big band. Only those who are on a need to know basis will know. My parents are in a weird place right now, but I don’t want their shit affecting us. So let’s just do it. It’ll be our little secret.”
“That we’re married will be our little secret? We can’t just do whatever we want. I mean . . .” I glance from the broom in his hands to the determined look on his face. “Can we?”
“It’s Juneteenth.” He holds the broom in both hands, palms up. “What better day to do whatever the hell we want than this day when we celebrate liberation?”
The more I think about it, the righter it feels. This is a day of liberation. Of jubilee.
There is not a better day to express our independence, our autonomy and assert our desires.
“Okay,” I laugh disbelievingly.
“Okay?” He leans in closer, whispering. “Well alright. Then come jump this broom with me, baby.”
Kiera was in her bed sleeping, but woke like I’d splashed cold water on her face when I told her we were getting married tuh-day. I even promised she’d still be able to make the Juneteenth festival. I explained what we wanted. Twice. Once to her and then to Mama when I asked if we could use her back yard. I want to get married with the old oak tree that shadowed and sheltered me as a child. I want it standing watch, bearing witness when I take this pivotal step into the rest of my life.
Compared to the pomp and circumstance wedding my future mother-in-law has planned, this one is as minimalist as you can get. My wedding dress is an ivory creation of lace and boning and silk with a train and veil that may as well follow at twenty paces they stretch so far behind me. But today, it’s simplicity. An elegant white sundress for me. White roses woven into the dreadlocks drawn up into a crown atop my head. Kiera does my make-up. Dark slacks and plain white button up for Markus. As we stand in the back yard under the shade of the oak tree, it’s just Mama, the frat brother preacher, Kiera, my last-minute groom and me. The back yard is decorated with our love, trimmed with our devotion. Dressed for a happy ever after and a fresh start.
We repeat the words the preacher leads us through, but it’s clear in the way our fingers interlock, and our gazes cling, that we are making our own vows. Declaring our own promises. Doing this our way. And when the final words echo in the stillness of the back yard, a benediction to a beginning, we both stare at the broom on the ground. It signifies sweeping away the old and beginning anew. It signifies that we, unlike so many before us, get to choose our when our where our who and how. We get to choose our love and we have chosen one another. It is celebration. It is jubilee. It is freedom I hope I’ll never take for granted.
When we finally take the small leap over the broom into our big future, we laugh with tears and grateful hearts. As surely, as strongly, as the strings bind the bristles of the broom, we, too are bound. Bound to each other, bound in our future. It is sweet liberty.
And finally it is ours.