Downstairs, Kye and LA Kim were helping my mother get ready in my parents’ bathroom. It felt wrong to be separated, and I was self-conscious without my mother’s supervision. When we finished I headed downstairs, anxious for her approval.

She sat on the small wicker couch at the foot of her bed, wearing the vibrant hanbok Nami had sent the week before. Her jeogori was made of bright-red silk, the collar lined in dark blue and gold, with a bright-blue goreum, which Kye had tied in the proper way. The cuffs of the sleeves were white and embroidered with a red flower; the long skirt was honey-cup yellow. She wore a long, dark-brown wig with bangs and a simple low ponytail. She hardly looked sick at all, and it felt nice to pretend just for a moment that she wasn’t. Pretend that there was nothing wrong, that it was just a beautiful day for a beautiful wedding.

“What do you think?” I asked nervously, standing before her.

She was silent for a moment, taking me in.

“Beautiful,” she beamed at last, tears collecting in her eyes. I kneeled down beside her, laying my arms on her skirt.

“But what about my hair?” I asked, concerned when she offered no feedback.

“It looks very nice.”

“What about my makeup? You don’t think it’s too much? My eyebrows—they’re not drawn too heavy?”

“No, I don’t think it’s too much. Better for pictures.”

There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful. Deep down I always believed her. That no one would tell me the truth if my hair looked sloppy or if my makeup was overdone. I kept waiting for her to fix what I could not see, but she offered no critique. She just smiled, half in and half out of consciousness, maybe too medicated now to tell the difference. Or maybe deep down she knew what was best, that small criticisms weren’t worth it anymore.

* * *

—

ALTOGETHER WE WERE a party of one hundred. One table was filled with my father’s office colleagues. One table was for my mother’s Korean friends. Another consisted entirely of our friends from Philadelphia. Closest to our makeshift altar, our parents sat with Kye and LA Kim, and my father’s sister Gayle and her husband, Dick, who’d flown in from Florida. Across the way was the bridal party, Corey and Nicole and their boyfriends, Peter’s brother, and his best friend, Sean. Heidi, my mother’s only friend from her lonely years in Germany, flew in from Arizona. Two young Korean women she’d gotten close to over the past few years in art class came with their families, eager to see the friend they hadn’t seen in months. My mother had been private about her illness, and so the wedding doubled as a celebration of her life without the added pressure of saying it outright. It worked just as planned, all these people from different stages of her life, all together in one place.

Peter walked down the aisle first with his mother, and I followed behind, arm in arm with my father. I wore simple white heels that sank into the soft sod and struggled to make my way gracefully down the grassy aisle, descending into the mud with every step.

Peter had prepared what looked like ten pages of vows. “I promise to love you perfectly, and this is what I mean by that,” he began. He held the microphone the same way he had the night I met him, daintily, with three fingers. It was hard to decipher what he was reading aloud. From what I gathered it was a list of ten commitments, but there were so many words I had never heard before, I couldn’t help but let out a laugh when, nearing the end, he intoned “what procellous awesomeness does not in you abound.” The guests welcomed the opportunity to release a few laughs as well. When he finished, I read the vows I had written.

“I never thought I was going to get married,” I said. “But having witnessed for the past six months what it means to keep the promise to be there for someone in sickness and in health, I find myself here, understanding.”

I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him. While he listened patiently through the five calls a day I’d been making since June. And though I wished our marriage could begin under more ideal circumstances, it had been these very trials that had assured me he was everything I needed to brave the future that lay ahead. There wasn’t a dry eye left in the tent.

We ate galbi ssam, cured meat, soft cheese, crusty bread, plump shrimp, sour kimchi, and creamy deviled eggs. We drank margaritas and negronis, champagne and red wine and bottled beer, took shots of Crater Lake gin, of whose local provenance my father grew more disproportionately proud with every tipple. Peter and I had our first dance to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” a song the two of us had listened to on repeat on a road trip to Nashville. My father was so nervous about our dance, he cut in fifteen seconds into the song. Peter held my mother’s waist, supporting her as they rocked slowly back and forth. He looked handsome in his new suit, and with my mother’s left hand on his right shoulder and their free hands together, they almost looked like a couple. I realized Peter would be the last man she would ever approve of.

After the dance, my mother went up to her room. I could see her weeping as she walked away with Kye and my father. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was so happy or if she was upset, frustrated she couldn’t enjoy the night until its end. I tilted back another flute of champagne. I was so relieved that the wedding had happened, relieved she hadn’t relapsed, relieved there was no need to call the whole thing off. I let myself slip away from worry. I took my shoes off and went barefoot in the grass, the bottom four inches of my dress awash with mud. I fed Julia pieces of cake from my hand and sang karaoke with my friends and hung from the rafters of the tent, reveling in the luxury that no one could kick me out of my own wedding. A limousine was supposed to take us to a hotel for the night but got stuck trying to turn around in the gravel driveway, so all ten of us in the wedding party piled in with And And And’s trumpet player and rode in the back of their band van into town. Within fifteen minutes of our arrival, hotel guests called the cops and we were forced to relocate, flooding the bars downtown, half of us denied entry, the other half gorging on corn dogs inside, spilling mustard on our suits and dresses. After last call, Peter and I returned to our hotel bed, too drunk to touch each other, and fell asleep side by side as husband and wife.

12

Law and Order

The following days were quiet. It had felt almost as if the wedding would either miraculously cure my mother of her disease or she would just disappear entirely into the air like a balloon. But after the celebration, there we all were again: same illness, same symptoms, same drugs, same quiet house.

My father started planning a trip for us to go wine tasting in Napa, a thinly veiled guise to keep up momentum. If we always had something to look forward to, we could trick this disease. Not now, cancer, there’s a wedding! And then a tasting in Napa! Then an anniversary, a birthday. Come back when we’re not so busy.

Such diversions began to seem unrealistic. I spent most of my time lying quietly beside my mother just watching television, holding hands. There were no more walks around the house. She had less and less energy and there wasn’t much else she could manage. She slept more often, began to talk less. Hospice brought in a hospital bed and placed it in my parents’ room, but we never moved her there. It just seemed too sad.