Mavis had already been given 22 invitations.
Then one evening, she arrived with 18 more names.
Ryan pointed at one.
“Who’s Dennis?”
“Your second cousin.”
“I have a second cousin named Dennis?”
“You met him at your grandmother’s seventieth birthday.”
“I was eight.”
“Exactly. So you know him.”
Ryan pushed the list back.
“No more additions.”
Mavis looked directly at me.
“You don’t have much family, though, do you?”
The room went silent.
My parents had died when I was in college.
She knew that.
Ryan’s expression hardened.
“This is our wedding. No more guests.”
Mavis folded her list.
“Of course.”
The smile on her face made me uneasy.
A week later, I finished all 96 wedding invitations.
It took three evenings.
When they were finally stamped and addressed, I stacked them in the exact center of our dining table and took a photograph.
I sent it to Ryan.
FINALLY DONE. Tomorrow they go in the mail!
That afternoon, I went grocery shopping.
When I returned, Mavis was standing in my kitchen.
She had a spare key for emergencies.
Beside her was a bucket of dirty mop water.
Inside it were all 96 invitations.
The envelopes had swollen open.
Ink ran across the paper.
Stamps floated on the surface.
I dropped my grocery bag.
“What happened?”
Mavis shrugged.
“I was washing your floor and bumped the table. They slid into the bucket.”
I stared at her.
“I told you I already mopped this morning.”
“Well, clearly you didn’t do a very good job.”
That’s when I knew.
I pulled up the photograph.
The invitations had been sitting nearly two feet from the edge of the table.
“Mavis, how did all 96 envelopes slide from here into that bucket?”
Her face tightened.
“I bumped the table.”
“Hard enough to launch the invitations, but not hard enough to spill the bucket?”
“I don’t appreciate being interrogated.”
“You destroyed our wedding invitations.”
“It was an accident.”
Then the front door opened.
Ryan was home early.
He looked at the bucket.
Then at my photograph.
Then back at his mother.
“You’re seriously calling this an accident?”
Mavis crossed her arms.
“Because that’s what it was.”
Ryan stared at the ruined invitations for several seconds.
Then he looked at me.
“Don’t reorder them.”
“What?”
“We’re not replacing them.”
“Ryan, we need invitations.”
“No.”
He took my hand.
“We need a different wedding.”
That night, he opened his laptop.
On the screen was a small beach resort.
“You, me, our siblings, Dad, your aunt, our closest friends,” he said. “Twenty-something people.”
I stared at him.
“You’re serious?”
“I want to marry you. I don’t want to spend another ten weeks fighting with my mother about tables, flowers and relatives I haven’t seen since I was eight.”
I looked at the beach.
Twenty-four people.
No seating-chart politics.
No endless negotiations.
“Let’s do it.”
Two days later, we canceled the original wedding and booked the destination ceremony.
When Ryan told his parents, Mavis was initially horrified.
Then she heard beach resort.
Her mood instantly changed.
“Oh! Well, I’ll need something lighter. Do you think pale champagne will photograph as white?”
Ryan said nothing.
Three days later, she called asking for the hotel information.
“For what?” Ryan asked.
“The wedding.”
He calmly buttered his toast.
“Mom, you’re not coming.”
Silence.
Then she laughed.
“What?”
“You’re not invited.”
“I am your mother!”
“You deliberately destroyed our invitations because we wouldn’t let you control our guest list.”
“It was an accident!”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Then came the sentence I’d expected.
“She has poisoned you against me.”
Ryan’s voice changed.
“Stop blaming her.”
“So you’re choosing her over your own mother?”
“No. I’m choosing my marriage.”
And he hung up.
Naturally, Mavis told the family I’d banned her over an innocent cleaning accident.
Ryan corrected that himself.
He posted the photograph of the invitations sitting in the middle of the table.
Then the photograph of them soaking in the bucket.
He explained exactly what had happened and made one thing clear:
Changing the wedding was his decision.
Excluding his mother was also his decision.
A few days later, his father called.
He had finally confronted Mavis directly.
After denying it repeatedly, she admitted the truth.
She had deliberately put the invitations in the water.
She’d been angry about the guest list and thought destroying them would force us to delay the wedding and reconsider her additional guests.
Ryan wasn’t even angry anymore.
He was exhausted.
His father quietly asked whether he was still invited.
“Of course you are, Dad.”
Mavis apologized a week later.
Or something resembling an apology.
She said she was sorry “things got out of hand.”
Then she asked if she could come.
Ryan said no.
For once, there was nothing left to negotiate.
Our wedding had 24 guests.
Bare feet.
Good food.
No arguments.
No mysterious second cousins.
Before the ceremony, Ryan’s brother knocked on my door and handed me an envelope.
Inside was a freshly printed copy of our original wedding invitation.
Ryan had secretly ordered one.
On the back he’d written:
She ruined the invitations. She didn’t ruin the wedding.
I cried hard enough that my sister had to redo my makeup.
An hour later, I married Ryan on the beach.
Mavis wasn’t there.
Her son had finally stopped trying to keep his mother happy at the expense of his future wife.
And fortunately, my new father-in-law was there to watch him do it.