I Now Pronounce You Someone Else by Erin McCahan

he explained to me those things in his daughter’s character—mostly her regard for truth no matter what it was—that would make her a uniquely gifted attorney. Then he said he would be proud of her for the same reasons even if she worked in a diner for a living, and I believed he would.
    Lauren’s fiancé was an attorney with Veenkamp-Roy, where he was part of the firm’s Business Transactions Group. I nodded as he explained to me what his work entailed—corporate and real estate transactions, estate planning, even some historic rehabilitation—but I already knew that.
    Eleven years earlier, my father had just been made partner at Veenkamp-Roy, in the firm’s Business Transactions Group, when he died in the plane crash. It was a small, private plane, flown by a client who wanted to show my father and one other attorney in the firm a piece of land in the Upper Peninsula he was thinkingabout buying. Strong winds blew the little plane out of the sky, and all three were killed. Portraits of my father and the other attorney hang in the lobby at Veenkamp-Roy.
    I didn’t say any of this to Spence Mollenkamp or even to Jared that night. I would tell them eventually, at the right time, when it would come as part of a conversation, not its end. Instead, I asked loads of questions—I really did want to know how Lauren and Spence met, where they went to school, what they studied—and Mr. Sondervan told me I’d make a great reporter one day. This, after I said I was interested in news writing.
    “You ask good questions,” he said. “Gets people talking about themselves.”
    Jared leaned comfortably on his elbows and smiled at me.
    From me, they wanted to know how long it took to write articles, where I got story ideas, if it was difficult finding sources or getting them to talk.
    “Sometimes,” I said. “Definitely for the flushing article.”
    So the steady pace of talk continued, blighted by only one thing.
    Tenderloin.
    The size of my fist.
    It may as well have been my fist, or someone’s fist, because— barf —I dislike every single aspect of the entire meat experience. Taste, texture, sight, smell, the idea that this thing used to have legs, and now I wonder where the legs went.
    Again, barf.
    And people don’t do this with tenderloin—or shouldn’t do this with tenderloin—but meat in general is the only reason ketchup was invented in the first place, which is one more reason I hate, hate, hate meat.
    I hadn’t eaten it in four years, and vegetarianism was now such a natural part of my life that I completely forgot to mention it to Jared. And now it was too late. His parents had purchased and cooked this thing, meaning my options were either rudeness or revulsion.
    I chose revulsion, a natural instinct since I was raised by a woman who would not announce at a dinner party that she was having a heart attack if, in fact, she were. “Heavens,” she would say. “Heavens, the soup would get cold, and the guests would be so upset.” Warm salad. Delayed entrée. Possibly burned while they waited for paramedics. All in all, a ruined party and all her fault.
    Somehow, then, I actually managed to swallow without puking three small, feels-like-squishy-wet-leather-in-my-mouth bites. I dropped two forkfuls in my napkin and hid a couple large pieces under grilled vegetables I would have eaten had they not been necessary for camouflage. And I earned the reputation in the Sondervan family of eating like a bird, but I was starving, and clearly these people had never seen me with chocolate chip cookies and Diet Coke.
    After dinner, Lauren and I talked at length about her wedding, by which I mean she answered my eighthundred questions, and I eagerly listened. I loved weddings more than I loved kissing and gushed about both.
    Lauren kept saying, “You are so cute to ask. You really want to hear it all?”
    “Yes. All.”
    It was one year away, next June 4. Everything was planned. Lauren’s dress was a strapless ivory