Always a Groomsman

Chapter 3: Stephen and Ira

Chapter 3: Stephen and Ira

Saturday, May 24 was nothing that I imagined it would be since I overslept, waking with a headache. A pimple the size of Saturn decided to take over my left cheek. The coffee pot took a personal day and called off, failing to work. My mother called from Barefoot Beach, Florida, and informed me that my father was driving her mad after forty-four years of marriage. And to top off my day, I forgot to pick up my half dozen suits from Geraldo’s Fine Laundering on Chatman Street.

I didn’t cave, though, no matter how badly my day was unfolding and being uncooperative. Disgust could have easily taken my mind and actions over, but I refused to relinquish to its abnormal powers. Instead, I trudged forward through that upsetting day and prevailed the way any working all-American man would.

* * * *

Before attending Stephen Ridgeway and Ira Robindock’s wedding ceremony at The Templeton Aviary, I primped, poked, and produced a beautiful employee of Wedding Peeks. Lori Banter was always about a positive and elite look. Not one of her employees was shabby or ugly. Truth was, Wedding Peeks just happened to be a top-notch company for the perfect bride and groom. To represent Lori’s business without candor would have been an insult to her. Therefore, I looked good in a linen navy suit, matching bowtie, a button-down white shirt, silver cufflinks, and Italian shoes, which were worth more than my two-bedroom house on Pod Street in downtown Templeton.

The Templeton Aviary’s design was comprised of three glass and stainless steel bubbles that looked like giant greenhouses. Horned owls, cockatiels, a variety of wrens, among two hundred other types of birds, were housed in the non-profit domes. The center bubble was red-bricked and glassed with three gardens, flamingos, doves, a man-size harp, and rows of white chairs for sixty guests. At the arranged chairs was a vine-covered trellis decorated with arm-long, bright green palms. Among the palms were an assortment of white flowers, some of which were Anguilla and Cereus. Springtime light ebbed through the surrounding panes of glass and caressed the sixty chairs, harp, and trellis.

Ira Robindock was a stuffy Jew with loads of money, arrogance, and the most beautiful smile that any man could have dropped to his knees and worshipped. He wasn’t tall by any means, was almost forty, and hadn’t worked a day in his life since his family owned half of Erie’s vineyards. On the other hand, Stephen Ridgeway didn’t have a dime to his name, was Catholic, and looked like a Hollywood actor with his rigid jawline, head of thick brown curls, and dimples. Stephen was thirty-five, had come from California subsequent to him being a scriptwriter for the last dozen years, and was head over heels in love with Ira; something anyone could have seen in the corners of the man’s eyes.

Rather discreetly, just as I was paid to be, I used a high definition Nikon D5300 digital camera with twenty-four-point-two megapixels. The tool cost me over sixteen hundred dollars, not including its twin, which I always kept in my XC90 Volvo, a silver SUV that I still had four payments to complete prior to owning it outright. I moved around the wedding guests, their seats, and through the jungle-like foliage like the professional photographer that I was. My labor consisted of snap, snap, snap, reinventing the wedding through pictures that would eventually be showcased in the married couple’s online wedding album and Lori Banter’s Wedding Peeks.