Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 111732 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 372(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111732 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 559(@200wpm)___ 447(@250wpm)___ 372(@300wpm)
I don’t cook for clients in our new hometown. I’ve left my private chef days behind me for now, though I still love cooking for my family and devising new recipes for the line of cookbooks Max and I are developing to compliment the vast assortment of cooking gadgets and kitchen tools we’ve recently brought to market with astounding success.
Holy hell, some of those doodles in my notebook turned out to be solid gold. We’ve only just gotten started, but sales of our first batch of products have smashed all sales projections. I’ve got a lot to juggle these days between Ripley, the new business, and our baby on the way. I’m sure life will be even more chaotic when Baby Marcus arrives, but it’ll be a labor of love all around, so I can’t wait.
Marcus. That’s the name we’ve chosen for our son. Full name: Marcus Henry Vaughn.
Initially, I suggested the name as a tribute to my late mother, Marcia. But when Max and I realized Marcus Aurelius was a famous Roman Emperor, we were doubly sold. We weren’t motivated to continue the Vaughn family tradition of naming baby boys after famous rulers. We certainly didn’t intend our son’s name as any kind of a nod to Alexander. But we also didn’t want Alexander to spoil our fun. Gigi shares her given name, Geraldine, with some famous Albanian queen, after all. Plus, my father, Henry, shares his name with history’s most notorious English king. Therefore, giving our son a famous emperor’s name didn’t feel as much like a tribute to Max’s father, but, instead, as the continuance of a tradition shared by our baby boy’s entire family on both sides—a tribute to Daddy, Uncle Auggie, Gigi, and Grampy.
I’m a tiny bit freaked out to have a newborn in a new city, away from all our family and friends back home. But the flight between San Francisco and Seattle is only two hours, so we’ve already been able to see everyone quite a bit since the move, and everyone has assured us they’ll come to visit so often after Marcus arrives, we’ll get sick of seeing them and beg them to leave.
“Marnie,” our darling officiant, Wayne, says with a huge smile. “Do you take Maximillian to be your partner in life, your beloved husband, for better or worse, through good times and bad, through sickness and health, and all the ups and downs life has to offer and everything in between?”
“I do,” I say, looking into Max’s blue eyes. “With all my heart and soul.”
“Ripley, can you bring us the rings now, honey?”
My father carefully hands Ripley the wedding bands, and she walks with them in her upturned palms toward us like she’s walking on a tightrope stretched across two skyscrapers.
We know it’s customary for the best man to hold the rings. But I couldn’t pick a maid of honor out of my best friends, even though we all know Lucy and I are especially close. Plus, at such a small wedding, making my best friends stand alongside me in matching gowns didn’t feel right to me. And so, Max opted to let his best man, Auggie, sit next to his mother in the front row and observe the ceremony holding her hand, rather than standing alongside Max. It feels right to me, poetic, to stand up here with Max and nobody else. We’ve got the best family and friends in the world, and we love them dearly; but Max and I are excited to face the world together, as an unbreakable pair, just me and him against the world.
When Ripley reaches Wayne, Max, and me, she carefully holds up her palms to Wayne, who takes the rings and compliments her on a job well done.
“Stay up here with me, peanut,” I say. “That way, you can walk down the aisle with Daddy and me when we’re officially husband and wife.”
Ripley visibly vibrates with excitement at that suggestion. She scurries behind me to the spot I’ve indicated, the flowing skirt of her purple dress swinging as she goes. It was no surprise when Ripley asked if she could wear her favorite color for today’s wedding. Also, no surprise when she asked to wear the little diamond necklace Max gave her for her fifth birthday. The big surprise was that when Ripley asked to wear purple, she pronounced the word expertly, with no extra “o” sound to be heard. It was a sad day for us all, Dad and Gigi included. We’d all grown quite fond of Ripley’s adorable pronunciation of purple—purpole—and had even started using it ourselves as an inside joke.
Wayne hands Max the gorgeous wedding ring he’ll slip onto my finger to seal our fate—a simple diamond band I’ll wear alongside the fake diamond ring I wore at family camp. Many times after slipping that fake ring onto my finger outside Captain’s, Max has expressed his intention to get me the whopper of a diamond ring Fake Marnie picked out online for Fake Max to give her. But I’ve explained to Max repeatedly I only picked out that ridiculously expensive ring when I didn’t know Real Max would one day propose in earnest. If I’d known things would turn out the way they have, I never would have suggested Max spend the equivalent of a Ferrari and then some on an engagement ring.