My husband had been gone three years, and I had almost talked myself out of the party.
Fifty years. Half a century since I walked down the aisle toward James with shaking hands and a borrowed veil. He used to joke that the veil was the only thing about that day that wasn’t perfect — because everything else, he said, was me.
After he died, the anniversaries became quiet things. A candle. His photograph. Takeout I barely tasted. My son Michael called every year and asked what I wanted to do, and every year I said the same thing: nothing. Let’s not make a fuss.
This year, something shifted. Maybe it was turning seventy-three. Maybe it was finding the old bakery box in the attic, the one with “Happily Ever After — June 1976” written in my mother’s handwriting across the lid. Inside was a single sugar flower, yellowed but intact, from our original wedding cake.
I called the bakery — the same family bakery, now run by the founder’s granddaughter — and asked if they still had the recipe. They did. Lemon filling. White frosting. Delicate sugar flowers, exactly like the ones in our wedding photographs.
I decided to throw a small rooftop gathering. Just family and a few old friends. And at the center of it all, a stunning three-tier replica of our 1976 wedding cake.
The guest list
I kept it small on purpose. Michael and his wife. My sister. Three couples James and I had known for decades. And — because she had been asking for weeks — my old friend Barbara and her daughter Janet.
Janet is forty-one years old and has never quite forgiven the world for not revolving around her. Barbara adores her, which is Barbara’s right, but the rest of us have spent decades politely stepping around Janet’s moods. At my seventieth birthday dinner, she spent the entire evening correcting the waiter. At Michael’s promotion party, she announced — loudly — that the champagne was “a brave choice for the budget.”
Still. She was Barbara’s daughter. I put her name on the list.