Ch. 4 The wedding
Where was I last time? Was it Nurse Fallon or the coffee? That was the highlight of my parents' budding relationship and those few months that followed were a lot more like what you would see on TV. I could assure you those are juicy stories to tell, but they're too dramatic to be good for one's heart. Instead, I will fast forward to their wedding—or the absence of it.
People lost hope in marriage even back in my parents' hay days. Not my dad. In fact, he was so eager to wed my mom after two years into their relationship that she almost broke up with him. Anyone who knew how strong-willed and work-oriented Cristina Yang was would not have committed that mistake when she was fighting hard to become chief resident.
The second time he proposed to her, he thought he was capitalizing on the right moment—when Mom's patients, a loving old couple, died 10 minutes apart, side by side in the hospital room. Poor Dad. He wasn't aware that Mom couldn't quite draw the connection between love and death the same way he did. After that, Preston Burke was a defeated man and he decided not to ask again.
How, then, did they end up getting married? It was unplanned, unrehearsed, totally on impulse. The only person to blame, of course, was me.
Mom knew it wasn't food poisoning when she began throwing up uncontrollably. She didn't want Dad to make a fuss of it, however. In principle, she wanted to take control before Dad's excitement turned him into another Nazi. She knew what he could be up to, selling her motorcycle, hiding her vodka, replacing her wardrobe with fat pregnant girls' dress, canceling her surgeries, and stopping her from meeting her friends at Joe's, wrecking her life.
So, that very evening, Mom threw her husband-to-be a 3-page contract.
"Both of us are off this Saturday, so we're getting married—If you agree to all the conditions."
Obviously, the first thing she made very clear was that she did not want a wedding, or wedding gown, or her mother.
They always told me they had a great time that weekend, but nobody really knew how it was, except that they were pronounced husband and wife, for the first and only time.