My name was supposed to be Paul Harvey Merritt. In the hospital room after the birth, my father accidentally wrote "Pual" on the birth certificate and gave it to the nurse while my mother was asleep. When my mother found out how much paperwork was required to change it, she decided to pronounce the name "Pool," and told anyone who asked that it was French.

I should mention that my mother is a woman who likes to leave things up to chance. Every morning, she consults her horoscope before making plans for the day. She got pregnant with me because she and my father decided to stop using birth control and, as she puts it, "see if it was meant to be."

Apparently, it was; she got pregnant within two months. And from that moment on, every relative and stranger she came into contact with was certain -- either intuitively, or using such time-honored methods as dangling her wedding ring from a string over her belly -- that the baby would be a boy.

My parents were young and easily convinced. They bought a dictionary of baby names at the used bookstore for a quarter, and they only opened the male half. When I was born a girl, they were still frozen in position, and it never occurred to them to name me Paula or Pauline. I'm thirty years old now and could have changed it myself, but I guess that I, too, like to leave some things to chance.

~

So at any rate, you can understand why I wasn't surprised to get a call from my mother telling me that she had met a man in the shoe department at Sears and was driving to Minnesota to get married that weekend.

"My horoscope said to be on the lookout for love," she said, as if that explained everything.

I was in my cubicle, at work, and I asked if I could call her back. Mondays are always my busiest days, and I had two customers on hold.

"All right," my mother said, "but call me soon. I need your opinion on flowers."

"As soon as I'm done, I promise." I hung up, pasting a bright smile on my face before I pressed the button next to the blinking red light for line 2.

~

It is my job to make other people happy.

My desk is located in the customer service division of Sun Day, Inc., which manufactures a wide variety of products, the most popular being our nylon support hose and upright vacuum cleaners. People are upset when they call me, in the mood to complain or yell or insist on speaking to my supervisor.

I answer the phone from my cubicle, where I am always dressed in a smart suit, whether it's 8 o'clock in the morning or 10 o'clock at night. And though I remain faceless to all but the most dedicated and geographically close complainants, I wear a nametag pinned over my left breast. Sun Day's founder, Peter Day, insists on it. My name is etched in white calligraphy on a royal blue background:
Pual Merritt
Your friendly customer service representative.

~

On my lunch break, I called my mother back. "You met him this morning?" I asked.

"I've been buying shoes from him for years," my mother explained. She sighed happily. "He said I have beautiful calves."

I winced, envisioning a perpetually part-time college student with a foot fetish kneeling next to my mother's lap.

"And now you're getting married?"

"We have a lot in common," she assured me. "We're both passionate about Greek food, Victorian novels, and hiking."

There was a long silence.

"I don't know what to say," I said.

~

My parents' meeting was also somewhat unconventional. They were both young, partway through college, moonlighting as clowns in a small local circus and working at children's birthday parties on weekends.

Even after the divorce, when one of them was having a bad day, they would put on their red noses and big clown shoes and head over to a nearby park, where they juggled and fashioned animals out of balloons. By the time we got back to my mother's house, they would be laughing and joking, and she sang as she wiped off her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror.

As a child, this ritual was fun for me, too; I might have called it charming if I had known the word. But as a teenager I watched them from a secluded park bench, squirming in my navy plaid skirt and penny loafers, wishing that they acted more like my best friend Susan Carter's parents. Her parents were both lawyers, and Susan said that their dry-cleaning bill was over a hundred dollars a month.

Despite a series of odd jobs, my mother tended to call herself a homemaker. In her spare time, long before health food became trendy, she made her own yogurt and baked whole wheat cookies sweetened with molasses or maple syrup. Other kids surveyed the contents of my lunch box with pity as they wolfed down their white bread and bologna sandwiches and store-bought chocolate chip cookies.

My father was an inventor, but not of anything cool like computer games or flying vehicles. Instead, he fixated on things like a device to help toilet water run more smoothly without splashing.

"See here," he told the first boyfriend I brought home from college. "You don't want to clog the toilet, right? So you flush while you're still sitting there, before you wipe. And you don't want that filthy water splattering all over your backside."

I groaned.

Ever since the divorce, my father had lived next door to my mother and me. A few years earlier, he had married a woman named Petal who grew her own organic vegetables in the garden behind their house, and they had arrived just before dinner carrying armloads of produce. My mother, who loved Petal like a sister, had kissed them both and ushered them into our living room.

~

After work, I met my current boyfriend, Ronald, for dinner.

"Mom called me this morning and said she's getting married," I told him over a basket of bread.

Sounding amused, he said, "That Audrey."

"She bought a pair of sling-back pumps from him, and I guess it was love at first sight. They're driving to Minnesota. Apparently there's a wedding chapel at the City of Gold Hotel and Casino."

Ron snorted. "Your mother and her hare-brained schemes. Good Lord. Where does she come up with these things?"

"So do you want to come with us?"

"Oh, you're going, too?" He shook his head. "When is this blessed event?"

"Saturday."

He straightened. "Wait a minute -- this Saturday? I have tickets to the Brewers game. You said you were going with me."

"I'm sorry. Maybe you can take Jeff."

"Are you kidding? You're canceling our plans so you can drive to rural Minnesota with your mom?"

"It's for her wedding."

The waitress arrived with our food. As soon as she had walked away, Ron leaned forward. "Let me get this straight -- she met him this morning?"

"He's been selling her shoes for years."

"That's his job. Of course he has. What else does she even know about this guy?"

"She said they have a lot in common. They both like Greek food and…Victorian novels…"

"Wow. He sounds perfect."

I sighed. "I know."

Ron drummed his fingers on the table. "We've been engaged for a year, and you won't even move in with me."

"I know."

We ate our food in silence.

When I got home that night, I removed the Pual Merritt pin from my suit jacket and laid it out with my clothes for work the next day.

~

My mother and her shoe salesman arrived at my apartment late that Friday afternoon, not long after I got home from work. I had packed a bag the night before.

"Pual, this is George," my mother said.

"It's good to meet you," George said pleasantly, offering his hand for me to shake. Despite my fears, he was around my mother's age and had a bald spot on the crown of his head that he didn't try to conceal.

My mother, playing the role of a movie heroine, was wearing big sunglasses with a scarf tied over her hair. George put his arm around her and said shyly, "This has been the best week of my life. I've admired Audrey for years."

Mom couldn't seem to stop smiling. "Oh, George," she said.

Downstairs, I half-expected to find a cherry red convertible with the top down, but they had rented a dark blue van with captain's chairs and a state-of-the-art speaker system. My father was perched on the edge of the passenger seat tuning the radio, and Petal sat in one of the middle seats flipping through an issue of Utne. As George opened the sliding side door, Petal said, "Harvey, for goodness' sakes, pick a station and leave it."

Dad paused on Simon and Garfunkel singing "Cecilia" and raised the volume. He turned toward Petal, melodramatically singing along: "Cecilia, you're breakin' my heart, you're shakin' my confidence baby…"

"It's ‘daily,'" Petal corrected, but she was laughing.

Leaning over to avoid hitting his head on the van's ceiling, Dad gestured wildly as he moved back to the middle seat next to Petal, singing, "Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please to come home…come on home."

Petal had set the magazine aside, and she, Mom, and George were laughing and singing along.

~

I called Ron when we got to Minnesota. My father and Petal were in the hotel room next to mine, and through the wall I could hear them talking softly.

"We're here," I said. "Did I wake you?"

"No. I was reading."

"We had fun on the drive over. I wish you were here."

Ron didn't answer right away, and I could almost see him shaking his head. "I'm sure I'm really missing out."

"You are! My dad and Petal got -- "

"Your dad? Harvey's there?"

"Yeah, he's in the room next-door."

"Harvey came along to your mother's wedding."

"Why wouldn't he?"

"I don't know, Pual. It just seems a little weird."

I was sitting up on the bed, twisting the phone cord around my fingers. My father's room had fallen silent. "How was work?" I asked.

"Fine."

"Mine, too. I had this one really irate customer, and she insisted on speaking to Mr. Day himself."

"Why don't you quit?" Ron said. "I've never understood why you work at that Sunshine place anyway. You have a degree in biology. Why don't you use it?"

"It's Sun Day," I told him.

"Whatever."

"I like helping people."

"So become a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. There are a lot of ways to help people that don't involve sitting at a desk making minimum wage."

"But I don't want to quit."

"When we get married, you won't have to work, anyway."

"I don't want to quit."

Ron sighed loudly. "I should go. I'm planning to get up early tomorrow."

I hung up the telephone and lay flat on my back on the bed.

"You okay?" my mother asked. She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow, facing me. As a bow to tradition, she was staying in my room until after the wedding.

I picked at the bedspread with my fingernails. "Why are you getting married?"

Mom looked pensive for a moment. "In general, I guess I'd say because I'm a little lonely. I like having other people around. Specifically, though, I'm crazy about George. He's a good guy."

"A good guy," I repeated, unintentionally changing the emphasis of her words. The phrase now sounded as though it had more to do with heroes and villains than with an aging shoe salesman. "But you only met him a few days ago," I said. "You don't know anything about him."

"Well. . . . That's not strictly true."

"What do you mean?"

Sounding reluctant, she said, "We've been dating for a while."

"Then what happened on Monday?"

"He asked me to marry him."

"In the shoe department at Sears."

Mom hesitated. "Not exactly."

"Where, then?"

"Over breakfast at IHOP. But then he had to go to work," she assured me quickly, "and I went with him and bought the sling-back pumps. The shoes were real."

"Well, that's good, I guess."

"We'd already driven into Minnesota and applied for the marriage license."

I shook my head. "I don't understand. Why didn't you tell me all this in the first place?"

Mom looked slightly apologetic, but she shrugged. "Didn't my version make a better story?"

~

As I fell asleep that night, I thought about a phone call I had gotten at work. A woman had been leaning over, vacuuming under the bed, when she accidentally vacuumed up her own hair.

"Please don't hang up," she told me. "I got the 1-800 number off the bottom of the vacuum. I'm trapped here and my husband won't be home for an hour."

"Don't worry, ma'am," I said. "Believe it or not, this isn't the first time this has happened."

"Really?" she asked. "I feel like such a fool. I should have tied up my hair."

"Do you have a screwdriver?"

"Not with me, but in the house, yes."

"You're going to need to unscrew the panel on the bottom of the vacuum and loosen your hair from the rollers. Unfortunately, you may lose some of it."

"That's all right," the woman said. "I was due for a change anyway."

That night, lying in bed next to my mother at the City of Gold Hotel and Casino, I dreamt that I was playing the slots and got my hair caught in the arm of the slot machine. In real life, no one in my family gambles, and my hair is not much more than shoulder-length. In the dream, though, I played the slots like my life depended on it, and my hair had grown almost to my feet.

When a manager arrived with an enormous pair of silver scissors, I begged him not to cut me free. "Just leave me here," I kept repeating. "Please. All I want is to blend in."

~

Outside the wedding chapel, propped on a black vinyl chair, was a ridged black board with removable white letters. Before we arrived, someone had spelled out the arrangement for the day:

Congratulations
Lucy and Marvin
Audrey and George
Melanie and Atticus
Paul and Ronald

"That's progressive," my mother said. We were on our way back up to the room after eating breakfast at the City of Gold buffet with Petal. My father had taken George out to avoid any mingling of the bridal couple before the ceremony.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Paul and Ronald?" I looked furtively around.

"What's the matter?" Petal asked.

"Surely Ron would have called you before he drove all the way down here," Mom said.

"I don't know."

"I'll go find Marcia," Mom told me. "She's the wedding coordinator."

"When's the last time you spoke to Ron?" Petal asked as my mother walked into the chapel.

"Last night, when we arrived."

Petal glanced past me, and her eyes widened. I knew what I would see before I even turned around.

Walking down the dim hallway toward us, clad in a black tuxedo and carrying an army of red roses, was my boyfriend, Ron.

"Pual!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"

I stared at him. "Going to my mother's wedding. What are you doing here?"

"Well, I was planning to do this later, but…" He shifted the flowers, fumbling with the hip pocket of his jacket. "Could you hold these for a minute?" he asked Petal.

She accepted the pile of roses, peering around them curiously.

Ron pulled a black velvet jeweler's box out of his pocket and got down on one knee. He cracked the box open with a flourish, revealing a large square-cut diamond ring. "Pual Merritt," he said. "Will you marry me?"

"We're in a casino," I hissed. "Do you really think the floor is clean enough for that?"

My mother emerged from the chapel and threw her hands in the air. "What are you doing? It's bad luck for the bride to see the groom before the ceremony."

"We're not getting married!"

"That's not what Marcia told me," Mother said. "You're scheduled for four p.m." She smiled happily. "You know what my horoscope said this morning? ‘Today is your lucky day.' Isn't that fabulous?"

I frowned. "Fabulous."

"How long does the guy usually stay down here?" Ron asked. "My knee is starting to hurt."

"Didn't you propose once before, anyway?" Petal asked. "I thought you two had been engaged for a long time."

"A year," Ron said. "I took her out to dinner and asked her to marry me over strawberries and champagne."

"And everything just fell into place," Petal mused dreamily.

"I guess you could say that." Ron turned back to me. "Look," he said. "I've got the tux, I've got the flowers, I've got the place, I've got the ring. What more do you want?"

Helplessly, I shook my head. Ron was exactly the type of man I had always envisioned myself marrying: clean-cut, with a stable, respectable job and a good family. More importantly, though, he was the man I had always envisioned myself marrying. I had spent my entire adult life -- and, if you wanted to be honest, my entire adolescence -- pining after Susan Carter's beautiful older brother. I had literally been waiting years for this moment.

So I did the only logical thing I could do. I stalled. "What about your family? How could they miss your wedding?"

"Mother's in the Caribbean," Ron said. "Dad's in New York on business. And you know Susan. She's always running in ten different directions."

"So she said that she couldn't come?"

He shrugged. "I didn't bother calling."

"If we got married today, it wouldn't even be legal."

My mother put her arm around me and in a hushed voice said, "Honey, it's almost time. I'm going upstairs to get dressed."

I glanced down at my own T-shirt and jeans. "I'm coming, too."

"Wait a minute," Ron said. "What are you doing?"

"Sorry," Petal said, placing the flowers gently back in his arms. "I haven't even showered yet."

"Pual," Ron said sternly. "This is getting ridiculous."

"I'll see you in a bit," Mom told me. "Bye, Ron." She and Petal headed down the hall.

"I'm the maid of honor," I said. "I have matching shoes and everything."

"I drove all night to get here in time. I'm going to miss the Brewers game."

I began backing down the hall. "Besides, I promised my mom I'd help her."

In his steady lawyer's voice, Ron said, "If you go upstairs right now, we're through."

"I'm sorry. I said I'd help her get ready." I turned away from him.

His words hit my back with the angry force of buckshot. "I can't believe you're throwing all this away."

When I reached the end of the hall, I looked back. Ron was still down on one knee with his arms full of red roses. "You have an unhealthy attachment to your parents," he yelled as I turned the corner and walked toward the elevator.

In the hotel room upstairs, Petal's hair hung in wet ribbons down her back. Wearing nylon stockings and a plain white slip, she stood behind my mother, who had propped a large mirror and a halogen lamp on the desk and seated herself in front of them.

"Are the fake eyelashes too much?" Mom asked as I entered the room. She had already slipped into her cream-colored dress, and Petal was carefully pinning up her hair.

I closed the door and walked toward them. "No," I said.

~

George stood at the front of the little chapel, flanked by the minister on one side and his brother and a friend on the other side. The groomsmen had driven over early that morning.

To their right was a small black piano. A portable stereo had been placed on the piano bench, and a tinny version of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major played as I walked slowly toward them, keeping time with the music while trying to ignore the blisters forming inside my purple pumps and holding my bouquet at just the height recommended by Marcia-the-wedding-coordinator.

I reached George and his coterie at the front of the room. To the tune of "Here Comes the Bride," my father walked my mother down the aisle and kissed her cheek before sitting down next to Petal in the first row of seats.

The bride's bouquet was a combination of cream and lavender flowers, and Petal had removed some of the smaller blooms and arranged them among the soft pinned-up curls of my mother's hair. Mom smiled radiantly at George as she joined him and they linked arms. The music discreetly ended, and the minister began to speak.

~

Ron had left the red roses on a row of black vinyl chairs along the wall just outside the chapel. He, or perhaps Marcia, had removed our names from the black board. I could imagine him arguing coolly over a nonrefundable deposit, playing a couple rounds of blackjack, and climbing into his BMW to drive home.

I must have looked sad, because my father reached forward and squeezed my hand, smiling. "Don't worry," he whispered cheerfully, mimicking the words he had repeated so often after my parents' divorce. "We'll always have plenty of love for you."

Though he had mistaken the source of my melancholy, I was touched by the sentiment, and I smiled back at him.

I turned again toward my mother. Looking at her here, all decked out in a cream-colored sheath with flowers in her hair, it was hard to imagine her anywhere else. Yet I knew that a few weeks from now, she would undoubtedly be back in the park with my father, wearing white makeup and a red nose, shaping balloon animals for little children. I grinned, thinking of it.

And at that moment, George gazed down at her with an expression of deep affection, as if he, too, had just realized how lucky he was.

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Leah Browning is the author of two nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens, Babysitting Basics and Babysitting Rules (Capstone Press, 2006). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Mamaphonic, Mothering Magazine, Literary Mama, MotherVerse, and other less parent-centric venues such as The Saint Ann's Review, Blood Orange Review, Salome Magazine, and Autumn Sky Poetry. In addition to writing, she serves as editor of the Apple Valley Review, an online literary journal. Her personal website is located at http://www.leahbrowning.com.