Rude Awakenings: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 2)

Chapter Fifteen: Lauren, Summer, 1992

Lauren married Joe without Rachel as her maid of honour. After years had dulled the pain of her absence, this knowledge was the whetstone that honed it to a sharp and jagged edge again.

It took place in Holy Spirit Parish, the church Joe's family attended ever since they arrived in Canada, even though by this time they had moved to North Burnaby. The service couldn't include the full mass because Lauren wasn't Catholic, and for that she was thankful, because the ceremony was only a half hour long instead of a full hour. The dour old priest, still the same one who was at the ten year celebration dinner but now more stooped and shrivelled, did his best to make the ceremony as joyless as possible by insisting that her wedding dress not be too revealing; by suggesting (not really suggesting, demanding) that they purchase the flowers through the church's supplier and leave them after the wedding to decorate the church for the next day's masses; and by sprinkling hints throughout his droning sermon that sex was for babies only and not to enjoy it too much. The one thing she wouldn't budge on was that she wanted both her parents to walk her down the aisle; she was not some property to be passed from father to husband.

The dress she wore was her mother's, and luckily it didn't need much alteration; they had similar frames. It covered what it needed to cover to the priest's satisfaction. It was an ivory colour that complimented her skin tone, but to be honest she never really cared about the dress, she would have married Joe wearing a garbage sack if that was all she had, but the dress fulfilled the something old and something borrowed items. The something new was her shoes, a sensible pair of flats matching the dress, that would allow her to dance the night away at the reception without killing her feet.

The something blue was a garter belt that only Joe would see later. It was definitely not coming off during the reception for the delectation of the single men; she'd toss the damn bouquet, but that was as far as she'd go with the humiliating reception rituals, and she was already dreading all the clinking of glasses every five minutes.

Joe was already crying as he watched her march up the aisle. She could have killed him for that, because of course now she was crying. For such a big, manly man, he was surprisingly emotional, and though she liked it most of the time, right now she was in danger of making her mascara run. His brother Johnny stood beside him, his best man, and that made her cry harder, because Rachel should have been there on the other side, holding her bouquet, beaming at her; maybe her dirty blonde hair would be in a fancy chignon, and she would be the one wearing the lavender dress. Having no siblings of her own, she had no natural choice, and the best friend of her childhood would have been the logical option. It was a sad state of affairs when she had to go looking for someone to fill the role, that she didn't have a posse fighting among themselves for the honour.

Joanie Mara was the only other woman in her classes at the Justice Institute of B.C. Lauren had never gotten rid of the detecting bug, and none of the other universities or colleges offered any educational options that interested her. The Justice Institute offered education in all of the first responder professions, and even though police training was one of the fields of study, at least it wasn't direct recruitment in a specific police force, so Dad wouldn't have a heart attack while she learned the know-how if not put on a badge right away (she'd cross that bridge later if necessary.)

Joanie came from police, though, and she was on track to follow her father and his father before him into the RCMP. Lauren didn't introduce Joanie to her parents because she didn't want her to get an earful about the whole family history. The only time they met her was at the wedding.

She was nice enough, and she and Lauren had bonded in solidarity against the hyper-male culture of the program. No one was supposed to say as much anymore, but the male classmates looked unfavourably upon their presence in the classroom, and did their best to make them feel unwelcome. The locker room talk, the jokes that were poorly disguised misogyny. The pranks. Joanie was tough as nails, though, and her family history eventually earned her grudging respect. Lauren, not so much; she had to work twice as hard as the men to earn the same amount of recognition, but at least she had Joanie there to support her and complain with her in private.