LA Kim flew in a week before the wedding, her hair neatly cropped, nails garishly adorned with many small crystals. She and my mother caught up in her bedroom while Kye presided over them like a disapproving nun. LA Kim was as warm and cheerful as Kye was cold and distant. I had always liked her and I was eager to have another person on my side, a Korean woman who could stand up to Kye and offer perspective. Also, my mother had always complimented her cooking.

LA Kim woke up early the next morning to prepare nurungji for my mother, just as Kye had done. She pressed the rice against the bottom of the pot, browning it to a golden hue, then added hot water to create a light porridge. She snuck in a bit of poached chicken, a little extra protein for my mother’s meal.

“Oh, this taste, it’s too strong,” my mother said.

“Why would you do that?” Kye snapped. She rolled her eyes and took the bowl away.

Booted from the cooking, LA Kim focused her energy elsewhere. She went through the kitchen cabinets, filling garbage bags with the expired cans my mother had accumulated in the pantries, and volunteered to prepare the galbi, my favorite celebratory Korean dish, for our wedding.

Once, when I was in college, my mother walked me through her recipe over the phone. She relayed the ingredients haphazardly, rattling off the brand of mulyeot, or sweet barley malt syrup, and describing the tin of sesame oil she had at home as I darted around H Mart, struggling to keep up. Back at home, I called again to have her walk me through the process, frustrated that her instructions were always so convoluted, even when it came to making rice.

“What do you mean put my hand on top of the rice and add water until it covers it?”

“Put water in until water covers your hand!”

“Covers my hand? Covers my hand until where?”

“Until it covers the top of your hand!”

I held the phone against my shoulder, my left hand submerged under water, laid flat on the surface of the white rice.

“How many cups is that?”

“Honey, I don’t know, Mommy doesn’t use cup!”

I watched LA Kim intently as she worked through her recipe. Instead of chopping the ingredients, she blitzed Asian pear with garlic and onion in the blender, making a thick marinade for the short rib to lie in. Her recipe relied on fruit as a natural sweetener, whereas my mother always used mulyeot and a can of 7Up. I brought the marinade to my mother to taste. She dipped her index finger into the liquid and licked it. “I think it needs more sesame oil,” she said.

Peter and his parents, Fran and Joe, and his younger brother, Steven, arrived two days before the wedding. I was worried they might be upset with me for pressuring their son into a slapdash wedding, but as soon as they walked through the door my concern melted away.

Fran was the ultimate Mommy-Mom, the type that scooped Peter up if he got hurt and told him “That’s beautiful!” when he got her a piece of crap for Christmas. She ran a day-care center out of their home when her boys were growing up and dressed as Frumpet the clown for their birthday parties. She made homemade trail mix and something called muddy buddies and chicken stock from scratch and sent you home with leftovers in repurposed cottage cheese containers. She exuded a motherly nurturing that made you feel like you weren’t any kind of bother at all.

“How ya doing, hon,” she said, enveloping me in a big hug. I could almost feel in the embrace that my concerns had been her concerns, my pain had been her pain.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Pran,” my mother said, Konglish morphing Fran’s F into a P.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you! What a beautiful home!” Fran said. The two of them hugged and it was like Peter and I were watching our worlds collide. We were really getting married.

Flowers arrived the next day, for my mother, the most essential piece. There were peach-colored roses and white hydrangeas to decorate the tables, budding lilies, cream and chartreuse, to strew over the wooden arbor we’d pass under in the ceremony. In an old-fashioned wooden milk crate there were boutonnieres for the men, single roses wrapped in soft sagelike leaves, and bouquets bound by light-gray ribbon for me and my bridesmaids.

In the evening a large truck pulled into the driveway and a group of men set up a big white tent on the back lawn, filling it with the tables and chairs we’d chosen. I watched my parents walk out beside it, then stand for a few moments together, looking out beyond the steep hill. The sun was going down and the sky was an orange pink.

They were taking in their property, mulling over the many summers they’d labored on it, the lifetime they’d saved up to reach these years when they were supposed to be able to sit back and begin to really enjoy it together. I remembered watching them from the back seat when I was younger on a drive up to Portland, the two of them holding hands over the center console and just talking about nothing for two hours. I had thought that was what a marriage should be.

My father made no secret of the fact that my parents were rarely intimate. In spite of my secret knowledge, I had always believed that he truly loved her. That life was just like that sometimes.

When my father came back inside, he seemed boyish and giddy.

“What were you talking about?” I asked.

“Your mother just grabbed my penis,” he said with a laugh. “She just said I’ve still got it.”

The morning of the wedding I was restless. By noon my friends arrived and helped me get ready upstairs. Taylor braided my hair into a neat crown and tucked it up loosely. Carly powdered my face. Corey and Nicole, my best friends and bridesmaids, zipped me into my dress.

“I can’t believe you’re actually getting married,” Corey said, gazing at me misty-eyed and in disbelief, as if just the other day we had been twelve, brainstorming names for our tennis balls.

Downstairs, Kye and LA Kim were helping my mother get ready in my parents’ bathroom. It felt wrong to be separated, and I was self-conscious without my mother’s supervision. When we finished I headed downstairs, anxious for her approval.

She sat on the small wicker couch at the foot of her bed, wearing the vibrant hanbok Nami had sent the week before. Her jeogori was made of bright-red silk, the collar lined in dark blue and gold, with a bright-blue goreum, which Kye had tied in the proper way. The cuffs of the sleeves were white and embroidered with a red flower; the long skirt was honey-cup yellow. She wore a long, dark-brown wig with bangs and a simple low ponytail. She hardly looked sick at all, and it felt nice to pretend just for a moment that she wasn’t. Pretend that there was nothing wrong, that it was just a beautiful day for a beautiful wedding.

“What do you think?” I asked nervously, standing before her.

She was silent for a moment, taking me in.

“Beautiful,” she beamed at last, tears collecting in her eyes. I kneeled down beside her, laying my arms on her skirt.

“But what about my hair?” I asked, concerned when she offered no feedback.

“It looks very nice.”

“What about my makeup? You don’t think it’s too much? My eyebrows—they’re not drawn too heavy?”

“No, I don’t think it’s too much. Better for pictures.”

There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful. Deep down I always believed her. That no one would tell me the truth if my hair looked sloppy or if my makeup was overdone. I kept waiting for her to fix what I could not see, but she offered no critique. She just smiled, half in and half out of consciousness, maybe too medicated now to tell the difference. Or maybe deep down she knew what was best, that small criticisms weren’t worth it anymore.

Altogether we were a party of one hundred. One table was filled with my father’s office colleagues. One table was for my mother’s Korean friends. Another consisted entirely of our friends from Philadelphia. Closest to our makeshift altar, our parents sat with Kye and LA Kim, and my father’s sister Gayle and her husband, Dick, who’d flown in from Florida. Across the way was the bridal party, Corey and Nicole and their boyfriends, Peter’s brother, and his best friend, Sean. Heidi, my mother’s only friend from her lonely years in Germany, flew in from Arizona. Two young Korean women she’d gotten close to over the past few years in art class came with their families, eager to see the friend they hadn’t seen in months. My mother had been private about her illness, and so the wedding doubled as a celebration of her life without the added pressure of saying it outright. It worked just as planned, all these people from different stages of her life, all together in one place.

Peter walked down the aisle first with his mother, and I followed behind, arm in arm with my father. I wore simple white heels that sank into the soft sod and struggled to make my way gracefully down the grassy aisle, descending into the mud with every step.

Peter had prepared what looked like ten pages of vows. “I promise to love you perfectly, and this is what I mean by that,” he began. He held the microphone the same way he had the night I met him, daintily, with three fingers. It was hard to decipher what he was reading aloud. From what I gathered it was a list of ten commitments, but there were so many words I had never heard before, I couldn’t help but let out a laugh when, nearing the end, he intoned “what procellous awesomeness does not in you abound.” The guests welcomed the opportunity to release a few laughs as well. When he finished, I read the vows I had written.

“I never thought I was going to get married,” I said. “But having witnessed for the past six months what it means to keep the promise to be there for someone in sickness and in health, I find myself here, understanding.”

I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him. While he listened patiently through the five calls a day I’d been making since June. And though I wished our marriage could begin under more ideal circumstances, it had been these very trials that had assured me he was everything I needed to brave the future that lay ahead. There wasn’t a dry eye left in the tent.

We ate galbi ssam, cured meat, soft cheese, crusty bread, plump shrimp, sour kimchi, and creamy deviled eggs. We drank margaritas and negronis, champagne and red wine and bottled beer, took shots of Crater Lake gin, of whose local provenance my father grew more disproportionately proud with every tipple. Peter and I had our first dance to the Carpenters’ “Rainy Days and Mondays,” a song the two of us had listened to on repeat on a road trip to Nashville. My father was so nervous about our dance, he cut in fifteen seconds into the song. Peter held my mother’s waist, supporting her as they rocked slowly back and forth. He looked handsome in his new suit, and with my mother’s left hand on his right shoulder and their free hands together, they almost looked like a couple. I realized Peter would be the last man she would ever approve of.

After the dance, my mother went up to her room. I could see her weeping as she walked away with Kye and my father. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was so happy or if she was upset, frustrated she couldn’t enjoy the night until its end. I tilted back another flute of champagne. I was so relieved that the wedding had happened, relieved she hadn’t relapsed, relieved there was no need to call the whole thing off. I let myself slip away from worry. I took my shoes off and went barefoot in the grass, the bottom four inches of my dress awash with mud. I fed Julia pieces of cake from my hand and sang karaoke with my friends and hung from the rafters of the tent, reveling in the luxury that no one could kick me out of my own wedding. A limousine was supposed to take us to a hotel for the night but got stuck trying to turn around in the gravel driveway, so all ten of us in the wedding party piled in with And And And’s trumpet player and rode in the back of their band van into town. Within fifteen minutes of our arrival, hotel guests called the cops and we were forced to relocate, flooding the bars downtown, half of us denied entry, the other half gorging on corn dogs inside, spilling mustard on our suits and dresses. After last call, Peter and I returned to our hotel bed, too drunk to touch each other, and fell asleep side by side as husband and wife.