“Do you like the buffet?” Lukas asked, beaming as he balanced a serving plate loaded with items I would have mistaken for pebbles in the dark. “I call it ‘Urban Tapas’. It’s a deconstruction of the classic wedding meal.”
I stared at a lonely cracker topped with a blob of liver sausage and a single, deeply miserable caper. “Lukas,” I hissed, trying not to suffocate in my too-tight suit, “this isn’t catering. This is a distress signal from our shared flat’s pantry.”
“Quiet in the cheap seats,” he whispered back. “People are drinking the free beer like there’s no tomorrow. They don’t even notice that the mini quiches are actually frozen pizzas I cut out with an egg cup.”
While the eBay extras dutifully nibbled on their pizza-dough circles and Malte, the ‘sad uncle’, pretended to cry over the olive bowl, things got serious. Grandma Hildegard had cornered Dr von Vogelstein. She’d trapped him right next to the gift table, where Lohmeyer the swan monitored the scene with his glassy eyes.
“Tell me, Doctor,” Hildegard began, stirring her plastic spoon in her sparkling wine. “At which faculty did you actually earn your doctorate in the ‘phenomenology of love’? I couldn’t find your name anywhere in the university directory.”
Basti, still sweating so heavily that his turtleneck was now two shades darker, swallowed hard. “That… that was an external doctorate. Very exclusive. In… Liechtenstein. The documents are usually kept in the archives of… er… silence.”
Hildegard raised an eyebrow – a danger signal I now knew better than my own bank balance. “Liechtenstein. How convenient. And what about the legal validity of this ceremony? According to section 1310 of the Civil Code, a registrar must—”
“Grandma!” Mia cut in sharply, wedging herself between them like an airbag in her massive tulle dress. “You absolutely have to try the cake! You chose it yourself!”
She steered Hildegard away just in time, before Basti could have a wine-induced breakdown. But the calm didn’t last long. Uncle Herbert, now wrestling with his third bottle of wine, tapped a rusty spoon against an empty pickle jar.
“SILENCE!” he bellowed. “Speech time! I want to toast the happy couple! Finn, my boy, come here! Why don’t you tell us… how exactly did the proposal go again? Mia said you knelt in the rain outside her window. But I thought you got engaged over the Maultaschen?”
The hall fell instantly silent. Even the extras stopped chewing. Mia stared at me, eyes wide. We had told two different stories.
I glanced towards the hall door. The escape route was clear. Then I saw Lukas, silently mouthing: “Cash envelopes!”
“It was both!” I blurted out in desperation. “I proposed over the Maultaschen, but she didn’t hear me because the fridge was humming so loudly! So I had to do it again that evening, in the rain! With… with a Maultasche in my hand as a symbol!”
Beate burst into tears. “So romantic! Like something from a French film!”
Hildegard looked at me. She knew. She knew everything. But then something strange happened: she winked at me. She raised her plastic cup and said, “To Maultaschen. May they never go mouldy.”
We’d made it through. But as I slipped the first envelope labelled “For the honeymoon” into my pocket, I suddenly didn’t feel quite so clever anymore. Especially not when I saw Karl-Friedrich the rat attempting to climb up Grandma Hildegard’s handbag.