Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
~Willa Cather

It was two days before my wedding. I had promised myself (and my fiancé!) that I wouldn’t be one of those brides—the bridezillas who freak out if every detail of the wedding isn’t perfect—but I was exhausted from planning, organizing, and coping with too much family and too little sleep.

I decided to try on the pearls my grandmother had given me, but the clasp was stuck. As I tugged, to my horror, the necklace snapped and pearls flew everywhere.

Keeping my cool, I gathered up the errant pearls, consulted a phone book, and began dialing. I received the same reply everywhere: a minimum of two to three weeks to fix. Even when I pleaded that my wedding was in two days, I just received more elaborate excuses: no on-site jeweler, full schedule already, company policy, sorry.

It was the proverbial last straw. I collapsed in tears on the bed, next to my sleeping fiancé. He awoke in confusion, listened to my tale of woe, then suggested, “Borrow my mother’s pearls.” This set me off into another jag of crying, the only discernible words being, “I want to wear the pearls my grandmother gave me!”

He must have realized I’d passed the threshold of rational thought, so he took charge and did the only thing he could think of under the circumstances: he lied. He phoned a jeweler and told the following story.

“I’m getting married in two days. I was fiddling with my fiancée’s grandmother’s pearls and broke them. I need them restrung by tomorrow, or else there might not be a wedding.”

The necklace was fixed by the next day.

~Sheri Radford