Father Bob consulted the Vatican after our first meeting. At that moment, I should have known that Chuck Taylor would keep me out of heaven.

The sun was setting when we parked in front of the rectory that first night, but the June heat was still pitiless. The Church of the Immacollatta loomed at the top of a hill surrounded on all sides by its massive asphalt parking lot. The main building was a giant beige pie wedge that pointed like an arrow to the mall just down the street; for years, I had referred to this place as Our Lady of the Galleria. Now, we were headed to the squat brick rectory behind the pie wedge to ring their faded buzzer and ask to become members. This was what we had chosen.

“So, how is this going to work?” Holly asked as we crossed the asphalt. Holly wasn’t Catholic, and while she hadn’t bought into the faith yet she was interested in leasing if it meant we could get married.

“Well,” I said, “this is my first marriage, but as I understand it they assign a priest to us, we meet once a week for a few months, and we talk.” Six steps away from the car, I had already started sweating, only partly from the heat.

“And what do we talk about, exactly?” Holly asked.

“Well, marriage,” I said. “What marriage is, what it involves. Whether we’re ready. Whether we’re compatible.”

Holly crinkled her nose. “What marriage is? He’s a priest. He’s never been married.”

“Welcome to my people.”

“And who is he to say whether we’re compatible?”

“Well, that’s why we have to see him all summer. Don’t worry; they give him worksheets or whatever down at the home office.” I patted her shoulder in mock-condescension that probably felt like real condescension.

“Oh, God,” Holly said as we approached the bolted glass door to the rectory, “we have to take a test. What if we fail the test?”

I smiled. “I presume they arrange a better marriage for each of us and baptize you.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, trying not to smile back.

“‘True or false: I appreciate my spouse’s wit’ is a question on the test,” I said.

I was being as upbeat as I could. Holly was worried, but she was a worrier by nature. She said “what’s wrong?” instead of “hello” when she answered the phone. But this time, I was secretly as nervous as she was for completely different reasons. Holly was a Lutheran from small town Missouri. She had no frame of reference for postmodern pie wedges of worship; she grew up in a church where it was against the rules to sing any song newer than 150 years old. She was nervous because she didn’t know about Catholic priests. I was nervous because I knew about them.

We were going to get married in April, right after my thirtieth birthday, and I figured that was as good an excuse as any to try becoming an adult. For years before meeting her, I had been the kind of person who you occasionally read about in the paper, the kind of person who dies in his one-bedroom apartment one night and isn’t missed anywhere until neighbors in the hallway start noticing worse smells than usual. I had no “strong ties to the community,” as they say at bail hearings. I was only marginally more Catholic than Holly at that point; I went to Mass about once every six weeks but didn’t know anybody when I got there, hopping from church to church each time depending on which of the services most conveniently fit into my schedule that day. It was always only a matter of time before the priest said something in a sermon that pissed me off so much I had to vanish, especially during an election year. I was a ghost; I didn’t volunteer anywhere or belong to anything. Then one day, without warning, I belonged to Holly.

While we waited in nervous silence at the buzzer, Holly looked up and regarded the pie wedge like it was an alien spacecraft that had crash-landed in the asphalt. When the intercom finally squawked to life, she leapt like she’d set off an alarm.

“Hello?” The voice coming out of the box didn’t sound too old or grouchy. This was a good sign.

“Hi, Father Bob?” I said, not sure what part of the ancient device I was supposed to talk into. “It’s Jim and Holly…? We spoke on the phone earlier…?”

“Just one minute,” said the box, and then nothing happened for a long time. Standing there wilting on the oversized welcome mat, I stared past the first set of bolted glass double doors at the second set of bolted glass double doors. My eyes rested on the keypad on the wall just inside the entry hall.

“For people who are supposed to have faith and love their neighbors,” I said absently, “these guys have an awful lot of security.”

The doors unlocked, and through them walked a genial middle-aged man with a tentative smile and a hand extended for a shake.

“Bob Stevens, nice to meet you,” he said. “You’re here for the marriage prep instruction?”

We were relieved by Father Bob’s relative youth and harmlessness. He couldn’t have been any older than forty-five, with slightly receded black hair and a broad, plump pleasantness like a large Keebler elf. He was even wearing a sweater vest. Holly’s preachers back home had filled her head with a lot of intimidating ideas about the Papists and their priests (she had spent half an hour deciding how to dress, as if we would be turned away at the front door if her sleeves were too short) but one look at Bob popped those ideas like a big black balloon.

The site of the elf made me lower the shields. I’d been on the team since birth, but I was dreading what might come next. There was no way we were getting out of this without watching at least three hours of marriage videos. We would be going to classes on “natural family planning” given by people with half a dozen children. Years of lectures like these always left me itching for a fight. Holly knew there was a good chance when we arrived that this priest would say, “Won’t you have a seat?” and I’d blurt, “Who the hell are you to tell me how to live my life, old man?” but Bob immediately put me at ease.

Bob led us on a tour of the rectory, which looked like a finished basement from the seventies. The carpet was a little too orange; the walls were a little too wood-paneled. Every wall had at least one picture of Jesus, most of them painted in the motif I recognized from my eighties Catholic grade school religion books– Hippie Guidance Counselor Jesus. The whole thing could have used some updating, maybe a woman’s touch. Holly’s eyes darted around like we had just crossed the threshold to Wonderland.

We arrived in his leathery office and sat down on opposite sides of his desk. Any other man in this setting would have made it feel like being told you have cancer during a job interview.

“So!” Bob said. “Getting married, huh?” He seemed genuinely excited to be doing this part of his job. This was what he had signed on for.

“Yep!” said Holly a bit too quickly. “Finally found someone who can put up with me, ha ha!”

Bob smiled warmly. “It is always so wonderful to see two people coming together. I understand from talking to our secretary that you, Jim, are a lifelong Catholic…while you, Holly, are… let’s see… Lutheran?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is that okay? I heard that might not be okay.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all. People outside the Church have a great many misconceptions about supposed rules and restrictions, but in fact mixed marriages are quite common.”

Holly unclenched. I had assumed as much, but it was nice to hear him say it out loud.

“Of course,” he added, “in a few weeks you will have to sign some documents promising to raise the children Catholic, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first! Everyone focuses on the flowers and the deejay and whatnot, but the most important thing any wedding needs–besides the priest, of course!–is two official witnesses. Do you have anyone in mind for your maid of honor and best man yet?”

“We sure do, although not all of them are Catholic either….”

“Again, not a problem.”

Holly was beaming. This thing was actually going to happen.

“See?” I said. “No problem. The only thing a little out of the ordinary is that we’d like my sister to be ‘best man.’”

Father Bob’s expression changed almost imperceptibly, as if he had been flash frozen. His car salesman grin never faltered, but his eyes widened unmistakably, like he was giving a live speech on national television and his teleprompter suddenly went blank. His face still said Hey, we’re all buds here, kids, but his eyes said Don’t panic, Bob. Keep it together. We trained for this. Everything’s going to be okay.

“Really?” he said.

“Yeah,” Holly said with an embarrassed chuckle. “Instead of one of those weddings with nine bridesmaids where you leave half your friends out and leave the other half with ugly dresses, we decided we’d just let all our friends enjoy the party and go with an all-sibling wedding party. And Jim just has a sister, so….”

Already nervous about this Catholic magic man and his power over our wedding, Holly was struggling to fill the silence. If Bob didn’t talk soon, she would launch into the story of how we met.

“I…” Bob said very deliberately, his grin desperately rigid, “am not sure that you can do that.”

I was so taken aback by his transformation that I caught a laugh in the back of my throat. I knew they were called “best men” for a reason, but Bob was acting like I’d drawn a gun and ordered him to drop his pants, like he just needed to keep me calm until he could furtively call for help. I glanced over at Holly so we could share a get-a-load-of-this-guy look, but when our eyes met hers were saying, “Oh, no; I have to cancel the invitations.”

It was hard to take this crisis seriously, but since I had gotten engaged a lot of things that were hard to take seriously seemed to have gotten important. I could see I was the only person in the room who wasn’t panicking. I decided to diffuse the situation with a joke.

“The best man actually has to be a man, as a rule?” I said with a raised eyebrow and a chuckle. “Well, I wouldn’t want to break such an important rule, but it would be a shame if we had to get married out in the parking lot.”

“Now now now, it won’t be necessary to marry outside the Church,” said Bob. He had completely missed that I was joking; he thought he was about to lose my soul to the heathens. He walked briskly over to his bookshelf and began piling the leather-bound volumes out on his desk and rapidly thumbing through them. “I will just need to do a little bit of research. Don’t–just–give me one week. Oh! I’m having lunch with a fellow who specializes in canon law on Thursday. I will ask him. Okay. Yes. I will ask him.”

Here we go, I thought. They set up the hoops, I dutifully come in to jump through them with a big smile on my face, and now my best woman has induced a legal crisis. This is actually happening. Before this is over, I am going to end up faxing something to Rome to get stamped.

Thankfully, we learned a few days later that our best woman would not destroy the Holy See; the religion-lawyer told Father Bob out on the golf course that all we needed were witnesses, and it didn’t matter which gender was witnessing for whom. With that settled, Holly and I only had 3,947 things left to worry about before the big day, so the case of Best Woman v. Pope was quickly forgotten as our thoughts turned to flowers, deejays, and cake flavors. The sweltering summer nights passed in the rectory’s wood-paneled office. Before long, we skipped the office and started just taking good old Bob out for Chinese, or inviting him to our apartment for Holly’s lasagna (though we had enough sense not to mention that it was our shared premarital apartment of sin). The meetings became get-togethers; we started spending a lot less time going through exercises and more time chatting like friends, though at no time did Bob ever realize when I was joking unless Holly told him.

Next: Is the Church finished with our heroes? What does Chuck Taylor have to do with any of this? Wouldn’t a good writer have said by now? Tune in to part II to find out!