(if you missed part I, how dare you, and also it is here.)

On the morning of my wedding, I sat alone on my old bed in my parents’ house for an hour, staring at my rented tux in the mirror. We had watched every video, listened to every lecture, attended every class, taken every quiz and successfully landed on the other side of the last flaming hoop. Nothing left to do but cleave together as one blah blah blah. I was surprised not to be more nervous; everyone had always warned me that I would be hyperventilating, but I had spent ten months hearing and thinking about little besides this day, and I was ready to move on to the next thing. I was prepared. I was excited. I was profoundly uncomfortable.

The tuxedo had not proven to be my natural habitat. Every component of it existed to restrict and contort; I had spent twenty minutes threading fake buttons into a shirt that already had buttons on it, ten minutes linking my cuffs into something unholy, something that seemed designed to inadvertently blind someone before the end of the day. I felt like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and moved as gracefully. I would have torn the starchy suit of armor from my body by noon if not for my shoes.

In high school, I had fallen in love with the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star high top and had been wearing a pair ever since. When one pair wore out, I’d buy an identical new pair. I had a very liberal definition of “worn out.” Once, a girlfriend had written an expiration date on the soles to encourage some whisker of common sense, but the relationship expired first and I’d continued wearing them until the sole gave up and left the shoe altogether.

“Which of these shoes do you want to wear?” Holly had asked me that day at the tux place, holding up three rental loafers that looked like they were made out of stale licorice.

“None of them!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want to wear a one of them. They look like they’d flatten my arches like a ball peen hammer before we even made it to the dance floor.”

Holly regarded the foot torture devices for a moment. “Talk to me after you’ve tried heels for six hours. So what, then? What are you going to wear on your feet?”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m wearing my high tops.” I looked at her and grinned mischievously in anticipation of the look on her face.

She grinned right back. “Okay,” she said. “Good idea.”

She had called my bluff. I laughed and dropped it, but later that week she arrived at our premarital apartment of sin with a brand new pair of All-Stars that she informed me were my wedding shoes.

“Don’t wear them until the wedding day,” she said. “I don’t want you to walk down the aisle scuffed.”

They were black and white, to match the tux. We weren’t animals, after all.

Technically, the shoes were the bride’s idea. I would find myself repeating this often as the day wore on.

I waited until my parents and sister had retreated to their separate bathrooms to prepare for a day of having their pictures taken, shouted, “I’m taking off; see you at the church,” and slipped out the front door in my sneakers before anyone could see me. We had made it all the way to the big day without any strife or arguments, and I didn’t want Dad to see my footwear until it was too late to talk about it. My sister would laugh; my mom would roll her eyes; but Dad would take one look and filibuster until I lost my will to walk down the aisle. Dad had grown increasingly dogmatic since he’d retired and had nothing to do but go to church, and as he aged he seemed to genuinely believe that Jesus Christ was watching us all walk into His house like Joan Rivers on the red carpet. Never mind that you were one the three remaining people still going to church; if you were wearing jeans, you might as well just steal from the collection plate while you were in there. As an adult, I could not count the number of times I’d met up with him at a funeral and instead of saying “hello” or offering a consoling hug he had greeted me with, “No tie?”

“It’s disrespectful,” he would say in the conversation I imagined having as I tiptoed out the front door. “They’re insincere.”

“They’re shoes,” I’d reply. “I don’t even know what an insincere shoe is. I talked to them earlier, and I assure you they’re taking this very seriously. Besides, on the list of things God cares about today, I promise this does not make the top three billion. He probably appreciates the personal touch. He’s having a giant invisible chuckle in the sky about it right now.” This would be the point at which Dad would pin me in the foyer and begin unlacing. Best to leave it a surprise.

I stood by the asphalt sea in front of Our Lady of the Galleria for an hour while the photographer thought of new ways to position me and my ushers in front of a nearby tree. My in-laws and family were soon buzzing in and out of the church like worker bees, shuttling programs and flowers and whatever mysterious beauty implements Holly needed far from my curious eyes. After a bit of milling about, the photographer pulled various relatives over for pictures with me in front of the tree. Eventually, everyone’s eyes would drift down to the footwear. My sister laughed, and my mom rolled her eyes. Dad made a face like he was beginning to turn into a werewolf, but my mom shushed him and since there was nothing he could do at that point he stepped into the photos and accepted defeat. He would pray especially hard for my feet on Sunday.

The wedding would not start for another hour, and I had already nearly had my fill of flash photography when over my shoulder I heard the double doors to the rectory swing open. I turned and saw Bob headed over to the tree with the same bright smile and genial manner as always. Good old Bob.

He had gotten halfway to me when his teleprompter went blank again. His gait barely changed but got just a bit too stiff, a bit too quick. His smile got wider, but his eyes were not smiling at all.

“Hey, padre!” I said as he sidled up to me. “The big day!”

He was close and quiet, like he was telling me a secret. “I didn’t know you were going to wear those.”

“Wear…? Oh, yes! The shoes. Believe it or not, Holly actually–”

“That is completely unacceptable.” His lips barely moved, and the smile never failed him for an instant. Any bystander would have thought he was posing for one of the pictures with me. Above his smile, his eyes bored into my skull as if to say, “I’m nice to you, and then you pull this shit on me? If there weren’t so many witnesses out here, I would break a sacramental candle on your spine, you little asshole.”

“Huh?” I replied. I was the one drawing a blank now. “I don’t– Seriously? Completely unacceptable?”

Dad’s ears perked up when he saw the look on my face, and this turn of events nakedly delighted him. “Completely unacceptable wedding shoes!” he said, trying not to clap.

“Those will have to be changed,” said Father Bob flatly.

“I can’t change them,” I said. “I didn’t bring any other shoes. I have nothing but these.”

“You look about my size,” said Father Bob. “You’ll wear some of mine.” Without any part of his face betraying anything, he turned with the precision of a robot and walked calmly back toward his bedroom.

“You’ll just wear some of Father’s shoes!” said Dad with a mixture of relief and don’t-panic chirpiness. All of those years praying had paid off for Dad. Within minutes now, he would get his wish: God would deliver him a reverent son with a little divine punishment thrown in for free. He cheerfully led me right behind Father Bob, behaving like if he could just be happy enough for the both of us, he could stop me from having a stroke.

“So what you’re saying,” I said at increasingly high volume, “is that I have been through forty-seven hours of ‘instruction’ on how I’m supposed to talk to my spouse and not use birth control, I’ve actually agreed to sign a document that says I will raise my hypothetical children Catholic, I have spent entire Saturdays being told things I already know all for the sake of playing by each and every one of your rules, and now you are telling me you are not going to marry us because my feet have canvas on them instead of leather? Canvas is offensive? To God?”

“Here we go!” said Father Bob, pulling a pair of small black loafers out of his closet. I might as well have said nothing; my participation was no longer necessary. The momentum would carry everyone through the rest of the afternoon now no matter how hard I floored the brakes.

On the other side of the church, one of my ushers who had witnessed the kidnapping had run off to tell Holly what was happening. Surrounded by her half-assembled dress, she listened with equal parts exasperation and worry as he told her about this latest theological crisis.

“This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” said Holly as her attendants froze in their tracks. “The shoes? I bought him the stupid shoes. Tell them that. His dad likes me.”

I stood in the rectory with the priest’s sincere shoes in my hands. I stared at them very hard for a long moment. How could I have forgotten Best Woman v. Pope? No man who treated that speck like a sandstorm would ever be able to handle something like canvas shoes. Of course this was happening. I was so naïve to think that we were friends and equals just because we had some Chinese. This was a hierarchy, and he would always be three rungs up; we were sheep in the flock. If I jumped through every hoop, my only reward would be new, smaller hoops higher off the ground until the last jump killed me.

I took a breath. The two men were both staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to bend down and undo my laces. On the other side of the church, Holly was hearing the latest report and saying, “Oh, good Christ. I’m not getting married today.”

If this were any other day, any other moment in the history of my life, time to think would not have been something I would have burdened myself with. “Fair enough!” I would have said on any other day. “Go on in and tell everyone I’ve ever met that you won’t say the wedding. March into the church right now and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I refuse to perform this wedding on account of shoes.’ I dare you to be that big an idiot in front of everyone who has traveled here. I will be delighted to come along and see how that goes for you.”

But it was not any other day in my life. It was my wedding day, and I had started all of this in an attempt to act like an adult.

I bent over and undid my laces. I crammed each foot into a little fist of leather. They didn’t remotely fit, but today they would have to. Father Bob and I stood in the room behind the altar in silence for the rest of the afternoon as people filed into the pews. Father Bob kept breathing deeply, periodically saying, “Whew!” as if he had just had the scare of his life. After correcting the inappropriateness of my attire, he prepared himself for the ceremony by donning what appeared to be a bright purple tablecloth.

Holly and I got married. We sat on the altar, and Father Bob recited his sermon as if it were instructions for assembling a bookshelf. He had collected dozens of anecdotes and funny stories from the time we spent with him that he had planned to use at the service, but he was so thrown by seeing my shoes that he couldn’t regain his equilibrium. He was too dazed by the sight of canvas on the feet that would walk down the aisle to recover for the rest of the evening.

I saw Father Bob only once more, from a distance. Holly and I tried going to church after our honeymoon, and Father Bob was the one standing atop the altar in the center of the room, talking to his flock about how to stay in God’s good graces. I couldn’t concentrate on a word; I kept catching myself looking at his feet. It was as if a small absurd thread had been pulled and unraveled the whole crazy sweater. It all seemed ridiculous and infuriating; what about this was I supposed to take seriously? The only good option left was to lace up my running shoes and run the hell out of there as fast as I could. If I ever felt like returning, I still had Father Bob’s shoes in my trunk; he would not be getting them back.