“It’s not your fault that I was stupid. We’ve been through this. It’s on me, too.”
You smirk and I see this new side of you. Haughty. All velvet ropes and there’s no one in the room but you and I want in. “Joe” you simper. “You’re earnest. And I’m… I’m not sure that I’m even a whole person. Sometimes I think that everything I do and say… it’s all a reaction to what everyone thinks about me… She thinks she’s hot stuff because of one album. Her poor husband was right. She dragged him down just like he said she would! And she won’t even wear a ring. If she had any dignity she’d leave him and maybe then he’d write good music. She acts like she’s some kinda saint, keeping him on the wagon, but the man is miserable! And she just walks around that library pretending to be some independent woman. What a joke. What a lie. Who does she think she’s fooling? What is she looking for? When’s it ever gonna be enough for her?”
“Now,” I say. “This is enough. You don’t scare me and with this ‘not a whole person’ bullshit, either. Good try though. You almost had me… almost…”
It’s time to go hard but not too hard, soft but not too soft. I open my fist and the ring is right there. You spent your entire adult life pulling Phil out of the quicksand of stardom. I won’t ask you to marry me. You know what the ring means. I go soft so that you can go hard—please, please, please—and finally, you pick up the ring and slide it onto your finger and your face lights up and you are the star, my star.
“Okay,” you say. “I get it now. You really do exist.”
“I really do exist. And I really did fuck up. But I learned my lesson, Mary Kay, because we’re in the same boat. I never thought a woman like you existed either.”
You look at me. “And I do.”
“Yes you do.”
When we kiss, the Meerkat hollers and we look into the library and she’s there with a few of the Mothballs and a couple patrons and they couldn’t hear us talking but they were watching. Everyone loves a proposal, even one as simple and ass backwards as ours and you’re laughing. “Well, I guess I can’t take it off now!”
I kiss your hand. “Never.”
The Meerkat bursts through the door and she hugs you, she hugs me, and there is clapping, so much clapping, and a Mothball brings a bottle of fake champagne outside and I should be in pain. I was shot in the head. Love tried to kill me and Seamus tried to kill me but your hand is latched onto mine and you are showing off your ring and the Meerkat is putting us on Instagram and this is it, my happy fucking ending, my happy fucking beginning.
“Nomi,” you say. “What are you doing under there?”
She’s on her back, under the love seat, taking a picture of my vandalism. “Reading,” she says. “I think he was trying to carve his initials.”
“I love you,” you say. “But don’t fuck with my library, okay?”
I went hard and you went hard and now we’re gonna go hard together. “It’s a deal,” I say. “I will be good to you and your library, especially that big Red Bed inside…” It was just dirty enough and you wink at me, my fox, my fianc-fucking- ée.
48
It’s been four weeks and sixteen days and the love songs were telling the truth. When it’s real, it’s real and this is real, Mary Kay. You never take off your ring and commitment agrees with us. We worked hard to get here. We sacrificed a lot. Your friend Shortus died in a hunting accident—well done, Oliver—and I don’t care if you slept with him in his stupid cabin. He’s gone, I’m here, and we ran in the 5 fucking K to honor that racist, diseased little man and then we took a shower together and you didn’t fall off the edge of the sidewalk in despair.
You climb into bed with me and you hug me. “Promise me you won’t take up hunting.”
It’s almost like you know that my life was plagued with violence for so long. “I promise.”
Everything is different now. Fecal-Eyed Nancy put the moves on me when she was drunk at the pub last week and I told you right away and you told me I did the right thing and we had sex in the bathroom by Normal Norman Rockwell’s mermaid in the cage, by the shipwrecked sailor and the naked woman of his scurvy-induced fantasies. And then you decided that maybe you won’t start hot yoga with Fecal Eyes after all and it’s easy to grow apart from people. The toast at Blackbird is good but it isn’t something we can’t live without and it doesn’t matter that Fecal Eyes didn’t actually put the moves on me. I don’t like her. I don’t want her in our life and it’s just better to push her away because I promised I wouldn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone for you and I want things to stay that way. I want to honor my first vow to you, the one you don’t even know about.
The Meerkat bursts into the room and groans. “Enough with Taylor Swift.”
You’re the one who keeps playing “Lover” all the time and I get where the Meerkat is a little sick of it because love can be repugnant when it’s not yours, especially when it involves the woman who birthed you. You do the right thing. You tickle her. “Never,” you say, facetiously. And then you promise you’ll take the song off the playlist after the big day and the Meerkat snaps her fingers. “But it is the big day.”
Yes it is! You smile. “But the big day’s not over yet, honey.”
She groans, but she’s not really mad and we’re getting married in a matter of hours. Yes! I’m a good stepfather and I kill the Taylor Swift and the Meerkat is droll. “Thanks, Joe.”
“Anything for you, kiddo.”
It’s Saturday and there aren’t many Saturdays like this left. The Meerkat will be away at college soon—take that, Ivan—and it’s the three of us now, we’re the family boarding the ferry and there are no sharks in these waters. I don’t ignore you the way your rat did and the Gilmore Girls found their Luke and we spend the whole day in Seattle, roaming around looking at tchotchkes, tchotchkes we don’t buy because I’m here to remind you that they’re tchotchkes we don’t need and I love your friends who own the record store and they love me.
They found all the records I was looking for and that is my wedding gift to you: a jukebox, the old-fashioned kind with actual records, the one that you told me you always pictured in your Empathy Bordello. You’re right, Mary Kay. I do remember everything, and I took a hit from Oliver—1st Fucking Dibs—but I do have a nest egg and we are making plans for our bookshop, sending each other links to potential locations on Zillow.
I still volunteer and you still work at the library and the summer days are long, like days in a Sarah Jio book and sometimes it’s a shame that your Friends weren’t good enough for us, because happiness is contagious. It would be nice if RIP Melanda were here to envy us, if RIP Shortus were here to build us a love seat, if your rat were a big enough man to sit in the audience and force a smile when the love of his life chooses better.
Alas, we can’t control other people. We can only control ourselves.