49
It’s a shame that RIP Melanda didn’t live to see this.
Our backyard wedding is just the sort of night she pictured for herself when she read Sarah Jio’s Violets of March and your high school friends are irritating and the Seattle freeze is on—one asshole showed up in a Sacriphil T-shirt, as if Nomi needed that today—because this is our wedding, our celebration of our love.
The Sacriph-asshole pats me on the back. “He’d want her to be happy,” he says. “But ya know… it’s still weird for some of us.”
The asshole is drunk but you come to my rescue. “Paul,” you say. “You look like you’re freezing. We put a pile of fleeces by the bar. Why don’t you grab one?”
He gets the hint and you save this moment, you save me, you save everything. You kiss me. “We did it.”
“Yes we did.”
You are my conspirator and you rub your nose into my nose. “And wasn’t I right? Isn’t it kind of more fun this way?”
I tell you that you were right because you were right. We fucked up a little. We didn’t get a marriage license yet, but you told me that you want us to make it official in private, after all the pictures and the partying, because in the end, it’s nobody’s business but ours, after all.
You squeeze my ass and whisper in my ear. “If Nancy tries anything funny, I got your back.”
“Technically, you have my ass.”
You squeeze harder. “Semantics.”
And then you’re in circulation, as a bride must be, as loving and warm as you are in the library, only this is our house, our life. Everything is in place now. Brand-new Erin truly is the best replacement. She isn’t horny and snooty like Fecal Eyes and she isn’t a toxic fossil from your past like Melanda. It’s sad but ultimately good that RIP Melanda isn’t here to take pictures of you and put hearts on the unflattering ones, to call out the music for being problematic—Well she was just seventeen—and there’s so much love in the air that she might have gotten weak and wound up mercy-fucking RIP Shortus or Uncle Ivan, not that he came. But you don’t miss him. You say you’ll never forgive him for ignoring the invitation and if he were here, he’d fall off the wagon and start recruiting Nomi’s new friends and that frustrated, fecal-eyed mommy into some new fucking sex ring. I spin you around the tiny dance floor and you turn a little sad as “Golden Years” ends but that’s the way of all songs, all weddings, and I wonder what ever happened to Chet and Rose, the newlyweds in the woods where RIP Beck went to sleep.
I kiss you gently. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m okay. It’ll pass. Just a little emotional right now.”
I kiss your hand. “I know.”
“It’s weird without my core people…” Rotten to the core, all of them. “And at the same time, I’m remembering why I lost touch with half these people…” Atta girl and I kiss you and we don’t need to start having game night as you’ve threatened every now and then. “It’s strange,” you say. “But in a good way, you know?”
Whitney Houston comes to our rescue and you want to dance and it’s not easy to dance. The floor is small. My yard is small. Boring third-tier friends form a messy circle around us. We are Chet and Rose and it’s us in the center. These people aren’t our people, they’re warm bodies on a late summer night and none of them will be popping by tomorrow—not even Brand-New Erin—and Nomi taps your shoulder and we bring her in and we are that family now, that family everyone else wishes they could be and then the song ends and we aren’t the center anymore. A slower song begins, fucking reggae, somewhere between dancing and not dancing, and it’s too crowded and people are drifting and the three of us keep dancing and you ask Nomi if her friends are having a good time and she shrugs and I tell her that her friends seem cool and she laughs. “Don’t say cool. You sound lame.”
We have a family chuckle and it’s just as well because her friends don’t really seem all that cool. They’re sulking down by the dock like Philistan fan girls who don’t want to dance with a bunch of old people. But as we know, friends are important, and Nomi finally got rid of the little round glasses. She’s swaying hips I didn’t know were there and she won’t be a Columbine virgin forever and my brain hot-wires. I picture my son years from now, a younger me, macking on Nomi in a bar… but he’s too young for her now and he’ll be too young for her then and we are okay. All of us.
The reggae fades into “Shout” and Fecal Eyes and women from your Book Club are calling for you—Mary Kay, come do a shot—and it’s the part of the song where you slowly get down and what a sight this is, middle-aged mountain bike people trying to twist. We can have game night, fine, but we won’t be having any fucking dance parties, that’s for sure.
Nomi loses her balance and grabs my shoulder. “So Melanda texted me yesterday.”
Impossible. She’s dead and Shortus told the same fucking lie and I stumble but I don’t grab the Meerkat’s shoulder. “Oh yeah? How is she?”
It’s the part of the song where we work our way back up and Nomi’s talking about Melanda like she’s alive. This is my stepdaughter. This is a child—she’s eighteen but she’s a young eighteen—and she grew up in a should-have-been-broken home so I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s a liar. She lied for the same reason that Shortus lied, because lies make us feel better about ourselves.
The Meerkat pulls a strand of hair off her face and builds a better world. She tells me that Melanda is so much happier in Minneapolis than she ever was here. “She’s still mad at my mom for not having her back…” In Nomi’s fantasy, Nomi is the glue. The secret. The one with all the power. “But I get it and honestly, she does too because I mean that kid was a kid, you know?”
I do know and I nod.
“Anyway, mostly she’s just really happy about how you helped me get back on track with NYU and stuff.”
“Well that’s great,” I say and Billy Joel picked one hell of a time to start singing about loving somebody just the way they are. I stuff my hands in my pockets. I won’t slow-dance with my fucking stepdaughter. She wears a bra and those father-daughter Facebook dances are perverse. That’s your daughter, you shithead. Alas, Nomi’s father was dead when he was alive—the end of the summer, the end of all your fun—and she puts her hands around my neck. She wants to dance and this is wrong—eighteen is too close to seventeen—but she leaves me no choice. I rest my hands on her hips and I hit bare skin, but if my hands go lower, they’re on her ass, if they go higher, they’re on her chest. She looks up at me and there is moonlight—Are people looking at us?—and she smiles. “I owe you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say and I wish Billy Joel would shut up and I wish you would come back. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“No,” she says. “The only reason I get to go to New York is cuz you helped me see that Ivan was a jerk.”
I lie to her and tell her that Ivan isn’t necessarily a bad guy, that good people go through hard times and that life is long, that Ivan will go back to being good. Her smile is too bright and we need to find this kid a boyfriend. Or a best friend. These new Friends of hers are no good—two of them are pouring vodka into red plastic cups—and Nomi looks into my eyes—no—and I search for you, but you’re busy by the fire pit with your fucking Friends. The Meerkat has fingers—who knew—and she runs the tips of those fingers through my hair. I pull away. She claps her hands. She doubles over. She’s laughing at me—Omigod you are so paranoid—and she’s teasing me—You really do watch too much of that Woody Allen stuff—and then she turns serious because I am too serious. So I muster a laugh. “Sorry.”