It wasn’t like that, Jake and I would always tell him. We didn’t love crackers in the same way we loved people we would marry.
And yet there I was, married, and when it came time for the sake of the marriage to tell Cassie I “loved” her, even though I didn’t, there would still be a part of me that choked on the words, waiting to be taunted for them.
And there would also be another ounce of little kid logic that would want to point to someone as beautiful as she was right then, pushing the wild hair out of her face, and answer the taunts back. Well, I did marry her, motherfuckers. See? I did.
Cassie
Nothing in the Florien house needed cleaning, but here we were. Mom worked for Green Team, which meant she used tea tree oil and Dr. Bronner’s and vinegar on the tables and toilets of executives at Dell and IBM who decided their offspring should not inhale Lysol fumes. I had come here to talk to my mother about Luke, but there seemed to be no good time for that. How would I tell my mom I was married while I knelt next to a toilet bowl?
My phone buzzed. Toby, again. I ignored it.
And how would I tell my hook-up partner that I was married? Scratch that. Did I have to tell Toby anything about this, for that matter? I supposed not. And why was Toby calling me in the middle of the day? Was he trying to up the fuck portion of the fuck-buddy equation to include quickies in the afternoon? Was he trying to up the buddy and remove the fuck? I had no idea, and I didn’t want to find out. I had enough on my plate.
“Cassie,” Mom said. “Hello. Are you losing it?”
I looked up. I realized I had been scrubbing one spot on the sink for several minutes. “Whoops.”
She stood next to me in the kitchen, looking out the window above the sink to the Floriens’ sprawling backyard. A cast-iron table and chairs stood under the shade of a Texas ash. Beyond that, a large swimming pool.
“How’s your blood sugar?” Mom asked. She snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves.
“I checked it this morning, like I do every morning,” I replied. It was starting to become like second nature, this organized thing amid the chaos. Check blood sugar. Prepare healthy meal. Set phone timer to make sure I had an afternoon snack. Walk at least thirty minutes a day. Not that my mother trusted me to be on top of it.
“Have you cracked open the LSAT prep books?”
“I’ve been busy.” I picked at a piece of lint on my sponge.
“With what?”
Marriage. “Music,” I said.
There’d be more forms to fill out. IRS forms, direct-deposit forms, and Luke had called today about more army paperwork. There was the wedding, and that was it. There were no winks across rooms or fake briefcases or secret handshakes. Unless our “honeymoon trip” to Chili’s this evening was actually going to be a North by Northwest case of mistaken identity, this whole thing was unsettlingly easy.
Mom picked up a bottle of Windex and headed to the breakfast nook. “If you’re going to stand there, at least polish the silverware.”
I picked up a fork from the pile near the sink. “We’re probably going to play again at the Skylark.”
Mom sighed as she stepped on a bench to reach the high windows. “When I was your age I was doing the same thing, going to the bars with my face painted, different places every night, going on dates, trying to find another daddy for you. And look how that worked.”
I rubbed a butter knife, tense. “It’s not the same.”
“Nights in bars. Looking for something that isn’t there.”
“It is there,” I called. “You heard it. And it’s something I’m passionate about.”
Mom shook her head, laughing to herself as she made small circles on a pane. “What do you mean, passion?”
“Doing anything else besides it sounds like hell. That’s passion.”
She stepped off the bench, scooted it to the left, and stepped up again. “Life is hell, Cassie. We do what we can to make it manageable, and we wake up and do it again.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I know. That’s why you can’t just say ‘I want, I want, I want’ and hope something happens to you. You don’t waste time following. You get into a position where you don’t have to follow anything.”
“Aren’t you ‘following’？” I asked. “I mean, is this what you want?” I picked up my polishing rag from the counter, shaking it at her.
She scratched her flushed cheek with the back of her wrist, and resumed scrubbing. “I want to earn my pay, go home and put my feet up, read books, and tell jokes with MiMi.”