“We’re eating ham sandwiches,” Allen said. “Do you want mine? It’s disgusting.”
Tina looked up at me deferentially. She did want to stay, I could tell, but not unless I wanted her to. “I should really get going,” she said.
Regret lumped in my throat, but I simply couldn’t look Tina in the eye with an open sore on my chin, with a nephew like this, who would thrill in pointing out my every flaw to her. “The least I can do is make you lunch,” I offered weakly.
“I don’t really like ham,” Tina said. The pair of us, unable to say what we really wanted, would have been comical if it weren’t so sad.
“There’s cheese,” Allen said. He grabbed her hand and tugged her inside. “The yellow and white kind.” He dragged her into the kitchen, eager to impress our beautiful visitor. When you look like Tina, children like Allen are just children. They can’t hurt you.
* * *
Allen insisted on being the one to make the cheese sandwich for Tina. I was a terrible cook, he told her, and I argued that I was actually an excellent cook, and he said no, I wasn’t, and I knew it would go on and on if I didn’t put an end to it, so I forced myself to do the adult thing. Tina laughed and said, “More women should be terrible cooks, actually.” I laughed with her, and Allen glowered, too young to understand but old enough to feel left out.
“I’ll be right back,” I said to the two of them, and then I dashed upstairs to pat the good makeup on my chin. For a moment, in the more humane lighting of my own bathroom, I wondered if those Acnotabs were actually starting to work. I didn’t look half as hideous in the mirror as I did in my mind.
When I came downstairs, Tina was standing in the wallpapered dining room before a photograph on the mahogany chest that had belonged to my grandmother.
“Allen wanted me to eat in here,” she explained without turning around. She pointed. “Is this your dad?”
The picture had been taken at my brother’s wedding eight years ago. When the photographer had said, Just the groom’s side now, my father had clapped his hand on CJ’s shoulder and stayed him in place. My sister-in-law had cast me a sympathetic look from behind her lace veil, acknowledging what had taken me years to recognize: my father was giving me an out. Quite literally an out—at the time that photograph was taken, I was living in a hospital, working through a severe emotional disturbance. Just like Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly Last Summer, I would tell myself on my darker days.
CJ was married to another woman on the day that picture was taken, but no doubt my father had viewed this as a mitigating factor. CJ’s wife was a pathetic woman four years his senior. They had gotten together in high school when he was just a freshman. CJ had always looked older than he was; he was short and stocky and entered Issaquah Catholic Upper sporting a full beard, a man’s beard. The older girls went after him like it was a blood sport—students placed bets, money was won and lost.
In that photograph, CJ was still young, but his twenty-five-year-old wife was getting old. She was a heavy drinker, a nasty drunk who had to be escorted out of bars, stumbling and slurring obscenities. She had shown up to the church reeking of gin, and by the time we’d reached the reception, she had removed her shoes and lost her purse. My father had to break up an argument between her and CJ, and he was the one who called a cab for her and asked one of our cousins to escort her home. He insisted CJ stay, that he was like a member of the family and he could not miss the wedding reception of one of his oldest friends.
I knew CJ had feelings for me. Everyone in my family did. He was my protector when we were kids—he punched a neighborhood boy in the mouth after he threw a snowball that accidentally struck me and knocked me off my bike. I sensed it growing into something else, at least on his side, once I hit high school. I never thought it would amount to anything, though, not only because CJ was married by then but because he knew the reason for my hospitalization.
He shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, but on my brother’s wedding day, liberated from his angry, aging wife, his old longing surfaced again. I’m sure my father thought he was doing both of us a favor by moving CJ to our table, by spinning me into CJ’s arms on the dance floor when the music slowed and couples swayed. But now I think we might have been the ones performing a service for my father.
I’m seventeen years old in the picture, my skin institutionally dull but clear—the acne cropped up after I married CJ, like protective warts. I look very agreeable and lovely in my blue bridesmaid’s dress, but my shoulders are slumped, like I’d just released a heavy sigh, realizing what I’d gotten myself into.