Epilogue
SO MY DADwas right, in the end.
We all really did manage to be okay.
And it only took us ten years.
But what does okay even mean? Life is always full of worries and struggles, losses and disappointments, late-night googling of bizarre symptoms—all tumbling endlessly over one another like clothes in the dryer. It’s not like any of us ever gets to a place where we’ve solved everything forever and we never have another problem.
That’s not how life works.
But that’s not what a happily ever after is, anyway.
Poor happy endings. They’re so aggressively misunderstood. We act like “and they lived happily ever after” is trying to con us into thinking that nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again.
But that’s never the way I read those words. I read them as “and they built a life together, and looked after each other, and made the absolute best of their lives.”
That’s possible, right?
That’s not ridiculous.
Tragedy is a given. There is no version of human life that doesn’t involve reams of it.
The question is what we do in the face of it all.
AND WHAT DIDwe do, our little family?
We did the only thing we could do. We made the best of things.
Sylvie and Salvador both wound up working in medicine—him as a physician’s assistant, and her as a nurse anesthetist. They stayed with my dad in his apartment for two years after their elopement before Mrs. Otsuka got the bright idea that maybe my dad should come live next door with her.
My dad loved that idea—but he said they should get married first.
Which Mrs. Otsuka was happy to do.
And so they had a little ceremony in the community garden, and then Salvador helped my dad move all his instruments next door—and Mrs. Otsuka didn’t even have to put foam cushions on her sharp corners, because by that point, my dad had been spending so much time at her place that she’d already done it.
She took on a lot of caregiving, marrying my dad. But she told me once that it’s worth it. He cures her loneliness. He shines light on her shadows. He makes her laugh all day long and into the night. That’s how she sees it: she takes care of him, but he takes care of her, too. And it’s so plain to see that they have much more fun together than they’d ever have apart.
My dad started learning Japanese, by the way. Turns out, he has a knack for languages.
And he also has a great tutor.
Sylvie and Salvador turned my dad’s old room into a guest room. Sylvie also decided to redecorate the apartment in her spare time—dismantling our childhood bunk beds, and wallpapering an accent wall with tropical flowers, and filling up the windowsill with succulents in bright painted pots. She made a Pinterest page and everything.
Now Sylvie and Salvador are working hard, and saving up, and hoping to buy a house big enough for all of them, and a gaggle of kids, at some point. Sylvie even googled our sunny, rambling childhood home to see if that might be an option—but it had been bulldozed to make way for a megamansion.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” I said as Sylvie ranted about it on the phone. “Maybe life is telling us to keep moving forward.”
Kenji continues to come visit every summer and go to camps at the science museum. And it turned out, he has twin younger sisters, who started joining him when they got old enough. My dad loves it when all the kids show up at the apartment and fill it with life and scampering and giggling, and he’s taught them all how to play the harmonica.
“It’s a lot of harmonicas,” Sylvie says. “They could start a Bob Dylan tribute band.”
AND ME? WHATbecame of me?
I moved to LA and kept writing.
I got my own tiny apartment for a while, right above a tattoo parlor.
It did just happen to be walking distance from Charlie’s place, but I swear that was a coincidence. Mostly.
It was my first time living alone in my life, and I did some hard-core nesting—amassing a block-printed cloth napkin collection, stocking up on kooky coffee mugs, and diving full-immersion into a throw-pillow lifestyle.
“What is it with women and throw pillows?” Charlie asked when my bed got so laden with them, it was hard to find the mattress.
“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you,’” I said.
Charlie fully supported my commitment to independence.
But, even still, every single day… he asked me to marry him.
Which I loved.
Even though, every day, I also evaded the question.
A smile would take over my face, and I’d say, “You don’t have to be married to be happy.”
And Charlie wouldn’t disagree.
“I just want to belong to you,” he’d say. “And I want you to belong to me.”
And then I’d push him down into all those throw pillows in a way that left no doubt about who belonged to whom.
But I still resisted saying yes—in that way you can when absolutely everybody knows you want to say yes. And you will say yes—eventually.
And anticipation is half the fun.
One great thing about being writers is that our jobs are portable. So we spend summers in Houston, in Sylvie and Salvador’s guest room. It’s a total circus: Sylvie, Salvador, their two golden retrievers, our dad, Mrs. Otsuka (who, once we were family, encouraged us all to call her by her first name, Mitsuko), all three of her grandkids, and Charlie and me. All of us just back and forth between apartments, and sharing food, and babysitting, and helping out, and working in the community garden, and buzzing with kinetic energy in that cheery, noisy way that happens sometimes when families are piled into close quarters.
Sometimes we even add Jack Stapleton and his cute wife, Hannah, into the mix, and we all squeeze in around the dining table, grandkids on various knees, and have little impromptu sing-alongs after dinner.
Though my dad has never stopped calling Jack “Jake Singleton.”
And Jack never corrects him.
DID CHARLIE ANDI wind up going to the Olympics for line dancing and taking the gold for the USA?
Well, since there is no line dancing at the Olympics, and since it’s much more cooperative than competitive, and since it’s not exactly a thing you can win—unless you count just being there as winning—and since I just recently pulled a muscle while executing a sailor step into a coaster step…
Not exactly.
But we did keep going to lessons.
Though, in an effort to minimize any and all six-foot cowboys, we signed up at the senior center nearby, where eighty-year-olds danced circles around us. The instructor herself was eighty-six—and still going strong in a pair of red rhinestone boots and a fringe jacket. We went every week, faithfully. Charlie was universally adored, and I was routinely pitied—but with a warmth and compassion that made it okay.
“Oh, sweetheart,” they’d say. “That’s not a rumba step.”
And then they’d show me. Again.
It’s fine. A little humiliation gets you laughing like nothing else can.
And I have begun to master right versus left.
And, for the record, I never mind having a reason to bump into Charlie.
DID CHARLIE ANDI keep writing together? We did.
And did writing “lady movies” tank Charlie’s career, as Jablowmie had prophesized? Would Charlie have been better off lending his talents to the string-bikini reboot of Beer Tower III—or whatever project T.J. was meeting Donna Cole about at the coffee shop that day? A project she declined to work on, by the way. Which wasn’t my fault—though T.J. still insists that it was.
“You sabotaged me,” he said in a lowered voice the last time I saw him at an awards show—just as Charlie broke in with “You sabotaged yourself,” and steered me off to visit with someone else.
I won’t name-drop who the someone else was…
But let’s just say her name rhymes with Sheryl Sheep.
Was that enough comeuppance for T.J.? Not getting what he wanted one time?
Probably not. But it’s a start.
If you’re wondering how The Rom-Commers did, I’ll let the legendary box office numbers answer that. And all the headlines that included the term “surprise blockbuster.” And also that piece in The Atlantic, “How Charlie Yates and His Writing Partner Are Resuscitating the Rom-com.” True, my name is missing from the headline. But the full-page photo is of me, filling up most of the frame, with my curly hair puffed out to maximum dramatic capacity by a makeup artist who also does shoots for Vogue and who made me look a thousand percent cooler than I am in real life. And Charlie, in profile and half out of frame, gazes at me admiringly.
When I saw the photo, I said, “This is the only time I’ve ever liked my hair.”
And Charlie said, “That’s okay. I like it enough for both of us.”
Also: During the interview for that piece, Charlie deferred to me at every question, and then, when the writer turned for his response, just nodded and said, “What she said.” Every time. Making sure, in his friendly way, that I was quoted—heavily.
All to say: Charlie’s doing just fine.
As am I.
I did eventually give in and marry Charlie, by the way. And I did transfer my mug collection to his mansion. But I am still, to this day, not allowed to touch the coffee maker.
AND THAT’S HOWthis story comes to an end: with a total of not one, not two, but three weddings.
Do you have to get married in life to be happy? Of course not.
But it’s certainly one way to go.
My dad got certified as a reverend online for thirty-five dollars, insisted we all start calling him Reverend Dad, and then served as our officiant. We all gathered once again in the community garden, surrounded by a bumper crop of Mitsuko’s dragon’s egg cucumbers—just a year to the week after my dad’s own wedding in the same spot.
I carried a bouquet of marigolds, which were my mom’s favorite flower, and which the lovely Mitsuko had planted and grown in anticipation of the big day. We also pinned them to the guys’ white guayabera shirts—it was far too hot in June for jackets—as boutonnieres.
This time, in his official capacity, my dad had some things to say. Leaning on his walker, he told us the smartest thing he knew about being married:
“People say ‘marriage is hard’ all the time.” He looked around the small crowd—which included our family, Jack Stapleton and Hannah, Logan and his husband, Nico, Mitsuko’s family, in town for the summer drop-off, and all the members of the community garden.
My dad went on, “But I disagree. I don’t think marriage is hard. I think, in fact, if you do it right, marriage is the thing that makes everything else easier.”
My dad let that sink in.
He went on. “Now you’re wondering how to do it right—right?”
We nodded.
“Well, you’re lucky. Because love is something you can learn. Love is something you can practice. It’s something you can choose to get good at. And here’s how you do it.” He let go of his walker to signal he meant business: “Appreciate your person.”
He looked around.
“That’s it,” he said, like we were done. Then he added, “Well—first, be sure to choose a good person.” He evaluated the crowd to make sure we’d done that. Then he said, “But we’re all good people here.”
Bashful smiles all around.
He went on: “Choose a good, imperfect person who leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and puts the toilet paper roll on upside down, and loads the dishwasher like a ferret on steroids—and then appreciate the hell out of that person. Train yourself to see their best, most delightful, most charming qualities. Focus on everything they’re getting right. Be grateful—all the time—and laugh the rest off.”
My dad smiled at us, and then put a hand back on his walker.
“And that goes for kids, too, by the way—and pets, and waiters, and even our own selves,” he said. “There it is. The whole trick to life. Be aggressively, loudly, unapologetically grateful.”
My dad nodded at us then, like You’re welcome.
Then he concluded with, “Now let’s get these two kids hitched.”
ALL TO SAY … yes. This was and is a happily ever after.
Even though I still—always—miss my mom. Even though my dad continues to struggle with his balance, and just got seven stitches after slipping in the shower, and still keeps his unplayed cello in a corner of the room where he can see it. Even though Sylvie and Salvador have been trying for a baby for two years and haven’t had much success. Even though I still google “elbow cancer” in the middle of the night, and I don’t make it home nearly as often as I’d like to, and feel, honestly, a little jealous of Sylvie sometimes, now that she’s taken over. Life has no shortage of disappointments. Mistress Jablowmie got vengeful when she didn’t get her screenplay from Charlie, and now his Mafia movie may never see the light of day. T.J. Heywood continues to menace me every chance he gets—stubbornly refusing a redemption arc. The lovely Mitsuko has an irritating new neighbor who keeps spraying insecticide on the butterfly weed she planted as food for the monarch caterpillars. And Cuthbert the guinea pig never did conquer his melancholia—and eventually followed his brother across the rainbow bridge.
That’s just life.
Tragedy really is a given.
There are endless human stories, but they all end the same way.
So it can’t be where you’re going that matters. It has to be how you get there.
That’s what I’ve decided.
It’s all about the details you notice. And the joys you savor. And the hope you refuse to give up on.
It’s all about writing the very best story of your life.
Not just how you live it—but how you choose to tell it.