SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER
Thank God.
I didn’t know I needed this. Not until Kacey rested her head against my chest. A communion with another person in pain, the only other person on the planet who’d been as close to Jonah as I’d been.
I let my cheek rest against Kacey’s forehead.
We turned in a slow circle, hardly moving, just holding each other.
My body should’ve been rampaging with her pressed against me this way.
But nothing sexual was in the warmth flooding me.
Only comfort. This woman knew exactly how I felt.
I didn’t have to say a word. I didn’t have to explain why I felt like shit, out of place, or why I’d spent the whole night listening for Jonah’s voice, straining to hear him among the crowd, craning my neck to see him laughing with Oscar.
He should’ve been here. To give the toast, to dance with our mother, with Dena, and especially with Kacey. It would’ve broken my damn heart, but I would have given anything in the world to look over and see Kacey wrapped in Jonah’s arms.
Instead, she was in mine, my body absorbing her peace like a sponge soaked up water. Part of me felt like a fraud. Like a con man. A consolation prize.
The other part of me felt like I was home.
“This feels nice,” Kacey murmured. “Whenever I feel I’m coming apart, you always hold me together.”
“Same for me,” I said. “Right now…this feels good.”
She nestled closer to me, and I held her tighter, not wanting the song to end.
If I closed my eyes, I could shut out the world for a little bit longer.
But I looked up and found Oscar staring at me, his eyes hard, his brows furrowed in confusion.
As Kacey and I turned, I saw our table, where my parents were sitting.
They were watching us dance, my father with pursed lips, and my mother with a nervous smile for me when our eyes met.
I pulled away from Kacey—unmolded myself from her body.
The song ended at just that moment, but my sudden break startled her.
She stared up at me, and whatever sense of peace she’d had during our dance seeped out of those incredible blue eyes and the real world—the one without Jonah—flooded back in.
“Sorry,” I muttered lamely. “Sorry, Kace… I…”
“It’s okay,” she said softly. “It was nice. For a few minutes, anyway, wasn’t it?”
I led her back to the table, and she excused herself to use the restroom. Tania jumped up to go with her.
“It's so sweet of you to comfort Kacey like that,” my mom said. “She must be hurting so badly.”
I nodded, jaw clenched. All the old pain and anger came roaring back, burning up the last of my peace with Kacey. “Yeah,” I said, biting off each word. “She is.”
“You're wonderful to take care of her,” my mother said, looking relieved. “I know Jonah must be glad for that.”
“He is,” I muttered, easing a sigh, forcing myself to calm down. “I know he is.”
Because that's what I promised him: to take care of Kacey.
The other half of Jonah's promise had never felt more impossible to keep.
Tania and Kacey came back from the bathroom just in time for the bouquet throwing. Kacey tried to refuse, but Tania tugged her arm. “It’s just silly fun. Or in my case, it’s looking for all the help I can get.”
Kacey laughed a little and relented, but both came back empty handed. My mother actually looked relieved, as if catching a bunch of damn flowers meant anything.
“I did my best,” Tania said, with mock sourness. “But Oscar had a secret Olympian high-jumper on his side of the family. I’m telling you, this was fixed.”
Everyone laughed, but Kacey only smiled, her eyes distant.
She looks tired , I thought. My phone’s face read midnight when Oscar and Dena changed into more casual clothes and left for the airport.
The guests watched from the front porch of the Centennial House as they drove off in a sedan, Just Married soaped up on every window.
Some people threw rice, others sugar—an Iranian tradition meant to wish them a sweet life.
I leaned over to Kacey. “You want a ride back to the hotel? It’s late.”
She smiled wanly. “God, yes, I am so done.”
I drove my parents, Tania, and Kacey back to the hotel in Albany. We made plans to have breakfast the next morning and said our goodnights with a palpable sense of relief the night was over. The first big event in our lives Jonah wasn’t there for.
I walked Kacey to her room. Outside the door, she paused. “Now that we’re here, I’m strangely awake. I’m going to watch a movie. Want to watch with me?”
That's a bad idea, said an inner voice, remembering Oscar's hard look and my mother’s nervous smile.
“Sure,” I said. Nothing was happening with Kacey and me. She was my friend and she comforted me like nothing and no one ever had before. I wasn't about to let anyone make me feel like shit about it.
In her room, I shook off my tux jacket and tossed it and the tie onto one of the double beds.
“Tania was so funny about the bouquet,” Kacey said, pulling the pins out of her hair on her way to the bathroom. “You should’ve seen her. When the other girl caught it, I thought Tania was going to tackle her. I didn't even try for it.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, I’m not in the market. For another…it felt wrong. I had the feeling if I came back to the table with the bouquet, it would’ve hurt your mom’s feelings.”
Before I could reply, she came back out and pointed at the TV. “The hotel has HBO On Demand. Can you see if they have Dirty Dancing ?”
“Again?” I asked. “I’ve seen it twice with you. God knows how many times you’ve seen it alone.”
“Fifteen.” Kacey grinned. “Sixteen’s the charm.”
“If you insist.”
“Thanks. I gotta get out of this dress.”
I kicked off my shoes and settled against the headboard while Kacey rummaged in her luggage for something to sleep in.
I hoped she didn’t need help unzipping her dress.
I hoped she did.
Some friend you are.
She managed it on her own and came out of the bathroom wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Her hair fell around her shoulders in honey-colored waves from being pinned all day.
“It was a beautiful ceremony, wasn’t it?” she said, settling herself on the pillows of her bed.
“Yeah,” I said, though I couldn’t recall much of it. I’d watched Kacey come down the aisle, looking radiant in her dress that made her eyes stand out like sapphires, and just about lost my damn mind. The rest of the ceremony was a blur.
I punched in buttons on the remote and called up the movie.
“Oscar and Dena are going to make the most beautiful kids,” Kacey said after a few minutes.
“Probably,” I said.
“How about you? Do you want to get married some day? Have kids?”
“Yeah, I do. You?”
Kacey smiled sadly. “I don’t know. I never thought I’d be the marrying type. Or the kid-having type, either. I was too messed up for too long to be responsible like that. But maybe. Someday.”
“Someday should be my motto.”
“You’re actually willing to give up your rep as a ladies’ man and settle down?” she asked with a grin that pushed back the sadness for a heartbeat.
“I’m not like that,” I said. “Not anymore. I got it out of my system.”
“Yeah? The way Oscar talks, I imagine you out with a different girl every night.”
“He’s just messing around.”
She nodded. “Well, I can see you getting married.”
“You can?”
“Of course. You told me once, you like permanence.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a familiar fire simmer in Kacey’s presence, the same I’d felt on the dance floor. A peacefulness and an urge to trust her with the truth. “I want something real.”
She curled toward me on her bed. “I have this image of you holding a baby, tucked in the crook of your arm like a football while snagging the diaper of another toddler before he tips over and clocks himself on the edge of the table. And you do it with zero stress. Don’t even blink an eye.
” She laughed a little. “I don’t know where that came from. ”
“Oh yeah?” I was going to leave it at that, but it was easy to talk to Kacey. “Buddy of mine has a new baby. He posts pictures of him napping with her on his chest, holding his finger in her little fist. I could handle that.”
“How many kids do you want?”
“At least two,” I said. “I think they should have a brother or sister. I’m glad I did.”
Understatement of the century.
Kacey’s smile faded. “I’ll bet. I always wanted a brother or sister too. But dad could barely stand me as it was. It’s not surprising my parents only had one kid.”
“Have you talked to them lately?”
She shook her head. “Not since…I don’t even know when.” She shrugged, a tight, helpless gesture. “Not a word in a long time.”
“Such bullshit,” I muttered under my breath . The pleasant warmth in my chest from this conversation heated to anger.
“What did you say?”
“I said, it’s fucking madness they won’t even call you back. It’d been, what? Six months since you heard from them?”
“Longer,” she said. “I stopped calling them right around the time I met Jonah. We saw them on our trip to San Diego. Did he tell you about it?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t tell me anything, but his face was like a postcard when he got back.”
She tilted her head.
“I remember he looked…content. In a way a man in his position didn’t have any cause to look.”
She stared at me blankly, and I watched my words sink in, spread over her face, and draw a beautiful smile to the surface. “Thank you, Teddy,” she said softly.
I waved my hand. “Anyway,” I said. “You saw your parents then?”
She nodded. “We saw them,” she said. “Literally. From across the street. I didn’t want to talk to them. They looked happy so I let them be. Maybe I should do that permanently.”
“You want to?” I asked gently.
She shrugged again, her hands toying her long hair, examining the ends. “Might be easier than being rejected over and over again.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“You do, don’t you?” Kacey sat up on her pillows. “This is a personal question, but has Henry always been hard on you?”
I nodded. “Since Jonah and I were kids. Nothing’s ever good enough. I get sick of it. I’m so sick of giving a shit about what my old man thinks of me, and yet I can’t stop.” I snorted. “Sounds like such self-pitying bullsh—”
“Hello, look who you’re talking to,” Kacey said. “It’s frustrating as hell, right? Like you don’t want to care but you do. A lot.”
I looked. At her beautiful, open face; her simple words resonating in my heart. “Yeah, I do.”
“Why is he hard on you?” she asked. “Harder on you than on Jonah?”
“Definitely not. I never resented Jonah for it. Not even when we were kids. He stood up for me, but he never pitied me. I could never hate him. Or be jealous of him…”
The pain I kept so tightly locked down threatened to boil out. I kept the lid on tight.
“Dad’s never approved of my art and he never will. I should get used to it or get over it. If it weren’t for my mom, I’d move the fuck out of Vegas and open a shop somewhere else.”
“Oh, really? I can think of a city that could use your talents,” Kacey teased, and then waved her hands, as if she could dispel the words like smoke. “No, Beverly needs you. And I think Henry is reachable. I feel he’s got it in him to come around.”
“What makes you say that?”
“When I compare him to my dad.” She flumped back on her pillows. “Dad and I are a lost cause. I think my mother and I are becoming one, too. Every day I don’t talk to her makes it easier for her to let me go.”
“Let you go for what? Why did he cut you off? Why has he been a dick to you for so long and why does she go along with it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel like my mother’s not telling me something about my dad.
When I was a kid, still living at home, he could hardy look at me.
Like it hurt his eyes. And sometimes I’d catch Mom staring at me like the way you do an old photograph.
With nostalgia.” She shook her head. “I know that makes no sense at all, but I get this vibe from her. As if she missed me…even though I was right there the whole time.”
“Maybe she was feeling shitty for not standing up for you,” I said.
“Maybe.” She smiled a little, turned on her side to face me. “You and I are a lot alike, Teddy.”
I stared at the TV where the movie was playing without an audience. Baby trying to learn the steps to that first dance with Johnny, nervous and faltering. “We both have a parent we can’t please,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“And we both miss Jonah.”
“God, yes, I do. It comes over me in waves. Unpredictable. It ambushes me when I’m with my friends in New Orleans, or when I was recording that album…
Oh my God. I’d be singing one track, and I think, ‘This is getting easier. Our time together was so short, but instead of feeling bad that it ended, I’m just happy it happened.
’ Like my heart was healing after all. And then I’d ruin the next track completely with a total sniveling ugly cry, and I’d think, ‘I’m never going to get over this.
I’m never going to keep that promise I made to him. ’”
I jerked my head in her direction. “What promise?”
Her blue eyes shone like glass. “He was extracting promises at the end. Remember?”
“I remember,” I said quietly.
Kacey’s smile was heartbreaking as she dropped her gaze to the blanket. “Mine was to promise to love someone else.”
My heart began to jackhammer, and the blood rushed to my ears. Her promise and mine linked themselves in my mind. In my goddamn heart.
“I promised,” she was saying softly. “I said yes. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t mean it. It felt impossible. But he was so tired…” The tears were coming again, and her voice turned weak and watery. “He was so tired. But then I promised and he was happy.”
A thousand different emotions were boiling in me. My guts churned as if I’d eaten and then jumped on a roller coaster.
He asked her to love again.
He asked me to love her.
What the fuck, Jonah?
Kacey wiped her face on the pillowcase. “My hope is someday the promise will stop feeling so impossible to keep. But whether or not I do, at least it made him happy at the end. That's all that matters.” She looked up at me. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, like a croak. Then louder, “Yes, that's the most important thing.”
She became engrossed in the movie, while I stared straight through the TV. Lost in my head, unable to fathom the depth of my brother’s heart. A man who told the love of his life, at the moment of goodbye, to love someone else.
And to his brother, a promise to love her…
The movie ended. Kacey had fallen asleep. I slipped out of the bed I was lying on, put on my shoes, grabbed my jacket and tie. The door squeaked like a goddamn hyena, but Kacey only stirred and slept on. I closed it tight, making sure it locked behind me.
In the silent hallway to my own room, our promises—Kacey’s and mine—linked themselves again in my mind, around and around, like dancers at a wedding.