27. Clarence #2
The Reverend asks if we’ve got anything we want to say to each other. I didn’t plan for that. Charly goes first, and her voice is already shaking before she even gets a word out.
“I’ve laid every part of myself bare in front of you.” She has to stop and steady herself. “The good, the bad, the worst of it. The doubt, the scared parts, all the times I tried to talk myself out of this.”
I squeeze her hands.
“And I don’t always get why you stick around for all of that.
But you do. You always have.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “My whole life I thought love was something you had to earn. That if I messed up enough, or wasn’t enough, somebody’d take it back.
” Her thumb moves over the back of my hand.
“And you just keep giving it to me anyway, like I never had to do anything for it. So that’s it.
I’m yours. Whatever happens with everything else, I’m yours. ”
The Reverend reaches over and hands her a tissue from his wife’s box. She laughs through it, wrecked, and now it’s me, and I have to clear my throat twice before anything comes out.
“Our love story was never perfect,” I tell her. “And I wouldn’t trade it for a perfect one. I met you when I’d stopped believing this kind of thing happened to people like me at all.”
I bring her knuckles up to my mouth.
“And loving you feels like coming home. I mean that literally, that’s the closest I can get to it.” My thumb strokes across her knuckles. “Like a sunny day where there’s nothing to do. You and me out on a field somewhere with a picnic, watching the sun go down, nowhere we have to be.”
She’s nodding, crying, holding on.
“There’s gonna be days you can’t stand me. Where I’m the last face you want to see.” My voice goes somewhere I can’t control. “And I’ll still show up. I’ll still come home to you and we’ll figure it out, every time, because I’m not going anywhere. Not ever.”
I press her hands to my chest.
“I’m gonna love you till the day I die, Charly.
And then I’m gonna find you again.” My throat closes up and I push the rest out anyway.
“Next life, the one after that, however many it takes. I’ll come looking every time, and we’ll just pick up right where we left off.
You’re not getting rid of me. Not in this one, not in any of them. ”
The Reverend closes his little book. “Well, by the power vested in me by the state of Ohio, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” He smiles at the both of us. “It’s official, son. Go on and kiss your wife.”
My wife. I get a hand on the side of her face and I kiss her, and she’s smiling too hard to do it right.
“Oh, what a beautiful couple,” the wife in the slippers says, full-on weeping into her own tissue box. “Just look at the two of them. Forty years and these still get me every time.”
And that’s it. That’s the whole thing. We walk in two people and walk out married.
Outside the air’s gone cold and we’re both a mess, half crying, half laughing, standing in the gravel lot under the one light that works.
“So what do we do about the other wedding?” she says, wiping at her face.
“We still have it.” I dig the car keys out of my pocket.
“Wait, we’re still doing the big one?” She grabs my arm. “After all this?”
“Course we are.” I pull her in by both hands and hold them against my chest. “This one was just for us. The big one’s for everybody else, your dad and your aunts and the whole circus. You really think your dad’s letting me skip walking you down that aisle? He’d put me in the ground.”
She laughs, the wet wrecked kind, and drops her forehead against my shoulder. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
“I’d marry you a hundred times,” I tell her, and I mean it more than I’ve meant anything. “A hundred chapels. A hundred cities. A hundred different versions of our whole lives. Just so you’d finally get it through your head that you’re enough for me. You’ve always been enough.”
Her breath catches.
“How did I ever deserve you?” she says.
And I laugh, because of course she said that. After everything she’s been through, she still thinks love is a thing you have to earn, a thing somebody can take back if you stop being good enough for it.
“You didn’t, though,” I say.
She pulls back to look at me, confused. “I didn’t what?”
“You didn’t, though.” I shake my head. “Nobody deserves anybody, that’s not how it works.
” I kiss her forehead, right there in the cold.
“You’ve been waiting this whole time for me to wise up and walk.
Like there’s some line you’ll cross and I’ll be done.
There’s no line, Charly. I’m just here because I love you.
That’s the only reason there’s ever been. ”
***
I take her home and we take our time with all of it.
It’s not really about the sex tonight, even once we get there.
It’s slower than that. I get her out of the clothes she cried in twice today, no rush, and she lets me look at her without doing the thing where she folds her arms over herself.
I kiss her like I’ve got the whole rest of my life to do it, because that’s exactly what I’ve got now.
She keeps her eyes open the whole time. That’s the thing that does me in.
She usually shuts them, goes off somewhere in her own head where I can’t reach her, but not tonight.
Tonight she just watches me, and I watch her right back, and we don’t say a word because there’s nothing left to prove to each other.
After, we’re a mess of blankets and bare legs, her cheek on my chest, my fingers working through her hair. She’s drawing little shapes on my stomach, not even paying attention to it.
“That poor woman cried way harder than I did,” she says into the dark.
“Forty years of other people’s weddings will do that.” She laughs against me, this small warm shake. “I liked them, though. The cardigan, the slippers. The whole thing.”
“Me too.” Her finger goes still. “I keep thinking I made it up. Then I touch this.” She finds my left hand, the band that wasn’t there this morning, and turns it around and around on my finger.
“It’s real.” I close my hand around hers so she can’t keep fidgeting with it. “All of it. The license, the Reverend, you stuck with me. No takebacks.”
“No takebacks,” she says, soft, like she’s testing the words out.
I pull the blanket up over her shoulder. She burrows in closer, fits herself against my side the way she does when she’s actually about to sleep instead of just lying there pretending. Her breathing slows down. Her hand goes loose in mine.
For the first time in the whole time I’ve known her, she’s not lying next to me waiting for the floor to drop out. Not bracing for the morning she’s sure is coming, the one where I figure out she’s not worth it and go.
She knows I’m not going anywhere. I can feel it in how she’s holding on, easy now, no white knuckles.
I made sure of it. Twice, in one night. And I’ll do it a hundred more times if that’s what she needs, a hundred chapels, a hundred Reverends in cardigans, however many it takes for her to believe it all the way down.
But I don’t think it’s going to take a hundred. I think she’s finally starting to get it.
I press a kiss into her hair and let myself follow her under.