28. Charly #2
“I wasn’t the mother she needed when she was younger.
I know that now. I spent a lot of years being hard on her, harder than I ever was on her sister, and I told myself it was because she was strong enough to take it.
” She stops, presses her lips together. “That wasn’t fair.
She was a child. She shouldn’t have had to be strong enough. ”
The room’s gone very quiet. I can’t move.
“And she grew up anyway. Into somebody kind, after everything. Kinder than I taught her to be.” Her voice wavers and she lets it. “I don’t know how she did that. I didn’t give her much to work with.”
She turns and looks right at me, finally, and her eyes are wet, which I have seen maybe twice in my whole life.
“You deserved better from me, and you still turned out better than all of us. I’m proud of you, Charly.” She gets my name right the first time, and that’s the thing that breaks me. “I should have said it a long time ago. I’m saying it now.”
She lifts her glass, sits down before she’s even fully done, like she used up a decade’s worth of feeling in one go. For my mother, that wasn’t a toast. That was the closest thing to an apology she’s ever managed, and she did it with a whole room of people watching.
I look around at all of them and I think, we made it. Not clean. Not without a lot of damage. But we’re all still in the same room, and that’s not nothing.
And then the room changes. I feel it before I see it, the way the talking drops half a notch, the way heads turn toward the door.
Adam.
For one bad second I’m twenty-nine again, standing in the wreckage of the first time he blew up my life. Then Clarence’s hand tightens on my knee, my husband, sitting right there, and the second just passes. Gone like it was never in me.
Adam comes over slow. No swagger left in him, none of that thing he used to walk around with. He looks like a guy who knows exactly how little he’s owed.
“I almost didn’t come,” he says. “Then I figured skipping it would be one more coward move, and I’ve made enough of those to last me.” He looks at Clarence, then back at me. “Congratulations. Both of you. I really mean that.”
“Thanks for coming.” And the weird thing is, I mean it too.
“I’m not gonna stand here and make some big speech at you, you don’t want it and I didn’t earn it.” He drops his voice down so it’s just our little corner. “But I’m sorry, Charly. For all of it. Took me way too long to quit blaming everybody but myself.”
“I know,” I say. “I can tell.”
He nods, like even that’s more than he came in hoping for. Then he looks at his brother.
“You showed up for her when I didn’t. You showed up for Mom and Dad too, the whole time I was off being a disaster.” His jaw works. “You’re the better brother. Always were, honestly. I just didn’t want to hear it.”
“You were a disaster,” Clarence says, quiet. “Were. You’re trying now. That counts for more than you think.” He lets it sit a beat. “Took you long enough, though.”
Adam huffs out a sound that’s almost a laugh. “Yeah. It did.”
“I’m actually heading out of town for a while,” Adam says. “Somewhere I can’t lean on everybody else to clean up after me. I’ve got a lot to make right, and none of it happens if I stay here being the same guy. Figured I’d start by getting out of everyone’s way.”
He sets a small wrapped thing on the table, flat and square. A book, by the look of it.
“It’s nothing fancy, don’t worry. It’s just a book.” He says it fast, almost embarrassed about it. “That photography one, of the little coast town you always used to go on about. I couldn’t exactly buy you the trip, so. The pictures’ll have to do for now.”
“You didn’t have to get me anything, Adam.”
“I wanted to. It’s the least I owe you, and I know it doesn’t come close to covering it.
” He straightens up, steps back. “I’m not going to ask either of you to forgive me.
I just needed you to hear me say it out loud, in front of people, that I know what I did.
That’s all. I’ll get out of your hair now. ”
And then he’s gone, out the same doors he walked in through.
I sit there a second with my hand on the book, kind of bracing for it, the anger or the hurt or whatever I figured would hit me seeing him again.
Nothing comes. I don’t hate him anymore.
I don’t love him either. He’s just somebody I used to know, from a part of my life that’s over, and I can finally think about all of it without my stomach dropping.
***
Late in the night, when the dancing’s gone loose and nobody’s keeping track of the bride, I pull Clarence out onto the terrace where it’s quiet and the city’s all lit up below us.
The envelope’s in my hand. He clocks it right away.
“Okay, you’ve been guarding that thing like state secrets all day.” He leans on the rail next to me. “What is it?”
My stomach flips. First time I’ve been nervous all day, and it’s now, with him.
“Just read it.” I hand it over. “Don’t say anything till you’re done.”
He opens it. It’s one page. I watch his eyes go down it, slow, and then stop, and then go back up to the top and start again, and his jaw does the thing it does when he’s trying not to come apart.
It’s all the stuff I could never say out loud.
How I spent my whole life scared of belonging to somebody, scared of handing a person that much power over me, because the one time I tried, it blew up in the worst possible way.
How he never once asked me to be anybody but exactly who I am.
How for the first time I actually want to belong somewhere, and the somewhere is him.
And at the bottom, where my name should be, it’s not Charly Scott.
It’s his name, sitting under mine. The whole thing, no hyphen, no holding a piece of myself back.
I went and made it official weeks ago, quietly, on my own, and didn’t breathe a word of it to anybody.
I wanted to be the one who chose it. After a whole life of being scared of belonging to anyone, I wanted to hand it to him on purpose.
Under that I wrote one more line.
I don’t need a hundred lifetimes to choose you. One was plenty.
He looks up. His eyes are full and he’s not even trying to fix it.
“Charly.” It’s all he can get out at first. Then, “When did you do this?”
“A few weeks ago. Walked in on my lunch break, signed the form, walked back out.” I wipe my face and it does nothing. “I’ve been sitting on it ever since, waiting for today.”
“You changed your whole name and just, what, kept it in your purse?”
“In my purse. Next to a granola bar and like four hundred bobby pins.” I’m laughing and crying at the same time, which is apparently just my entire personality now. “I wanted to see your face. Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m absolutely going to make it weird.” His voice breaks on it. “Don’t make a speech, you said. You wrote me a speech. You handed me a speech on paper.”
“That’s different and you know it.”
“It is not even a little bit different.”
“Don’t.” My own voice cracks. “If you start, I’ll lose it, and my makeup’s barely hanging on as it is.”
He doesn’t keep going. He just takes my face in both hands and kisses me, slow, like he’s trying to hold onto exactly this, the terrace and the lights and the paper still crumpled in my fist.
When we come up for air he presses his forehead to mine.
“One lifetime, huh,” he says, quiet, and I know he’s thinking about the chapel, about what he promised me that night, that he’d find me in the next life and the one after that.
“You said you’d come looking for me a hundred times over.” I close the last bit of space between us. “Turns out I only needed the once. I already found you.”
We go back in hand in hand. Not two people climbing out of a disaster. Not proving anything to anybody. Just married, the loud way this time, with everybody we love in the room, walking toward whatever comes next.