Epilogue
“You did it! We da best!” Stick shouted as we slapped hands and hugged. “Congratulations, Rapp!”
Grinning, I said, “Thank you, Mr. Bouchard! You got next, right?”
Stick slowly lifted his left hand, revealing a wide, silver wedding band. “Me and Coco eloped last weekend.”
“Ohhhh, shit!” Ford yelled. “Stick done got locked in! Congrats, man!”
“Yeah, congrats!” both Jones and I offered.
All three of them were my best men, my brothers.
“Man, this is crazy! First, we win the Stanley Cup, and now, Southern Comfort plus Stick are all married, but Rapp had the wildest journey of us all. Nigga went from becoming a damn hermit to bagging one the baddest rappers alive. One summer you on tour with her, the next summer you got a kid and getting married. I just don’t know how a nigga as unattractive as you managed to pull this off,” Ford quipped.
I smirked. “Easy. I got a big dick. I know that’s a foreign concept to you.”
“Nigga, please. There’s a reason they call me Big Dick Ford!”
“Don’t nobody call your ass that,” Jones chimed in.
“My wife does!” Ford countered.
“She’s contractually obligated to,” I pointed out.
“Man, fuck y’all!” Ford growled.
“You guys are crazy. California love!” Stick contributed, making all of us laugh.
I’d just married the love of my life in my hometown and in the presence of family and friends. My dad was still sitting in the front row in shambles, flanked by my stepmom and Aunt Taneisha, who happily held my baby boy in her lap.
So, I took a seat between him and my aunt, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Thanks for walking Ish down the aisle. I appreciate it.”
“Ain’t nothing I won’t do for you and yours, son. Nothing,” he said in return.
“You know…when my nephew told me him and his wife was coming to your wedding, I said, ‘Well, shit, let me hitch a ride with y’all.’ Look, I like Bronco Tina. Can’t many white girls rap that good, but you might wanna get that baby you holding checked out. I don’t think they gave y’all the right one. He don’t look mixed at all,” Big South’s Uncle Lee was saying.
I kissed my boy’s forehead as I tried to come up with an answer, but everything this man said was so damn wrong; I wasn’t sure what to address first.
Finally, I replied, “Um, my wife is Black. She has albinism, so she’s lacking melanin.”
“Ohhhhh, like that boy, Michael Jackson, had? What they call it? Vertigo!”
“No? I…”
“That explains it, then! I gotta tell my nephew she ain’t Albanian. I don’t know why he told me that. Well, congratulations, young man!”
“Thanks?”
“Uh-huh. Let me go see what y’all got to eat. I’m hungrier than a prostitute in North Dakota.”
As he left, I looked at my chubby three-month-old son and said, “Let’s go find your mama because I don’t know what the hell just happened.”