Dario
THIRTY-TWO
The wedding is small, which Lena wanted, and beautiful, which I insisted on. It takes place in the park in our neighborhood, the one we take Opal to whenever we get the chance.
There are thirty-one people. Most of them are Lena’s—her overly religious mother, two aunts, three close friends from various stages of her life who receive me with varying degrees of wariness that I consider entirely appropriate and make no attempt to override.
They have every right to doubt me. I still doubt myself sometimes.
I have no idea how I managed to make Lena want to marry me. All I know is I’m glad I did.
Just a handful from my side: Alanda, four people from the organization whose loyalty I trust entirely, and Ed, who has seated himself in the second row with the careful posture of a man who is aware that his presence at this event requires some explanation and is prepared to be judged for it.
Nobody judges him. Opal, who has gotten used to the fact that the formerly scary man has been a fixture in her home, pats his arm twice and moves on. He watches her go with the expression of a man who has been forgiven something he isn’t sure he deserves forgiveness for.
I know the fucking feeling.
Opal has rehearsed the flower girl role with the focused dedication she brings to anything she considers important.
This includes the correct pace of walking, the right distribution of the multi-colored petals, and the ideal facial expression for the occasion, which she has decided should convey dignified joy.
She showed me dignified joy at the kitchen table three nights before the wedding. It looked a lot like the Joker’s smile.
I told her it was correct. She said she knew.
Over the past two weeks, she has also developed strong opinions about what constitutes appropriate wedding music, which she communicated to Lena by singing the songs she wanted to hear. Loudly. Off-key.
She asked me whether the ceremony would have a beginning, a middle, and an end, because she has learned that good presentations have structure. I told her yes. She said good and went back to rehearsing.
She is the perfect flower girl on the day of our wedding.
She walks with a measured, deliberate pace, distributes the petals with an even hand, her expression exactly dignified joy (less Joker for whatever reason), and completes the full length of the aisle, taking her spot without looking anywhere but straight ahead.
Ed starts crying about forty-five seconds later.
Not audibly—he’s holding it together—but the tears are there, and they keep coming, and by the time Lena appears at the end of the garden path, he has given up trying to stop them and is simply sitting there with wet cheeks, looking at some middle distance and apparently re-evaluating several of his life choices.
For people like us, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to feel forgiven. A sweet sickness settles in, an ache you can’t relieve. I’ve lived with that feeling for months now. I’m not sure it’ll ever go away.
Not for me. Not for Ed.
When he learned he was invited to our wedding, I thought he might bolt. “You’re serious?”
“I’d be insulted if you didn’t show up.” That’s the kind of thing I’ve heard from people my whole life, so it seemed appropriate.
“I… Boss, I hurt those girls. I terrified them. They want me there, or you do?”
“All of us do, Ed.”
He paused. “You talked them into it, or—”
“Lena brought it up over dinner. Opal decided it made sense.” I shrugged. “They’re right about that. About you.”
He gulped and blinked a lot. “I… Where’s the bathroom in here?”
I instructed him, and he practically flew out of my office. Not fast enough for me to not hear him sob, though.
No one says anything about his tears. Except Opal, who sits next to him in that row and puts her hand on his, and says, “It’s okay to cry at weddings. Everybody cries at weddings.” Then she adds, magnanimously, “Even big people. It’s one of the rules Mom told me about.”
He laughs. He keeps her hand. “Thanks, kid.”
Then I stop watching Ed, and I watch Lena.
She’s wearing an ivory gown with her honey-blonde hair down and loose around her shoulders, and she’s walking toward me with the easy, deliberate walk she has always had.
I don’t know why, but I think about my father.
He didn’t say much about my mother when she wasn’t in the room.
What he did was watch her. The way he did when she entered any space they shared—not infatuated, just the absolute certainty of a man in the presence of the one thing in his life he was sure about.
I watched him watch her for years, and I understood it as a fact without understanding it from the inside.
I understand it from the inside now.
Lena reaches me, and I think that I would have burned the whole operation down to get here.
I would have let it all go. The organization, the name, the years of carefully constructed infrastructure…
All of it was worth less than this, and I knew it in a thousand moments before I proposed, and I know it more completely now.
She takes my hands, and all I feel is gratitude.
My father loved my mother the way you love something that makes you better than you are, he once told me. I didn’t know what he meant. I was a kid, and I thought I understood love as a concept, but I actually understood nothing at all.
I know now.
The ceremony is brief, which we both wanted. The officiant is someone Lena found—a woman with a warm, unhurried manner who talks about the choice, the daily ongoing choice of staying in something rather than just arriving in it. She says the words. We say the words back.
When we kiss, it feels like a promise.
Afterward, there’s food and music and the particular loose joy of a party full of people who mostly like each other or don’t know one another at all.
Lena’s overly religious mother finds me at the edge of the park and looks at me for a long moment, and then says, “She’s happy.
” She says it like she’s unhappy about it.
“That bothers you?”
“This wedding, if you can call it that, should have been in my church. Is that woman even a real officiant?”
I don’t want to start off my marriage on the wrong foot, but I have the urge to do the wrong thing right now.
So I smile. Lena says that’s a good way to avoid a bad mistake, or at least steer it in a different way.
“Ms. Swan. Thank you for coming to our wedding. It is a joyous occasion.” I step closer than needed and lower my voice.
“You would like it to remain a joyous occasion for the daughter you neglected for years and the granddaughter you chose not to help when she was chronically ill. If you do not help us keep today a joyous occasion, I will take great pleasure in reminding you of your shortcomings every day of the rest of your life. Are we on the same page, Ms. Swan?”
She glares up at me. “Are you threatening me? I’m your mother-in-law—”
“Yes, and I know all about you, so let me use small words so you might understand me better. You are the person who birthed the woman I love more than life itself, and as such, you are entitled to exactly whatever she decides you are entitled to.” I let that sink in.
But she still looks confused, so I add examples.
“If that means you move in with us so I can oversee your medical care personally, so be it. If that means you are tossed carelessly into the worst imaginable care home I can find, I will make that happen for her. Your life will be whatever Lena decides. So help her make a good decision for you by being the best possible wedding guest and the best possible mother to your daughter. Got it?”
She keeps looking at me for another moment. “I’ll take it under advisement.” Then she turns, and I hear the most pleasant voice out of her yet. “Lena, darling,” she says as she scampers to her daughter.
Ed finds me later. He’s had some wine and his tie is loosened, and he has the look of a man who has been welcomed into a group of people and found it unexpectedly pleasant. He stands beside me, watching Opal instruct a cousin on how to dance.
Neither of them knows, apparently. But she won’t let that stop her.
“She’s something else,” he says.
“You have no idea.”
“I have a few.” He bumps my shoulder with his. “Maybe it’s weird to say, considering our history, but I’m happy for you, boss.”
“Thanks.” I don’t know why that makes me happy. But it does.
Lena finds me at some point in the middle of the evening, appearing at my elbow. She has a glass of wine and a look on her face that I’ve learned is her private-happiness look, the one she only shows when she’s not managing anything.
“My mom is being nice. Like actually nice. It’s bizarre.”
I smile. “People can surprise you.”
“What did you do?”
“Gave my wife a wedding present.”
“Threatened her into submission?”
I shrug. “Didn’t take much.”
She giggles. “What are you thinking about right now? Want to run screaming yet?”
“Your family isn’t scary. They’re normal. Which is scary, but in a way I’m used to, so it’s okay.” I pause. “I’m thinking about my parents.”
She looks at me. The look she gives when she’s deciding whether to ask more or let it be. She lets it be, which is what I needed.
She always knows what I need.
We watch the party from the edge of it for a while—Opal and Ed in a corner having what appears to be a vigorous discussion about table centerpieces, an uncle (I think) talking to Lena’s mother with the easy body language of a man who is very good with people when he chooses to be, Alanda dancing with two of Lena’s aunts and clearly having a better time than anyone else at the event.
“Alanda’s always wanted a throuple. Maybe she’ll become an in-law.”
Lena snorts. “My aunts are in their sixties.”
“She likes a gray shag carpet. I don’t judge.”
Her laugh cuts through the music, but no one pays much attention. “This is a good life we have.”
“It is.”
I watch my wife dance with her daughter at our wedding, in a park in our neighborhood, with the people who chose to be here, and I think about what my mother would say if she could see this.
“Took you long enough.”
The women in my life are always right. It’d be annoying if I didn’t love them.