Epilogue - Van
Two Years Later
“Spend My Life With You” played through the speakers while I slow danced with my wife in the middle of my grandparents’ backyard.
My wife.
I’d been calling her that in my head all day and still wasn’t tired of it.
Lee had both arms around my neck while we moved slowly across the grass.
The ceremony had been right here by the river a couple hours earlier, with white chairs filling the yard, flowers lining the aisle, and about fifty of our closest family and friends watching us get married.
Now the chairs had been moved, tables sat underneath the string lights, the DJ was set up near the back porch, and everybody had settled into the reception.
When we first started talking about getting married, I expected her to want something bigger.
She liked nice shit. A good handbag, nice shoes, nice hotels, and she wasn’t scared to spend money when she wanted something.
I figured I was gonna end up in some ballroom wearing an expensive tux while two hundred people watched us say our vows.
Then she told me she wanted to do it here with immediate family, close friends, good food, music, and the river behind us. That was enough for her.
The longer I knew Lee, the more I realized that simple things made her the happiest. She liked game nights where everybody talked over each other.
She liked holidays when the house stayed full half the day and people left carrying plates.
She could sit around with Anika doing absolutely nothing for two hours and still call it a good time.
Love-Lee Nails was the same way. She loved making money, but she loved her clients too. I knew more about some of those women’s marriages, kids, jobs, and personal problems than I had ever asked to know because she came home telling me their business like I knew them personally.
I looked down at her. Lee caught me staring and smiled, her fingers playing with the back of my collar.
“You’re beautiful.”
Her smile widened. “Thank you, husband.”
I liked hearing that.
“Say it again.”
She laughed softly. “My husband.”
I pulled her closer, and she rested her cheek against my chest.
“I love you,” she said.
I kissed the top of her head. “I love you too, baby.”
We kept moving with the music, and standing there with her in that yard made me think about the first time she walked into this house during the estate sale.
Lee had come in with Maisie wearing all that damn pink, looked across the living room at me, and neither one of us did much to hide the fact that we liked what we saw.
My daddy noticed. Skye noticed. Maisie definitely noticed because she started trying to set us up before Lee even got those lamps out of the house.
Back then, I knew she was fine, funny, and I wanted to take her out. Then she told me she had somebody. Complicated, she called it. So I left it alone. Didn’t mean I stopped being intrigued.
After that, we kept running into each other, then started talking more, and somewhere in there I realized how easy it was to lose track of time around her.
I could stop by to bring her a pumpkin pie and end up standing in her kitchen arguing about football.
She made me laugh. That mattered more than I probably realized at first.
So did the way she cared about people. Lee could cuss somebody out in one breath and be trying to figure out how to help them in the next. She remembered birthdays, appointments, people’s kids, little things they told her weeks ago. Once she cared about you, she cared hard. Sometimes too hard.
I had seen what that cost her.
But I also watched her learn how to do all that loving without handing over every damn thing that belonged to her.
I looked over her shoulder toward the edge of the dance floor. Myles stood there watching us, his tiny black tux still holding on from the ceremony even though his bow tie was crooked and one knee already had grass on it.
He had done better as ring bearer than I expected. Before Lee ever came down the aisle, Myles started toward me with the ring box in both hands. We had practiced it enough times that he knew exactly where he was supposed to go. He made it halfway. Then he looked up and saw me.
“Daddy!”
The rings stopped mattering. He took off running, and I caught him with one arm before he dropped the box.
Myles had never really known me as anything but Daddy. His first word was “da-da,” and he was looking dead at me when he said it.
Lee tried to tell me babies made sounds like that all the time and it didn’t necessarily mean he was talking to me. I didn’t care. He was looking at me.
I had been his goddaddy before he was born.
I cut his cord, held him right after he came into the world, got up with him at night, changed diapers, fed him, cleaned puke off myself, sat through cartoons I couldn’t stand, and learned the hard way that giving him the wrong cup in the morning could apparently ruin his whole day.
By the time he was old enough to know what Daddy meant, he’d already been calling me that for a while.
My family made the whole thing funnier. I had told Mama before Myles was born that he wasn’t mine, but once Lee and the baby moved into the house with me, everybody went right back to believing what they wanted to believe.
Somewhere along the way they decided me and Lee must’ve gotten a DNA test and found out he really was mine.
Eventually I had to tell them again that no, we had not secretly discovered anything. Mama still called him her grandbaby. My daddy still spoiled him. Nothing about the way they treated him changed.
JB was his biological father, and that was something Myles would always know. When he got old enough to understand everything, he could decide for himself what kind of relationship he wanted with JB.
Me, I was raising him. I was his daddy.
“Too slow! Dance fast!”
I looked down and found Myles standing beside us, staring up at me like our first dance had gone on long enough.
A few people close by started laughing.
“We almost done,” I told him.
“Too slow.”
Then he ran back toward the other kids.
Lee laughed against my chest.
“He’s yours.”
“Now he’s mine?”
“He’s been yours since he learned how to get on my nerves.”
I laughed and kissed her just as the song started fading out. Everybody around us clapped, and Lee took my hand as we moved off the dance floor.
I watched Myles run back to JJ, Jaliyah, and Zuri.
JJ was five now and took being the oldest seriously whenever it benefited him.
Myles followed him around like everything he said was law, Jaliyah stayed right there with both of them, and Zuri, Anika and Trevon’s daughter, chased behind all three on her little short legs determined not to get left out.
Watching them run through this yard still got me sometimes.
After Poppa died, Skye asked if I was keeping the house. I told her I didn’t know because a place this big deserved kids running through it, and at the time all I had was Snoop.
Now somebody’s toy was always under my foot.
JJ and Jaliyah were over enough that nobody thought anything about seeing them here anymore.
Lee and Hannah had figured out how to make that work for the kids.
They still weren’t friends, but they could be around each other now without dragging all the old shit into every conversation.
Most of what they talked about was kid stuff anyway. Birthdays. Pickups. Somebody getting sick. School. Whatever needed handling. That was about it.
The kids got to know each other, and that was what mattered.
JB wasn’t around to complicate things anymore. The federal investigation involving his trucking company ended with him taking a plea and getting twelve years. Hannah never married him. By the time he was sentenced, the ring was gone, and she was back running House of Hannah full-time.
His plea also forced him to finally put something on paper he should’ve admitted years earlier. The drugs and money found inside Love-Lee had belonged to him.
Lee’s lawyer took that admission and went back after her conviction.
I was at the shop the day her lawyer called.
Lee stood behind the front desk with the phone pressed to her ear, barely saying anything besides a few quiet yeses.
At one point she asked him to repeat himself.
When the call ended, she lowered the phone and stared at the screen for a few seconds.
“It’s vacated,” she said.
Then she broke down.
I barely made it around the desk before she covered her face and started crying like a baby. Her knees gave out and I caught her. She grabbed onto my shirt while I wrapped both arms around her.
I didn’t say much. There wasn’t much to say. Five years were still gone. The call didn’t put them back. It didn’t undo everything she lost while she was locked up or everything she came home and had to deal with afterward.
So I just held her. She cried against my chest until she could finally breathe without another sob coming out, and I stayed there until she was ready to pull away. After that, she called Maisie and Anika, then sat back down and cried some more.
I couldn’t give her those five years back. But I could hold her through that part.
Another song had started by the time Lee leaned into my side, and I looked past her toward the house.
Poppa and Memaw’s pictures were still inside. A lot of their old things were still there too, mixed in with everything me, Lee, and Myles had added over the last two years.
Holly had somehow taken over our bed. Snoop was getting older and had less patience for Myles climbing all over him, but every night he still slept near his bedroom.
The house didn’t feel empty anymore. Neither did my life.
Love-Lee had outgrown Malcom’s back suite before Myles turned one. Lee stayed there a little longer because she liked the space, but eventually she found a storefront she wanted and signed the lease herself.
The first time I saw LOVE-LEE NAILS across the front window, I pulled in even though I knew she was working.