You Love Me(You #3)(125)

“Oh yes,” you say. “He put the ring on my finger and left the house and it took me a long time to notice it and he was so mad…”

I do not speak ill of the dead but wedding days are like this. You reflect. I kiss your forehead. “I love you.”

You lean your head into my chest. “Yes, you most certainly do, Joe.”

And then you smack me on the ass and remind me that we have fifty people waiting downstairs and I salute you. “Aye, aye, Hannibal.” And then you change your mind and you close the door. “Or do you prefer Buster?”

I lock the door that you closed and I press my body into yours. I run my hand down your back and I pull your panties off and I am on my knees and who gives a shit about the fifty people outside when I am in here, Closer as in closest?





49





It’s a shame that RIP Melanda didn’t live to see this.

Our backyard wedding is just the sort of night she pictured for herself when she read Sarah Jio’s Violets of March and your high school friends are irritating and the Seattle freeze is on—one asshole showed up in a Sacriphil T-shirt, as if Nomi needed that today—because this is our wedding, our celebration of our love.

The Sacriph-asshole pats me on the back. “He’d want her to be happy,” he says. “But ya know… it’s still weird for some of us.”

The asshole is drunk but you come to my rescue. “Paul,” you say. “You look like you’re freezing. We put a pile of fleeces by the bar. Why don’t you grab one?”

He gets the hint and you save this moment, you save me, you save everything. You kiss me. “We did it.”

“Yes we did.”

You are my conspirator and you rub your nose into my nose. “And wasn’t I right? Isn’t it kind of more fun this way?”

I tell you that you were right because you were right. We fucked up a little. We didn’t get a marriage license yet, but you told me that you want us to make it official in private, after all the pictures and the partying, because in the end, it’s nobody’s business but ours, after all.

You squeeze my ass and whisper in my ear. “If Nancy tries anything funny, I got your back.”

“Technically, you have my ass.”

You squeeze harder. “Semantics.”

And then you’re in circulation, as a bride must be, as loving and warm as you are in the library, only this is our house, our life. Everything is in place now. Brand-new Erin truly is the best replacement. She isn’t horny and snooty like Fecal Eyes and she isn’t a toxic fossil from your past like Melanda. It’s sad but ultimately good that RIP Melanda isn’t here to take pictures of you and put hearts on the unflattering ones, to call out the music for being problematic—Well she was just seventeen—and there’s so much love in the air that she might have gotten weak and wound up mercy-fucking RIP Shortus or Uncle Ivan, not that he came. But you don’t miss him. You say you’ll never forgive him for ignoring the invitation and if he were here, he’d fall off the wagon and start recruiting Nomi’s new friends and that frustrated, fecal-eyed mommy into some new fucking sex ring. I spin you around the tiny dance floor and you turn a little sad as “Golden Years” ends but that’s the way of all songs, all weddings, and I wonder what ever happened to Chet and Rose, the newlyweds in the woods where RIP Beck went to sleep.

I kiss you gently. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m okay. It’ll pass. Just a little emotional right now.”

I kiss your hand. “I know.”

“It’s weird without my core people…” Rotten to the core, all of them. “And at the same time, I’m remembering why I lost touch with half these people…” Atta girl and I kiss you and we don’t need to start having game night as you’ve threatened every now and then. “It’s strange,” you say. “But in a good way, you know?”

Whitney Houston comes to our rescue and you want to dance and it’s not easy to dance. The floor is small. My yard is small. Boring third-tier friends form a messy circle around us. We are Chet and Rose and it’s us in the center. These people aren’t our people, they’re warm bodies on a late summer night and none of them will be popping by tomorrow—not even Brand-New Erin—and Nomi taps your shoulder and we bring her in and we are that family now, that family everyone else wishes they could be and then the song ends and we aren’t the center anymore. A slower song begins, fucking reggae, somewhere between dancing and not dancing, and it’s too crowded and people are drifting and the three of us keep dancing and you ask Nomi if her friends are having a good time and she shrugs and I tell her that her friends seem cool and she laughs. “Don’t say cool. You sound lame.”

We have a family chuckle and it’s just as well because her friends don’t really seem all that cool. They’re sulking down by the dock like Philistan fan girls who don’t want to dance with a bunch of old people. But as we know, friends are important, and Nomi finally got rid of the little round glasses. She’s swaying hips I didn’t know were there and she won’t be a Columbine virgin forever and my brain hot-wires. I picture my son years from now, a younger me, macking on Nomi in a bar… but he’s too young for her now and he’ll be too young for her then and we are okay. All of us.