Unwifeable(89)

“I love you, Mom,” Pat says. “I miss you.”

When we leave at the end of the night, Pat and I are quiet for a while before we reach the rental car. He turns to me, and his face shows a kind of love deeper than any I’ve seen before.

“You rubbed my mom’s feet,” he says. “That’s, like, some biblical shit, Mandy. What made you into that kind of person?”

“Childhood stuff,” I say quietly. “I think my primary love language is touch.”

Pat pulls me into his arms and squeezes me tight.

“I would never put you in a home,” he says quietly.

Only a few months later, Pat flies down to be with his mom in her final days. He brings her that photograph she asked for in a small silver frame and places it next to her.

Surrounded by family, Pat sits next to his mom, holding her hand one last time. His father and his brothers and sister and a roomful of relatives are there with him, too. He calls me after she passes, his voice breathless.

“She’s gone,” he says. “It was peaceful. I love you.”

His mom’s passing makes me want to introduce him to my family all the more.

“I’m honestly looking forward to it,” Pat says. “And I hate meeting parents.”

We plan a trip to San Diego a few months away, and in the meantime, I give Pat my dad’s phone number so the two of them can talk. But I don’t know that I expect him to actually call. I don’t want to be disappointed, so I kind of forget that I even gave it to him.

Before they do connect, my dad and I have a conversation on the phone one day where I am gushing all about my relationship—but before too long it ends in screaming and tears.

“I really love Pat,” I tell my father at first. “I’m so excited for you to meet him.”

My dad is silent.

“Dad?” I ask. “Aren’t you excited for me? At all?”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he says.

“Dad, don’t you see that if that’s your only reaction . . . just . . . can’t you see how hurtful that is to me? How negative it is?”

“Okay, well, I tell you what, Mandy,” he says, his voice rising in anger, “you tell me what to say and when to say it and how to say it and I’ll forget being honest and spontaneous.”

I am shaking. I am so far regressed back to my childhood place of fear and anger and sadness I can’t see straight.

“It seems like, you know,” I begin, my voice shaking, “I’m trying to tell you about something I’m really proud of, and your reaction is, ‘I’m just afraid that it’s going to go away.’ Do you see how that’s immediately just like a lump of coal in my stocking?”

“I’m sick of being the family asshole!” my dad yells. “Fuck it!”

He hangs up the phone, and I throw my iPhone across the room. I didn’t detach with love. I engaged with a whole lot of expectations. Honestly, my father’s negativity addiction is so all-consuming sometimes I don’t think he sees how it affects others. But I just know that if I weren’t dating Pat, my dad would be asking me if I was dating anyone—and now, when I do find someone, it feels like he won’t give me the approval, celebration, and support I so deeply crave.

Later that night, Pat walks into my apartment using the key he now has, but I can tell he’s in the middle of a phone call. He is laughing and smiling, but I am not in the mood. I just sit on my bed, flicking TV channels, my face in a deep scowl—when Pat hands me the phone.

It is my father.

“I just had the best conversation with Pat,” my dad gushes. “He’s hilarious. He’s kind. He’s great. I can see why you guys love each other so much.”

I burst into tears.

“I’m sorry for before,” I tell my dad.

“So am I.”

When we finally travel to San Diego to meet my family, Pat charms them all—and is charmed by them in kind. It is the complete opposite of Blaine’s standoffishness and frequent looking away from my parents when we visited. It is so clear how much Pat respects them. He notices the sly hilarity of my mom, which no man has ever fully appreciated before, and he says of her bouncy walk, “She’s the most youthful woman in her seventies I’ve ever seen.”

All of the strangeness I long sought to hide from others, he just completely gets it. They are hilarious, weird, brilliant, deranged—and where I come from, always.

On our last night in town, my parents and my sister’s family all gather together for a big pizza dinner at Filippi’s, my favorite restaurant growing up, where I used to play with the dough as a little girl. There are a lot of moments that would normally be very stressful for me—my dad needs to sit in a certain place so he can see very partially out of his one eye, he knocks something over, the waitress doesn’t get his sense of humor, they’re out of everything. But I don’t feel on edge like I did with Blaine. I know Pat accepts me and isn’t judging me on any normal scale of What will the Joneses think?

The dinner is instead hilarious and fun, with my sister’s children taking over my Snapchat, and my dad and Pat swapping jokes nearly the entire dinner. At the end, my father proposes a toast.

“To Pat,” my dad says, raising a glass.

“To Pat,” my mom says, and then she can’t resist adding, “who is one funny motherfucker.”