Coda (Songs of Submission #9)(25)

He’s not teaching our kids that.

“Up tempo, people!” I cried just as the cake appeared.

“Happy Birthday”—well, there’s not much you can do with it when everyone’s singing and not listening to the piano. I smiled. Fuck it. I gleefully let everyone else set the tempo, and I sang along in the dragged out rhythm. No one knew why I was smiling, not even Jonathan, who came up and leaned on the piano.

Sheila brought out the blazing white confection and placed it on the piano as we sang, “yoooooooouuuu!”

His face lit golden and his smile a true thing, from his beautiful candlelit green eyes to his borrowed heart, he blew out his candles. Or tried. No one could blow out thirty-three candles (and one for good luck) in one breath.

“Nice effort,” I said, standing.

He put his arm around me, and we blew together. I clapped and faced him. I wanted a kiss, but he glanced at the cake, then at me, then back at the cake, then at me, as if he was trying to tell me something. I looked down at it, thinking we’d missed a candle.

And we had. One little bugger was still bopping along, but I didn’t blow it, because inside the ring of candles sat an open, frosting-caked velvet box, and inside the box was a ring.

“Jonathan?”

He plucked the candle out of the cake. “That was the candle I hold for you.” He blew it, and the flame popped up again.

Thirty people and ten kids said, “Awwww.”

He pursed his lips in a smile. “I didn’t know there would be so many people here.”

Margie took the candle from his fingers. It still burned. It must have been one of those parlor trick candles, and it was sweet.

“What are you doing?” I asked, still confused. He guided me back onto the piano stool, and I sat. “We’re already married.”

“Not properly,” he said, picking the ring out of the box. “Not on my own power and not for the right reasons.”

Were there dozens of people in the room? I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t see them. Only this man, this king, getting on his knee in front of me.

“Jonathan, you don’t have to. I…”

“You going to give me your hand or not?”

“I can’t.” I put them in the corners of my eyes as if to press the tears away. “I’m using them. Hang on.”

“Get on with it!” a male voice called from the crowd.

“Shut the f*ck up, Pat!” someone else said.

Jonathan touched my left wrist, and I brought my hand down. I didn’t wear the borrowed diamond anymore. Just the key ring wedding band.

“Will you marry me, Monica?” I sniffed back a bunch of tears, and before I could answer, he continued, looking at me. “Will you have a normal engagement with me? Will you get to know me on any given Tuesday?” He shook his head quickly, as if making it all up on the spot and discarding an idea. “Can we plan a real wedding and argue over seating arrangements? Can we find the things we agree on naturally? Flowers. Invitations. Whatever is important to us. I want us to be right with the world. I want us to take our time, because you’re worth it. We are worth it. Nothing skimped or rushed. You deserve all of it. Everything.”

Doing it all over. A second chance at a mask of normalcy. He wasn’t rethinking or going backward. He was giving me a gift.

“I love you,” I whispered through my tears. “I want you. Everything.”

He slipped the ring on my finger. The diamond was huge and the color of sunshine.

“A canary diamond,” he said. “For my songbird.”

“Gross, Uncle Jon!”

Jonathan turned around toward David, who had a face like kneaded dough at the thought of icky grown-up love.

“Yeah, gross,” a laughing, adult voice called out.

Jonathan glanced at me for half a second, and I saw mischief in those eyes. I didn’t have a moment to tell him not to do whatever it was he was about to do, before he scooped up a swipe of white frosting from his cake and flung it at his tormentor.

“Quiet, Patrick!” Jonathan said.

Impulse moved my arm. I scooped up another bunch of frosting and flung it at my husband and fiancé, coating the bottom half of his face in a buttercream goatee. “Be nice to the guests!”

He blew, spraying me in vanilla, and everyone laughed and clapped. David, seeing the world as only a ten-year-old could, recognized an opportunity when he saw one. He mashed his hand in the cake then flung it at both of us. Jonathan, not to be out-immatured by a ten-year-old, whipped around and threw a mess of it at his nephew, with half of it getting on Eddie.

“Hey, *!” Eddie shouted.

“Language!” Sheila called, too late.

Her son threw another handful of cake at her. The young pitcher had great aim, getting his mother in the face with white confection.

“You!” Sheila said with a pointed finger.

I shut the cover over the piano keys just in time, because all hell broke loose. Cake flew everywhere. Laughter. Squeals. My god, the cake must have been huge. I was covered. Jonathan was covered. Everyone I could hit with a lump of cake was covered, and we were all laughing through beards of white frosting and fruit filling. The kids were licking the floor. Eileen slipped on a wad of cake and laughed, and her granddaughter put a handful down Eileen’s shirt. Leanne fell when she tried to help Eileen up, and Jonathan, my beautiful king, put his arms around me and kissed cake off my lips.