Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac(69)

I must have started to cry because Dad held out his sleeve for me to wipe my eyes on, which I did. It wasn’t anything in particular that Dad had said, but it was like he’d read my mind and put words to all the things that had been brewing inside me for so long. We were so much alike really.

I wanted to tell him how I was in love with Will, but it was Dad’s weekend (and me not a particularly confessional sort of person under any circumstances) and maybe he already knew it anyway. Besides, it seemed silly after we’d just been talking about James. I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who always needed to be in love with someone.

So all I said was “I’m really happy for you, Dad.”

Rosa Rivera had no use for the color white—not in decorating and certainly not in weddings. “I am not young or a virgin,” she had declared, “and I have already worn a white dress once. This time, I will wear red.” The only white she wore on her wedding day was a white ribbon that she tied around her waist like an afterthought and the roses that she wore in her hair.

“But, Mama, aren’t white roses bad luck?” George had asked her.

Rosa Rivera said she didn’t know and she didn’t care to know.

She didn’t much care what us bridesmaids wore either. “You girls wear the white if you like. You are young, and it will set me off nicely, I think?” It was a suggestion more than an order. (Then again, most everything Rosa Rivera said about anything sounded interrogative.) Freddie and George decided to honor their mother’s request as she had made so few, and we wore three nonmatching white dresses. Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn’t care to remember or just plain didn’t care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife.

The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?”

“Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said.

Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

“But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.”

“You make a good point there,” Dad said. “How’d you get so smart?”

I shrugged. “Probably all that time conjugating verbs for French.”

“Not to mention I’ve already said ‘I do,’ so maybe this time I should try something else.”

They said their “I will’s” by the beach at sunrise, both Rosa’s and Dad’s favorite time of day. Rosa was a rooster and Dad was a vampire, but somehow they managed to overlap for a couple of hours every morning.

I was happy for Dad, but I also felt like I was losing him. I was that baby in the typewriter case all over again. Maybe this was just life? One orphaning after the next. They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

I was feeling rather sorry for myself when Rosa threw her bouquet. I hadn’t even noticed until the flowers were already heading my way. My instinct has always been to dive and catch, and this is what I did.

“You’re next,” said Freddie.

“Not so fast,” Dad said. “She’s only seventeen.” He appealed to Rosa like a put-upon father in a sitcom. “Maybe you should throw that again?”

I threw the bouquet to my grandmother Rollie, who was sleeping in a beach chair. Rollie didn’t like to have to get up before noon if she could help it. She woke when the bouquet hit her lap. “Oh crap, not again,” she said. She had already been married four times, so she tossed the bouquet in the sand as if it were on fire.

“Does no one want my bouquet?” Rosa asked. Her tone seemed to be joking, but I detected some degree of offense.

I thought of that time I hadn’t taken Rosa Rivera’s scarf and what Dad had said. I didn’t want her to have hurt feelings on her wedding day, so I retrieved the bouquet from the sand. “I do,” I said. “I want it.”

As we were walking back into the hotel for breakfast, Dad whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. I know what you meant to say was ‘I will.’ As in, in the future. In the distant, distant future.” He winked at me conspiratorially, and I didn’t feel like an orphan anymore.

“Who’s Martha?” I whispered from the bathroom of the hotel room I was sharing with Rosa Rivera’s two daughters, who were already asleep. I didn’t have to say what I was talking about. It was eleven, and I hoped Will would be awake.

“Hold on,” he said, “I’ll look it up.”

I heard him breathing lightly and the rapid clack of his fingers on the keyboard. “She was the mother and daughter of the white person who discovered the island. They had the same name, and they both died,” Will reported. “The natives called it something else, of course.”

“Stupid white people,” I said.

“Good night, Chief.”

“Night, Coach, and thanks,” I said.

There was a pause where neither of us hung up the phone. It might have been five seconds; it might have been five minutes. I couldn’t say for sure.