Purple Hearts(19)

No, Cassie was going to help me. She was annoying as hell but she was fierce, and she was going to help me protect them. I wanted to shake her hand or hold her. It seemed absurd that we would just go off in our separate directions, like we had talked about the weather.

But that’s what we did. I glanced back over my shoulder when she reached the road. Though I couldn’t be sure through the afternoon glare, I thought our eyes met, and I waved. She lifted her hand and waved back.





Cassie


Someone was knocking on my door. I looked up from my keyboard, the remains of three joints on a saucer next to me, the shells of pistachios scattered under my feet. Pistachios were an expensive but type 2–friendly cure for the munchies, I’d found. I had been pacing, crunching, going back and forth between contacting Luke and telling him we had to call it off and playing piano to calm my nerves.

I checked the peephole. It was Rita, my landlady.

Uh oh.

I opened the door a crack. “Yeah?”

Rita was holding her dog, Dante, who was panting, cross-eyed. Rita sniffed, her eyes as pink and puffy as her robe. “I noticed your lights were on all night. Just wanted to check if you were all right.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good.”

She sniffed again. “Were you smoking weed in here?”

My pulse quickened. “No.”

“Yes, you were.” I prepared an excuse, something about buying the wrong incense. Then she said, “You have any left?”

Phew. “Of course.”

It was an unspoken agreement that I could get away with a lot in Rita’s attic if I wasn’t stupid about it. There were a lot of unspoken agreements. I didn’t say anything about her loud weeping, for example, or her occasional parties where it sounded like people were making animal noises at one another, and she didn’t say anything if my rent was a few days late, or about the fact that my subwoofer shook the entire house.

“Nothing like a good wake-and-bake,” Rita said, settling herself on the couch.

Wake-and-bake? I looked at my phone. Six. Shit. I hadn’t realized it was so late. Er, early. I was supposed to meet Luke and Frankie in an hour before we went to city hall. And I was supposed to have written a “biography” of sorts for Luke, a collection of facts about my life that he could have reasonably retained in the week or so we’d “known each other and fallen in love.” It was a good idea—he’d suggested it on the phone last night. He was writing one for me to read, too.

Instead, I’d started writing a song. When I feel something I can’t quite understand, like when I felt smothered by Tyler, or when I found out I had diabetes, or now, for instance, I’d look for the feeling in notes.

Writing a song is like walking through a forest, foraging for food. You start at the edge, at the organ sound in C major, or E, then you see color somewhere through the trees, maybe a more synthy F-sharp, and you pick it up but it’s not quite right. Not quite the right berry to eat, so you venture further, touching E minor in a vibraphone like you would a familiar leaf, feeling its texture, playing it fast or slow, and there it is. You take it and you start picking more notes nearby. Nutty G chords and back to F, now that it’s ripe.

I never quite found the right notes for I’m getting legally bound to a person I don’t know. The feeling went in too many directions. Disbelief. Fear. Skepticism. But I found the notes for hope, a bright shapeless thing far off in the woods. I focused on this feeling in particular. Hope, though I didn’t know what it looked like, was leading me forward.

Playing all night had been a sort of ceremony before the ceremony. A big nod to whatever force had decided to make me fall in love with music enough to do this in the first place.

Rita handed me the final tip as Dante sniffed around at the empty Accu-Chek boxes and the clothes, in varying shades of denim or black, that covered every surface.

“My life’s about to change today, Rita,” I said, blowing out a puff.

“Yeah?” she replied, standing up to call Dante with a whistle. “Good. I try to tell myself that every morning.”

An hour later, I was ready. I had checked my blood sugar, and eaten a potato and white bean spicy scramble. I’d found my phone in a pile of laundry. I’d even put on a little mascara and some lip color. It wasn’t until I got in the Subaru that I realized what my wedding clothes would be: the same Kinks T-shirt and jean shorts I wore yesterday. My hair was in a bun that would probably fall out soon. My Converses were unlaced.

I ran back upstairs and found a heavy cotton black sleeveless dress with a deep V-neck. A bit revealing, and it smelled a little like old beer, but it didn’t have stains on it.

“Shoes, shoes, shoes,” I whispered to myself. Then I remembered I had a pair of red heels from when I was Marge Simpson for Halloween. I slipped them on and looked in the full-length mirror on the back of my closet. Fine, no bun, I decided, and took my hair down.

It took me a second to find myself in the feminine figure.

Then I realized that in this dress, the antler tattoo just above my left breast was visible. A protector.

Oh, there I was.





Luke


Apparently, to the hair-sprayed, aging waitress, it seemed totally normal for two men in tuxes to be eating eggs Benedict at seven in the morning, one of them flipping the box of a Walmart-bought wedding ring, the other furiously taking pictures of his companion, of the menu, of the ring, of the row of empty booths, and, within full view of the waitress, of the waitress herself.