Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(75)

He wipes a smudge of pizza sauce from his elbow. “So you’re almost done with spring.”

“Yep.”

“And I’m almost done with summer.”

“Got it.”

“You’re a deep thinker, DeeDee. You always were.”

“You’ve had a pretty wild summer, huh?” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve had a pretty wild spring.”

We sit for a while, not talking, only eating. We alternate studying each other’s faces for too long and looking away bashfully.

“What if Mom hadn’t gotten pregnant with me?” I ask finally.

“What do you mean?”

“Would y’all have gotten married?”

Dad looks at me for a second, then looks down at the table. He toys with a bit of straw wrapper, twisting it around his finger until it snaps. “Um,” he says quietly. “I don’t…know.”

“Did you want to marry her?”

“I—I think so.”

“You think so?”

“There was definitely part of me that did.”

“So part of you didn’t.”

“I guess that’s what that means.”

“Did Mom want to marry you?”

“She did marry me.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He sighs and fiddles with his fork. “I don’t know, DeeDee. I think so. I think she did.”

Momentous information has a way of turning time into a syrupy, delirious crawl. I always assumed my parents definitely wanted to get married. It never once occurred to me that they only did it because of me. I’m the only reason my dad was around to leave me in the first place. It gives me that snake-eating-its-own-tail feeling of looking in the mirror too long or saying my name too many times.

I’m trying to make sense of my current tumult of emotions (a kind of storm I don’t love!). Anger. Disappointment. Sadness. Longing. Triumph. Wonderment. Hurt. It’s all there, like spokes on a game show wheel that keeps turning and turning, while I wait to see where it lands.

I wonder how much of me is him and how much of him is me.

I wonder who the man sitting in front of me would have been if I had never existed.

I wonder if I’m fixing something inside me at this moment or breaking something that can never be put right again.





Divine gesticulates with a fork. “So I say, ‘Hey, Cher, honey, maybe you could share some of that Bolivian marching powder, and while you’re at it, we better find your unmentionables because I think Sly Stallone’s pet dingo carried them off. And then Nicolas Cage comes in, and apparently he’s gotten ahold of a hot-air balloon and a pilot….”

If the measure of success of a TV industry dinner is picking at your sad, tiny, egregiously expensive salad while the person across the table regales you with an unceasing litany of stories about how famous he is and how many celebrities he knows, while you trade please let the sun turn the Earth into a scorched globe of ash this moment looks with your boyfriend, who is also glumly picking at his sorry salad, then this dinner has been a smash hit.

I slip off a shoe and run my toe down Lawson’s calf under the table. He grins quickly. Hey, if I’m going to be sitting at a goony restaurant, dressed like a vampire, listening to a goony dude tell goony stories, I’m pulling out my goony rom-com moves.

Yuri and Divine finish their dinners and lean back in their chairs, picking their teeth. Yuri gives a somewhat more jovial grunt.

The waiter comes by. “Madam, sirs, was everything to your liking?”

“Delectable,” Divine crows. “Please give my compliments to the chef.”

“Can I tempt any of you with some dessert? Perhaps our tiramisu or crème br?lée?”

“I couldn’t possibly,” Divine says. “Watching my figure. But do be a prince and package me another one of those four-pound Newfoundland lobsters to go. In case I get peckish in my hotel room later tonight. You know, there is nothing worse than being hungry in a hotel room.”

I can actually think of some worse things.

“Very good, sir,” the waiter says with a bow-like nod. “And then the check?”

“Please.”

The waiter leaves.

Divine turns his attention (I use the term attention very loosely) back to us. “Speaking of getting peckish in hotel rooms, I was in Joshua Tree in 1979 with Stevie Nicks. Now let me first say, frying eggs on a hotel room iron is not an ideal situation, but with Stevie Nicks, there is a sense of infinite possibility. Anyway—”

My consciousness exits my body and I become a soaring being of pure light and energy, throwing off the cruel shackles of this world’s gravity. I run through green meadows and flowered pastures. The sun is warm on my face. Lawson and I hold hands under the bracing spray of a waterfall. Jasmine and hyacinth waft on the air. Now I swim in a warm ocean under a moonlit sky. On the white sand shore, a harpist plays— The waiter approaches with a box and what looks like an old-timey leather-bound, riveted ledger book from A Christmas Carol. He places the box by Divine and starts to set down the bill as well.

Divine motions at me with his head, mouths Thank you, and makes a namaste motion with his hands pressed together. The waiter sets the bill by me. It happens in slow motion. Falling like a sawed-through tree.