That night, as planned, we hold candles in Washington Square Park and wait for Karissa to walk by, which she is supposed to do with her friend at exactly nine p.m., when the sun is mostly set but the summery sky is still sort of gray and blue and gold instead of black.
Arizona is there.
Somehow we’re still unable to put a real foot down when it comes to this shit.
“Maybe she’ll change her mind,” I say. “Maybe getting proposed to is one of those things that seems like a great idea until it happens.”
“I have a friend from school who thinks she’s about to get engaged,” Arizona says instead of postulating about Karissa. “I mean, this guy is sort of Christian-y or whatever, and I guess Christian-y people get married young.”
“Midwest?” Roxanne says.
“Exactly,” Arizona says, and I know I’m missing some joke about the rest of the country and the people you meet when you leave New York City, and I try to lean harder on Bernardo. I hold his hand with one hand and a candle with the other.
“Karissa’s not Christian,” I say. “Or from the Midwest.”
“I know,” Arizona says. “I wasn’t talking about Karissa.” She has this edge in her voice that she used to use sometimes with Roxanne when Arizona and I would be using all this shorthand and Roxanne would struggle to keep up. Roxanne would keep asking who the guy from the beach two summers ago was, or which ice cream place it was that spilled the rainbow sprinkles down Dad’s girlfriend’s shirt one time, and Arizona would sigh and refuse to explain except in really short, irritated, fraught sentences.
I’ve never heard her speak that way to me.
The part of me that still thinks of Karissa as a friend has a strange instant of being happy for her, watching for her to come and for her face to light up. I can’t stop hearing the words she said the other day, about deserving something good. I wonder if she’ll be sad her mother’s not here. I wonder if she’ll wish she could call her sister.
I would want to call my sister.
I move to Arizona, to put my chin on her shoulder for a moment.
“Remember the girl with the bad breath?” I say. She’s our favorite of Dad’s girlfriends to make fun of. “I’ve decided I think it had something to do with Tabasco sauce and sex.”
“You’re disgusting,” Arizona says. “And it was absolutely McDonald’s french fries, poor flossing, and mouth breathing.”
“Mouth breathing,” I say, nodding my chin against her shoulder blade before moving back next to Bernardo.
She’s not gone entirely.
Dad’s a few feet away, and he keeps rubbing his hands against the top of his thighs, like he’s nervous. But it seems like he shouldn’t be nervous. He’s had practice.
We’re all new versions of ourselves tonight.
I haven’t even tried to scrub off the Sharpie, and neither has Bernardo.
“It’s pretty out here,” Roxanne says, looking at thirty-five people with tea candles circled around the bench that was the site of Karissa’s first date with my father. They are mostly doctor-friends and their wives because our limited extended family lives upstate and is uninterested in my father’s engagements.
“I don’t get when people want an audience for their freaking engagements,” Arizona says. “And by people, I mean Dad. Also, fire hazard. Seriously. I’m tempted to preemptively call an ambulance.”
“But pretty,” Roxanne says again. Since my father is not her father, she has the luxury of finding him romantic on occasion.
“Yep. Pretty,” I say. “Very hazardous. Extreme. Not his best, though. Maybe his second best. Definitely better than when he and Janie got engaged at Starbucks. And better than when he learned German to propose to Tess. Because that was truly awful.”
“What was the best?” Bernardo says.
I tell him my favorite was and will always be the time he proposed to Natasha on the intercom as we passed over the Atlantic Ocean on our flight to Paris. He said he knew Paris was the most romantic city in the world, but he simply couldn’t wait to get there.
It was bullshit, obviously. He’d planned the whole thing weeks ahead of time, but I liked the sentiment. And I don’t know, sometimes even if something is bullshit it can still be beautiful. Like Natasha herself, for example, who was mostly plastic by the time they got divorced, but is still, aesthetically speaking, totally gorgeous.
Plus, I got to go to Paris and see Notre-Dame, which is so pretty when it’s lit up at night that I dream of living next door to it. Preferably, at this point, with Bernardo. I told him my plans the other night when we were a little naked and a little out of breath and very twisted around each other. He said whenever I’m ready he’ll take me there. He didn’t seem to be joking.
Romance is weird. Things get said that seem too large. Even I love you feels oversize and ill-fitting. Like dress-up clothes.
He says it in my ear now, and I wish he knew it isn’t what I need at this moment.