“I do,” Dad says, all mock serious like he’s in his own wedding and yep, that’s what he sounds like when he’s getting married. I know it well.
“That sounds good,” Karissa says. I should leave. I need to leave. I’ve watched sickly sweet moments like this before, but always with Arizona and always when I didn’t know everything about the woman, and always when it was funny instead of terrible.
It’s bizarre to think my dad carries this baby-talk-using, skin-crawlingly cutesy side of himself all the time. That it lies dormant in him except when it pops out, surprising me every time.
“Well then, let’s do it,” Dad says.
Every part of me stops—my brain, my heart, my churning stomach, the world around me.
“What do you mean?” Karissa says, but her voice is so glee-filled I’m sure she knows exactly what he means.
“Let’s get married soon. Now. We don’t need to wait. We don’t need to plan a whole thing. You want to be married already, let’s be married already.”
“Really?” Karissa says. Her tears are gone, but the mess they made on her face is not. I’m sure she still smells like cigs and maybe wine and me too, from staying against me for so long.
“Really,” Dad says. He sounds proud, which is how he always sounds when he feels like he’s fixed something. Every time he gets married. Whenever he buys us something expensive and useless when we’re sad. When he has news from our mother, like it’s an accomplishment for us to get to hear she exists.
This is one of those moments where he thinks he’s solving a problem, but he’s making it worse.
“You got engaged five minutes ago,” I squeak from my place at the bottom of the stairs. “I think that would be a little . . . hard . . . for us . . . to adjust to.” It’s impossible to piece together a statement explaining something that should be obvious.
I was wrong, the lamp’s not the only addition to the apartment. I notice for the first time paint samples on the wall. Coral and violet and mustard yellow.
I don’t like any of them. I like the almost-green-but-mostly-gray walls Dad’s had forever. He’s never let anyone paint.
“You don’t get engaged unless you’re ready to get married,” Dad says.
“Karissa,” I say. I think I don’t need to say more than her name for her to understand me.
“Montana,” she says back. I guess I was wrong.
“This is a lot. At once.”
It is the gentlest way I can think of to say it is not okay, it is unacceptable, it is ridiculous. I even say it with a little smile, something warm and easy, a smile I would have given her after a hard scene in class or when we were standing on the corner and she lit my cigarette. It is a smile she knows.
She bursts into tears.
Dad shakes his head at me. At my insensitivity.
Karissa cries even harder, moaning a little. “Even my best friend doesn’t understand me,” she says, and I try to calculate how very wrong I might have been about her and how truly scary that is.
“I know,” Dad says, and I wish I couldn’t hear. “I know, I know.” He shoos me away with his free hand. Doesn’t even look at me.
I take the paint samples off the wall and go upstairs. The tape was too sticky, and some color tore off when I pulled too hard, leaving behind tiny squares of white.
It’s a little bit ruined, our home.
July 4
The List of Things to Be Grateful For 1 The little scab near my eyebrow ring. A sign that I did something real and dangerous and unlikely.
2 The little scab near Bernardo’s eyebrow ring. A sign that we’re in it together.
3 Fireworks in the far, far distance, seen from Roxanne’s roof. All four of us watching them together, something we can agree on. The wonder of colored lights flickering and thundering in the sky while we sweat and sink into the summer.
thirty-four
Bernardo goes home to Brooklyn after the Fourth of July finale is over—dozens and dozens of fireworks toppling over each other in the sky until the whole thing is so lit up and crowded that we can mostly see flashes of light, smoke, and nothing else.
Arizona, Roxanne, and I head to our place and have a sleepover after, all of us bundled in the basement like the old days. Karissa’s upstairs with my father and doesn’t wander down all night, and Arizona, Roxanne, and I stay up forever with a six-pack and cigarettes, so it’s a mellow end of the night and Arizona doesn’t even make me defend my eyebrow ring.
“How soon is soon?” Roxanne says when I tell them about the conversation Dad and Karissa had on Saturday in front of me. It feels so effing good to share it with them that I don’t even wonder what kind of fallout it might have. I couldn’t hold on to it all by myself.
“Like a few weeks, I think,” I say. “She has a dress already.” I don’t tell them how I know that.
Roxanne shivers and rubs her goose-bumped arms. She used to do the same thing when we’d tell each other scary stories with flashlights under our chins. She scares easily. We scare her.