“Come on.” Andres smiles. “I want to know what you think.”
Lore loves his interest in her opinions, her beliefs, his questions prying open parts of herself she’d never known. She feels herself relaxing as they walk, in the middle of that thorny jungle.
“Everyone deserves happiness,” Lore says, but that’s not quite right. “Unless you’ve hurt someone—really hurt someone. Torture, rape, murder. After that, I don’t think you deserve happiness anymore.”
“So only those who are moral deserve happiness?” Andres asks.
Lore considers. It seems like a trick somehow. “I guess so.”
Andres laughs. “Well, Ms. Crusoe, you’re in good company. The ancient Greeks believed, first, that happiness is a worthy pursuit—in some cases, the only worthy pursuit—and that it can only be found by those who understand and live into certain virtues and values. So,” he teases, “do you consider yourself a moral person?”
Lore’s first thought: No, I am not a moral person, and I told you this the first night we met, look at what you call me, for fuck’s sake—Ms. Crusoe. I told you everything you needed to know about me, and you weren’t listening.
But what if she believes that everyone is entitled to love, to giving it and receiving it, as much and as often as they can? How can love be immoral? Just look at Corinthians: Faith, hope, love. And the greatest of these is love.
If love is her moral center, and she is living into it, how can that be wrong?
“Yes,” she says, finally, with a jut of her chin. “I think so.”
Andres’s guayabera—bought at the nearest open mercado along with Lore’s dress, their simple silver rings, the arras, and the lazo—flaps a little in the breeze. “I know so. Look, we’ll make mistakes. But if we are moral people and we believe that moral people are deserving of happiness, then what is happening outside of us in this moment”—he gestures toward the invisible fallout—“is just that: outside of us.”
“So, in other words,” Lore says in English, with a slow, playful smile, “fuck ’em.”
Andres laughs. In English, he repeats, “Yes. Fuck ’em.”
They walk a few more steps before he takes her hand and turns her toward him. Lore squints into his face, the sun in her eyes.
“Seriously,” Andres says, “we don’t have to do this now. But—you do want to marry me? Because—”
“Yes,” Lore says, with a little shove to his chest. He catches her wrists, pulls her close, lowers his hands to her waist. She can feel their heat through her white sateen shift. Her heart catches at the intensity in his eyes, and she does what she always does when he looks at her like this: she tries to unshutter every hiding place, to let all her dark corners show.
“Good,” Andres says, his breath against her lips.
And so, five days after the earth bucked below their feet, they stand at the base of a saguaro cactus that looks like a massive hand stretched toward the sky. Penelope at Lore’s right, Carlitos at Andres’s left—their maid of honor and best man. Andres’s friend Jorge, a small, almost dainty man with an unexpectedly baritone voice, speaks words Lore will remember so many years later: “In this time of crisis, collapse, and separation, the two of you are forging a union—and amid all the rebuilding yet to come, the foundation of your union will be your starting point.”
Later, of course, they’ll need to get married at the Registro Civil, once they fill out the paperwork and Lore has a copy of her birth certificate translated to Spanish and they have their prenuptial blood tests done and Lore acquires the permiso to marry Andres. Legally, that’s the only wedding that counts in Mexico, and Lore is hoping to put it off as long as possible, though what’s the difference, really, when it’s this wedding that will count to Andres? But for today, they’ve chosen their favorite parts of the traditional Catholic ceremony to be performed in the botanical gardens, nature as their church, no roof that might cave in on top of them.
Jorge has brought two small white kneeling pillows embroidered with lace, his gift to them as not only their minister but a padrino.
And now the time has come.
“Lore and Andres, have you come here to enter into marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?” Jorge asks.
Andres’s hands are warm on Lore’s. In the sun, his eyes are the color of shallow river water. “I have,” he says.
Lore takes a deep breath. “I have.”
“Are you prepared, as you follow the path of marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?” Jorge asks.
“I am,” Andres says.
A flickering image of them as viejitos, Andres’s lean limbs age-spotted, his hands gripping the rubber handles of a walker; her in a rocking chair, a crocheted blanket on her lap. She feels tears on her cheeks, she alone aware of the impossibility of her promise.
Her voice trembles. “I am.”
“Repeat after me,” Jorge says to Lore. “I, Dolores Rivera . . .”
“I, Dolores Rivera . . .” (Is claiming Fabian’s last name a kind of thievery? Or an honoring, an inclusion of him in this day?)
“Take you, Andres Russo, as my lawful husband . . .”
“Take you, Andres Russo, as my lawful husband.”
“To have and to hold from this day forward . . .”
“To have and to hold from this day forward.” (As long as I can.)
“For better or worse . . .”
“For better or worse.” (I’m sorry.)
“For richer or poorer . . .”
“For richer or poorer.” (Fabian, in Austin.)
“In sickness and in health . . .”
“In sickness and in health.” (The way Andres washed her feet the first time they’d made love.)
“Until death do us part.”
Lore’s armpits prickle. Would Andres still be alive if she’d walked away in this moment? Impossible to know, of course, which vagaries of life he would encounter without her, but at least he would never open that door at the Hotel Botanica. He would not lie on blood-wet carpet, waiting to be found by a stranger. But they are living in innocence now, as everyone is of the future.
“Until death do us part,” Lore says.
Andres gives Lore the arras, thirteen gold coins tucked inside an ornate gold box. Their symbolism—a man’s promise to support his wife—reminds Lore of Fabian and his endless labor, and she wishes they’d left this part out.
Then Penelope and Carlitos drape the lazo over their shoulders, smiling. The pearl beads of the oversize rosary are cool on Lore’s skin. Somehow, she’d expected them to burn.
Jorge smiles as he begins the nuptial blessing. “O God, who by your mighty power created all things out of nothing, and, when you had set in place the beginnings of the universe, formed man and woman in your own image, that they might be no longer two, but one flesh, and taught that what you were pleased to make one must never be divided . . .”
Not divided, Lore thinks. Multiplied. Love, multiplied.
And soon after that, they are married.
Cassie, 2017
I was a coward. Just like my mother, who’d done nothing to get me out of that house. I’d told Andrew I’d spoken to my father when I’d actually hung up after the second ring. The next day, though, Andrew told me the internet was back on. The following evening, he said he thought Dad was going to meetings. “Whatever you said to him must’ve worked,” Andrew said, and I hated myself for taking credit for what was, at best, a temporary improvement. Dad’s an alcoholic. You didn’t know? Andrew’s voice chimed through my mind at odd hours, waking me in the middle of the night. The way he wasn’t surprised when I asked whether he felt safe.