The bride walked alone down the aisle. She had shoulder-length white hair. Her drop-waist dress hit at the knee, and she wore ivory pumps. When she saw the man she was marrying, tears came to her eyes. She waved at him giddily, as if she was a kid on a merry-go-round and had just rounded past her parents. They exchanged rings and kissed, then hugged their respective children, six in all.
Not long ago, Sylvie might’ve thought the ecstatic, hopeful looks on the couple’s faces were impractical. Why go through all that trouble to get married at that age? It’s not as if they were naive teens. But now, she was sympathetic to their exuberance. It was kind of beautiful how regenerative optimism was, how people could hurl themselves headlong into the same situations again and again.
Felicia and Graham, the bride and groom, got up for their first dance. His big, craggy hands clutched her waist, and they both took small, careful steps. They smiled into each other, delighted. It was a look Sylvie had seen on so many other faces this summer—the look that said this day set the tone for their entire marriage and that every day henceforth would be as beautiful as this one. They didn’t bother worrying about the curveballs life would throw at them, the difficult decisions they’d have to make, or even the disappointments. Right now, those things didn’t exist.
Sylvie crouched down and took another picture. And she silently said the same thing she always said to all the couples she’d met. Keep holding on to that, she told them. Keep holding on and don’t let go.
Epilogue
He almost drove by the exit at first. The sign for it was smaller than he remembered. The toll booths were meager and hokey, the lanes separated by staggered orange construction cones. There was a steakhouse on the corner now instead of the old Applebee’s. The sign for the Gray Horse Inn that hosted art shows and served Mother’s Day brunch had gotten larger, now featuring curly, old-timey script. There were leaves on the trees now, not just buds but fat, summery foliage. He had missed the beginning of spring, the floral scents in the air, everyone opening their windows for the first time, the appearance of bees in the garden. He’d missed summer, fall, and winter, too, looping back to late spring. It was an unusually humid day. When he shifted his legs on the seats, there was a thin sheen of sweat on the leather.
When he came to the turnoff to the house, he realized he couldn’t go there. Not yet. So he checked into the motel down the road, a one-story complex he’d driven past countless times. He expected alarm bells to go off as soon as he set foot back here. He expected the motel proprietor to beam broadly and say, “Why, hey there, boy! Where’ve you been?” What would he reply? Would he grin back and answer, sheepishly, “I took a little adventure”? Would he tell him why?
As it turned out, Scott didn’t recognize the guy behind the motel desk. His face wasn’t one he’d passed at the grocery store or nodded at while stopped at a traffic light. He’d never seen the man in the aisles at Pep Boys. The man handed Scott a flat, credit card–shaped room key impersonally and turned back to his baseball game on a little black-and-white TV. There was a Phillies pennant hanging behind the desk, a tribute to their World Series win last year. As Scott walked to his room, he wondered if he was still a Phillies fan. Or were the Diamondbacks now officially his team? Maybe the Diamondbacks had always technically been his team—in Arizona, when people asked him where he was from, he always said, “Here.” It was, he figured, the truest answer.
When he got to the motel room, he slung his bag on the table, took off his shoes, and lay down on the bed. The ceiling was roughly plastered, looking like thick globs of cottage cheese. Outside, birds twittered. They sounded different from the Arizona birds, but the same, too. And the wind brushing through the trees was the same, the cars swishing down the roads. Somehow, he’d expected things to be different. He’d expected the world to fall down as soon as he crossed state lines.
It had all started when his apartment got that leak. He’d been staying in his mother’s side of the house for a couple of days when he woke up in his childhood bedroom, drenched with sweat. It happened sometimes. He was never able to fall back to sleep when it did, so he’d gotten up and padded around the upstairs, looking into his brother’s old room, the shared bathroom, and then, finally, his father’s office.