Momma used to tell me all the time about the day she and Daddy got married. She said that by the time they said “I do,” she was already pregnant with me, which didn’t matter none to her or Daddy, but her own momma and daddy didn’t like it one bit. Turned out they didn’t like Daddy much, either, and so one day, when Momma was nineteen years old, she and Daddy drove out to a chapel in Des Moines, and they got hitched. Momma told me about it, about their wedding in a cozy little church on the side of the road, as we sat on the front step of our tiny prefabricated home, painting our toes candy-apple red while Lily slept the afternoon away. I was eight years old. Momma told me about the chapel, about her walking down the aisle in a strapless, tea-length vintage wedding dress the color of snow; she told me about her veil, a birdcage veil she called it, and I imagined canaries perched on the top of her head. She told me about the man who did their wedding, some man named Reverend Love, and even at that age, at eight years old, I had a hard time believing that was his real name. Reverend Love. I remember the way Momma said his name, that very day we sat on the front step of our prefab home, staring down the boring old street at some boys playing kickball on their lawn? the way she elongated the word love until we both about died laughing.
But she said that Daddy was handsome as all get out, dressed up in a shirt and tie, a sport coat he’d borrowed from a friend. I tried hard to imagine that, ’cause I didn’t think I’d ever seen my daddy in a shirt and tie before in my whole entire life. There were no photos from their wedding, ’cause Momma and Daddy didn’t own a camera back then, but they had a piece of paper that said they were married, and that was even more important to them than some picture. Momma showed it to me, that paper. Certificate of Marriage, it said, and there, at the bottom, the words Reverend Love.
And then, some six months later, I was born. Momma told me about that day, the day I arrived. She told me how I took my sweet time coming out of her, how I was in no rush. She told me how Daddy held on tight to me, there at the hospital, as if he thought I was gonna break. I didn’t meet my grandparents when I was born, not then, not ever. Momma’s momma and daddy didn’t want a thing to do with us, and Daddy’s, well, Daddy’s were dead. We visited them every now and then, over at the cemetery on Fifth Street, leaving browning dandelions beside the headstones that read Ernest and Evelyn Dalloway.
My momma was convinced by her own momma that she was Audrey Hepburn, the reason she was named Holly, as in Holly Golightly. She’d pull her long black hair back into a beehive hairdo and prance around our home with a Breakfast at Tiffany’s style cigarette holder though Momma didn’t smoke. She’d walk around our home in old polka-dot shift dresses on any old day of the week and plagiarize Audrey Hepburn quotes, as if they were her own, and I’d sit there, on the couch, and just stare.
It never surprised me one bit that Daddy wanted to marry her. I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as Momma was.
I asked Momma more than once to tell me how she met my daddy. It was a story she never tired of telling. She told me how she met Daddy in town, at some saloon where he was tending bar, about how some oaf of a man was trying to get friendly with her and how Daddy didn’t like it one bit, how he didn’t like the way that man talked to her, didn’t like the way he kept holding her hand after Momma had told him to quit. Her knight in shining armor, she said. Momma always said that marrying Daddy was the best decision of her life, though as it was, her marrying Daddy made her own parents all but disappear. Poof, she said, holding her hands up in the air like some kind of magician, like magic.