“Not that your marriage wasn’t real. I know you well enough to know that’s true. But I just . . . you have a kid and you daydream about him getting married. Getting married was the last big thing he did and I wasn’t there. Jesus, was I so terrible that he couldn’t tell me what he was doing? That I couldn’t have been there?”
I was surprised that this was coming up now because she seemed like it was all behind her, but now I understood that it had never been behind her. It had been right there on the surface the whole time, so large and imposing that it colored everything she saw.
“He wasn’t . . . ” I say. “You weren’t terrible. It wasn’t that. It had nothing to do with that.”
“Well, what then?” she asks me. “I’m sorry that I sound upset. I’m trying not to sound . . . I just . . . I thought I knew him.”
“You did know him!” I say, and this time I am grabbing her hand. “You did know him. And he knew you and cared about you. And maybe the way he did it was misguided, but he loved you. He thought if he told you . . . he thought you couldn’t handle it. He worried that you wouldn’t feel like you two were a family anymore.”
“But he should have told me before you two got married. He should have at least called,” she says to me.
And she’s right. He should have. He knew that. But I didn’t.
MAY
We were two hours outside of Las Vegas when the cold feet set in. Ben was driving. I was in the front seat calling wedding chapels. I also called hotels to see where we could stay the night. My body was thrilled and anxious. The car could barely contain me, but I could see that Ben was starting to tense.
He pulled over into a Burger King and said he wanted a burger. I wasn’t hungry, I couldn’t possibly eat, but I got one too and let it sit in front of me.
“I’m thinking we should go to the Best Little Chapel,” I told him. “They take care of everything there. And then we can stay at either Caesars Palace, which has a pretty good deal on a suite, or interestingly enough, the Hooters hotel has really cheap rooms right now.”
Ben was looking at his burger, and when I stopped talking he put it down abruptly. I mean, he basically dropped it.
“I need to tell my mom,” he said. “I can’t do this without telling my mom.”
“Oh,” I said. Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about his mom, or my own parents. I had briefly thought about inviting Ana to come and be a witness, but I quickly decided I didn’t want that either. I just wanted Ben and me, together. And whoever the officiant was.
“Don’t you want to invite Ana or something?” he asked. I did not like the turn the conversation had taken. The turn in the conversation was about to create a turn in the trip, which had the very real consequence of a turn in this marriage.
“Well, no,” I said. “I thought we just wanted it to be the two of us.”
“I did,” he said. “Well, no, you did.” He wasn’t being combative, but I was still feeling defensive. “I just think that I was being overzealous before. I think I should tell my mom. I think if she found out afterward that she would be heartbroken.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she wasn’t there. That her only child got married and she wasn’t there, I don’t know.”
This was what I had been afraid of. Suddenly, I felt my whole life slipping away from me. I’d only been engaged for four hours, but in those four hours I saw a life for myself that I wanted. Just in the time we had been in the car, I’d thought so much about what our night would be like, what our tomorrow would be like, that I was already attached to it. I had replayed it so many times in my mind that I felt like I’d already lived it. I didn’t want to lose what I thought I already had. If Ben called his mother, we weren’t going to get back in the car and drive straight to Nevada. We were going to get back in the car and drive straight to Orange County.
“I don’t know if that’s . . . ” I started, but I wasn’t sure how to finish. “This is about you and me. Are you saying you don’t want to do this?”