Ben
One Year Later
“Rain is good luck for weddings, though,” Greer says, looking out from the dining room into the backyard, which is puddled and muddy, sheets of rain still falling from the sky, streaming down the windows.
“Tell it to the bride,” says Zoe, and I snicker, checking my watch.
Forty-five minutes until this thing gets underway, and the storm isn’t quitting, so I’m guessing we’re all going to have to cram into the living room. It’s a good thing it’s a small group, and I wave River over so that he and I can start pushing furniture out to the sides of the room. He’s wearing ripped jeans and Converse, a blazer his mother bought him at the Salvation Army, and a vintage-looking Tucker’s Salvage t-shirt underneath, which he’d designed sometime last year in spite of my father’s repeated protests that we’d never sold anything new at the yard, ever. He’s brought a date to this—a quiet, pale-faced girl named Amy who has a streak of her mostly white-blonde hair dyed hot pink—and I can tell, when he moves to the other side of the couch to heft it up, that he’s trying to impress her. Greer lights candles on the mantel. That’s where we’ll have the minister stand, and Zoe takes the big basket of rose petals that were planned for post-vows tossing and scatters them from the bottom of the staircase to the fireplace, a makeshift aisle that I’ll have to sweep up later.
It’s not perfect, but it’ll be fine. With the candles and rose petals, it at least looks the part of a place you could get married. I check my watch again, and Zoe nudges me. “She’ll be here,” she says.
“I know,” I mutter, but I’m nervous, sweaty and tense under my suit, which feels heavy and unnatural on my body these days. I’m not quite used to Kit’s travel schedule yet. When she’s gone, I sleep with my phone turned up on high next to the bed, and I check flight plans, making sure her connections run smoothly. She teases me about how I’d made my living traveling all over the world and now get “fussy” when she does even a short trip up the eastern seaboard for the private consulting she’s been doing for the last six months. It’d been her idea, the consulting, and I’d at first thought she’d meant the kind of work I was most familiar with—visiting corporate labs, lending her expertise on various materials or equipment. But Kit, I don’t think, will ever be interested in that kind of science. Instead, with Jasper’s help, she’d taken half time at the university and has been doing educational rep work for the manufacturers who make the microscopes themselves—running training sessions, reconfiguring the way they operate their schedulers, maximizing experimental time for faculty and graduate students, offering suggestions for undergraduate education on experimental equipment. She’d gone back and forth a bit, before those first few trips—maybe I shouldn’t do this, I don’t even like travel—and I’d listened patiently, every time.
Because every time, Kit got on the plane, and made the best of it. Kit was trying, with her work and with me, not to be afraid anymore, not to cling so hard to the familiar, to let herself explore different parts of herself without worrying that something would be taken away. She’s talked, over the last couple of months, about wanting to teach, about how she might make that a reality. But she’s as committed as ever to this place, her hometown, she’s started to call it. Last weekend she made me spend two hours with her filling out some kind of survey for a local paper about our favorite spots.
I check my watch a third time. Maybe we shouldn’t have planned this for this weekend. The schedule is too tight now that there’d been a flight delay that had kept Kit away an extra night, and despite her new willingness to get out there and make a different path for herself, she relishes coming home. Sometimes, we spend whole weekends without leaving here, eating and talking and puttering around with various house projects, making love late into the night, early in the mornings before falling asleep again.
I’ve never been so happy in my life.
“Ben!” my dad hollers from upstairs, and I turn to hustle up, finding him in the guest room standing in front of the full-length mirror there. “Tie this,” he barks at me, holding out the pale yellow necktie he has for today, the one that’s supposed to match Sharon’s pantsuit, though since she hasn’t let us see it, we’d only made our best guess at the department store this week.
“Relax, Dad,” I say, taking the tie from him and looping it around my own neck to make a loose knot that I can pass over his head.
“Relax? You try getting married at my age! I haven’t had this much flop sweat since I saw you come out of your mother’s…”
“Dad. No,” I say, contemplating self-strangulation for a brief moment.
“I fainted then, you know. Do you think I’m going to faint down there?”
“You won’t faint,” I say. “Sharon’ll hold you up, anyway.”
Sharon had proposed to Dad three weeks after I’d moved back from Houston—“all business-like,” Dad had told me, but she’d also told him that she was never going to have him go in the hospital again and not be his next of kin, and anyways, she loved him and it was about time they made it official. The day after, Dad and I drove to an auction in Pennsylvania to buy her a ring. Since so far, they were both keeping their houses—“I said I wanted to marry him, not clean up after him!” Sharon said, but Dad thought she’d change her mind—Kit had offered ours as a neutral spot for the wedding, an idea that had seemed to hold more appeal for Dad and Sharon than something at city hall.
“You got the rings?” Dad asks, as I tug the tie over his head, tightening it around his neck.
“Yeah,” I say, touching my pocket. Two wedding rings in there, and one that I’ve been holding onto, since that auction in Pennsylvania—a dark green emerald, surrounded on all sides by tiny diamonds of varying cuts, marquise, round, tapered baguettes—a starburst around a verdant planet. I’d never seen anything like it, and had decided right then it was the ring I want to give Kit, sometime, when the time is right.
“Jeez,” Dad says, wiping his brow. “How much longer?”
“Seventeen years and now you’re in a hurry!” shouts Sharon, from our bedroom next door, where she’s getting ready. My mom is helping her. She brought a makeup bag the size of my toolbox, and as weird as this whole situation is, somehow, it feels right that my mom’s in there, helping out with this day. Richard is downstairs too, having spent the last hour trying to talk Zoe into joining his firm, and while I’ve been getting along with him better these days, I have no problem admitting that I thoroughly enjoyed watching her turn him down flat.
“Ears like a bat, that one,” Dad says, smiling.
“I’m happy for you, Dad,” I say, setting my hand on his shoulder, looking at both of our reflections in the mirror. He puts his arm around me too, squeezing my shoulder back.
“You’re my best friend in the world, kid,” he says, looking into my reflected eyes. “And I’m real glad you’ll be standing up with me today.”
I swallow back that damned lump in my throat, look down, check my watch again. “Me too,” I manage.
The door slams downstairs, a little titter of applause that I’m guessing is from Zoe and Greer. “So, she made it,” Dad says, shoving me away playfully. I give him one final pat on the back, tell him to be downstairs in ten, and call through a timing update to Sharon too.
Kit’s at the bottom of the steps, handing off bags to Zoe and Greer, running a hand through her hair, jet-black with moisture from the rain. Her face is flushed, her brow furrowed. She’s complaining about the flight, the taxi service that took too long to get her here—and then she looks up and sees me, and for a minute, everything stressed and flustered disappears from her face, and it’s only the two of us in this house, smiling at each other in relief for her being home and excitement for the day and happiness for being back together. I kiss her behind her ear when I get to the bottom step, tell her she’s got ten minutes to change, and watch as she bounds up the stairs, laughing at the way this day has turned insane already.
* * * *
Later, after we’ve watched my dad and Sharon exchange vows they wrote themselves—including a surprisingly lengthy diversion from them both regarding promises having to do with my father’s work hours—and after we’ve eaten piles of catered food and made toasts and drank too much, the rain stops, late afternoon sun peeking out from the clouds that make their way out of town. While we’d only invited a few to the ceremony itself, the after-party has grown considerably, and so we’ve spilled out into the house’s outdoor spaces too. Some have taken off their shoes and squelch happily around the muddy backyard, others drink and talk on the front porch, still others, including my mom and Richard, reluctant about the damp, stay inside, where River’s date has turned herself into something of a DJ for the event, though I have not recognized a single song she’s played through her tinny portable speakers. Sharon and my dad danced together, right there in the living room, as if they’d done it a hundred times, and as it turned out, they had—my dad sheepishly admitted they’d taken classes together for the last ten years.
When I see Kit duck into the kitchen, carrying a few discarded champagne glasses, I follow her in, wrapping my arms around her from behind, pressing my nose into the join of her neck and shoulder. “You smell so good,” I tell her.
“I smell like an airplane,” she laughs.
“Nope. You smell like yourself, right here. Right on this skin here.” I kiss her there, open my mouth and take a small, surreptitious bite. Her nipples peak beneath the fabric of her dress, and I can’t help but press myself against her, loving the small sound she makes in the back of her throat as she arches her back a little, pressing into me.
“Too crowded in here,” she says, but her voice is low, husky. She turns in the circle of my arms, wraps her arms around my neck, and kisses me, damn the crowd. She tastes like champagne, sugar from the cake we ate. Like Kit and like home. “Missed you,” she says, and I murmur it back.
It’s getting too heated in here between us, not suitable for public consumption, so I pull back, reaching up to trace my hands down her bare arms while I do, clasping her hands in mine when I get to her wrists.
“I can’t believe we had a wedding here,” she says, smiling up at me, those brown-black eyes lit up from behind. “In this house!”
“Nothing broke, either,” I say, and I’m only half kidding. We’d done so much to this place since Kit had moved in all those months ago, and since old houses were full of unexpected challenges, some of that had been unplanned, inconvenient, supremely ill-timed. All of it, though, every single thing about it, had been fun, had been Kit’s and my way of making this place belong to the two of us, of making it our home. When she’d made the offer to Dad and Sharon, I’d been a little surprised, actually—we’d been working so much on renovations, on various repairs, that we’d not even managed a housewarming of our own, and I’d worried the wedding would steal some of her thunder about the house. “You’re really all right,” I say, tugging her toward me a little, “that we did this here?”
“Of course,” she says, a little line of concern wrinkling her brow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
I shrug, noncommittal. “You don’t feel…I don’t know. That you’re having your space invaded?”
She tips her head back, laughs a little—the sound is half-relief, half-happiness. “No,” she says, looking back at me, stretching her arms out wide, my hands still clasped to hers. It’s as if she’s giving a hug to the entire house. “This is people I love. This is family. So no, I don’t feel that way at all.”
I lean down to kiss her forehead, her cheeks, another hard press to her mouth. It is family. But I can’t wait to be alone with her again. “Besides,” she says quietly, right against my lips. “I’m thinking of this wedding as practice.”
“Practice?” I ask, and that ring is burning a hole in my pocket.
She gives me a crooked smile, all mischief, a smacking kiss on my chin before pulling away. “Practice, Ben. For whatever comes.” Then she winks at me, twirling away, calling to Zoe and Greer for a dance, and I stare after her, stupid and stunned and more settled in my own skin than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I tuck a hand in my pocket, trace my finger over the ring, feeling the same way I’ve felt since the first time Kit said yes to me.
Like the luckiest guy in the world.