Ceremony

  My boyfriend wants to get married. I will be his first wife. He will be my sixth husband. Or my second third husband. Second third time’s a charm. He never laughs at this joke. He is a little too serious for me sometimes.

     Gene is nervous. I get it. He’s almost 60 and has lived alone most of his life. It’s a huge change. Sometimes I think there’s a real chance he won’t show up to our ceremony, which we are having in my daughter’s back yard. She’s my only kid, thank god, from my first husband, Tim. She’s going through her first divorce.

     I married my first husband when I was 17 because he got me pregnant in the back of a Chevy van while we drank cans of Coors and smoked a joint. Hank Williams Jr. was playing in the tape deck as we did it, and the sex was over before the good part of “A Country Boy Can Survive.” We got married after I was three months late. I’d told Tim I was knocked up even though I hadn’t taken a pregnancy test yet. Those pee-on-a-stick things were expensive back then and we didn’t have any money. And my mom and dad had recently kicked me out of the house for “being a whore,” though I really think they were looking for any reason to get me out of there — so I couldn’t exactly go to my folks for what a doctor visit would’ve cost. Telling Tim we were having a child was a tiny act of faith on my part. He took the news okay. He said, “This could be so fun!” as if we were talking about taking a trip to Branson and not the act of bringing a real human child into the world.

     Tim and I got married in his parent’s back yard while his dad grilled burgers and bratwurst for everyone, and I got drunk on Wild Turkey in Hawaiian Punch, and then I puked in one of their window wells. His mom said, “Morning sickness?” as she held my hair. Six months later Tim left me the night before I gave birth. He woke me up and said, “I can’t do this.” He’d already left and come back three or four times in that final month, so I figured he’d be back. I got up and peed and made myself a cheese sandwich and laid down on the couch. Then my water broke.   

     When Tim didn’t come back, I tried to give our daughter up to the nuns but they told me no, wait, think on it some. By the time I found work as a mail carrier I was so busy that I never got around to giving her away. Like it was an errand I forgot to run.

     I like the symmetry of my first and last marriage ceremonies happening in back yards. For this one, instead of burgers and brats we will have Taco Bell cater our reception. And by cater I mean I’ll swing by and pick it up beforehand. Taco Bell is Gene’s favorite. He’s eaten it for every dinner for the last 25 years, which I guess means I’ll probably outlive Gene.

     The closest I ever came to being a widow was when my fourth husband, Pat, died two years after we split up. Pat liked to have sex in the garage. I could come to him in bed, wearing my pushup bra and the one thong I used to have back then, or I could step into the shower with him and drop to my knees as the water sprinkled over us, and he was never interested. His cock would be like a wet washcloth. Whiskey dick, he’d say. But come to him while he was out in the garage, while he was replacing a rotor or draining fluid from one of the semis he used to fix for broke truckers, and start kissing his neck or fondling him while he was all greased up and gross? He was ready in two seconds. He’d say he liked the spontaneity of it. He liked to call our garage his Muff-ler shop. I hated that joke. He liked to huff the gas fumes while we did it.

     At least once a day I ask Gene if he’s sure. “We don’t have to,” I keep saying. “We have a good thing going and there’s no need to put any pressure on it.” He says he’s ready. He tells me that he doesn’t want to go through his whole life without being a husband to someone. I feel like I should point out that this isn’t really the best reason to marry. It probably should be about something more. Love maybe. Or at least security. But who am I to talk? I am not in love with Gene. I like him most of the time. And he’s definitely not security for me. He makes twelve bucks an hour stocking shelves at night at the Piggly Wiggly. We live in an “apartment” in a detached garage behind an elderly woman’s house. She’s a widow. 

     In the second year of my fifth marriage, I got word that Pat broke into a dental office and sat in the chair and put the little gas mask over his face and cranked the nozzle as high as it could go. Pat was super dead when the hygienists came in the next morning. My fifth husband, who isn’t even worth naming here, kept telling me I should go to therapy, that I had some sort of self-destructive grief over Pat, that I blamed myself for not being able to save him. I told my husband I was fine, really, just fine, that I was happy for Pat, that he died doing his favorite thing. I started sleeping with Gene a few weeks after Pat’s kids invited me to scatter his ashes in the lake Pat used to fish at.

      Gene says he wants matching tattoos instead of wedding bands. I try not to laugh. He says he knows an artist who will do it for free, as a wedding gift. Gene says he’s not talking about getting some kind of ring inked around our fingers, but it should be something matching. Like birds, he says, or puzzle pieces. He says I can choose anywhere on my body. I tell him thanks for giving me that choice. He says you’re welcome, as if he’s never heard sarcasm before. I will definitely be leaving Gene one day. This is the moment that I know for sure. I should tell him now and save us both the trouble. Instead, I say, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll think about it.”

     Three years into my second marriage, my first husband Tim came back. Our daughter was about to turn four and she had only known James Ryan as her dad. She would go most of her life thinking James Ryan was her dad, until I blurted it one day, just before she turned 17, when James Ryan left me for some other woman (who he’s still married to). In a moment of rage at my daughter’s tears over the looming divorce I announced that he wasn’t even her real dad anyway so she didn’t have to be all emotional about it. She accused me of lying and didn’t speak to me for three years afterward. To this day she still thinks I made it up. She is still close with her fake dad. I guess I’m glad about that. James Ryan is easy to be close to. I’d have stayed married to him forever if he hadn’t left me.

     Tim showed up at our door one day while James Ryan was at work. Tim said he’d made a huge mistake and leaving was the biggest regret of his life so far. He said he wanted us to be a family. “You can’t blame me. I was young. Seventeen is so young,” he said, as if he was so much older and wiser at 22. I told him it didn’t work like that. I said I had moved on, that I was remarried, and I was happy, and that he was a monster for leaving me like that before I gave birth.

     “How is she?” Tim asked. “Our girl.” He didn’t even know her name.

     “She’s dead,” I said. 

     “She’s dead?” he said. He stumbled backward and almost fell off the porch.

     “No, idiot, she’s at pre-school.” I told him to get off my property or I’d call the cops. Then he called me a monster. I slammed the door in his face. Two days later Tim and I met up at a Days Inn and started fucking.

     Gene keeps looking at houses. He keeps saying he wants to “do this right.” But I like our apartment. And the old lady we are renting it from is nice enough. She is technically our landlord, but we always make out the check to her son. I’m convinced he’s stealing from her. Our place was where he lived when he went through his own divorce, he said. He framed it into the corner of the four-car garage over two manic weekends and lived here until he was back on his feet. “Text me if you ever get lonely,” I said when I came to look at it on my lunch break, after Gene and I agreed to move in together. The son laughed it off, as if being with me was a punchline. I lay in bed most nights hoping that his old lady mom will drop dead as she weeds her garden one day. This way Gene and I could go inside and snoop through the place, see if there’s anything worth taking before calling an ambulance.

     I was still sleeping with Tim when James Ryan left me. This thing with Tim wasn’t continuous, wasn’t like I was some bigamist with two relationships going on at once for an entire decade. Only men are capable of that, I think. It was more like Tim would come into town, give a call, and we’d meet for lunch and then do something stupid and exciting. We’d lay in bed afterward and imagine that this is what it could’ve been like if we’d married for the right reasons, if we’d never had the pressure of a kid put on us by society and nature. It was a glimpse into an alternate reality, Tim said. Then he’d be off on his way again, on to the next town to sell HVAC parts or RV parts, or whatever, I don’t remember. All I know is that he was doing well for himself. He’d flash all this cash at our lunches, so much money that I joked more than once about him being a drug dealer. He never laughed at that. I told him at one of those lunches that we could finally be together because J.R. was leaving me for someone else. “We can finally actually give this family thing a shot,” I said. “We can get it right.”

     “Yeah?” Tim said. He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. “I think we should. This could be amazing.” That was Tim back then. Everything was either amazing or wonderful or incredible. He sounded like a motivational speaker. As soon as he said this I told him I needed to go to the bathroom, and then I snuck out while he ordered for me. I watched him from my car for a few minutes after I slipped out of the restaurant. He kept looking back toward the restrooms, waiting.

     When Gene proposed I looked up Tim on Facebook. His profile pic is of him and his current wife, and in it they are on some tacky cruise up one of those European rivers. The kind of thing people do to brag about more than to have actual fun. In the picture Tim is an older version of that 17-year-old who accidentally got me pregnant. His hair is thin and stringy like the twine that grows off a coconut. He doesn’t comb it over, thankfully. His face is skull. His eyes protrude in perpetual surprise. And his teeth are perfectly white and straight instead of the crooked boney tombstones I knew from our youth. Dentures. I wondered if his number was still the same, if I should text him and check in.

     Gene is asleep when my daughter calls. He’s been sleeping a lot lately. Probably he’s depressed. Or it could be Long Covid. Is it bad that I sort of hope for this? Then I could be the one to take care of him when he needs me to, pick up the slack for us if his energy never quite comes back, make him cardiologist appointments if he gets AFib or whatever it supposedly causes. I could be what he needs. 

     My daughters says, “How are you?” Then she asks how the wedding plans are going. She says she’s excited for me. She says she wants me to be happy for once. For once? This phrase sends a jolt of rage through me. I want to punch her in her stupid perfect nose for saying this, make it forever crooked like mine. I want to tell her I’ve always been happy. That’s it’s been other people who have ruined it. That’s my real problem, I want to say. All of you. But I don’t want to fight.

     “Everything is perfect, honey,” I say. “How are you?”