Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [89]
“Of course, Gladdie changed her tune once we told her that there was a baby on the way. But I honestly never felt that we were too young. I felt like we’d lived enough life,” he said. “Until recently….”
He looked at the smeared reflection of the moon in the rippling bay water.
“You remind me of Gladdie,” he said.
“Really?” I asked doubtfully. My grandmother could win over anyone with her oversized personality. But me? Hardly.
“You know my parents didn’t get married until they were both thirty-five?”
“Thirty five?” I asked. “That’s not right….”
“Whaddaya mean that’s not right?” my dad asked.
“Gladdie got married when she was seventeen….”
“Seventeen?” my dad barked. “Where did you get that crazy idea?”
“She told me so!” I said. “At Bethany’s wedding.” I remembered this vividly. I had been flirting with the best man’s younger brother, and Gladdie grabbed me by the arm to interrogate me about setting the date for our own nuptials. I patiently pointed out to her that we had just met, and besides, I was only sixteen. At which point she said in that un-forget-table bellow, “I was only seventeen when I married your grandfather, God rest his soul….”
“She had a lot of crazy notions after that first stroke,” my dad said. “But I know for a fact that my parents got married when they were thirty-five, which was unheard of in 1945! My dad had been in the war, of course. An old guy. He left engaged to some other woman, and when he got back, she was engaged to a 4-F who worked alongside her in a defense plant.” He took another swig of beer.
“How did he meet Gladdie?”
Dad leaned back in his chair and smiled. “They met at a bar in Manhattan. Both rarely visited the city. Your grandfather was there for a boxing match, and Gladdie was there to see a Broadway show. They wound up at the same bar.”
“Did Grandpa spot her from across the crowded room and buy her a drink?” I got carried away with a vision of my grandfather as a tall, broad-shouldered soldier with slick, Brylcreemed hair, winking at the pin-curled tomato in a floral swing dress as she received a cocktail garnished with a cherry….
“No,” he said. “They met waiting on line for the john.” He chuckled to himself. “Romantic, huh? My dad—you never knew my dad, obviously; he died when you were two—he used to say, ‘When you start in the shitter, you can only go up from there.’”
We both laughed.
“Speaking of,” my dad said, standing up, “I’m gonna head up to bed.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed.
“Listen, I didn’t mean to get on your case about Marcus,” he said. “I just…” He took a deep breath. This was not easy for him.
“What?”
“I understand what it’s like to be twenty-two and in love. I know what it’s like to be afraid of losing that person to the world,” he said. “But sometimes I think that Gladdie was right. That maybe your mother and I would get along better now if…”
“If what?”
“If we had broken up—even for a little while—back then.” He looked upstairs to their bedroom window, which was now dark.
“Oh, and one more thing…”
One more? Just one more? I could think of a bizillion ellipses worth finishing.
“Don’t let on to your sister that you finally caught on to the whole conceived-out-of-wedlock thing.”
“Uh, okay.”
“It’s kind of a touchy subject for her, best left untouched.”
“But she already knows. What’s the big deal?”
“She’s okay with her knowing the truth,” Dad said, “as long as no one else does.”
And without another word, he bent himself in half and kissed me good night on the top of my head.
And I stayed on the patio and wrote.
thursday: the seventh
fifty-seven
It was the coughing that woke me up at 6:42 A.M. A dry-throated hacking, followed by giggling.
Cranky and half-blind, I looked out the window that provides a clear view of my parents’ patio. If I craned my neck, I got a partially obstructed view of the neighboring concrete on the other side of the PVC latticework. And there, on the opposite side of the fence, two sixteen-year-old girls engaged in a Thursday-morning wake-’n’-bake before school. You know the ones