If You Need Me I'll Be Over There by Dave Madden

Author:Dave Madden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There

MY BROTHER WAS GETTING MARRIED ON A BEACH IN North Carolina, and I would not be his best man. Nor would our father. That honor, Jarem announced at Christmas dinner, was going to Mike Koblecky, next to whom my brother stood at the latter’s wedding earlier that year, and I supposed there was some reciprocity in these matters. Our plates by then were empty, save for my unsuccessful sweet potatoes, and Santa’d brought Mom a dimmer switch for the dining room, so everyone seemed to glow, like on soft-core. Dad broke out the only something fancy he could find: a bottle of Grand Marnier he’d inexplicably been saving through two presidential administrations. It tasted as sweet as the bottle I’d bought last Cinco de Mayo. We sipped and talked about my brother. Was I a groomsman, then? We haven’t worked out all the details, Jarem said, one arm around his bride-to-be, who beamed, all teeth.

I have, like, a hundred friends, Shelley said. It’s gonna be so hard to say no.

Though Shelley’s family had a house at the Jersey shore, my brother’d somehow bullied her into what counted for Mid-Atlantickers as a destination wedding: the Outer Banks. We used to vacation there. I remembered houses on stilts and getting a boogie board at eleven and feeling like a hotshot. One summer the house we’d rented had a crow’s nest we’d clamber up to to read the ads for beer specials that trailed behind noisy biplanes, or to watch the sun set behind the Wright Brothers memorial, that fat monolith. It made me want to be a pilot, for a time. Now I was in grad school. To be a filmmaker? I knew that’s not exactly how it worked, but I was glad just to read and teach until I could figure it all out. Jarem’s June wedding meant I had to teach second summer term Intro to Pop Culture, and thus no break before fall, but such were the sacrifices I’d make for my brother. In turn, he rewarded me with a job officiating the wedding. Shelley’s not religious, he told me over the phone, as though we’d ever been. She thought you’d come up with something good.

I was going to be the best: tears like rain on people’s faces. I became a minister online and at night started asking my new boyfriend for help. Speak from the heart, Dean said one night, unhelpfully, and then: Will I be invited? I didn’t know how to answer, so I ran my hand reassuringly through the hair on his chest and stared out the window at a distant streetlight. I’d come out to my family three years prior, just weeks after I’d finally come out to myself, a fact that’d always baffled Dean. How could I not have known? At eight he knew he’d grow up to share a bed with Superman, whereas I chastely dated three women over twelve years before finally giving in, as I’d understood it, to my weakness.

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