Just Like Me, Only Better by Carol Snow

Author:Carol Snow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2009-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

And it did work out—at least in the short term. Hank didn’t propose marriage so much as suggest it. And I didn’t accept so much as agree.

We were married in Hank’s backyard on March seventeenth. After a rainy winter, the ground was still soggy, but at least the skies were clear. A For Sale sign hung in front of the house. We’d already put in an offer—well, Hank had, anyway—on a brand-new twenty-one-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom model across town.

We commissioned a cut-rate caterer to provide hors d’oeuvres and cake. Thinking it was a St. Patrick’s Day party, the caterer brought a green cake decorated with candy shamrocks. I was upset for maybe thirty seconds before I realized how appropriate it was: nothing quite works out the way you plan it. I wished I’d told Susy and Ellen, my maids of honor, to wear green instead of “whatever you want.” They wore black.

My parents, trying their hardest to look pleased, came down from northern California. Hank’s sister and her husband flew in from Colorado, and his mother drove in from Redlands. His father had died years earlier.

Hank’s brother-in-law was the only relative who really seemed to enjoy himself. He got drunk on green beer (one of my friends brought the dye) and said, “I always said, the only way Hank was ever gonna get hitched was if he got some girl in trouble!”

Otherwise, ours was just your basic, low-budget, backyard wedding. Music played from a boom box, but no one danced. Friends took photographs, and some remembered to give me copies. One of Hank’s friends from high school—a big, bald guy with a goatee whom everyone called Jacko (even though his name was Daryl)—flirted outrageously with pretty Susy. Out of earshot, she howled with laughter and said, “Ew, he’s old!”

Later, when everyone was gone, Hank carried me over the threshold—otherwise known as “the back door.”

“Gettin’ a little heavy there, missy.”

“It’s all baby weight,” I responded, a running joke throughout the pregnancy. (If my weight gain had indeed been all baby, Ben would have weighed forty pounds at birth.)

“And that’s missus to you,” I added.

He grinned. “I’ll try to remember that.” He set me down gently.

“I wish you could have had the marriage of your dreams,” he said—a Freudian slip for the ages. “I mean, the wedding.”

“I loved my wedding. It was perfect.”

“You’re right. It was.”

All at once, I was filled with happiness. Hank was kind and gentle, playful and good-looking. He had a steady job. He had bought me a house. In the fall, when we had our new baby, we would truly be a family. Things were happening faster than I might have liked, but in the end I was getting everything I had ever wanted out of life. Hank was right: it had all worked out, after all.

Six years later, Hank would marry Darcy at the Ritz Carlton in Dana Point. There would be exotic flowers, a string quartet, and gallons of champagne. Ben, dressed in a tiny blue suit, would be the ring bearer.

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