Sight Hound by Pam Houston

Author:Pam Houston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Rae #4:

On the morning of the wedding we went to town to meet the mayor, who had agreed to do the deed. Howard said he wanted to write our vows and I thought, more power to him. I don’t do crossword puzzles and I don’t like Scrabble and the thing I maybe hate more than anything else on earth is refrigerator magnet poetry. When the mayor asked to hear the vows, it was my first time hearing them as well.

“I love Rae Rutherford,” Howard began, his voice big and resonant, “I want to take care of her, raise dogs with her, strive to understand her, and build with her a happy life. I want to—”

“Howard,” the mayor said, “those words are lovely, but it is usually the custom at a wedding to address your future partner rather than the audience.”

I loved him so much in that moment, my Howard, always playing to the crowd.

It was right after we shook the mayor’s hand and said we’d see her in a couple of hours that I started to feel a bad little buzz between my temples. I probably shouldn’t have had the fifth latte. I probably should have tried to do a little better, that week, with sleep. But on the way back to the ranch from town, the impossibility that any of this could turn out well hit me like a bucket of cold water.

“Howard,” I said, right after we hit the gravel road, “I can’t marry you. I mean, no offense, but I don’t really know you at all.”

SO FAR IN MY life I’ve been the queen of the fake marriages. One time standing in a field with twenty-five other couples all dressed in leather and astride Harley-Davidsons (it was brief, my biker chick phase, but potent) and the next time in a civil court of law in pursuit of a United States green card. I married Mack because I was in town the day that everybody decided to do it, and I married Sergei because if I didn’t, the government would have sent him back to Vladivostok. I loved both Mack and Sergei in my way at the time, which was not particularly well, but together they don’t count as one whole marriage, and if they had I probably never would have gone through with either of them. Then came the years of Tucker, Adam, and Peter, the Dante years, the years of waking up.

This time, I was committed to the idea of getting married for real. I’d even gotten a big white fluffy dress with a train and a veil. Nobody needed to know I bought it for three hundred dollars at the Costco of wedding stores, six-thousand-plus dresses on the rack and then some. I was in and out of there in forty-five minutes, and I would have been faster if I hadn’t had to keep telling the saleswoman to stop calling me sweetie-pie.

“I am many things,” I told her. “But sweet isn’t one of them.”

All of

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