19

My head hurt so badly it woke me up. Sunlight blasted the room and above me the dress floated in the brilliance, shivering in the AC’s breeze. Beside me Frank lay with his ankles crossed and his arms out as if he’d been nailed to the bed, one of my shoes above his head in lieu of halo. I still wore the other. I vaguely recalled having sex for a very long time. His cheeks, rough with stubble, had scraped the insides of my thighs. I regarded the pillows and the sight of them awakened in my mind secret amiable memories.

Someone was knocking at the courtyard door. Still more than a little drunk, I got up, kicked off my shoe, and made my unsteady way from the front room to the bedroom. I paused to see if the sight of the toilet might convince my stomach to give up some poison, but it was too late for puking. What I really needed to do was pee.

“Hold on,” I shouted. My voice was like a hammer between my eyes. I had to lean against the bathroom doorframe until my head stopped spinning.

“Hannah,” my mother called. “It’s us.”

I was afraid termites were hiding in the clothes on the floor, so I took the wadded sheet off the bed, shook it, and wrapped myself in it.

When I opened the door, my mother’s smile fell and Jen’s rose. I looked over my shoulder and saw what they saw: purple panties dangling from the smoke alarm; green plastic penis, erect but half-empty of booze, on the bedside table; veil in the epicenter of the bed.

I wanted to cry when Mom took one more look into the room and excused herself to go and see if the cake had arrived.

Jen stepped in and closed the door. “She’s freaking because her baby’s getting married and your dad’s not here. She’s been weepy and cranky since we left Nashville.” She hugged me. “You stink. Take a shower, then we’ll get some coffee.”

I nodded. “Frank’s asleep. In the other room.”

“I promise I’ll keep it down.” She picked up the remote and turned on the bedroom TV. Boss Hogg was abusing Roscoe.

I sat in the tub under the shower and almost fell asleep. When I thought about coffee, I retched. When I thought about wedding cake, I retched. Even thinking about Dukes of Hazzard made me dry heave. I washed my hair and hoped I’d fallen and hit my head the night before. It didn’t seem possible it could hurt so badly just from booze, but I couldn’t find a lump.

The curtain zipped open and Jen stood above me, laughing. I crossed my arms over my chest, confused and embarrassed.

“Your beau woke up,” she said. “I didn’t hear him coming and he didn’t know I was in the room.” She cranked off the water and tossed me a towel. “So now I’ve seen the groom and the bride naked, which I think is a New Orleans tradition.”

I found Frank in the hide-a-bed with the covers pulled up to his chin. “You okay?”

“Sorry, Frank,” Jen yelled from the other room.

“That’s Jen.”

“She introduced herself when I walked into the room wearing nothing but a hangover.”

I tried not to laugh and failed, then had to hold my head to keep it from splitting open. “She thinks you’re cute.”

Frank pulled the sheet up over his face. “Bring me coffee—bring me big coffee, please.”

We went to a patisserie on Charters where Jen ordered black coffee and brioche for me, espresso for herself. We sat under an umbrella in the courtyard. The first sip of dark roast made me spit up a mouthful of thin gray-green bile into a potted palm.

“Jesus, Han, how much did you have last night?”

I stuffed brioche into my mouth, hoping it would sop up the dregs of the booze roiling in my gut. I washed it down with coffee and it stayed down, a good sign. “All I remember is there was a point when I thought, it’s not a good idea to keep drinking this, then I kept drinking it, and then everything gets wavy.”

I took another big bite and Jen grinned foolishly while I chewed. “What?” I asked with my mouth full.

Jen kept grinning. “I knew you when you had your first crush, when you had your first kiss, when you had to look up ‘fellatio’ after Wes suggested it in a note he left in your locker.”

I drained my cup. “Good old Wes. Where would I be without his suggestions?”

“Seriously, Han, doesn’t this seem hard to believe?” Jen gestured to the blue sky above. “I mean, what if I told you I’d fallen in love with someone and I was getting married?”

The coffee and bread were clearing my head. “That would freak me out.”

Jen nodded. “Why?”

I needed more French roast and another brioche, not be coached through a conversation. I was getting weepy as I sobered. “Because, I don’t know, like you said, we’ve known each other for a long time.”

“We have, but here’s what I think: Since we went away to college and stopped being around each other all the time, we think of each other as the person we knew back in high school. I think of you as the chick from marching band who talked me into helping you shoplift The Joy of Sex from Walden Books so we could figure out what the hell Wes and the other boys were talking about, and you think of me as the lookout for that crime, not as the law student who might have a fiancé. That’s why having Frank saunter into the room like an illustration from The Joy of Sex come to life was mind-bending.”

My forehead felt like it was inflating, worry expanding like a migraine. “Oh shit, he doesn’t look like one of those guys, does he?”

“It’s okay. He looks a little like the hot one, not the Charles Manson one.”

I laughed, but stopped when my eyeballs felt like they were pulsing.

When we got back to the hotel, we found Frank and my mother sitting on the couch, holding hands. It looked like they’d been crying. I held a cup of coffee out to Frank and when he took it with his left hand I tried to remember in which hand he held a pen.

“Dot and I were talking about my parents.”

“And about your dad,” my mother added.

“And my brother.” Frank took a long swallow of coffee and shuddered.

I nodded. He never talked about his family. Aside from staring silently into his plate the Thanksgiving we went to Denny’s and acting oddly depressed and obsessed when a Browns or Indians or Cavaliers game was on TV, it was as if they’d never been in the car crash he mentioned just once. I felt slightly betrayed, then felt foolish for feeling so. People told mothers things they didn’t tell their lovers, even if the aforesaid mother was the mother of the lover. My head hurt.

“Give me a sip of that coffee,” I told Frank.

“Jennifer,” my mother said, “I think we should go.”

“I’ll be back in an hour to help you get dressed,” Jen told me.

After they left I went to the bathroom and then peeked into the bedroom. The bed was made and there was no sign of the obscene cup or my underwear. When I’d washed my hands, there were no new towels or hand soaps. The maid hadn’t come; Frank had cleaned up.

He was sitting on the couch with his head thrown back and his eyes closed and tongue stuck out. He looked like he’d died after I left the room.

“You okay?”

“Coffee burned my tongue.” He opened his eyes and lifted his head. “You feeling rough?”

“what did you talk about with my mom?”

Frank shrugged. “She told me she wished your dad could’ve met me, I told her I wished my mom and dad and brother could’ve met you, and then she started crying, and then I started crying.”

I felt like crying, too. “You wish your mom could’ve met me?”

“Come here.” He held open his arms. I sat in his lap and he hugged me. “Of course I wish my mom could’ve met you, and my dad and Harmon.”

He’d never said his brother’s name before. “Harmon,” I repeated.

“A great uncle. I got off easy with Franklin—my grandfather’s name.”

Jen painted my lids with pale lilac shadow, curled my lashes, powdered my nose, pretended to stumble over a lecture on the birds and the bees and wedding nights that left us laughing so hard I smeared my makeup and she had to start over.

She twisted my hair into a bun at the nape of my neck. “This needs something,” she said, and left me sitting on the couch, looking at my done-up face in a mirror in an antiqued frame.

“Harmon,” I said to my reflection. The surprise I’d felt when Frank told me he wished his brother could’ve met me had been downright old-fashioned, a shock like the one naïve brides got in dirty jokes. There were things about Frank I thought I knew, but I didn’t, things I now understood I’d find out about in flashes over the otherwise lazy passage of years of married life, not during the manic first months.

“I stole this baby’s breath from a arrangement in the lobby,” Jen bragged when she came back. She stuck the flower into my hair, then pulled it out and stuck it in again at a different angle.

“Crap,” I said. “I forgot to order a bouquet.”

“You want me to go steal more flowers?” Jen plugged in the iron and unfolded the board.

Someone knocked on the courtyard door and I went to answer, assuming it was my mother or Frank. Instead it was the concierge, an older black guy in a red jacket with gold braid and admiral’s epaulets who’d earlier directed us to the coffee shop.

“Saw that other girl take some flowers and figured you could use these.” From behind his back he produced a huge bouquet of white roses: I wished for flowers and they appeared.

“Two dozen. Woman was long gone by the time her man sent her these,” he explained. “Hate to see them go to waste.”

“Wow, thanks.” I held the heavy flowers with both hands.

Jen’s arm came from under my elbow, a third hand with a twenty-dollar bill in its fingers.

“Too kind,” the bellman said as he folded the money into his pocket.

The wedding was quick. The Justice of the Peace was a perfect caricature: seersucker suit, shock of white hair, breath sweet with bourbon, Foghorn Leghorn drawl. “We are gathered in the sight of God,” he began. I held a dozen perfect roses and a thirteenth was pinned to Frank’s lapel. Harmon echoed in my head, dulling the ache. It was a code word, a promise, maybe the name of a child I might someday have, someday, maybe. The fountain plashed and I heard parrots cawing nearby. “You may kiss the bride,” the justice said, and Frank did.

I changed into the yellow sundress I’d worn to the party in Ithaca where we became a public couple, and we all went to dinner at Antoine’s. The tiled room was brightly lit and loud with the noise of forks and knives and happy voices. Oysters Rockefeller, gumbo, Chateaubriand for the bride and groom, creamed spinach, pommes de terre soufflés, baked Alaska—if there was a perfect menu to erase a hangover, this was it. Frank and I played footsie and tried to keep straight faces while we split a cold bottle of hair-of-the-dog white. There were toasts and counter-toasts. My headache was gone and between courses I said a silent prayer of thanks for all the blessings I’d received: Frank, Mom, Jen, the food, the flowers, New Orleans.

After coffee we stood on the sidewalk, stunned by meat and wine and ice cream, listening to a tugboat blowing its horn on the river just blocks away. I’m married, I realized, astonished.

Frank and Jen and Mom laughed.

“What?”

“You said that out loud,” my mother told me.

When Frank kissed me, I felt the slow soothing beat of my heart quicken.