“Louise,” I say. “This is a very happy, yet sad day for me. I must let my Miss Temple follow her heart and go away with someone else.”
“Jeez, Pop. Our Lady of Guadalupe is just a half hour’s trot away.”
“The road she follows from there goes ever on and on.”
“And so do you sometimes.” She sways a bit from side to side, considering. “You still have your PI business.”
“Perhaps. But I only went into it to help Miss Temple after I found her first dead body at the convention center. I cannot be her sole bodyguard anymore.”
“There are other bodies to guard.”
“Louise, you have survived on the streets alone. You have never had a strong bond with a human. I understand. So, I am here to tell you, Louise, that it is possible, in some remote way probable, that you are…related to me. More than somewhat.”
Her golden eyes widen. Definitely a bit of the Oasis Hotel’s sizzling feline mascot Topaz there, or of Satin, the Sapphire Slipper bordello cat.
“Daddy Dearest!” she purrs. “Then I can get my name on the business as a Junior?”
“No. You are not a boy. Only boys are ‘Juniors’.”
“So what!” She gives me a friendly air-swipe on the cheek. “It can read, ‘Midnight Louie, Sr. and Midnight Louise, Junior Miss’. I like that. Classy with a feminine touch. We can amp up the clientele for more female customers.”
“Way too wordy, Louise, like you.”
I sigh. Then…and now, coming back into the present with a mental lurch. I wonder where Louise is, given all this chaos.
I can only pass the time watching the flashing tuxedoed legs of multi Fontana brothers churning by, showing off their silver satin side stripes.
This is a wedding, folks, that may utterly and forever rearrange my happy home. You are lucky I am willing to participate in this folderol at all… I could very well go rogue and run off with the wedding rings.
But I am not heard or heeded, of course. I have always had a very bad feeling about the time and place of this wedding. And, luckily, I prepared well in advance.
The procession music sequence is about to begin. Distant voices from the choir loft at the back of the church are checking mic settings. I can only glimpse tall Miss Lt. C.R. Molina’s dark hair in her persona of songstress Carmen.
I have nothing better to do now that I am once again confined to zebra-stripe quarters (is that not what convicts had to wear in the old days?) to hearken back to discussions the couple-to-be had within my hearing at the Circle Ritz only a week ago.
Well, actually, we all were in the privacy of my Miss Temple’s bedroom, where I have been a planted listening device for more than two years.
When I occasionally flick an ear to fine-tune my built-in woofers and tweeters (not referencing dogs and birds), she sometimes wonders aloud if I have a flea in my ear and require a preventative treatment.
Please. No flea would dare to challenge the lightning justice of my super-sharp shivs, but I allow Miss Temple to monthly dab a little ‘perfume’ purported to ward off vermin on my neck. Rather like a vampire bite.
Frankly, warding off vermin—insect, or mammal, or human—has always been my job and I am very good at it without the assistance of applied substances, except for a bit of nip now and again.
Anyway, I am cleaning my toe hairs when I overhear the very discussion in question now, noxious as it is.
“Wedding-wise,” Miss Temple says to Mr. Matt, “what are we going to do about your irregular family situation? My dad and mom can play their traditional roles, with dad walking me down the aisle, but nowadays the groom’s parents may walk him down the aisle too, which is less sexist.”
Mr. Matt mutes Jimmy Kimmel on the late-night TV. See, they are like an old married couple already. Disgusting! However, I have always wanted to mute Jimmy Kimmel, so I give Mr. Matt an invisible high-five and listen ever-so-much more intently, as the Gossip Girls do.
Mr. Matt considers with a sigh, “That would have to be my mother and her new husband.”
“Who is genetically your uncle.” Miss Temple frowns. “Wedding planning can get complex.”
“The weddings I officiated at—” he begins.
Miss Temple threads her arm through his, rests her tousled red head on his shoulder and coos, “I would love to be married by you to you.”
“Cannot happen,” he says. “Anyway, the groom and his best man always lurked in the sacristy and appeared at the altar just in time to watch the wedding party coming down the aisle, starting with the mother of the bride and ending with the father of the bride. Simple enough.”
“I invited both brothers and spouses, on the pretext that they are the sole brothers in the new step-family your mother has married into. You know how much being there would mean to your ‘real’ father. That man must be heartbroken to have been kept ignorant of your existence and not have been there for you from cradle to priesthood because of his parents’ manipulations.
“If I had been the screenwriter on that situation,” my Miss Temple adds indignantly, “I would have put the love-at-first-sight teen lovers back together in their middle years.”
“You are a charming romantic, Temple. I know my father would have ‘done the right thing’ and acknowledged my mother and me, if he had known. But he went off to the military, against his family’s wishes, anyway. And they ‘handled the situation’ without telling him.”
“Was it because of their mondo money or were they just mean?”
“Parents back then expected to have authority over their children, ‘for their own good’. Did not yours freak even now when you went off to Las Vegas with Max?”
“They were not happy. I was their only daughter and youngest child, but I was in my late twenties. Time to slash the cord.” Miss Temple is quiet for a few moments. “Max helped me do it.”
“Which is why, having been through several cord-slashings myself…my mom, the family, the church. the city of my birth, etcetera, I wish him well.”
“That is so very noble of you. I see why you are such a star at advice-giving.”
“In that mode, I am sure my father would have stood by my mother if he had known, because his family-approved wife has proven to be selfish and shallow.”
“Really?”
“He does not love her, but he will never leave or divorce her, as a Catholic man, and for the sake of their children.”
Miss Temple shakes her head. “He must see Mira often, with his brother at family events. It must be so painful.”
“Yeah, but not unprecedented,” Mr. Matt says. “There was a case in Chicago of two judges when I was on The Amanda Show. One married the other’s divorced wife and, to retaliate, the other brother married his brother’s longtime paralegal assistant.”
“How weird.”
“That is what people are. So no, on the gnawing pain factor,” Matt said. “My genetic father is a realist. Love at first sight is a miracle, maybe, but real adults have to make compromises. My mother marrying my father’s widowed brother, starting over, the two of them, at their age, has made her stronger than she has ever been. She knows the truth, and the truth is that you cannot go back thirty-some years to rewrite the present. And neither I, nor my ‘real’ father, would want to sacrifice seeing Mira strong and happy. And that is why I have come to peace with him and cherish him so much.”