“Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
Had he been writing this scene in a script, the conversation wouldn’t have ended there. His fictional daughter would have asked the obvious questions. How could he possibly promise that she wouldn’t do the very thing he was doing? Wasn’t she his daughter? But it wasn’t a script, and his real-life daughter was too kind to say what she was thinking, maybe even too kind to think it.
“What I’ve been wondering is whether you’ll ever forgive me.”
“Oh, I already have,” she said, shouldering him hard but playfully, then getting to her feet. Apparently the father-daughter segment of the program was drawing to a close. “I’m still pretty mad at you, though,” she admitted.
“I know,” he said, rising as well. “Me too.”
When they emerged from the maze, she said, “Grandma told me one other thing, actually. About you.”
“What’s that?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“She said you’d never admit it, but you’re just like her.”
Damn right you are, his mother said, agreeing with herself.
Everyone did seem to be on their best behavior, just as Joy had promised. He’d no sooner gotten himself a glass of wine than Jared-at least he was pretty sure it was Jared, given the shaved skull-came over and extended his hand, which Griffin saw no reason not to take. Whichever brother he was shaking hands with looked like what he was, a career marine: lantern jawed, thick necked, improbably muscled. “So,” he said, pumping Griffin ’s hand in his crushing grip, “no hard feelings?”
Jared, then. Note to self: Jared, skull; Jason, hair. Griffin said no, there were no hard feelings.
The twins were a family enigma, born nearly a decade after Joy (Jane and June were older, the girls all spaced in two-year intervals) and completely different in temperament. As boys they’d worried Harve and Jill by fighting constantly and ferociously, neither ever seeking parental redress or justice. They fought until they bled, then fought some more. But suddenly all of that was over. Instead of wanting to kill each other, they had each other’s backs. With the leftover energy they took to bodybuilding and making gentle, sometimes not so gentle, fun of their father, first behind his back, later to his face. Neither had married. Now in their forties, they still liked heavy-metal music, strip clubs and the kind of women one met there.
“Two sides to every story, I guess,” Jared said, a worm squiggling under the skin of one temple, evidence how costly, for him, such magnanimity actually was. “Push comes to shove, I have to side with my sister, but…”
“I’m kind of on her side myself,” Griffin told him, because it was true, but also because it seemed like a good idea to suggest to Jared that pushing really needn’t come to shoving. Or punching, or stomping, or castration. All of which had apparently been on the table at one point. Brother Jason (not hair so much as stubble, really) was watching them from across the room, Griffin noticed, his expression, well, murderous was probably too strong a word. “I hear your brother left the service,” Griffin ventured, genuinely curious that either twin should do something so brazenly individualistic.
Jared snorted, glancing over his shoulder at his brother and raising his voice enough to be sure he could hear him. “Yeah, well, Jason always was a pussy.”
“We’ll see, J.J.,” his brother called back. This was short for Jared the Jarhead, the nickname he’d immediately picked up when he joined the marines. As if there weren’t enough J’s in the family already. “You wait.”
Joy’s father was indeed in a wheelchair along the far wall. A tall, angular woman who Griffin assumed must be Dot stood sentry at his elbow, and when he approached, she bent at the waist to whisper, like a handler to a pol, in Harve’s ear. To remind him who Griffin was? That he and Joy had separated?
“What?” Harve barked at her, and then, when she repeated whatever she’d told him, said, “Hell, I know who it is.” He extended a feeble, palsied hand, and Griffin felt an unexpected surge of pity. His father-in-law had always been a robust man, but no more. His pale blue eyes were watery, their lids outlined in bright red, as if with a cosmetic pencil.
“Jack,” he said, “are you keeping your head down?”
“Look up and all you’ll see is a bad shot,” Griffin replied. “It’s good to see you, Harve.”
The man nodded. “You know my wife died?”
“Yes,” said Griffin. He’d attended Jill’s funeral, of course, and thought about reminding Harve of this but decided not to. “Yes.”
“He knows,” said Dot, unhelpfully.
“Hell of a thing,” Harve said, unwilling to let go of the subject. “I hope you never have to go through it.”
“Me too,” Griffin said, realizing that despite Joy’s warning he’d given him far too much cognitive credit. If he knew about their separation, he’d clearly forgotten. Either that or someone had informed him that Griffin was bringing a guest to the wedding, and it was this woman he was hoping wouldn’t die on him.
“Hope you never have to walk into a room and find your wife in a heap on the floor.”
“ Harvey,” Dot said, “you’re going to upset yourself.”
“Because that’s no fun, let me tell you,” he went on, ignoring her completely. “No replacing a woman like that.”
Dot sighed and looked off into the middle distance. She’d clearly heard this sentiment expressed many times before.
“You probably didn’t know, but she was writing a pistolary when she died.”
Griffin glanced at Dot, who rolled her eyes. “A Western?” Griffin asked.
“No, a pistolary. You don’t know what that is?”
He confessed he didn’t.
“Well, she was writing one of those,” he said. “Your Joy’s a lot like her mother.”
Ah, Griffin thought, Joy was still his. At least as far as her demented father was concerned.
“All three girls take after their mother, of course, but Joy’s the most like Jilly Always was.”
“And Laura’s like her mother,” Griffin added, hoping he might take comfort in further feminine continuity.
But Harve just blinked at this, clearly unsure who this Laura might be.
“Laura’s the bride,” Dot informed him under her breath. “We’re here for her wedding.”
“Well of course we are,” Harve said. “You think I don’t know my own granddaughter?” Then, to Griffin, “She thinks I forget things, but I don’t. Like you. I remember perfectly well you could never keep your damn head down. You still don’t, I bet.”
“You’re right, Harve, I still look up.”
Harve nodded sadly, as if to admit that human beings were frail creatures indeed. Impossible to teach most of them the rudiments of anything, much less a complex activity like golf. “You look up,” he said, looking up, his watery blue eyes fixing on Griffin, “all you’ll ever see is a bad shot.”
Then he looked away again, and Griffin could tell he was following the errant shot’s trajectory in his mind as it sliced off into the dark woods, out of sight, where he could hear it thocking among the trees.
“I know this really isn’t the time or place,” said Brian Fynch, dean of admissions and Joy’s boss. The rehearsal dinner was over, and people had been encouraged to reconfigure over dessert. Griffin had been seated with Andy’s family, a smaller group, all of whom seemed a bit cowed by the size and sheer decibel level of Joy’s family (Jane and June were both shriekers). For his part, Griffin had been grateful to be seated with them.
Fynch was a tall man, and his suit was well tailored and expensive looking. He seemed comfortable in it, as men who wear suits every day often are. His haircut was early Beatles, sweeping bangs at the eyebrow line, ridiculous, Griffin couldn’t help thinking, for someone his age, a few years younger than Joy, and Griffin immediately dubbed him “Ringo.” Joy had introduced him as her “friend” (the very word Laura had used on the phone when she told him her mother would also be bringing someone to the wedding). “Jack” was how he himself had been introduced to Fynch, as in Jack, of whom you’ve often heard me speak and weep and curse. He chided himself: But come on, Griffin, get a grip. Joy had probably said nothing of the sort. In fact, be grateful. She’d have been well within her rights to introduce him as her soon-to-be ex, which would have been worse. He didn’t realize he’d been half hoping she’d introduce him as her husband (which he still was, after all) until she didn’t.