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“Pinky swear it?” He held his hand up, pinky finger extended. I looked to his previously broken pinky that never quite healed right, then to his big brown eyes. The air was clear and clean, so I shook my head, grabbed his crooked finger with mine, and giggled. “Anything else?” he added with a firm squeeze around my little finger.

“I got nothin’. That’s it. Clean slate now. You?”

“Nope, I’m good. Skeletons are all out. Let’s get married, ya dirty barracks ho.” He laughed a fantastic, pure, whole-hearted laugh as I put the car in gear and looked for traffic. The left turning signal ticked through my surprise.

“You got jokes! Okay, when your bastard son comes knocking on our door for a child support check, we’ll see who was the barracks ho. Go ahead, tell your bastard son you da baby daddy.”

“Ohhhhh burn! That’s a good one coming from a cum-guzzling gutter slut. Boo-yeah, puta!”

The jokes went on like that getting more vulgar at each stoplight until we had to whisper them in each other’s ear while we stood in line at the courthouse. It must have looked as if we were in an enchanted whirlwind of love.

I didn’t talk much about Doug and the whirlwind of young love to my family. My sister knew more about him than anyone but never figured I would run off to get married. I told my mother what my plans were the week before we were to elope in Vegas in a slipup on the phone. She was so hurt and caught off guard that she and her second husband immediately drove from Ohio to Arizona to meet this punk kid. I’m sure their plan was to deter me from a horrible fleeting mistake. A mother’s idea of her daughter’s wedding does not involve jeans or an ordained minister dressed as Elvis. This is why her eyes were swollen with tears when she finally arrived in the small western town outside of the military installation. You could tell she had her husband stop at a gas station so she could splash a little water on her saddened face and attempted to hide red eyes with makeup.

Doug and I met Mom and her second husband at a local award-winning steak house that was a brothel until the Gold Rush ended. We used the history of the place to strike up ice-breaking conversation. It worked and they both seemed a little calmer by the end of dinner, but not enough to make it any easier to not be a part of the wedding. The truly sad part was that we left for Las Vegas right after the meal was finished. We had no idea she was coming until she called that afternoon to let me know she was a few hours away.

Mom drove across the United States of America to rescue her daughter from insanity; after dinner, she watched me drive off to the City of Sin. I broke my mother’s heart, but for some reason her only verbal protest consisted of one question: “Are you sure?”

If there was more, I didn’t hear it. In fact, I was so self-absorbed that when I opened the box of gifts my mother had selected in haste, I passed judgment on almost every item. I was ashamed that she went to the thrift store, embarrassed that she spent money she didn’t have on items I didn’t want. I was reluctant to take joy in her attempt to salvage her dreams for my wedding day. I pitied her and thought it was cute how she tried to make it special for me.

My egotistical mind was arrogant to what I was doing to everyone but myself and my new fiancé. I thought I was being humble in my desire to be in love. I didn’t need a frilly dress and huge ceremony to feel that or proclaim it. Weddings are for families and friends anyway. It was as true to me then, as it is now; only now I can say it with older, wiser convictions.

Weddings are for friends. They want to see your happiness in ceremony and cry with you as they have done at every major event shared between friends. They are for family. Siblings want to be a part of supporting who you vow to spend the rest of your life with and witness the passion to which you devote yourself to another person. Mothers want to be in the back and do whatever it is they do to comfort their daughters and cry uncontrollably as the vows are said. Fathers want to give their daughters away and share that special father-daughter dance before another man becomes the center of her world. It’s a religious experience. It’s tradition. It’s the right way to declare that two people are one in the eyes of friends, family, the legal system, and God. I was just fucking ignorant enough to think that I could be in love without the approval of anyone.

Doug and I drove to Las Vegas in his immaculate black car with the marriage license stowed away in a book bag he carried throughout high school. Mom’s box of white wedding gifts sat opened in the backseat minus the tiara that read, “I’m the bride,” which was on my head until the cheap plastic dug into the back of my ears about fifteen minutes into the drive.

Sometime during hour number three, after the singing and frantic chatting died down, slow music and the hypnotizing road gave pause for reflection. “This is just crazy.”

“Isn’t it?” I agreed. “What are you going to say to your parents? They are going to hate me.” I immediately looked beyond the farthest mountain of the Arizona desert, as it slowly seemed to move with our travel.

“No, they won’t. Did you tell your dad yet?”

I whipped my head to him and shot daggers from my eyes. Doug knew my dad and I had a falling out just before I turned eighteen. Three weeks before my birthday, I moved in with my mother and didn’t talk to him for almost a year until I went home for Sunny’s wedding. Since then, I had discovered independence, sexuality, the value of a dollar, and my right to utterly break free from a living Diablo I knew as my stepmom, thus creating an insurgency against my father and anything else that I felt was holding back my life force.

“No, I did not. He is seriously going to kill me.” I looked to the mountains again for comfort.

“You should call him.”

“I will once we get there,” I assured him as a beautiful bird gracefully dove to the earth and lifted in its grasp a small desert snake.

My dad was unfairly oblivious to the happenings in my life as I met and surprised my future in-laws with the news. I’m sure they thought I was a lovely, foolish girl, but nothing topped the insanity of calling my dad. I’d never mentioned a word about Doug to him. He didn’t even know I was seeing someone other than Robert back home. In fact, my dad was still building a son in-law relationship with my first love when I decided to tell him the news.

When we finally arrived in Las Vegas and all of the hugs had gone to each one of his family members, I called my dad. “Guess where I’m at.” I paused for a moment as Douglas sat with me on the bed.

He was relaxed and calm. “I don’t know. Where?”

“Las Vegas!”

“You are? What are you doing there?”

“I’m getting married tomorrow. Do you want to talk to your future son-in-law?” I said it all in one fell swoop. It was so easy for me to smile and say it without shaking or worry because the clarity of the decision to be married was so obvious. I knew I was hurting feelings and crushing parental dreams, but I never once second-guessed myself. And, believe me, I am typically the queen of needing constant reassurance. It was pure self-centered bliss with Doug, and anything outside of my protective box meant nothing, even breaking my father’s heart.

“WHAT!” he yelled, outraged. “No, I don’t want to talk to him! Who is this kid? I’ve never heard you talk about…what’s his name? Where did you meet him? What about Robert?”

I attempted to calm him. “Dad. He’s twenty-five, about six-foot-two, one hundred sixty-five pounds, dark hair, big brown eyes. His parents are Spanish, German, and Italian. They live in Vegas and we are staying with them right now…”

Dad cut me off. “Italian. Are they in the mob?” For a second he thought all of this was a joke, and he actually laughed. “You are kidding, right?”