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“Good.” Dad closes the short space between us. Clamping on to my shoulder, he looks me head-on. “I asked her to marry me.”
“Who?” I ask in disbelief.
He drops his hand and crosses his arms, looking annoyed. “Ju-Lee-Uh.” He enunciates like I’m a child learning my first word.
My only response is a dropped jaw and twitching eye.
“Come on, Nate. You can’t be upset about this. You’re thirty-three. Your mother and I have been divorced for ten years. She’s been married twice since, and you never had an issue with that.”
“One of those marriages was an accident and immediately annulled. The other was to a manher age.”
Mom and Dad didn’t have a messy divorce. They just grew apart. Once I graduated from college, Mom left the country, becoming nomadic as she tried to reenact her personal version ofEat. Pray. Love.For a long time, Dad just worked. He dated here and there, but nothing serious. Then, one day, he meets a yogalates enthusiast and life coach, who isthirty yearshis junior.
I hold up my hands, looking at his expression that’s a mix of pissed and wounded. “What do you want me to say?” I ask defeatedly.
“Congratulations.”
“Fine. Congratulations,” I parrot flatly.
“And that you’ll make an effort to get to know Jules.”
“Okay. I’ll make an effort to get to know Julia.” I definitely won’t, but I’m trying not to be a dick to his face.
“And you’ll be my best man.”
Oh, hell.“Don’t you think Uncle Mac would want to do it? I don’t want to take that from him. I know how close you are.”
Dad sucks air through his teeth, the sharp squeak echoing off the rubble surrounding us. “Uncle Mac?”
“Yes.”
“The same Uncle Mac I speak to about once a year and only when he wants to withdraw a lump sum from his inheritance?” Dad oversees his little brother’s allowance. It’s a pain point between them. But after Mac almost spent a quarter billion dollars by commissioning the finest minds at NASA to build him a functional version of Optimus Prime,to scale, the entire family agreed he needed to be cut off.
“I’m happy. And Jules is wonderful in every way. She’s the reason I bought this place.”
“Not helping her case.”
“She’s teaching me to see the beauty in potential instead of focusing on the bottom line. We know how to acquire and sell and make more money than we’ll ever know what to do with—but this?” He holds his palms up and takes a few steps back, gesturing to the condemned building like he’s proud. “Let’s bond over building something from nothing. I won’t be here forever, kid. This is the kind of stuff you’ll remember when I’m gone.”
“You don’t want to hire a project management team. You want to do this ourselves?”
His face is filled with the excitement of a kid in a candy store. “Yeah. From the studs. We pick the architects, the designers, approve the concepts, and do the walkthroughs. Let’s get our hands dirty. A real father-son project.”
I scoff. “It’s a colossal undertaking.” Typically our firm just deals with the numbers. When your corporation is worth billions, you hire people to hire other people. We sign the checks; they make the magic. I don’t do site walkthroughs until the project is finished, or someone needs to be fired. Getting involved in the details turns one step into fifty.
“What do you say?”
A reluctant, “Fine,” breaks through my lips. “Let’s do it.”
“What about being my best man?”
Agreeing to that would make it difficult to stay in denial about this marriage. But this is my dad… He’s the best guy I know. He didn’t give up on me during my darkest times. He was patient and supportive when I made decisions he didn’t understand. I can’t not do this for him.
I let out a deep sigh of exasperation. “Your bachelor party—strippers or no strippers?”
Dad laughs and pulls me into a rib-crushing bear hug. “Thank you, son. I knew I could count on you.”
“Congratulations, Dad. I mean it.” I wish I didn’t sound so sullen. It’s not only that I’m not particularly fond of my father’ssoon-to-be bride, it’s also a painful role reversal. I asked my dad to be my best man, too. For a wedding that never happened. Three years later, it still hurts miserably.