Page 12 of Fathers of the Bride

With a supreme effort, I resisted the temptation to verbally grind him into little bits and instead asked, “Can you believe our little girl is getting married?”

He smiled, a bit sadly, and said, “No, I can’t.”

One of the hardest things about divorce is that there’s no one else you can really say things like that to. No one else who knows exactly what ‘our little girl’ really means. Well, that was a sentimental thought.

“She’s barely twenty-four,” I said. “How can she get married?”

“We weren’t much older.”

“Yes. And look how that turned out.”

“Miles, our marriage was very good for a very long time. We just took a wrong turn.”

“A wrong turn? It was a relationship, not a weekend trip to Palm Springs.”

He smirked, letting out a tiny guffaw.

“What’s so funny?”

“That time you got us completely lost in Palms Springs.”

“I would never have gotten lost if they hadn’t named everything after Bob Hope.”

“That is not even remotely true. Everything in Palm Springs isnotnamed after Bob Hope—a few things—”

“Fine. Everything they didn’t name after Bob Hope they named after Dinah Shore.”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Just admit you have a terrible sense of direction.”

I was admitting no such thing.

“I get where I need to go.”

That made Andy smile, again. He said, “I wish…” but then stopped.

“You wish what?”

“I wish things had turned out differently. That’s all.”

“Well, that would require your having made completely different choices, wouldn’t it?” I said, and even as I said it, I wondered if it was really what I’d meant to say. Not to mention, I hated the shrill tone in my voice.

“I stand by my choices,” he said, calmly. Too calmly.

“You stand by your choices. Really?”

“Yes, I do.”

Apoplectic. Instantly apoplectic. I thought I might burst a blood vessel. Which would not be good. I did not want to die in Bean There Donut That sitting at a café table with my ex. God, what would my obituary say? ‘Miles Kettering-Lane died unpeacefully surrounded by people he couldn’t stand.’ No, that would not do.

Still though, I felt like a train about to run off its tracks. I decided to take some advice I’d read in a self-help book. Lame, I know, but I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten. Breathing carefully in and out. Two, three, four. In and out. Seven, eight, nine. Inhale. Ten.

When I opened my eyes again, Andy was gone. He’d left me alone with my anger.

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