Page 158

She took my face in both hands. She was crying, which she’d sworn she wouldn’t, and her mascara was going, and her pearls had slipped sideways. I looked down into her small, fierce, beautiful face and thought: she’s going to do this at my funeral, too. She’ll cry into a tissue in the front row and tell the priest he’s got the wrong hymn.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said.

“Mom—”

“I’m not finished.” She sniffled. “When you were a baby, you didn’t sleep. You screamed for hours. Your father walked the halls with you every night. He said, Catherine, this boy is going to be trouble. And I said, Richard, he is going to be loved. “ She wiped her eyes. “And you are. Look at you. You are so loved that I cannot see straight.”

I couldn’t speak. I put my arms around her, and she felt very small, and I held on.

“Now,” said my mother, into my lapel. “Go and marry that boy before I lose my nerve and make him sign a prenup.”

“There’s no prenup.”

“There is an anti -prenup. It’s in the safe.”

“Mom.”

“Go!”

We got married in February.

I’d like to say it was romantic, and it was. But mostly it was cold. Maksim had wanted a wedding in the place where he’d first tasted bread, and there was no place on earth I could refuse him, so Mom rented a stone barn on the edge of a lake, in the hills north of the city, and strung it with a thousand white lights. Snow lay thick on the fields. The lake was frozen. Inside, there were long wooden tables and a roaring fire, and a band, and a bar, and about a hundred and forty guests in coats and scarves and formal boots.

It was the best-attended wedding of the year. Half the guests were hockey players, and the other half were my mother’s friends, who had all read about the hostage situation in the Times and wanted to see the couple in person. Nobody said a word about it, only “congratulations” and “we’re so happy for you.” Mrs. Van der Berg from the club took my mother aside and whispered, “My nephew is also ,” and my mother said, “How lovely,” with a face like a queen accepting a gift.

I had a best man.

I had, to be honest, a lot of options. But there’s only one person you ask to stand next to you when you do the scariest thing you’ve ever done, and I’d asked him in the Blue Line, over a plate of onion rings, and he’d burst into tears.

“I’m honored,” Jason had said. “I’m so honored. I’ll cry. I’ll cry in the speech. I’ve prepared, like, forty minutes.”

“Please don’t do forty.”

“Fifteen.”

“Five.”

“Ten, and I’ll do the goose story.”

“There’s no goose story.”

“There is now. “

He stood beside me at the altar, in a black tux, with his hair combed for the first time in his life and his eyes already wet. He’d been trembling since noon. I could feel it through his sleeve.

“You good?” I whispered.

“I’m so good.”

“You’re shaking.”

“It’s a happy shake. “

“Okay.”

“I love you, man.”

“Shut up, Jason.”