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She stops suddenly, looks me up and down, then, with a huge smile on her face, pulls her phone from her back pocket and holds it up.Click.
“It’s your first walk of shame.” She holds the phone in my direction to show the picture. I look disheveled and stunned. “Had to capture the moment.”
“Really, Sophie?”
“Someday you’ll look back on it fondly.” She tucks the phone into her back pocket. “Okay, time to spill the deets.”
“I sent you a text. I was out with the guys.” I drop my wallet and keys on the table by the door. The table Sophie insisted I get when she moved back in after her freshman year in the dorms. Apparently, my life was in complete disorder without an entry table.
She eyes me suspiciously.
“Yeah, but you never go out.”
I shrug. “It was the last night at the revue so I decided to change it up.”
“Where did you go? What did you do?” Her eyes are filled with curiosity as she rapid fires questions at me. “And where did you sleep last night?”
On my drive home from The Strip, I’d thought about what I was going to tell Sophie, my brain still working through what Emma and Jess had proposed. Me going to New York for the next three weeks to pose as Emma’s husband. Technically, I am Emma’s husband, so the posing would be to show the world—specifically this Kandi Kline woman—that we intentionally got married and are living our happily ever after.
Initially, I thought it was a ridiculous idea, but seeing the chaos her viral video and the announcement of our marriage has caused for Emma and her brand, I don’t know that there’s any other way to protect her image. Seeing the look of desperation on Emma’s face, I’ve determined it’s what I need to do to make things right.
Before I left Emma’s hotel room, she and Jess offered me compensation. Jess wrote me a check, assigned a number value to my participation in this scheme, but I don’t plan on cashing it. I don’t think Emma should pay me thousands of dollars for a mistake we made together. To satisfy Jess, I folded the check and put it in my wallet.
While I always make it a point to be honest with Sophie, I’m having a hard time informing her I got drunk and married a stranger. Everything I’ve done for the last twelve years is to set a good example for Sophie and I hate that this could change how she sees me. I know everyone is allowed mistakes, but I’ve held myself to a higher standard and one night of poor decision making could undo it all.
Also, I know that Sophie harbors guilt about me raising her and giving up things in my twenties, like dating and partying—which was always my choice—but if she knew I had found a woman that I was interested in, let alonemarriedher, she’d never let me blow it off as a wild night. She’d have some romantic notion about it. Tell me it’s meant to be.
Sophie is a romantic. She’s never had a serious boyfriend, that I know of, probably because I’ve done my best to keep her focus on school and her future career, but she wants to plan weddings for a living. The union of two people and the romance of that event makes her gush with happiness. From the early days when she was planning Barbie and Ken’s wedding to her high school junior prom where she headed the committee that coordinated a rustic romance themed prom complete with wooden doors and archways and thousands of twinkle lights. She talked a local florist into donating greenery so she could make vine-like chandeliers to hang from the ceiling. Then she entered a prom theme contest and her school was featured inSeventeenmagazine. It gave her the confidence to seek out a part-time job assisting a wedding planner at one of the hotels on The Strip. And now she’s weeks away from graduating and starting her career.
I’m searching for the best response when I sniff the air. “Is something burning?”
“Oh, shit. Pancakes!” Her blonde ponytail whips the air as she abandons the suitcase and rushes into the kitchen.
I quickly follow.
“Oh no!” she wails when she flips the pancake and finds it overdone.
“You’re making pancakes?” I ask.
“I thought we’d do happy face pancakes.” She sighs at the charred surface of the pancake. “We haven’t done them in forever, but I got distracted with packing, and interrogating you. Now they’re burnt.”
Happy face chocolate chip pancakes are a Sunday tradition. I started it when Sophie was ten, shortly after we lost our mom. The social worker who was in charge of our case said it would be good for us to establish some routines together. It would give us both a sense of order and stability, something we hadn’t been given by any of our parents. Now that we’re older, it doesn’t happen every Sunday, but we try to do it once a month. We’ve been busy the last few months. Sophie approaching graduation and preparing for her final project, while I had been studying for the bar exam during the day and working for the revue at night.
I reach out my hand to indicate for her to hand me the spatula. “You finish packing, I’ll take care of the pancakes.”
She hands me the spatula. I lift the burnt pancakes from the griddle and drop them into the compost bin, then reach for the batter to start a fresh batch.
While I cook, Sophie moves around the kitchen collecting items for her trip.
“Are you ready for this?” I ask.
“God, yes. Three weeks and I’m graduating! I can’t wait to be done.”
“Have you heard from your summer internship applications?”
“A few.”
I watch the batter bubble, then carefully flip it over.
