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“Honey,” she said to me. “You have excellent taste in men. You’ll have to tell me all about how you met him.”
“Mom,” I said. “This is Brody. You know? Dad’s friend.”
“Oh!” She looked surprised.
Brody stepped in to explain. “I’ve only met you, dear,” he said to me. “Your father’s been very protective of his girls.”
“Speaking of your father,” mom said. “Where is he?” Mom started to rush outside of the building, heading past the busy crowds of people who were ambling out of the airport.
I didn’t want to tell her that Daddy didn’t want to see her, a bitter fact that I intended to fix. When Brody and I had talked about it, he told me I was just rushing things.
“Give it time,” he had told me.
Brody took my sister and mother’s bags, getting the vehicle started.
“No driver?” My mother asked in a snooty tone.
“I can drive,” Brody said. “Besides, drivers are for men who want to be carried around like wo—“
“Brody,” I said, reminding him that he didn’t need to conform to overly macho stereotypes. “Mother, he’s driving us because we don’t need other people doing everything for us.”
The real reason was actually much simpler than that. Brody’s man, Carlo, had gotten COVID, and while we didn’t worry about it, Brody wanted to make sure my baby was born without disease.
Mother, Emma, and I were soon entranced with good conversation as Brody took us to Daddy’s. Even though dad didn’t want the girls over, I had convinced him that it would be a nice gesture, and, to my surprise, he had agreed.
It had started to feel like everything was coming together. I was with my once absent family, and even my father was willing to try new things.
Brody pulled up to Daddy’s, a modest home in the Chicago suburbs.
“This is your home?” Mother asked, the disdain clear in her tone of voice.
“No, Mother,” I said, then quipped. “Mine’s much smaller.”
Mom was horrified, and I smiled inwardly at her overt materialism. I could have anything I wanted, but peace was something that you couldn’t just buy. You had to work for it.
Love worked the same way, and when father finally reunited with my mother and sister, I could tell that the three needed some time to get situated with one another.
Their first encounter was awkward, as father had started mentioning the fact that mother had left him.
“Dawn,” he said. “You took Emma away from me, and Emma, you turned your back on me.”
Brody gave me the excuse to leave as we needed to “talk in private.”
“That was a lame excuse,” I said to him. “Talk in private, come on, I could have come up with something much better than that.”
It was in that moment that I realized Brody wasn’t right in front of me, towering over me with his tall body. I looked down, and saw the much anticipated moment of my lifetime.
He was kneeling down and held a small box in his hands, with a small ring in it.
“Adriana King,” he said. “Will you be my wife?”
Of course, I said yes.
The two of us must have been quite the sight to see. My mother, sister, and father all came out from whatever it is they had been doing.
“So?” My father asked. He seemed to be the one who wanted to know the most, by the expression on his face. My mother was also curious, and Emma…Emma just followed.
“What do you think I said?”
