You Love Me

by Caroline Kepnes

  They found all the records I was looking for and that is my wedding gift to you: a jukebox, the old-fashioned kind with actual records, the one that you told me you always pictured in your Empathy Bordello. You’re right, Mary Kay. I do remember everything, and I took a hit from Oliver—1st Fucking Dibs—but I do have a nest egg and we are making plans for our bookshop, sending each other links to potential locations on Zillow.

  I still volunteer and you still work at the library and the summer days are long, like days in a Sarah Jio book and sometimes it’s a shame that your Friends weren’t good enough for us, because happiness is contagious. It would be nice if RIP Melanda were here to envy us, if RIP Shortus were here to build us a love seat, if your rat were a big enough man to sit in the audience and force a smile when the love of his life chooses better.

  Alas, we can’t control other people. We can only control ourselves.

  We’re such a good fucking family that I want us to go on Family Feud because we would win, even if it was just the three of us, because it was just the three of us. You laughed when I said it last week—That’ll be the day—but when I went on your computer and looked at your search results, there it was: How do you get on Family Feud? I knew it. I knew that once I proposed we would all be in a better place. We are on the roller coaster now and there is no jumping off the ride. Our life is the photograph that rich dimwits pay for at the theme park because their memories alone are inadequate. We took the leap of faith and the coaster was slow to start—amusement parks are all aging and dangerous—but we took our chances. We boarded. We strapped on our seatbelts. And now our hands are in the air and we are coasting.

  Our guesthouse is for guests—Ethan and Blythe can’t make it to the wedding because Blythe caught a parasite from a piece of sushi—but there will be guests eventually. I like it better this way. We are nesting and look what I did for you, Mary Kay! You aren’t the town widow who got fucked over by her druggie husband and her sleazy brother-in-law. You’re my fiancée. You stashed my guitar in the closet—I don’t want to go down that road again, you know?—and I do know. I’m not RIP Phil. I don’t want to be a rock star and it’s like you texted your semi-friend Erin, who is vying for Melanda’s position in your life: I always heard second marriages were like this. I know we’re not married yet but JESUS. Every day I’m like oh. So THIS is how it can be. So yes. Bring New Guy to the party. Believe in love!

  I didn’t sneak into your phone or invade your privacy. You changed your settings and when you get a text the words are right there because for the first time in your adult life, you have nothing to hide from me, from RIP Phil, from anyone. I only look at your back-and-forths when you leave your phone open on the counter because you have to pee and a lot of people look in their spouses’ phones, Mary Kay. I’m sure you’d do it to me too if I were more like you. But I’m me. And you’re you. And we’re not gonna be those unbearable in-your-face assholes who create a Mr. and Mrs. Joe and Mary Kay Goldberg account. We’re not in denial about our individuality. But in a good relationship, you respect your partner’s needs. You’re a worrier so you don’t need to know that I just blew five grand on a vintage tabletop Centipede videogame formerly owned by a fucking Pizza Hut. You don’t need to know that Oliver still didn’t sell his show—issues with Johnny Bates’s likability—but continues to peddle it around that vile no-good city with his agent. To be me is to be aware of all the mugs of urine in the world, in our house. I know where you keep your diary—up high in the closet that’s yours now—but I haven’t opened it once and I dip my razor in the sudsy sink and the shaving cream clings to the blade.

  Perfect.

  I pull my skin and the razor does what razors do, it removes unwanted tiny hairs—I don’t want your face to burn when we get in bed together—and all is right in this world, in this home, on this razor blade, and you knock on the doorframe. “I’m just so fucking happy. Is this… Is this how it’s gonna be?”

  I dip my razor in the suds and once again, perfection. “Yes,” I say.

  You nod. You wear socks. And I tsk-tsk—my floors are hardwood, slippery—and your floors were different and you can’t wear socks around this house and walk safely and you are stubborn—socks are your tights in summer—and you are always stumbling and sliding. I want to protect you. I nag you to wear shoes or go barefoot but you think you’re Tom Cruise in Risky Business. You imitate his famous sliding dance and I shake my head and tell you what I always tell you when you walk around in socks, that life is risky business. “Young lady,” I say. “You need to put on some shoes.”

  You take a step closer and you are over it. “Are you almost ready?”

  I like our nagging because it means we are a real family. We’re being ourselves. You had PMS last week and I surprised you with O.B. tampons and you laughed—Thanks… I think—and you ate the leftover pizza I was planning to eat for breakfast and I was annoyed—I told you one pizza wasn’t enough for three people, that’s TV bullshit when they do that—and you were annoyed—You try getting PMS every month and see how you deal when your own body turns against you—and the Meerkat was annoyed—Mom, can you please not talk about your period so much?—and it was fucking awesome! Because it means we’re like Seinfeld and company on Festivus, we’re airing our grievances instead of letting them boil inside of us. There are weeds in our garden and they complement the flowers and that’s how I know this is real. The flowers and the weeds, I can’t tell them apart, but at the end of the day, I love them all. We’re not afraid of Virginia Woolf in this house. When we tousle it’s a fair fight. Clean.

  You blush, horny like the fiancée that you are and you tell me that you’ll be on the deck and I breathe you in and you kiss my cheek and shaving cream covers your lips and I wish it was whipped cream. You giggle. Dirty. You reach for me with your hand and the door is wide open but you are a fox. You like the risk and this is who we are now. Lovers. You want my hand in your hair and I do what you want and there is no reason for you to know about RIP Beck or RIP Candace—your tongue grazes my shaft—and what we have is real. It’s now.

  You stand. Dizzy. I zip up. Dizzy.

  You are bashful, avoiding your own reflection in the mirror, as if what we just did was wrong. You swat me with a washcloth—Bad Joe, Good Joe—and I throw up my hands—Guilty. I tell you that you make me feel young and then I take it back. “That was the wrong word,” I say. “You make me feel better than young. You make me feel old. I always liked the song ‘Golden Years,’ and I know we’re that old, but I get what Bowie meant in a way I never did before.”

  You like that. And you laugh. “Fun fact,” you say. “When Phil proposed, I was sleeping.”

  I’m used to this by now. When I make a rock ‘n’ roll reference, you respond by talking about your rock ‘n’ RIP husband. And it’s good, Mary Kay. It’s healthy. You’re remembering all the little things that made him fallible because nothing compares to me and I fucking love it when you see the light. I’m excited for the rest of our lives and I grin. “No.”

  “Oh yes,” you say. “He put the ring on my finger and left the house and it took me a long time to notice it and he was so mad…”

  I do not speak ill of the dead but wedding days are like this. You reflect. I kiss your forehead. “I love you.”

  You lean your head into my chest. “Yes, you most certainly do, Joe.”

  And then you smack me on the ass and remind me that we have fifty people waiting downstairs and I salute you. “Aye, aye, Hannibal.” And then you change your mind and you close the door. “Or do you prefer Buster?”

  I lock the door that you closed and I press my body into yours. I run my hand down your back and I pull your panties off and I am on my knees and who gives a shit about the fifty people outside when I am in here, Closer as in closest?

  49

  It’s a shame that RIP Melanda didn’t live to see this.

  Our backyard wedding is just the sort of night she pictured for herself when she read Sarah J
io’s Violets of March and your high school friends are irritating and the Seattle freeze is on—one asshole showed up in a Sacriphil T-shirt, as if Nomi needed that today—because this is our wedding, our celebration of our love.

  The Sacriph-asshole pats me on the back. “He’d want her to be happy,” he says. “But ya know… it’s still weird for some of us.”

  The asshole is drunk but you come to my rescue. “Paul,” you say. “You look like you’re freezing. We put a pile of fleeces by the bar. Why don’t you grab one?”

  He gets the hint and you save this moment, you save me, you save everything. You kiss me. “We did it.”

  “Yes we did.”

  You are my conspirator and you rub your nose into my nose. “And wasn’t I right? Isn’t it kind of more fun this way?”

  I tell you that you were right because you were right. We fucked up a little. We didn’t get a marriage license yet, but you told me that you want us to make it official in private, after all the pictures and the partying, because in the end, it’s nobody’s business but ours, after all.

  You squeeze my ass and whisper in my ear. “If Nancy tries anything funny, I got your back.”

  “Technically, you have my ass.”

  You squeeze harder. “Semantics.”

  And then you’re in circulation, as a bride must be, as loving and warm as you are in the library, only this is our house, our life. Everything is in place now. Brand-new Erin truly is the best replacement. She isn’t horny and snooty like Fecal Eyes and she isn’t a toxic fossil from your past like Melanda. It’s sad but ultimately good that RIP Melanda isn’t here to take pictures of you and put hearts on the unflattering ones, to call out the music for being problematic—Well she was just seventeen—and there’s so much love in the air that she might have gotten weak and wound up mercy-fucking RIP Shortus or Uncle Ivan, not that he came. But you don’t miss him. You say you’ll never forgive him for ignoring the invitation and if he were here, he’d fall off the wagon and start recruiting Nomi’s new friends and that frustrated, fecal-eyed mommy into some new fucking sex ring. I spin you around the tiny dance floor and you turn a little sad as “Golden Years” ends but that’s the way of all songs, all weddings, and I wonder what ever happened to Chet and Rose, the newlyweds in the woods where RIP Beck went to sleep.

  I kiss you gently. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m okay. It’ll pass. Just a little emotional right now.”

  I kiss your hand. “I know.”

  “It’s weird without my core people…” Rotten to the core, all of them. “And at the same time, I’m remembering why I lost touch with half these people…” Atta girl and I kiss you and we don’t need to start having game night as you’ve threatened every now and then. “It’s strange,” you say. “But in a good way, you know?”

  Whitney Houston comes to our rescue and you want to dance and it’s not easy to dance. The floor is small. My yard is small. Boring third-tier friends form a messy circle around us. We are Chet and Rose and it’s us in the center. These people aren’t our people, they’re warm bodies on a late summer night and none of them will be popping by tomorrow—not even Brand-New Erin—and Nomi taps your shoulder and we bring her in and we are that family now, that family everyone else wishes they could be and then the song ends and we aren’t the center anymore. A slower song begins, fucking reggae, somewhere between dancing and not dancing, and it’s too crowded and people are drifting and the three of us keep dancing and you ask Nomi if her friends are having a good time and she shrugs and I tell her that her friends seem cool and she laughs. “Don’t say cool. You sound lame.”

  We have a family chuckle and it’s just as well because her friends don’t really seem all that cool. They’re sulking down by the dock like Philistan fan girls who don’t want to dance with a bunch of old people. But as we know, friends are important, and Nomi finally got rid of the little round glasses. She’s swaying hips I didn’t know were there and she won’t be a Columbine virgin forever and my brain hot-wires. I picture my son years from now, a younger me, macking on Nomi in a bar… but he’s too young for her now and he’ll be too young for her then and we are okay. All of us.

  The reggae fades into “Shout” and Fecal Eyes and women from your Book Club are calling for you—Mary Kay, come do a shot—and it’s the part of the song where you slowly get down and what a sight this is, middle-aged mountain bike people trying to twist. We can have game night, fine, but we won’t be having any fucking dance parties, that’s for sure.

  Nomi loses her balance and grabs my shoulder. “So Melanda texted me yesterday.”

  Impossible. She’s dead and Shortus told the same fucking lie and I stumble but I don’t grab the Meerkat’s shoulder. “Oh yeah? How is she?”

  It’s the part of the song where we work our way back up and Nomi’s talking about Melanda like she’s alive. This is my stepdaughter. This is a child—she’s eighteen but she’s a young eighteen—and she grew up in a should-have-been-broken home so I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s a liar. She lied for the same reason that Shortus lied, because lies make us feel better about ourselves.

  The Meerkat pulls a strand of hair off her face and builds a better world. She tells me that Melanda is so much happier in Minneapolis than she ever was here. “She’s still mad at my mom for not having her back…” In Nomi’s fantasy, Nomi is the glue. The secret. The one with all the power. “But I get it and honestly, she does too because I mean that kid was a kid, you know?”

  I do know and I nod.

  “Anyway, mostly she’s just really happy about how you helped me get back on track with NYU and stuff.”

  “Well that’s great,” I say and Billy Joel picked one hell of a time to start singing about loving somebody just the way they are. I stuff my hands in my pockets. I won’t slow-dance with my fucking stepdaughter. She wears a bra and those father-daughter Facebook dances are perverse. That’s your daughter, you shithead. Alas, Nomi’s father was dead when he was alive—the end of the summer, the end of all your fun—and she puts her hands around my neck. She wants to dance and this is wrong—eighteen is too close to seventeen—but she leaves me no choice. I rest my hands on her hips and I hit bare skin, but if my hands go lower, they’re on her ass, if they go higher, they’re on her chest. She looks up at me and there is moonlight—Are people looking at us?—and she smiles. “I owe you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say and I wish Billy Joel would shut up and I wish you would come back. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “No,” she says. “The only reason I get to go to New York is cuz you helped me see that Ivan was a jerk.”

  I lie to her and tell her that Ivan isn’t necessarily a bad guy, that good people go through hard times and that life is long, that Ivan will go back to being good. Her smile is too bright and we need to find this kid a boyfriend. Or a best friend. These new Friends of hers are no good—two of them are pouring vodka into red plastic cups—and Nomi looks into my eyes—no—and I search for you, but you’re busy by the fire pit with your fucking Friends. The Meerkat has fingers—who knew—and she runs the tips of those fingers through my hair. I pull away. She claps her hands. She doubles over. She’s laughing at me—Omigod you are so paranoid—and she’s teasing me—You really do watch too much of that Woody Allen stuff—and then she turns serious because I am too serious. So I muster a laugh. “Sorry.”

  “You just had a bug in your hair. I was pulling it out.”

  I scratch my head the way you do when someone reminds you that you have one. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says, stepping back, on her way to her bad-influence friends. “I won’t tell my mom about your little freak-out. I’m not stupid.”

  None of our wedding guests saw what happened and maybe that’s because nothing happened. I fix a drink—I am of age—and I search the air around me for bugs. Gnats. Fruit flies. Anything. I see nothing. And then you are here, by my side, following my sight line into the abyss.
“We really hit the jackpot, huh? No rain.”

  You make everything better and you stare at the stars above and you sigh. “I saw you dancing with Nomi,” you say. “That really made me happy. That’s when it all kind of hit me, Buster. We did it. We really did.”

  We all know the rules. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. You saw us dancing and you saw nothing and this is the good part of my life so I go with it, I go where you go because I can, because I have to. “Yep,” I say. “It made me happy too.”

  50

  Better safe than sorry and I am playing Centipede, just like Oliver and Minka. I play alone—you don’t know about my game—and I am winning. The goal is simple: Do not be alone with Nomi. Kill that Centipede every time it appears on-screen. Except in this game, I don’t kill her. It’s in her nature to want to be with me and there are bugs, she might have been trying to take a bug out of my hair. But you just never know, do you? And the Centipede isn’t evil and we’re all just prone to root for the soldier, the player, because the Centipede is presented as the enemy. I am like you—a future cofounder of the Empathy Bordello—and I am able to see things from Nomi’s perspective. She lost her father. Her uncle’s a motherfucker. Her fake uncle died in a hunting accident and proceeded to be torn apart by wild animals. And now she has a stepfather. It’s confusing stuff and the Centipede is on a mission to get close to me and it is my duty to do what is best for the Centipede: to stay the fuck away from her.

  This is no way to live, being endangered in my own house, but in four days she goes to New York and that means no more fucking Centipede. At least, not until the real Centipede arrives, the two-player tabletop I bought for us. You walk into the kitchen and I pour coffee into your mug and you say you don’t have time for that. You have to catch the ferry. Erin is meeting you in Seattle to see a designer. I push the coffee across the table. “Oh come on,” I beckon. “You can do that later. Stay home.”