Alone in the parking lot, the cold clogging my nose and scraping against my newly shaved face, I listen to the cars speeding by, their snow tires slapping heavy and useless against the pavement. The low December sun glares from behind the clouds, casting an icy sheen over the tree tops and deserted Detroit factories. At my feet, dried leaves skitter across the lot until they buck up against the back fence of the yellow cinderblock 7-Eleven. “Roast Beef, $3.29/lb. Get it here—QUICK!” the sign says. “You need it—we got it.”

I finger the envelope in my pocket. Check the number on the door. This is the place.

Could have fooled me.

I watch another car turn into the lot. A ’71 red Buick Skylark. Prize of a car. Lady with her hair done up in a twist is driving. My breath catches in my chest. No. Not Cora, though it could be one of her customers. One last time, I take out the invitation. My hands tremble. The letters shine like tar.

Cora Ginetti Vitale

requests the honor of your presence

at the marriage of

Angelina Mary Vitale

and Scott John

on the seventeenth of December

Nineteen eight-five

4:00 P.M.

1682 East Grand Boulevard

Detroit, Michigan

 

I shake my head. My name not even there. Like I’m dead or something.

“You ever tell your mama I call you every other week?” I once asked Angie on the phone. “And send money each month?”

“Nah, Dad. It’s not worth it,” she said. “I don’t bring you up. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.”

Yeah, I think, staring at the convenience store. This is what comes of keeping your mouth shut.

 

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take to my new life after I left Angie and Cora. I wish I could say the fire drove me away, but it didn’t. I stayed six more years, until Angie told me she wanted to move to my sister’s house. Closer by miles to the high school, and closer to her friends. My plan was to strike east from Detroit and find a job outdoors. It was 1979. I was thirty-four and tired of working under cars all week. Tired of patrolling empty plant halls at night and on the weekends for extra cash. And tired of knowing how unhappy I was making Cora. So I set off, leaving her the car and putting out my thumb. I ended up being lucky when a trucker picked me up on his way to the Scranton sandpits. They needed people, he said.

I loved the sandpits—the sun on my face, the heavy lifting, the sound of the sand rushing down the chutes into the waiting trucks. At night, I had tons of quiet and books to read. Always a reader. Every other Sunday, I talked with Angie.

But when winter came, the cold drove me south. I moved on to St. Louis and then Dallas, fixing rails, tending the yards, piling feed and fertilizer. I loved the big engines. Loved watching them slide along the shiny rails, their wheel pistons churning back and forth inside the big steel rims. Loved watching the sparks fly, too. Same as Angie. When she was little, she used to hang out with me at the garage, sit on one of the old aluminum bar stools, kick out her legs, and gaze at the driveshafts spinning. “Daddy,” she’d say, “What makes the sparks fly? Why do the pistons fire in that order? Why don’t the belts just sheer in half, they work so hard?” She had a touch of her mother’s southern twang, then, and just like her mother, she never stopped long enough to hear the answers. Maybe that was a good thing, not waiting to hear the answers.

I stayed in Dallas almost four years until the railroad moved me to Denver, then Boise—too cold there for me—so I went to Abilene. That’s where I was, readying cars for a load of beef, when the invitation came. I couldn’t believe the fancy lavender scrawl on the envelope. Cora’s writing. Cora’s favorite color. Angie’s name in the return box.

 

In the parking lot, I wait as a few more cars arrive. Young people dressed in fancy clothes, frills and tuxedos hanging down below their parkas, greet each other with hoots and hellos. Their laughter hangs in the frozen air like it might stay there forever. I watch as they enter, not wanting to admit what holds me back. Not my fear of seeing Angie. I can’t wait to see her. But my fear of seeing Cora. Suppose she’s changed. Suppose she hasn’t.

Near the door, an older woman stops to ground out her cigarette underfoot. She looks me up and down as she twists real hard, like she could put out all the fires in the world. Me in my khakis, flannel shirt, and a borrowed wool coat. I clutch the invitation in my hand. “Hey, I’m here for love,” I want to say. “You got a problem with that?”

For a few more minutes, I stay outside. So much easier to hang here with the cars. Things I understand. Brakes yanked into place, ignitions clicked off, low beams disappearing into sockets like water sucked down a drain.

I never really got over leaving Angie. I mean, I managed okay. I figured after I left, things would finally get better. But deep inside, I’ve always worried Angie thinks I’m a deserter. That she doesn’t believe in me anymore. I think you should be able to believe in your Daddy, even if I wasn’t so hot with mine. I’d make up for that, I used to tell Angie. And Cora.

I stare as two men about my age come out the door. One holds a jug of milk. The other cradles chips and soda. They slap each other on the back and guffaw. “What’s so funny?” I want to say. I step inside, see the pink and blue twisted crepe paper and fat silver bells hanging from the fluorescent lights. “We love you Scott and Angie!” reads a banner over the meat counter. Big red hearts on either side. “We’re having a wedding!” the store clerk whispers loudly. He points toward the milk coolers at the far end. Above the silver rims, a cow jumps over the moon.

I stand very still. How could Cora let Angie’s wedding be here?

 

On Angie’s tenth birthday, I didn’t expect Angie to walk into the kitchen from the backyard where she was having her party only to find Cora with an empty Dewars bottle in one hand and a full glass of scotch in the other. Angie didn’t know I’d just told Cora she couldn’t go eat pizza with the kids. Or dance with them. Or embarrass Angie with her wheeling about. Slurring words. Dropping things. Not if she was rotten drunk.

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” Cora was saying, her eyes and voice burning into me.

Angie stopped in the doorway when she heard the argument. “Not today, Mama. It’s my—”

Cora spun around to face her. “You keep out of this,” she said. She took a drag on her cigarette. “None of your business.”

“It is too,” Angie said, as if all her buddies outside had coached her. Ten years old now. Double digits. You can say whatever you want. “Daddy and I are only trying to help,” she added, looking toward me.

Cora put her head back, her long dark hair swishing with its own weight, and laughed a dry snide laugh. “Don’t you tell me about daddies,” she scoffed. She grabbed the side of the counter, her balance unsteady but her words driven with the force of someone hitting a nail only once. “You need to shut your mouth sometimes, Ang—”

“Don’t talk to her like that, Cora.” I gestured for Angie to go back to her party. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

“No, she hasn’t,” Cora said, pivoting toward me. “But then who has? Who’s keeping me from spending my own dead mama’s money on whatever I want?” She held up the Dewar’s bottle. “I make my own choices.”

Angie’s eyes filled with tears. “But I came in to ask you to light my candles and sing to me.” She walked closer to Cora. Reached for the glass.

“No, Angie,” I said, stepping forward. “Leave your mother—”

Angie shook her head. Extended her hand, her eyes meeting her mother’s. “I know what you’re doing, Mama. Drinking your life away. You think that doesn’t hurt—?”

Cora’s hand flashed against Angie’s cheek, a slap that stunned Angie so much she froze a few seconds before she turned and ran out. Cora had never hit anyone before.

“Cora!” I yelled, my voice hard and mean in a way I never expected to hear it. “Don’t you touch Angie. Don’t you—”

“Don’t you ‘don’t’ me,” Cora said, crouching down, burying her head in her hands, and shaking with her crying. When I knelt beside her, she pushed me away.

Later that night, I guess it was luck or instinct that woke me and got me downstairs to pull Cora from the burning bedspread on the sofa. A full ashtray beside her. Angie heard me yelling and rushed downstairs to help me beat out the flames. Cora, unharmed, was too drunk to wake up. Next morning, she said she didn’t remember anything. Not until I picked up the phone to call her doctor to get her back to the clinic.

 

In front of the cash register, I stand on my tiptoes. Where is Angie? There she is, framed by the silver milk cooler doors, her back to me. Broad where it used to be skinny. Smooth and white, edged by the lace of a long white satin gown. Her dark hair is up in a twist. Sparkling with a band woven through it. Cora’s doing, no doubt. The guy beside her wears a tuxedo—obviously Scott. Same height as Angie. Stocky and with dark brown hair. Like me. Except the collar of my shirt doesn’t pinch my neck, and sweat isn’t running down my hairline.

Why didn’t she tell me about Scott?

Above them, a wrought iron clock set in a big Slurpee cup registers the time. 4:05. A man clears his throat. “Friends and family,” he begins as a blast of cold air shoots through the door. A young woman, not wearing a coat, rushes in and beelines for the soda cooler. “Yo, Frank,” she hails the cashier in passing.

I shake my head. How could Angie’s wedding be here?

“We are gathered to celebrate—” the man’s voice rings out as I step between the aisles and pull myself up onto the bottom shelf of a cracker display. I scan over the crowd. In the far corner, a tall thin man with a bow tie shuffles his papers. Angie and Scott turn to face him. Where is Cora? She must be somewhere near the front, her hair up in a black twist, too. She would do that, wouldn’t she?

I wonder if she ever thinks back to the night of the fire. Her thick, disheveled hair strewn across her face and body, inches from the flames.

I never told Angie that Cora swore she wasn’t going into detox again. “Unless you get out of here first,” she told me.

There are some secrets you don’t tell your children. Not if they don’t ask. And not if they aren’t your secrets to tell.

The man in the bow tie waits for the crowd to quiet. “We are gathered here today,” he says finally, “to honor the love of …” Behind me, the door swishes open with another blast of cold air. Three girls enter in a titter. They giggle their way to the chips. Tiptoe back to the register. The drawer dings. “Happy wedding!” they shout. The crowd turns and laughs. Not Angie and Scott.

Not me, either. I grip the top of the shelf, determined to ignore the intrusions. The laughter. The clanging. The banging. The rustle of goods on the counter. The ding at the deli as the words of the ceremony float toward me, through me, filling me up. Who doesn’t think about their own wedding vows when they hear someone else’s? Especially their daughter’s. A serious, lifelong union … committed to loving one another… Requires deep commitment… trust… a lot of patience… be there for each other…in joy and … in difficult times.

When Cora and I got married in the fall after our high school graduation, she and her mother invited a hundred guests, perfumed and flounced, and ordered vases upon vases of flowers to fill the church. “Stargazer lilies and baby’s breath,” Cora insisted. “For our future,” she whispered. She didn’t tell her mother, and nor did I tell my elderly parents, she was pregnant. Our big secret. The thing that would forever hold us together, we thought. Her mother, fingertips yellowed by years of smoking, her face flushed deep red, came to the wedding with a flask in her bag, and never stopped crying.

Cora didn’t tell me until a few weeks before our wedding that when she was fourteen, she had a baby girl her parents made her give up for adoption. Not that she wanted the baby or thought she could handle that, she said. Her parents made sure her ninth-grade boyfriend and his family moved far away. Then they put her in a home for unwed girls. When she came home afterwards, too depressed to speak, her dad began to hit her, calling her lazy, until she told him she’d call the police. When her father died in a car wreck a year after the adoption, “his own drunken fault,” Cora said, “I never told my mother I thought he had it coming.”

Repeat after me.

Do you take this man? Do you take this woman? To honor and to cherish? In sickness and in health? Richer or poorer?

 

Sometimes, like today, my heart beats like an animal running. Not for its life, I want to believe, but for the joy of seeing someone else succeed.

After her detoxes, Cora often hung out with me and Angie in the kitchen, sitting on a stool, smoking her cigarettes, and sipping Pepsi from a tall plastic glass, but she didn’t eat much. Even when I made toast or a sandwich or dinner just the way she liked it, she left the food largely untouched. Mostly, she stared at Angie, who had begun to look so much like her mother. Angie didn’t like the staring. Or the return to the drinking. She started studying at her friends’ houses and keeping her door closed when she was home.

It’s not easy to stop drinking. Do I need to say that?

Not easy, either, to know Cora once hit Angie. She apologized a month later, or so Angie told me. Angie also told me she forgave her mother, but when she moved back into her mother’s house her senior year of high school, she also told me she made clear to Cora, “If you ever hit me again, I’ll hit you back.”

You may now kiss.

 

The hoots and cheers of the crowd feel like they could raise the roof. I, too, thrust my jubilant fist into the air and hoot, my heart racing as I step off my shelf, shake out my arms, realign the boxes, and get ready to see Angie. I’ll hold her tight, I tell myself, then grip Scott’s hand, or hug him, if he’ll let me. Like I’ll never let go again.

But as I wait for a path forward, my feet freeze on the floor. He had it coming. I’ll hit you back. Will Angie hug me? Will Cora remember our young love, and treat me like someone who tried to make a difference in her life? Or a nobody in her eyes? A deserter?

What Cora thinks shouldn’t matter anymore, but it does.

I jam my hands into my pockets. Shift from one foot to the other. In front of me rows of white plastic, egg-shapes shimmer, their bright-colored labels calling out. Sheer energy. Active support. Silky support. I stare at the choices. How does a woman ever know what she wants? How does anyone know?

The tap on my shoulder takes me by surprise, but not the press of the long nails. “Angelo,” Cora says from behind me. “Good to see you.”

Slowly I turn. I want to say the same, but not a single word rises over my pounding heart. Cora’s face, as always, is lightly blushed. As always, she’s wearing mascara. As always, her red lipstick is thick on her lips, though a little has smeared across one of her front teeth. Not something she would like. Not that I’ll mention it. Her black hair is shorter now, curled in a slight wave around her almost bare shoulders. Her lavender dress follows the curve of her body. A fuller body now. But just as beautiful.

“What a pleasant surprise,” she says. She glances over her shoulder before she flashes a smile.

I try to relax. Try to hear her comment as a genuine welcome. Maybe she, too, is struggling to find her words. But I’m also tempted to follow her glance. Who’s watching? Angie? Or someone else?

For a moment longer, Cora and I stand awkwardly facing each other. I wish our silence was because both of us have so much to say. How are you doing? Are you okay? What a hard time we had back then, but isn’t it great to see Angie so happy. Surely, she felt our love when she was a child. And surely, she knew how important it was for us to go our separate ways. To get you into detox so could you find your health and happiness. Not that Cora ever said that last sentence. And not that I didn’t love my freedom.

“So will you join me in a toast to the bride and groom?” Cora asks. Her eyes light up.

My head spins. She’s asking me to come with her to the milk coolers, to stand side by side at the front of the crowd, and raise our glasses together? I start to nod, a surge of gratitude pumping through me as she reaches into her bag and pulls out her mother’s old silver flask.

“Wouldn’t it be nice, for old time’s sake, to have a real toast?” She lifts the flask but only half-smiles, as if she’s seen the alarm written all over my face.

“I don’t have a glass,” I say, barely able to speak. Nor do I come up with the words that don’t flash through my mind until later on. This is 7-Eleven. We can’t drink here. Didn’t you know that when you chose this place?

I watch breathless as she reaches into her bag and brings out two plastic Slurpee glasses, places them on the shelf, unscrews the flask, lifts it to her nose, breathes in a long whiff, and grins as she extends the flask to me.

I pull my lips tight and shake my head.

“No, Angelo,” she says. The smile suddenly gone. She lifts the flask to my nose. “You think I haven’t learned something, too?”

My heart throbs as I take in a whiff. Not alcohol. Maybe sparkling cider?

“Are you—” I can hardly put out the words. “Not drinking since the day I left?” Could that be true?

She casts her eyes down and holds still. “Put it this way, Angelo,” she says, her voice almost too soft for me to hear. “When my daughter asks me to do something on her day, I’m totally willing. On other days—well—” Her voice drops. “I do what I can.” She pauses. “It hurts only me, now.” Then she lifts her head and looks me straight in the eyes, where I can see my reflection in the veil of water that makes her black pupils sparkle. “I’m glad you came, Angelo. Angie really wanted to see you. Now, if you’ll excuse me. She looks over her shoulder. “There’s someone who’s dying to—”

“Dad!” Angie comes running from behind me. “You’re here!” she says as I turn, take her into my arms, and hold her as tightly as she holds me. At the same time, I feel her nodding ever so slightly to someone behind me. Her mother? Scott?

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” I whisper into her ear, even as I feel a flash of self-doubt. Is her embracing me her choice or someone else’s?

“Did you like it, Dad? Were you surprised to find the wedding here? Surprised to learn about Scott? I wanted it to be a surprise. Now, do you wanna know our big secret?”

I hold very still as I feel the warmth of her cheek press against mine, and the softness of her satin gown as I rest my hands around her back. For six years I’ve been on the road, believing in her every day. That she’d remember the love and confidence we gave her early on. That she’d make it through high school. A good student, like me. Then through college. Strong enough to know when to speak up and when to be silent. When to hold on and when to let go. Why should that change now?

“You’ll never believe this, Dad,” she says. She laughs. “This is where me and Scott met two years ago. Both working the night shift. Going to college during the day. We decided it would be fun to have our wedding here. Isn’t it great?” As she laughs again, her gown swishes ever so slightly as if she can feel my body unwind, too. A clear start. A new beginning. “But there’s another secret, too,” she says. “Wanna know it?” She pauses long enough for me to think she feels me holding my breath. Wants me to be holding my breath. Remembering the tough days, too. “Scott wanted me to wear his manager’s apron over my dress for the ceremony,” she whispers, “but I said ‘no way’! I get to choose for myself. And don’t I look beautiful,” she says, stepping back and opening her arms, not to me or her mother or Scott, but to herself.

“Yes, beautiful,” I say, knowing my answer sounds sappy and cliché—the kind of thing weddings make us say and believe in again—but it’s also true.