Page 11 of Give In

The morning should feel significant for other reasons.

My son is getting married today, and I am standing on the balcony of my suite with a cup of coffee. The sun is doing something genuinely unreasonable over the water. Pinks and golds are stacking up on the horizon like the island is showing off. It probably is. I’ve owned this place for eleven years and the sunrises still stop me cold.

I should be thinking about Leo. About my best man duties. About the speech I finished yesterday and have already read back to myself twice this morning. About the fact that my ex-wife is somewhere in this building right now, a reality I have been successfully compartmentalizing thus far.

Instead, I am thinking about Clover.

Clover with her wild red curls and her brown eyes shot through with amber. Clover who talked to herself out loud and didn’t seem particularly embarrassed about it. Who lost a cake decorating job and called 9-1-1 on a class full of sick toddlers and had theories about sobbing widows and their boy toys. Who sat on my lap in the dark and came apart so sweetly it made something in my chest crack open like a window that had been painted shut for years.

Knowing all of that is the only thing that staved off the panic when I woke this morning and found her gone. Last night before I showered I’d sent a message to the weekend manager making sure her room was upgraded and ready. It had only taken a quick text to confirm she’d checked in. I knew where to find her.

I need to find her today. After the ceremony, after I’ve stood next to my son while he marries the woman he loves and given the speech and done what fathers and best men do. Then I’m going to find her and finish the conversation we started last night before Leo and Juniper arrived and the evening became a different kind of thing entirely.

I make a mental note to figure out how to say what I want to say in a way that sounds like a man who has his thoughts organized. Chances are telling a woman she’s not nothing isn’t nearly as romantic as it sounds in my head at six-thirty in the morning.

My coffee has gone lukewarm. I finish it anyway and go inside to get dressed.

I am apparently whistling when I find them at breakfast.

I don’t notice I’m doing it until Graham looks up from his coffee with an expression that contains multitudes.

“What the fuck are you whistling about?” he asks.

“Am I not allowed to be happy?”

Graham and Bram exchange the glance of two men who have known each other long enough to have developed a private language of meaningful looks. James, my brother-in-law, sits quietly with his coffee watching the water, which is his standard operating mode and one I have always respected.

“Morning,” I say.

“Morning,” James says.

Graham and Bram continue to say nothing, which is somehow more commentary than words would be.

I pick up the menu even though I know it by heart and study it with great attention.

“Perhaps next time don’t advertise it with a love bite on your neck,” Bram says.

The other two men stare at my neck with the synchronized attention of a jury.

Must have missed that when I was getting dressed. I try to muster up some embarrassment and genuinely cannot locate any. The fact that Clover left her mark on me makes me feel something closer to proud, which I am self-aware enough to know says a great deal about where my head is this morning.

“For fuck’s sake, Heath, you seriously going to rock a hickey at your son’s wedding?” Graham says.

And there it is. Big brothers, I have found, do not improve with age in this regard. They just accumulate more material.

“You’re one to talk,” Bram says, pivoting immediately to my defense in the way that means he’s already planning to use this against me later. “Taylor told everyone at family dinner the other night that you and Lizzie had matching hickeys at the office the other day.”

“Your granddaughter doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about,” Graham grumbles.

“Sure,” James says. “Though if you’re going to give a love bite, you really ought to do it somewhere generally covered by clothing.”

“Dude, that’s our sister you’re talking about,” Graham says.

James just chuckles, which is his primary mode of conflict resolution.

I order coffee and eggs and let the noise of my family wash over me. This is the thing about the people I love most. They are incapable of letting anything pass unremarked. It is exhausting, and it is, if I’m being honest, exactly what I need this morning. Because if Graham and Bram are giving me grief about a love bite then I am not thinking about Kiki. And any potential drama she might create. About the twenty years of complicated history that exists between us that Leo has spent his entire childhood navigating.

Leo isn’t a huge fan of his mother. Not in an angry way, just in the way of someone who made peace a long time ago with exactly who she is and decided to love her from a comfortable and sustainable distance. She prefers he call her Kiki rather than mom, a preference he accommodates without comment. He is, in this as in most things, a better person than the situation required him to be.