For maybe seven seconds, in a private room at a steakhouse in Lancaster, I heard my own laugh come out of me automatically, half a beat behind the table, before I understood what had been said — and then I looked at Karen and she was turning her wineglass and looking at the cloth. Twenty-six people, and the woman I was married to for eleven years, and she let it stand. The letter was her mother’s. Written in 2011, three weeks before she died, addressed to Karen and copied to me, and it said that whatever happened between the two of us, I was to be the one to walk her down the aisle if she ever married again, because I was the only person who’d sat in that hospital every night for four months. Her own son came twice.
He read it that night. His grandmother had written a line about him too, which I had not remembered was in there and would not have chosen for him to find at twenty-nine: that he was a good boy who had been let off too easy. He came to my hotel at one in the morning and stood in the hallway and couldn’t get through a sentence. I told him what I’d have told him at fourteen, which is that the joke wasn’t the problem, the fourteen years of not asking was, and that I wasn’t going to walk his mother anywhere the next day.
I sat in the fourth row. Karen’s brother did it. It was fine, and it was the right call, and I’d make it again. What I couldn’t do was stand up in front of that same room and perform being a good sport twelve hours after they’d all agreed I was a punchline. Karen has apologized twice since, both times over the phone, both times ending with some version of it was a long day. My stepson calls on Sundays now. Not every Sunday. He asked me in the spring if I’d have kept driving him to practice knowing how it turned out, and I said yes without having to think about it, which is either the best or the stupidest thing about me.
