“We have to get married,” I said.

Honestly, I’d never thought too much about getting married. Since I was a teenager I’d always enjoyed dating and being in love, but most of my thoughts about the future revolved around making it in a rock band. That fantasy alone kept me occupied for a good ten years. I didn’t know the names of necklines or silhouettes, species of flowers or cuts of diamonds. In no corner of my mind was there even a vague notion of how I’d like to wear my hair or what color the linens might be. What I did know for certain was that my mom had opinions enough for both of us. In fact, the only thing I’d always known was that if I ever did get married, my mother would be the one who made sure it was perfect. If she wasn’t there, I was guaranteed to spend the day wondering what she would’ve thought. If the table settings looked cheap, if the flower arrangements were middling, if my makeup was too heavy or my dress unflattering. It’d be impossible to feel beautiful without her approval. If she wasn’t there, I knew I was destined to be a joyless bride.

“If this is something you could see yourself doing in five years and we don’t just do it now, I don’t think I will be able to forgive you,” I said.

There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the line, and it occurred to me I had no idea where Martha’s Vineyard even was. At the time I thought his family was visiting the dusty groves of an actual vineyard. It was one of those novel differences between East and West Coasters that charmed me every so often, like when he referred to the coast as the shore or his indifference to the appearance of fireflies.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” I repeated.

“Okay, yeah!” he said. “Let’s do it.”

I bounded down the sterile, fluorescent hallway, my chest thumping as I passed the dark, curtained-off quarters of other patients, their heart monitors blinking, green lines zigzagging up and down. I returned to my mother’s room and told her she had to get better. She had to get home to Eugene and watch her only daughter get married.

* * *

—

THE NEXT DAY I looked up wedding planners online. Pacing outside my mother’s hospital room, I explained our situation and found one who was willing to make it work in three weeks’ time. Within the hour she emailed me a checklist of things to go over.

Seong Young took me to try on wedding dresses. I sent my mother photos of the different bodices and skirts over Kakao. We decided on a four-hundred-dollar strapless dress with a simple ankle-length tulle skirt. The tailor took my measurements and two days later they delivered it to my mother’s hospital room, where I modeled it for her in person.

I knew Nami and Seong Young thought I was crazy. What if she died the day before the wedding? Or was too sick to stand up? I knew it was risky to add even more pressure to already tumultuous circumstances, and yet it felt like the perfect way to shed light on the darkest of situations. Instead of mulling over blood thinners and Fentanyl, we could discuss Chiavari chairs and macarons and dress shoes. Instead of bedsores and catheters, it’d be color schemes and updos and shrimp cocktail. Something to fight for, a celebration to look forward to.

Six days later, my mother was finally released. As we wheeled her toward the elevator our doctor stopped us in the hall to give her a parting gift. “I saw this and thought of you,” she said, taking my mother’s hand. It was a small hand-carved wooden statue of a family—a father, mother, and daughter holding one another. They were faceless, huddled close, connected as if whittled from the same piece of wood.

11

What Procellous Awesomeness Does Not in You Abound?

I met Peter when I was twenty-three. One night in February, Deven invited us all out to a bar after band practice. His childhood friend had just moved back to town after grad school in New York and was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday at 12 Steps Down, a smoking bar in South Philly where you literally had to descend twelve steps to enter. At the time, we were a band of smokers and it was incentive enough to be able to smoke inside during the dead of winter. We all lit up before we’d even had the chance to order a beer.

It was karaoke night and Peter was up to sing as we filtered in. He’d picked a Billy Joel song called “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” I’d never heard the song, but I was impressed that among all the other hipsters who’d signed up for Weezer and Blink 182 standards, this guy decided to take on a mom-rock track with a forty-eight-bar instrumental break. He was wearing aviator eyeglasses with thin wire frames that took up practically half his face and a white T-shirt that plunged comically in a deep V, exposing an expansive tuft of curly brown plumage. He held the microphone as if it were the stem of a wineglass—daintily by his fingertips—and proceeded to move along bizarrely to the song, bobbing his head up and down atilt like it’d been partially lopped off and left to flap on a hinge, and tapping his corresponding foot on every quarter note like Mick Jagger at a square dance.

Having sung for a full six and a half minutes and sufficiently aroused the collective indignation of the karaoke waiting list that made up half the bar, Peter embraced Deven, who quipped something inaudible over the music. What I could hear was Peter’s laugh, a high-pitched, honking sound that was like a cross between a Muppet and a five-year-old girl. And that was it—I was in love.

It took Peter much longer to discover reciprocal feelings—or perhaps more accurately, for me to implant them. He was out of my league, objectively more attractive, his handsomeness even becoming a running joke among our dowdy friend group. He was a proficient guitar player but interested in more sophisticated endeavors—compiling redacted poetry, translating three-quarters of a novella. He had a master’s degree and was fluent in French and had read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time.

Still, I was determined and spent the next six months pursuing him, assiduous in my efforts to show up at all the same parties and eventually securing weekly face time when I got him a part-time job as a food runner at the Mexican-fusion restaurant where I worked. But even then, after nearly three months of food service camaraderie—cozying up at the service station with the crossword, polishing glasses and folding linens side by side, rushing after cash-outs to make last call—I remained deep in the friend zone.

By October we were gearing up for Restaurant Week, the busiest time of the year. Every fall a slew of suburban families pours into “upscale” Mexican restaurants like ours to dine on three courses for thirty-three bucks, while the chefs sweat and curse, pounding out ceviche after haphazard ceviche and hundreds of deconstructed tamales and miniature tres leches, struggling to fill what feels like a never-ending trough to feed the frugal hordes. That year Restaurant Week became Restaurant Weeks, much to the delight of participating restaurant owners eager to cash in, and equally to the chagrin of severely understaffed staffs such as ours, who were expected to work triple the headcount without a single day off.

Peter and I were scheduled to work the night of the kickoff together. I arrived at three thirty to set up for the night and was surprised to find Adam, our bald aggro manager, who frequently threatened to fine us for every glassware casualty, sitting unusually still at the bar, staring into his phone.

“Peter’s been in an accident,” he said.