The Wedding

I met Liam in Pennsylvania. We were on inner tubes, spinning down the Delaware River, but I was far ahead and moving faster with the current because I was lighter. I noticed him because he had only one leg. He was young, and it was the seventies, so you knew it was the war. He was getting farther behind me, and at a bend he disappeared from view.

I was twenty-two and just out of nursing school. My friend Meg and I had taken jobs in a hospital down in Charlotte, and before we left, we spent a weekend in a tent on the banks of the river.

Later, he and I saw each other again at the campsite. Liam was staying in the tent next to ours. He was vacationing with his niece, and we started talking by the fire while Meg braided the little girl’s hair. He had a prosthetic leg, and he attached it before coming out to the fire.

He’d lost his leg in Khe Sanh in 1968, he said. He had only been there nine days when it happened, and then he was hot hoisted out and spent three weeks in the woods in France before going home, in a chateau they were using as a hospital.

“Fucken Vietnam,” he said. “They took my leg and everything else.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked him, rolling a hot dog over the flames. The war had just ended, and it was all anyone seemed to talk about.

He said, “Damn right. After all these years, too.”

Later, in the middle of the night, he called out in his sleep. I crawled through the flap into his tent. He was cursing and rolling with the pain. The little girl was upright, her hands clasped in her lap, terrified.

“Shh,” I told him, putting my fingers on his hip. “It’s all right.”

I stayed with him for an hour, rubbing the stump where his limb would have been. I gave him a pill for the pain. When he shook his head, I told him, “Take it. I’m a nurse,” as if that made any difference, when pills like that were as easy to buy in those days as candy.

I saw between his lashes the beginning of tears. “I didn’t actually do anything,” he said. “I wasn’t a hero, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Do you think it will hurt like this forever?”

The pill knocked him out before I could figure out what to tell him.

The next morning, I decided not to move to Charlotte. Meg left without me. It would be almost a year before she would speak to me again. Liam was teaching in a high school in Franklin, New Jersey, and I took a job in a hospital in the town next to his. I moved back into my mother’s house in Pequannock. Everything was just as I’d left it—the brown and yellow carpet, my poster of Rock Hudson still on the bedroom wall.

In the evenings my mother and I ate spaghetti on tray tables by the television. I slept with my hair in curlers and stared at the bathroom light coming in underneath the door.

Liam never stayed the night, except for one time. We’d come home from the movies drunk and laughing, grabbing onto each other.

“That’s it,” my mother told him. “You can’t drive home like this.” She brought the cot up from the basement and Liam slept in the living room by the fireplace.

“Thank you, ma’am, thank you,” Liam said, his eyes shiny with the liquor. We fell onto the floor, laughing.

We were together for three years. We never lived together; for three years we just dated like teenagers. In the middle of the night we snuck into my room sometimes while my mother slept in the room next door. We went to the movies; in the summers we went to the New Jersey State Fair, where old men sent ducks around a pool with prizes attached to their bottoms. We ate ice from paper cones and bought painted flowerpots weren’t really going to use.

In the evening once, in the park, he chased a firefly over the pond. I remember he ran all the way into the water to catch it. There he was, standing up to his waist in water with the algae around his belt, and he blew on this fist and rolled the fly from his hand like dice—one, two, three. I laughed. “Why do you do that? That poor thing.”

He kissed the tips of his fingers. “It’s good luck,” he said, and shrugged. “Most of life is about luck.”

Liam taught Home Economics at Franklin High School. He did it because in the Army he had been a cook. That was what they sent him over for. Not to fight or fly airplanes, but to make the food. He was very good at it, but the students made fun of him. I came to visit him once. I saw the way they looked at his leg. They made fun of him in low voices over by the ovens.

I hated them for it. I waited in the corner until the class had finished, and then as they walked past me to the hallway, I stood in front of them and gave Liam a long, lingering kiss in the front of the room.

There were nights when I had to work. I wasn’t sure what he did on those nights. I knew he had a few friends nearby, other teachers, and he went to the bars with them sometimes. But mostly I assumed he stayed home and watched tv.

One afternoon, I left work early to surprise him. It was his birthday, and my mother and I had made him a cake.

He lived in the kind of neighborhood a single man could buy on a teacher’s salary—boxy brick houses with little lawns and hedges between the driveways. There were vases and knickknacks behind the windows, like storefronts.

He had asked me to live with him many times. But I knew that if I did that, we wouldn’t be waiting anymore for the next good thing. We would get married eventually, but after the wedding I would come home to the dishes from the morning before. I liked the life we had, when it was still in front of us.

When I turned the corner onto his lane there was a limousine parked out front of his house. Liam came outside with a knapsack over his shoulder.

I got out of my car. “Are you going somewhere?” Right away, I thought he had another woman in the backseat of the car.

“Hon, wait,” he said.

His leg was giving him trouble; he had a hard time walking toward me. I threw open the door to the limousine as he limped toward me, but I was too far away. He fell onto the grass, and the driver came out of the car to help him up.

There was no one else in the limousine.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

Liam held onto the driver’s shoulder to steady himself. “It’s free. It’s a gift.”

“A gift from who?”

“From a hotel. In Atlantic City.”

“Why would they give you a limousine?”

Liam took a handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbed it across is forehead. “I should have told you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been gambling?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise me? With what?”

The driver took off his cap and got back inside the car to wait.

“I’ve been trying to make enough to buy a restaurant,” Liam said. “Then I was going to stop.”

“How much have you lost?” I asked him.

He mumbled something.

“What?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“Twenty thousand dollars,” I said slowly. “Twenty thousand.”

“No,” he said, his eyes shining. “I’ve made twenty thousand.”

I blinked at him. “Oh,” I said after a moment. “Oh.”

He took my shoulders in his hands. “Twenty thousand dollars, Liz.” He whooped. “Twenty fucking thousand dollars!”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a lot.”

He frowned. “Aren’t you happy? Don’t you get it? I’m rich.”

I thought about it. “I am happy.”

“Well,” he said. “You sure aren’t acting like it.”

I took his hand and tried to smile. “Why don’t I go with you this time?”

Liam won five thousand more that weekend. He showed me around the casino floor with his chest puffed out and his hand around my waist. He’d been coming one night a week for two years, and I’d never known.

He won seven thousand more in the next two months. He left every other weekend to drive down to the casinos. He left on Fridays and came back on Sundays. Before he came home, he drove to the bank and put all the money away in a savings account. I kept waiting for him to lose, but if he did, he never said. He kept his account balance on a little black notebook that he always had in his back pocket.

In September we drove up to Boston for my girlfriend’s wedding. She and I had been roommates our first year in college, and she was marrying her college sweetheart. They’d met in the student bar when we were eighteen. I remembered him with pimples, shaving in his boxers in front of our bathroom mirror. I had thought it probably wouldn’t last.

The reception was in an old theater that had been turned into a banquet hall. The seats had been removed to make space for the tables and the dance floor. But the mezzanine was still there, and the chandeliers and the angels carved into the walls

Thick white candles burned on the tables; there were triangles of butter on the edges of every plate. The favors were small chocolate eggs in blue boxes. The band played jazz music on folding chairs set up on the stage, and as they began their second song the waiters came around holding trays of canapes. The moon came through the skylight and spilled over the tables, and there was a little pool of light in the center of the room.

As the music slowed down after the dinner, the bride said she was going to throw the bouquet. My college friends prodded me in the side. “You catch it,” they told me.

The bride called the unmarried girls together. She went up to the balcony with her flowers and we stood in a cluster on the floor by the stage. My girlfriends pushed me to the front. “Go on, Liz.”

I saw Liam sitting with the other men at the tables, waiting and laughing. They watched us struggle to grope our way to the front of the group.

Then unexpectedly, without counting to three, the bride threw the bouquet off the balcony. I saw it falling and reached out for it. It fell into my hands and I don’t know why, but I was startled. I dropped it. It all happened as if in slow motion. Another girl threw herself onto the floor to grab it.

I looked over at Liam. He wasn’t smiling anymore. I had this terrible, gut-deep feeling of having let him down. And, for the first time, getting married didn’t seem as bad as it always had. If I left him, someone else would marry him for the money. I would marry him in spite of it. Because he was a good man, and he deserved a restaurant. There was a difference between being a bad person and just being a lucky one.

I picked up the bouquet and held it over my head like a trophy, and Liam put his weight on his good leg and cheered.