Even if we never got together in a romantic way, I loved him. I guess I always had. To tell you the truth, the knowledge was something of a burden.

I remembered those porcupines I’d been watching with Dad the night I thought Will might be dying. Not the part about the urinating. The part where they looked each other in the eye. Will and I weren’t there yet. (Personally, I hoped never to get to the peeing stage.)

I stopped by Will’s house after school to tell him I wouldn’t see him for the next three days—I was taking off Friday to go to Martha’s Vineyard for Dad’s and Rosa Rivera’s wedding. I knew that Will had gotten used to my coming around every day, but I chose my words deliberately. I didn’t want him to think that I had any expectation that he would care that I was leaving. I also didn’t want to pull another disappearing act on him.

“Your dad’s wedding,” he said. “It sure came up fast, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, why didn’t you invite me, Chief?” He said this in a cheerful way where I couldn’t tell if it was a serious request.

“Well…you’ve been sick, so I doubt your mother would have let you go.”

“True, true.”

“And also”—I didn’t know I was going to say this until I did—“there’s Winnie.”

Will cleared his throat. “Yes, Winnie.” His voice was amused. He looked me in the eye, and I looked back. “She broke up with me. I thought you might have heard by now.”

“I hadn’t heard it from the source, so I didn’t put too much stock in the story.”

“She said I wasn’t a very good boyfriend.”

“I doubt that. You always seemed attentive to me.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. I’m a genius with birthdays, and I always do what I say I will. You know that. The thing was, she suspected I was in love with someone else.”

I took a deep breath and raised my right eyebrow. “Scandalous,” I managed to say.

Will’s mother got home then—since Will had been sick, she was always buzzing around him.

“Ma, can I go to the Vineyard for Naomi’s dad’s wedding?” Will called out.

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t invite him,” I called to her.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” Mrs. Landsman said. “But that son of mine.”

On the ferry ride to the Vineyard, Dad and I sat in the middle of a long pewlike bench with roughly a million sweating people on it. Rosa was on the deck with Freddie and George. Dad has always gotten seasick on decks, so I was keeping him company in the cabin. It had occurred to me that this was the last time it would be me and him for a very long while. Maybe Rosa, Freddie, and George were thinking the same thing when they’d decided to stay outside.

The day was bright and wet, and my clothes were sticking to me. I was seriously considering abandoning Dad for the deck (last time alone be damned), which at least had the benefit of a breeze, when he asked me if I was looking forward to the wedding. I told him I was. I said how much I liked Rosa Rivera and all the sorts of things I knew it would make him happy to hear.

“You seem a little flushed, though,” he said.

I said I was just hot.

It was noisy and crowded in the cabin, in other words not a great place to talk about serious things, but Dad persisted. “How’s James?” Dad asked.

Truthfully, I hadn’t thought of James at all. I hadn’t had time—not with Dad’s wedding and Will’s sickness and Will and my photography and tennis and yearbook.

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him.

Apparently, I could.

That I could forget him so easily, more than the loss of James himself, made me melancholy, I guess. I wondered if Mom had felt that way about Dad when she met Nigel again. I wondered if my biological mother had felt that way about my biological father, and even about me when she’d had to give me up.

“I don’t see him much,” I said to Dad finally.

“It happens, baby.” Dad nodded and patted me on the hand, and then he read my mind. “You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned—the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and the Pythagorean theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you’ll forget those, too. You forget your junior year class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend’s home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations—even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties. Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.”

I must have started to cry because Dad held out his sleeve for me to wipe my eyes on, which I did. It wasn’t anything in particular that Dad had said, but it was like he’d read my mind and put words to all the things that had been brewing inside me for so long. We were so much alike really.

I wanted to tell him how I was in love with Will, but it was Dad’s weekend (and me not a particularly confessional sort of person under any circumstances) and maybe he already knew it anyway. Besides, it seemed silly after we’d just been talking about James. I didn’t want to be the kind of girl who always needed to be in love with someone.

So all I said was “I’m really happy for you, Dad.”

Rosa Rivera had no use for the color white—not in decorating and certainly not in weddings. “I am not young or a virgin,” she had declared, “and I have already worn a white dress once. This time, I will wear red.” The only white she wore on her wedding day was a white ribbon that she tied around her waist like an afterthought and the roses that she wore in her hair.

“But, Mama, aren’t white roses bad luck?” George had asked her.

Rosa Rivera said she didn’t know and she didn’t care to know.

She didn’t much care what us bridesmaids wore either. “You girls wear the white if you like. You are young, and it will set me off nicely, I think?” It was a suggestion more than an order. (Then again, most everything Rosa Rivera said about anything sounded interrogative.) Freddie and George decided to honor their mother’s request as she had made so few, and we wore three nonmatching white dresses. Dad followed the trend with a beige suit that he had bought the summer we had wandered Tuscany. He either didn’t care to remember or just plain didn’t care that my mother had picked it out for him. A footnote to the day might tell that story: suit picked out by ex-wife.

The week before the wedding, I had heard Dad speaking to the wedding officiant on the phone. “Hmmph,” he said when he hung up, “they want me to decide between ‘I will’ and ‘I do.’ I didn’t know there was even an option. Which do you prefer, kid?”

“Pretty much everybody says ‘I do,’ right?” I said.

Dad nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

“But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.”

“You make a good point there,” Dad said. “How’d you get so smart?”

I shrugged. “Probably all that time conjugating verbs for French.”

“Not to mention I’ve already said ‘I do,’ so maybe this time I should try something else.”

They said their “I will’s” by the beach at sunrise, both Rosa’s and Dad’s favorite time of day. Rosa was a rooster and Dad was a vampire, but somehow they managed to overlap for a couple of hours every morning.

I was happy for Dad, but I also felt like I was losing him. I was that baby in the typewriter case all over again. Maybe this was just life? One orphaning after the next. They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

I was feeling rather sorry for myself when Rosa threw her bouquet. I hadn’t even noticed until the flowers were already heading my way. My instinct has always been to dive and catch, and this is what I did.

“You’re next,” said Freddie.

“Not so fast,” Dad said. “She’s only seventeen.” He appealed to Rosa like a put-upon father in a sitcom. “Maybe you should throw that again?”

I threw the bouquet to my grandmother Rollie, who was sleeping in a beach chair. Rollie didn’t like to have to get up before noon if she could help it. She woke when the bouquet hit her lap. “Oh crap, not again,” she said. She had already been married four times, so she tossed the bouquet in the sand as if it were on fire.

“Does no one want my bouquet?” Rosa asked. Her tone seemed to be joking, but I detected some degree of offense.

I thought of that time I hadn’t taken Rosa Rivera’s scarf and what Dad had said. I didn’t want her to have hurt feelings on her wedding day, so I retrieved the bouquet from the sand. “I do,” I said. “I want it.”

As we were walking back into the hotel for breakfast, Dad whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. I know what you meant to say was ‘I will.’ As in, in the future. In the distant, distant future.” He winked at me conspiratorially, and I didn’t feel like an orphan anymore.


“Who’s Martha?” I whispered from the bathroom of the hotel room I was sharing with Rosa Rivera’s two daughters, who were already asleep. I didn’t have to say what I was talking about. It was eleven, and I hoped Will would be awake.