Page 42 of My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

“I know.” He hesitates, as if searching for the right words or maybe he’s trying not to cry, too. “When I first found out—it wasn’t long after my wife died that I discovered she knew about you and had never told me—I was so angry I could hardly see straight. I was furious. With my wife, with your mother, withthe world.” There’s a beat of silence and then I feel him dial it back a notch. “It’s possible steam came out of my ears.”

“Like Yosemite Sam?” I surprise myself by asking.

“Exactly like Yosemite Sam.”

I turn and look up at him. He looks back. I still can’t believe he’s here. Real. In the flesh. Sitting right beside me. No longer the fresh-faced bridegroom in the powder-blue tuxedo who was stolen from me, but a grown man who’s clearly weathered more than a few storms and known his share of heartache. “I can’t quite... I don’t know... I’m just so stunned. And I can’t stop thinking if you hadn’t shown up today she might never have told me about you.”

He nods. “I understand. I’ve had a little longer than you to take it in, but I hope... For right now at least I’d like to try to set the anger aside so that we can start getting to know each other.”

I don’t answer at first, but as much as I don’t want to ruin this time with him, I don’t have the strength to pretend, and I definitely don’t want to lie. There’ve been enough lies already. “I’m not sure I can do that,” I say finally. “I mean, I want to know you more than almost anything. I’m happy to tell you about myself. But the anger? The hurt of betrayal? I don’t see those going anywhere anytime soon.”

He pushes off with one foot and the chains creak companionably. I tell myself this is really happening. I am not imagining it or making it up. This is real.

“Okay,” he says. “You first. Tell me about yourself.”

We swing in silence for a time as I try to think where to begin. How do you adequately summarize your hopes and dreams, your regrets, your favorite color, how you like your steak cooked, in one telling?

Because I actually want to know all of those things about this man whose DNA I carry and more. I need all those details, the kind I’d use to flesh out a character. Because those are thethings that make us who we are, that set us apart, that make us real.

“I suck at synopses. I’d rather write a whole book than try to summarize it.” I watch his face as I make this confession, but I see no judgment on it. He does not recoil in horror. “What if we just take turns asking questions?”

“I’m good with that,” he says. “Ask away.”

“Okay.” I ask the first thing that pops into my head. “How long did it take you to get over being left at the altar?”

There’s a long silence and it occurs to me that even after forty years he might still not be over it.

He’s staring out at the Dogwood when he finally says, “Being left at the altar is a lot worse than it looks in the movies. I mean, there’s the humiliation and all that, but when you truly love that person and know in your heart that you were meant to spend the rest of your life with them?” He shrugs. “It’s pretty close to unbearable.”

“But you married somebody else.”

“I did.” There’s a world of emotion behind those two words. One of those emotions is regret.

For the briefest moment I imagine what it would feel like to marry someone who wasn’t over the person who jilted them. “Was what my mother said about your wife true?”

“Yes.” He looks me in the eye and his gaze doesn’t waver. “There was a lot of... turbulence... in our marriage and in our family.”

“So you did, I mean, you do have... other... children?”

“Yes. I have two sons.” He pulls out a photo of two guys somewhere in their mid to late thirties standing in front of a colonial-style house. Both of them have his dark hair and a similar look about them.

I have brothers.I am not the only child of a man who died too soon as I’ve always believed, but one of three.

“This is Kevin.” He points to the taller of the two. “And thisis Drew. The picture was taken in front of our house in Bethesda.” He tells me where his sons went to college, where they live now, what they do for a living, but I don’t really absorb much beyond the obvious love and pride in his voice and the fact that I have two brothers who may or may not have led the kind of family life I dreamed about.

“I didn’t want to do or say anything before I knew you were okay with it, but I’d like you to know each other.”

I feel a rush of excitement that’s followed by another fire arrow of anger at all I’ve missed. I turned Bree into the sibling I never had, missed her all these years as if she really were my sister. Would we have been that close if I’d known I had flesh-and-blood siblings in the world?

He takes out another photo. “These are your grandparents. They lived in Richmond until they died two years ago. They were married for sixty-five years and they died within hours of each other.”

Two years ago. I’ve been at Fountain Bookstore on book tour numerous times and never even knew that Richmond was anything except the place where my mother was born. The rage bubbles up briefly again. It’s dampened only slightly by the regret that follows.

I look at the old photo of a white-haired man who looks like an older version of Jake, standing with his arm around the same rawboned woman Jake showed me earlier, only older and with white hair. “She looks a lot like me. Or I guess I mean I look like her.”

He hesitates again. His smile is pained. “Yes. It was that resemblance that my wife first noticed.”

“Did they...” I swallow around the lump in my throat. “Did your parents...” I can’t quite bring myself to call them my grandparents any more than I’m ready to call Jake my father. “Did they know about me?”

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