got the word chapel baked right into the name. Why would we wait?”
“I don’t want your mother to think it’s a fake wedding.”
“Who cares what she thinks,” Mia said. “And who’s she to judge? She and my dad got hitched on the Coney Island boardwalk during the thirty minutes between end of confession and start of Mass.”
“Haven’t you dreamed of a perfect wedding?” he said, looking up at her standing over him, arms akimbo. “What did you wish for? Whatever it is, I want to give it to you.”
“I have dreamed of my wedding, of course I have,” Mia said, planting herself in his lap. “What girl hasn’t? Do you want to know what my idea of a perfect wedding is? Okay, I’ll tell you. One in which I become your wife and you, Julian Cruz, become my husband.”
That took his breath away. “Okay.” He patted her bare hip. She was wearing his boxer tank and a barely there thong, just a silk thread between her buttocks. “So which one? Bells or Flowers?”
“I’m trying to imagine which answer I’d prefer to give people when they ask where in Vegas we had our fake wedding,” Mia said. “They’re both so good! I can’t decide. You decide.”
“No matter what I do, you keep saying it’s all good.” He patted her hip again, a little harder.
“Because everything you are and everything you do is good.”
“Chapel of the Flowers, then.”
“Why’d you pick that one?” she said. “I liked Chapel of the Bells.”
“Aaaand it starts,” Julian said. “Not even married, and already it’s not all good.”
She laughed. She just wanted to know why.
“Because Flowers is harder to rhyme,” he said. “Therefore, flowers will make a better story because the words will be less common.”
“Powers devours,” she said, rocking on top of him back and forth. “Speaking of rhyming, we need a wedding song.”
“How about ‘I’m So Afraid’ by Fleetwood Mac.”
“Aaaand, you see, he can be funny, ladies and gentlemen! He’s here all week. Try the veal. Make it real.”
She rocked so hard against him, the chair tipped back. They fell over.
Don’t get hurt before the wedding, he said.
I won’t get hurt before the wedding, she said.
46
Hey Baby
ASHTON TALKED JULIAN INTO WAITING A FEW DAYS. Mirabelle saw some wisdom in that, too. She admitted she couldn’t get married even in a tacky Vegas chapel without her mother. Julian agreed to wait until the following Saturday if Ashton would do him a favor and give Zakiyyah a ride to Vegas. Riley was in Chicago on business and would fly into McCarran straight from O’Hare. Ashton refused. “I’m already your best man. You can’t have my intestines, too.” Julian said Zakiyyah had sprained her ankle and wasn’t comfortable driving all that way by herself and besides, it didn’t make sense for both of them to take separate cars.
“It makes perfect sense,” Ashton said. “What doesn’t make sense is for her and me to be in proximity to each other, ever.”
“Please, bro. For me.”
“What, I don’t do enough for you?”
“One more thing.”
“You want me to drive across the desert,” Ashton said, “across Death Valley . . .”
“Not Death Valley, Mojave.”
“With Attila the Hun?”
“Come on.”
“Death Valley, Julian. That’s most appropriate. Death. Valley. With Attila the Hun.”
* * *
The following Thursday, the day of the bachelor party and two days before Julian and Mia’s wedding, at seven in the morning, Ashton pulled up to the curb on Lyman in front of Zakiyyah’s house and honked the horn. No one came out. He honked again and, receiving no reply, switched off the engine and walked up the stairs to the landing, where he gave a surly double knock and stood back, nearly kicking over the damn petunia pots.
Zakiyyah opened the door. She was wearing a gray cotton knit dress and a pink ribbon through her halo of corkscrew hair.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, did you not hear me honking?”
“That was you?” Zakiyyah said. “I was about to call the cops to report a disturbance.”
“You didn’t see my car?”
“How would I know it’s your car?”
“You didn’t see me sitting in the open convertible? You didn’t recognize me?”
“Odd, isn’t it,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you without your Free Licks shirt.”
Ashton wore an ironed, thin cotton buttondown, sleeves rolled up, and jeans. He was done speaking to her. She hadn’t invited him in or offered him a drink or asked him for help, so he stood like a pillar.
“Ready to go?” he said.
“Hold the door for a second,” she said. “I have to get my suitcase.