Chapter 2 - THE PRICE OF AN INVITATION
Six weeks earlier, I almost threw the invitation away.
Enough money spent on one envelope to cover the field trip Noah had quietly stopped mentioning.
Julian had missed another child support payment that week.
“Temporary cash flow problem,” his message said.
Apparently, the florist hadn't experienced the same problem.
I left the invitation on the counter while putting away groceries.
Noah found it before I finished.
“Dad's getting married?”
“Yes.”
“To Victoria?”
“Yes.”
He ran a finger across the gold letters.
“Are we invited?”
I wanted to lie.
I had already spent two years making his father's absence sound less cruel than it was.
Julian hadn't left because of Noah.
Julian wasn't missing soccer because he didn't care.
Julian would call tomorrow.
Eventually, tomorrow became a word Noah stopped trusting.
Our divorce had taken eighteen months, followed by six months of bills I opened standing over the kitchen sink.
I worked payroll at a plumbing company and took extra bookkeeping jobs at night.
Julian called that learning independence.
He called his affair an accident.
He called everything whatever made him sound least responsible.
“We don't have to go,” I told Noah.
He studied the invitation.
“If I'm not there, will he notice?”
That was why we went.
Not because I had forgiven Julian.
Because my son still wanted his father to look across a room and be glad to see him.
A week before the wedding, Noah took my father's recorder to Julian's house for a school project about family stories.
He came home carrying it in his backpack, quieter than usual.
“Did Dad answer your questions?”
“Some.”
“Anything interesting?”
He shrugged and asked for grilled cheese.
I mistook silence for an ordinary disappointment.
On the wedding morning, he showed me the brown box.
“It's the medal I gave Dad.”
“Where did you get it?”
“He put it in the stuff he sent back.”
Julian had returned Noah's childhood drawings in a grocery bag when Victoria redecorated the study.
I had cried over that bag in the laundry room.
Noah had apparently noticed more than I thought.
“Are you sure you want to give it to him again?”
“He might remember.”
Now, outside the ballroom, I understood what my son had hoped his father would remember.
A promise.
A family.
The difference between loving someone and owning them.
Behind the closed doors, music started again, then abruptly stopped.
A hotel employee approached with an envelope.
“Mr. Vance asked me to give you this.”
Inside was a printed demand that I surrender the recorder immediately.
May you like
The wedding cake hadn't even been cut.
My ex-husband was already threatening to sue our son.
