Page 97 of Goodbye Paradise
“We won’t even need them,” I said. “We don’t have very many people to invite.”
Miriam sat up a little straighter. “Let’s send invitations to everyone on the Compound. Archer will probably have a heart attack reading it. If we’re lucky, he’ll go face down in the mashed potatoes.”
Yesterday, the sound of the word “Archer” had made me furious enough to boil my blood. But now I actually laughed. “Wouldn’t you justloveto see the looks on the Elders’ faces?”
The three of us sat there in a row on a couch, chuckling over this bit of humor. We used to sit like this on the school bus in second grade, when Miriam was in kindergarten. “Like bumps on a log,” my mother had always said.
Josh held my hand, his thumb stroking my knuckles. Miriam made wedding jokes. And we were happy for once, just sitting and talking and having nowhere we needed to go, until Maggie called us in for quiche.
Twenty-Eight
DEAR WASHINGTON,
THANK YOU for the Christmas card. Our second one! It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a year since I sat in your truck, wondering how Caleb and I were going to survive the next week.
I have news.
And I started writing this letter a hundred times, and couldn’t figure out how to tell you. So I’m just enclosing this invitation instead. Sorry if I’m giving you one heck of a surprise.
There isn’t a whole lot else to say, I guess, except I hope we can still be friends. If we can’t, that will make me sad, but I’ll still think of you as someone who changed my life.
My love to Brenda.
Josh
JOSHUA ROYCE AND CALEB SMITH
Cordially invite you to join them as they exchange vows in a celebration of marriage
02.14.15
4 o’clock in the afternoon
Ralph’s Tavern
2900 South Boulevard
Hintenville, MA
Reception to follow
Twenty-Nine
THE NIGHT BEFORE OUR wedding, Josh and I spent a quiet evening on Maggie and Daniel’s sofa.
We’d been very busy that week. My fiancé was now taking GED courses at a community center in Pittsfield, in between babysitting gigs and the occasional catering job.
In fact, we had a marked-up calendar hanging in our new kitchen helping us map out who needed the car and for how many hours. Sometimes I had to borrow Daniel’s truck in a pinch, though Josh wouldn’t drive it. “I can’t park that boat,” he complained. Although by now he was a very good driver.
In addition to our busy work schedules, we tried to get out together sometimes, too. Once a week, we ate dinner at a restaurant, just the two of us. “Date night,” is what Maggie called it. Money wasn’t quite so tight now, so we spent a little cash on things like movie tickets and the occasional bar tab.
We’d met Jakobitz and Danny a couple of times at the Tavern for a bite and a beer. Josh was just so-so on all their betting talk, but he did like the burgers and fries. And once, Danny decided to teach Josh to shoot pool, which I thought was sure to be a disaster.
How wrong I was. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce my fiancé, the pool shark. There was just something about all those angles which spoke to Josh. By our second trip back, he was beating strangers in the bar.
“Damn,” Jako complained after Josh won his five dollars. “You should study engineering, or some shit. After you get that high school equivalency.”
“Agricultural engineering,” Josh muttered, lining up a shot.
