I had never seen this particular feature of the chapel before. It was as though Felicity was whispering in my ear.
“Birds,” I said.
“Maybe her stepfather was trying to be kind to Felicity,” Sam said.
“Probably he was,” I agreed. “Probably at first, he tried. And you remember, he tried to visit her in jail.”
“That’s true. I know that he dumped her mom, but maybe he wasn’t all bad.”
“I don’t think he was. Maybe he just got too ambitious. Sometimes, things just don’t work out. He’s not a minister anymore.”
It was then that I remembered I’d had another recent dreamabout Felicity. It came back to my mind, clear as film. I told Sam about a field trip Felicity and I had been part of when we were just kids, maybe in fifth grade, to Chicago museums and to the Brookfield Zoo. At the massive zoo, which I’d never seen, there was a program in the new aviary that allowed a few people at a time to stand among the birds in a re-creation of the rain forest. The docent explained that you could get bird poop on your head, and you could even get pecked, but probably not. Those revelations discouraged most of the girls, but not Felicity—and, since I couldn’t show up as a coward, not me. You got a little bucket of seeds, which you held in your hands, and the birds would come to you. The way St. Francis looked in the stained glass was the way Felicity looked that day, in an ecstasy, as brown and orange and blue creatures alighted on her hands and arms and shoulders... but I was terrified; the birds seemed to be dive-bombing me, tiny assassins like in the Daphne du Maurier story, their little eyes fierce and unblinking, their wings pummeling the air.
I finally had to be ushered out of the space, Felicity’s arm around my shoulders, and I now realized this was why I’d been frightened of birds, large and small, ever since. They really were not the merry little chubby-cheeked angel proxies of Disney movies but were instead like dinosaurs, cruel, coarse, combative creatures who would kill you in an instant over a crumb of suet if they didn’t weigh only four ounces.
“They don’t mean to scare you, Reenie,” Felicity said and laughed, but not in an unkind way, when I said that indeed they did and if she liked them, she was stupid, because if she was studying birds in the desert and she fell and hit her head, they would pick her flesh until she was nothing but a skeleton bleaching in the sun.
“I think that window is creepy,” I told Sam. “But I’m being like my very cynical father. Always looking for the worm in the apple.”
“I like him.”
“He liked you. My dad wouldn’t put on a jolly front for the royal family if they came over. The way he treated you was the equivalent of a ticker-tape parade for Patrick.”
“That’s good. One less mountain to cross,” Sam said, and then asked, “Do you want to get married in church?”
“Oh, Sam, I don’t know. I’m not opposed, though I’m not any kind of believer, but my father would drop dead of a heart attack. Maybe we could get married outside? Maybe in a bowling alley? Maybe in this place. I like this place. We could convince Patrick that it’s a municipal building.”
“Okay. I, Samuel Anthony Messina Damiano, take you... What’s your middle name?”
“It’s stupid...”
“Okay, take you, Irene Stupid...”
“It’s Tennyson.”
“Ah, hence the very depressing ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ But really, that’s a beautiful name. I, Samuel Anthony Messina Damiano, take you, Irene Tennyson Bigelow, to be my wife...”
“‘My wedded wife,’ I think it is, ‘to love and to honor, to protect and cherish, to respect and defend, in good times and hard times, for all the days of our lives.’”
“Is that the usual way? It’s a good way, I like it.”
“I, Irene Tennyson Bigelow, take you, Samuel Anthony Massimo...”
“Messina...”
“Messina Damiano, to be my wedded husband, to love and to honor, to protect and cherish, to respect and defend, to share my stories and my silence, to be my friend, in good times and hard times, for all the days of our lives” I added then, “I promise never to be jealous of your work or your friends. I promise to tell you the truth except occasionally and never about anything important. I promise to idealize you and look up to you and never insult youin public. I’ll stay up late with you and hire good people to clean the house. Most of all, I promise to try to make you laugh, even at my expense, even when my rear end is fat and my boobs sag and my ankles swell up if you insist on having a kid. I promise to love it too, although I can’t imagine loving anyone more than I love you right now. If we have half of what my parents have and half of what your parents have, it will be enough. I promise these things in front of St. Francis and these ghosts who’ve probably been waiting a while for a great moment like this one.”
Sam said, “What about obey? You left out obey.”
I told him, “You can obey me all you want to.”
Sam said, “Those were things I never thought of. They’re things I never knew I needed. But now, I know. And you always knew.” I kissed his cheek. “So can we just make a video of this? Do we have to do the other now? Invitations and fighting over the kind of cake?”
“We do, yes. We have to. I know exactly how to do this. All cake is good, if made by a professional. We could have a black-and-white wedding. It makes all the photos look good. And a black-and-white wedding cake, three layers, three different flavors, like chocolate, white, and coconut. Me, a fitted black lace bodice over a white tulle tulip skirt... the bridesmaids could carry white roses.”
“I thought you never really thought about this.”
“I thought about it for work, Sam! We had a wedding issue! And you know what they say, it’s a public commitment. Got to show the flag!”
