“I wanted to elope this morning,” I told him, when I could breathe again. “I was so overwhelmed by all of it. It stopped feeling like ours.”
“I know.” He tucked a piece of hair back from my face. “That’s why we did this instead.”
“You knew before I did.”
“I love you,” he said. “I pay attention.”
I reached up and held his hand against my cheek. Through the dome ceiling, the northern lights shifted from green to violet and back, and I thought about how I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to write a song that sounded exactly like this moment and probably never quite getting there.
That seemed fine.
Some things didn’t need a song. Some things you just kept.
“We have a reception to get to,” I said.
“We do.”
I took his hand and we walked out of the snow globe together, back into the July sun, into the noise and the love and the enormous, raucous life waiting for us up the mountain.
Pooh trotted between us, cape slightly askew, completely unbothered.
BEST KINGMAN
DECLAN
Ihad a lot of great days.
Bowl wins. Draft day. The first time I made the Pro Bowl and called my dad from the locker room and couldn’t figure out why my voice wasn’t working right. The day Kelsey told me she loved me in a tiny cabin in the woods.
This was better than all of them. By a lot.
I stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched my wife dance barefoot to ABBA’s Dancing Queen with Jules and Sara Jayne, and I felt something that didn’t have a clean name yet, so I just let it sit in my chest and take up as much space as it needed.
Sara Jayne had been my mother’s friend since we were young. She was at every birthday party after my Mom died, because that was Sara Jayne. Showing up for all of us when we needed a positive female role model in our lives. She showed up.
Seeing her out there, arm in arm with my wife, laughing at something Jules had just done with her elbows, was the kind of thing that made my throat do inconvenient things.
Wiener the Pooh was doing her level best to join the chorus line. She was still wearing the white braid and theblue-ish sparkly dress Jules had constructed for her out of materials I chose not to think too hard about, which made her look approximately like main character from the kids movie “Freezed,” which was Jules’s funniest bit of the day. It was her third costume change since noon. My person fave had been the snowman Pooh was going to sleep like a bag of rocks tonight, and I respected that deeply.
“Your wife can dance,” Levi said, appearing at my elbow with a plate of appetizers he had clearly liberated from a passing tray.
“I know,” I said.
“Like, really dance.” He offered me the plate. I took one. “Mom’s going to send her a recruitment letter.”
“She coaches soccer.”
“I know. I’m just saying.” He watched the dance floor with the expression of someone genuinely impressed. “Jules choreographed whatever they’re doing right now, didn’t she.”
“That is not a question.”
“No,” he agreed. “It is not.”
He was a good kid. He was going to be fine. Especially with his spitfire of a girlfriend, Olive, by his side.
The DJ transitioned and the tempo shifted and Kelsey looked up from the dance floor and found me immediately, the way she always did, like she had a standing internal notification set for my location. She started toward me, cheeks flushed, hair coming loose from whatever had been holding it up, and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my entire life. I was aware of how that sounded and I did not care.
“Dance with me,” she said, and held out her hands.
