Page 1 of My Dead Wife's Ex Will Do
One
Jason
“You’re not going to act all weird with him, are you?” My daughter’s voice drifts over the curtain enclosing the dressing area and rises above the tailor’s murmured instructions to turn this way, please; lift your arm a little; yes, now lower it.
“What do you mean ‘act all weird’? With who?” I’m standing on a riser while the tailor fits me for the suit I’m supposed to wear to my daughter’s wedding next month and if there’s anyone I’m likely to act all weird with, it’s this woman squatting at my knees who currently has her hands all over parts of my body that even I don’t touch this much.
“With Daddy,” Kelsey says, and I swear I can hear her rolling her eyes at me. I roll mine back, even though she can’t see me, and the tailor tosses a sympathetic smile up at me.
“I am not going to act all weird with Victor.”
“‘Cause you do, you know. Ever since Mom died, you act like you can barely stand him, and the last thing I need at my wedding is my two dads being the way you always are around each other.”
Kelsey delights in referring to Victor and me as her two dads. Which, fine. Technically, we are. Victor Hendricks is Kelsey’s biological father. I married Kelsey’s mother when Kelsey was not quite four years old. I wanted to adopt her, but Victor refused to give up his parental rights. After Leah died fifteen years ago, Victor and I shared custody of Kelsey.
I’m the man who raised her, for the most part. I tucked her in at night, taught her to read, how to hit a softball, helped her memorize her multiplication tables.
Victor taught her how to apply makeup, accessorize, and stand up to bullies. And how to sass her primary custodial father, something she still does on the regular.
Not that Kelsey has needed custodial parents for some time now. She’s twenty-seven and about to marry a woman she’s been dating for three years. But her wedding is one place I’ll definitely have to share her with Victor.
When she was a girl, Kelsey had an uncanny knack for sussing out which of her friends or teachers would be most shocked by the notion of two men co-parenting.
Never mind that Victor and I are not—and have never been—a couple. Or that I’m not gay.
“It wouldn’t kill your daddy to be a little less weird around me,” I mutter under my breath.
The tailor’s eyes flick upwards, but she drops them quickly back to her work. She’s probably been privy to any number of family squabbles, scandals, or breakdowns while taking measurements and pinning hems.
Not that there’s any scandal going on here.
Or family squabbles.
Unless you count what happened between Victor and me the night after Leah’s funeral.
Which I don’t.
One night. A moment of weakness when we were both grieving. Something that shouldn’t have happened but did, like things sometimes just happen, even when they shouldn’t.
Kelsey doesn’t—will never—know about that.
“How are the wedding plans coming along?” I ask. The subject of Victor and how I interact with him is not a sore one, exactly, but it’s also not one I have any intention of discussing with our daughter.
“Ugh,” she groans. “Adrienne wants to cancel the entire thing and elope. She’s opposed to what she calls ‘the wedding industrial complex’ and she thinks we’re spending too much money on only one day in our whole life together.”
I exchange a smile with the tailor at the air quotes I can hear in Kelsey’s voice. I love Kelsey’s fiancée almost as much as Kelsey does. She’s an attorney at a big law firm and the most no-nonsense person I’ve ever met. Of course she thinks they shouldn’t spend a lot of money on a wedding.
On the other hand, Kelsey has been dreaming about her wedding since she was a little girl, parading her Barbies down a flower-strewn aisle in the upstairs hallway of the Brooklyn brownstone Leah’s trust fund bought shortly before we married. Mother of Mercy, what a chore it was to vacuum up all those wilted flower petals.
“Are you going to do that?”
Kelsey sighs loud enough that the curtain sways a bit in the resulting breeze. “I,” she starts dramatically, “have compromised on freaking everything. But I want an aisle to walk down. And a pretty dress to wear. And a bouquet of flowers to carry. And a handful of friends and family there to see us make our vows and celebrate with us. Is that too much to ask?”
“Of course not, honey.” I want those things for Kelsey, too. I want to see my little girl all dressed up, exchanging vows to love, honor, and cherish the person she already loves so much, just like her mother and I did. “Is Adrienne really opposed to everything?”
Kelsey snorts, a truly unladylike sound, and I relax a little bit. “No. She’s just being a pill. She’s been overwhelmed at work lately, trying to wrap things up so she can take the time off. It was her idea to have it in Costa Rica in the first place, which is the main reason it’s costing so much.”
Instead of a church wedding in New York City, Kelsey and Adrienne have chosen to have their wedding at a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. Seven days of daily yoga sessions, local cuisine, spa treatments, and eco-tourism excursions, with their vow exchange on day five so we all have a day or two to recover before heading back to New York.
