SHOTGUN WEDDINGGGGGG.... part 1 :D

I’ll start in the middle, simply because that’s where you’re heading off to now. Marriage, I mean. I’ll start with my wedding. Not to your mother though, but to Matilda. I know you’ve always been curious, seeing as she’s a bit taboo in our house and all.

It was a shotgun wedding, you know. She was two months pregnant. Not even showing. But we had it two weeks after she came out about it– her mom insisted on it. The old lady still had her wedding dress, and I rented a suit, and we went down to the chapel and had the smallest ceremony you’ve ever seen. Your grandparents didn’t even have time to fly down for it. Not that your grandpa would have, he’d never travel that far. He’s stubborn like that. Just as well, I guess. Anyway, bada-bing, bada-boom, we were married.

I liked her, you know. Matilda, I mean. She wasn’t just some floozy I’d happened to knock up. I hadn’t been as in love with her as I was with your mother, but I was twenty and I thought hey, this could work out. I’m telling you this so you understand I didn’t mean for it to turn out so bad.

She didn’t move in right away. I was still in a one-bedroom apartment, she still had too much attached to her parents’ house. She still had a ton of stuff from her childhood. Toys, photo albums. Stuff like that. I offered to help her clean out her stuff and her parents said they’d find us a bigger place to live. You know, somewhere where the bathroom wasn’t so small the door wouldn’t open all the way because the sink was in the way.

I remember sitting in her room in her parents’ house with its rose-covered wall paper. I was on the floor, and she was piling dolls into my arms. She had tons of them– all different brands and sizes. She was going through them– she kept this all in this huge plastic bin– and picking out all her favorites.

If it’s a girl, she said to me, patting her stomach.

It’s okay if you want to keep your dolls, I said, thinking she just didn’t want to let everything go.

No, I have to grow up. Why can’t you understand that? She said.

She sounded kind of mad at me then. I kept suggesting she keep things if it made her sad to throw them out. Like her prom dress. She was just nineteen, you know, it would’ve still fit her. Not in a few months, of course, but maybe after the pregnancy she’d’ve still been able to squeeze into it. I guess we’ll never know now. Anyway, she nearly cried while she was putting it into the trash bag full of clothes her dad was going to take down to Good Will. I didn’t want to see her cry.

I don’t know what happened to all those dolls she dumped on me. I just handed them over to her mother. I hope they went to little girls who wanted them.

After a while Matilda’s dad found us a new apartment. It was still pretty small, me still working at the gas station and all, and Matilda’s tips disappearing and all that, but it was a bit bigger. Matilda wasn’t all that satisfied with it– she wanted this duplex her dad had found, but there was no way we could’ve afforded it.

Hey, you know why your grandparents divorced, right? Grandpa had an affair. Can you believe that? Guy as strict as him, shacking up with some tourist chick he met downtown. Said he was getting frustrated over Mom’s behavior, whatever that means.

Anyway– oh, how we met?

I met her at my work– I’d just dropped out of college. Gone west. Not far enough west though, never made it all the way to California. One minute I was filling up my truck in this godforsaken town in northern Arizona, the next I was talking to the gas station owner, who’d noticed my plates.

Georgia, eh? He said to me. Been driving a while?

Yeah, I said. Hoping to make it big on the West Coast.

He laughed. Then he said, Hey, you know, you don’t really sound like you’re from Georgia.

Nope, I said, Grew up Baltimore. Moved South in high schools when my folks broke up. Mom had some family in Athens.

Hey now, said the man, I have some family in Athens to. ‘Cept my Athens is in a whole other country. That’s how I put up with all this sun.

We both laughed over that. Then we got to talking, and since it was late in the day anyway, he offered to up me up for a night. So I went home with him, met his wife and two little boys, and I slept on their couch. I didn’t eat dinner with them; I just excused myself and went to a McDonald’s or a Burger King or something. I felt guilty enough as it was.

Then in the morning I woke up to the guy– his name was Bill, Bill Manellas– is telling me about how someone just called in sick and he’d pay me for the day if I filled in. And since I was near out of cash by that time, I agreed.

Now, I didn’t know anything about working gas stations, but I’d done retail before, and so he set me up at the cash register, and I sold people chips and colas and crap all day. And what do you know, the poor guy who actually worked for Bill had some horrible disease and couldn’t come in for two whole weeks, and so I just filled in for him and stayed with Bill and his family. Then next thing I knew Bill was hiring me full time and I was renting a run down apartment.

Matilda came in looking to buy cigarettes. She asked me what brand was good, and I thought wow, what’s this girl trying to do? So, not being a smoker myself, I said my father liked Marlboro. Then she laughed and said her mother used to smoke a pack of them a day.

Used to? I asked.

Well, she says she quit, but I’ve seen her lighting up out behind the diner we both work at, she answered.

Wow, I don’t think I could ever work with my mother or my father, I said.

So she said, It’s not so bad. Mom’s always forgetting her tips, and so the other girls just hand them over to me, and you know, I don’t always give them all over to mom in the end.

And so we kept talking and twenty minutes later I had her number and she walked out without buying anything. Then the next day I called her up, we set up a date, and it all went from there.

After the second date she took me home to meet her folks. I remember her mom taking my face between her hands saying,

Gosh does your face look familiar. Doesn’t he look like someone from church?

I don’t think so, her husband said back.

And no one could place who I looked like, but it was enough that I got her approval.

At least until I got Matilda pregnant, then she slapped me across the face. And she screamed,

You men, you think you can just take a girl to bed with you and just send her off. Well you listen up, you’re marrying her good and proper, and you make sure she’s happy and your kid stays healthy.

And I didn’t know why she yelled this, because like hell would I have just sent Matilda off. I told you, I loved her.

Anyway, I told her mom that and that we’d get married right away, and she still looked mad, but she still put up with me.

So we had our wedding, and Matilda and I managed to settle into our new apartment. She was pretty bloated by then, and her mom wanted her to quit work. But Matilda liked her independence, and she had that thing about wanting to grow up, so she kept working. I think that’s why she went to buy cigarettes that time we met, you know. To make herself grow up.

Then one day we were having dinner with her parents and she said,

You know I’ve never been out of Arizona?

And her dad said,

Nonsense, you went to Utah on that field trip that one time.

No, she said, I had a stomach virus and the teacher made me stay behind, remember?

And they prattled on about that for a while, then she suddenly announced that she wanted to met my parents before the baby was born.

Oh honey, her mom said. But plane tickets are so expensive.

And then Matilda got up, went to the back off the house and came back with a jar full off money.

I’ve been saving my tips, she said.

And then I knew her tips weren’t being stolen, but that probably she was stealing some of her mom’s tips. And what do you know, she had nearly enough in that jar for two round-trip tickets down to Atlanta.

And so it was settled. We were going to visit my mom in Athens. I called her, and she was so happy. And she called my dad and got him to agree to come down for the weekend to meet Matilda. I don’t know how she convinced him– guilt or black mail maybe. Or maybe it was the Braves game he wanted to take me and Matilda’s father to; I have no idea.

Oh yeah, Matilda’s parents came. It was a last minute thing, you know. They decided they’d rather meet their in-laws than buy a new washing machine. I almost wish their old one had broken down completely so they wouldn’t’ve.

So we all flew down to Atlanta and my mom picked us up in her old van. Everyone got along real well– I was thinking the whole time, Hey, won’t our baby have such a nice family? Maybe we can get together again for Christmas or something.

Then the next morning your grandpa showed up and it all went to hell.