Rachel immediately fell in love with Hester and asked Amelia if she could pet her. Amelia permitted her to coldly, then as Cordo watched she seemed to infer that Rachel was no threat or enemy and thereafter she was friendly toward the younger girl. They stayed with Cordo and Lila for a while, walking along the paths under the trees and between the bushes, until they came to the Japanese garden. Cordo gave them some admittance money and Lila told them to stay together as the two girls hurried up to the gate, Amelia and Hester trying to walk but being forced to run by Rachel’s excitement.
Cordo and Lila watched them until they passed through the gate, then they went on, talking in the sunshine.
When they ran into each other an hour later, Rachel talked nonstop about how pretty the garden was and how she would want her wedding to be held there someday.
“What wedding?” Cordo asked. “I thought you didn’t like boys.”
Rachel laughed.
“It doesn’t have to be a b—” Amelia began but Cordo put a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed, dissuading her from finishing while Cordo held down his laughter.
“I don’t,” Rachel said. “But in case, like, anyone ever forced me, like said, ‘Get married or else,’ I’d want it there.”
Cordo and Lila laughed. They continued through the gardens, Rachel stroking Hester’s head while Amelia talked to her about botany, horticulture, and plant biology.
The rest of the summer was filled with such play dates, as well as private dates for Cordo and Lila.
In July Tom proposed to Mark, who said yes, and a week later they had a small engagement party at Mark’s house in Bellevue. Cordo, Lila, Amelia, Rachel, Margaret, and Hester went.
“We’re trying to get everything in order for a November wedding but both our families are scattered throughout the country,” Mark said. “We might have to postpone for a while.”
“I knew it was gonna be a shitshow,” Tom said.
“But we agreed both our mothers’ hearts wouldn’t stand it if we eloped and we have aunts and grandmothers who’d be pissed.”
“Well what’s important is that it happened,” Lila said as she held a glass of white wine. “Everything will fall into place eventually. There’s no rush—have you read that Huffington Post article—”
“Boo!” Cordo put in.
“—about why couples should be engaged for longer than a year?”
“No,” Tom said.
“I’ll find it and send it to you,” Lila said.
They kept on and were the last to leave the house that night.
A week later at work, Cordo got a call from the security company that managed his house’s alarm system, informing him the alarm had been on for the last 30 seconds, do you need the police called? Yes, right away.
After he hung up, Cordo rushed down to his car and hurried home.
The house had been broken into from the kitchen window at the side. The glass had been broken in probably by a hammer or rock. What was perhaps strangest, however, was that nothing in the house seemed to be missing nor out of place from that morning before Cordo had left.
“Probably some dumbass kid broke in, set off the alarm, scared the piss outta him, so he ran off,” the police officer there speculated, following Cordo throughout the house as he looked in the subtle hiding spaces.
Lourdes’ jewelry was still in a cardboard shoebox in the floor of his closet, his grandfather’s old coin collection, worth about $2,000, was still between his mattress and box spring, as his grandfather had advised him as a child.
“Don’t trust banks,” he’d said to young Cordo. “They routinely fail, it’s cyclical.”
He checked the medicine cabinets in both bathrooms and found his and Amelia’s prescriptions in place.
“Anything missing, Mr. Tendler?” the officer asked for the umpteenth time.
They were in the guest bathroom and Cordo was looking at the orange pill bottle of Amelia’s fluoxetine. The bottle was nearly full. The label said it had one refill before August 2—next week.
“Mr. Tendler?” the officer asked again.
“No, no, I think everything’s fine. Thanks.”
When Margaret brought Amelia home that night, Cordo didn’t tell anyone about the alarm episode but instead asked Amelia if she had stopped taking her medication. She said yes without hesitation.
“How come?”
“I didn’t want to be on them anymore.”
“Why?”
He followed her to the backyard door, which she opened to let Hester out to the bathroom, and then into the kitchen, where she made herself a sandwich.
“I wasn’t hearing the voice anymore. The dreams were gone.”
“That was the point—get rid of your panic attacks and terrors and anxiety and everything.”
“And I haven’t had any since I’ve been off the pills. I’ve outgrown them.”
“But you’re hearing the voice again, having the dreams?”
“Yes. But they don’t overwhelm me like they did when I was young.”
“Why do you want them?”
Amelia shrugged.
“They’re important.”
“How?”
“…It’s hard to explain. When I’m taking a test, it tells me the answers. When I’m in the lab, it gives me suggestions on what to do.”
Cordo thought about this.
“But if you did fine when you were off them, when you didn’t hear—”
“Dad, I told you, it’s hard to explain. The important thing is I’m doing fine without the pills. I don’t want to be on them anymore.”
Cordo didn’t know what else to say, so he went into the living room and sat down to watch TV.
In August Cordo began looking for a ring. He hadn’t proposed to Lourdes with one—they’d gotten them after and it had been relatively easy, as Lourdes hadn’t been much of a jewelry-wearer.
But Cordo had more difficulty in finding a ring for Lila, so he invited Tom to help and they scoured the city’s jewelers.
“The problem is her ex-husband’s parents were rich, so he proposed with like a $50,000 ring,” Cordo told Tom as they looked through display cases.
“So anything you get her will pale in comparison.”
“Exactly.”
They looked at round, oval, marquise, asscher, trilliant, emerald, cushion, baguette, princess, pear, radiant, and heart diamonds before Cordo wondered if she even wanted a diamond. Then there were the colors, the bands, the settings, the clarities, and the carats to worry about.
“How did you decide on what ring to get Mark?”
“I didn’t really have to worry about it. People tend to look strangely at men wearing diamonds. We’re just gonna wear silver bands.”
“Yet another reason I wish I were gay.”
“You don’t have any family heirlooms? Any rings your great-grandmother got through the Holocaust with?”
“I wish. All my family are from Switzerland.”
“Neutral bastards.”
The more they looked, the more disheartened Cordo became.
“What are you looking for exactly?”
“Something I fall in love with immediately because I know she’ll fall in love with it immediately.”
As they headed into the third weekend of looking, Cordo’s attitude toward the idea of a ring soured.
“It’s really cliché and impersonal, isn’t it? And why do we give diamonds? Because some slave driver in South Africa said they’re forever? It’s just hardened carbon, no different from a pumice stone. I might as well get her that—it’s cheaper and, hey, perk, she’d have silky-smooth feet.”
“You’re losing your mind.”
“I just wanna propose with something she’ll love forever. I want that feeling that Niles and Chandler had, they saw rings and immediately knew, ‘That’s the ring!’”
“Niles is from—”
“Frasier.”
“Of course, I was always more of a Friends man.”
> At the end of the third weekend, they had some beers, still having found no satisfactory bauble.
“So fuck the diamond. In fact fuck the ring,” Tom said.
Cordo thought about this as he drank.
“Fuck the ring?”
“Fuck the ring. So you can’t best the ex-husband’s $50,000 ring. So you do something totally different—something nobody’s ever done.”
“So there’s no precedent.”
“Exactly. You be the fucking George Washington of engagement traditions.”
“OK. How?”
“You know her better than I do.”
Cordo thought for a moment. Then he slowly started spelling out his plan.
In mid-September Cordo asked Lila to come away with him for the weekend but she couldn’t until the first of November. Then Tom and Mark volunteered to babysit Amelia and Rachel and in private, Tom gave Cordo a hug and wished him luck.
Cordo drove them half an hour north to Willows Lodge, near green Woodinville. It was a drizzly afternoon and after checking in, they took one of the lodge’s vans to the numerous wineries in the area and got drunk on samples, then went back to the lodge and made love in their room for two hours. Then they went to dinner at the lodge’s restaurant, the Barking Frog, and afterward walked around in the lodge’s herb garden, through which a picturesque brook cut and a bronze head sat on the bank with its tongue sticking out.
They walked amid the fragrances of herbs beneath the moon and stars and she might have expected him to propose then but he didn’t. It was still drizzling but not enough to dampen the occasion. They found a cylinder-roofed stone hut and huddled inside it for a while and kissed.
Then they went back to their room and sat in front of their burning stone-trimmed fireplace to dry and warm up. They made love twice more before falling asleep.
The next day was dark but not drizzly. After breakfast and getting ready, Cordo put a bottle of red wine and a blanket in a tote bag and he and Lila went outside to the Sammamish River. Their running shoes, which had never known either of them to run, crunched in the dewy grass and rocky dirt as they headed downhill to the asphalt trail beside the river and then followed it southward.
They went on for a half-hour, Cordo repeatedly taking deep breaths, rolling his shoulders, and clenching and unclenching his fists. Then they found a nice grassy spot on the bank and Cordo spread out the blanket and they lay on it on their elbows, watching the current and the little animals on the other bank as they shuffled between stems and shrubs.
“You know it took me seven years to start dating again,” Cordo said.
Lila looked at him. Her red hair was straight, lying on her shoulders, an orange river frozen in place yet malleable.
“Tom suggested internet dating,” he said. “I thought it was the dumbest most pathetic thing, like officially surrendering.”
Lila chuckled empathetically.
“But since I met you, I’m terribly glad I did it.”
He stroked her hand.
“Me too,” she said.
Cordo cleared his throat.
“The time I’ve spent with you and Rachel, it’s all been the best time of my life in a long time…”
He reached into the tote bag and Lila reared up in preparation.
“…and I want us all to…”
He chuckled as tears dripped down from his eyes.
“…be a family.”
He brought out a little wooden box and opened it: Inside was black velvet padding protecting an egg-shaped pendant in a radiant golden frame.
Lila was a bit surprised at the object. Cordo told her to take a closer look.
“Do you know what a cameo is?”
She nodded as she leaned in, then after a second she gasped.
“It’s Rachel,” she said.
Cordo nodded, watching Lila as she examined the raised chiseled profile of Rachel on the marble-seeming face of the pendant. The layers of her hair, the shape of her nose and chin, her ear were all there, captured in white against a chestnut background.
“I found this picture on your phone,” Cordo said. “I sent it to a carver in Greece. It’s made out of sardonyx shell in a 14-carat white-gold setting—to go with your pale skin tone.”
Lila hadn’t touched it yet, looked at it with tears in her eyes.
“It’s amazing.”
Cordo took her hand.
“Will you marry me?”
“Yes!”
They declined having an engagement party, opting instead for a soirée intime at Cordo’s house with Tom, Mark, Margaret, Amelia, Rachel, Michelle, and Rebecca, Lila’s sister.
When asked when they were having the wedding, they said maybe in July, as everyone at the lodge had said the local lavender would be in full bloom and they could have their wedding at the Lavender Farm. The fact that purple was Lila’s favorite color was pure serendipity.
“Is eight months enough time?” Mark asked.
“Yeah, it’s only gonna be about 20 people,” Lila said.
“What about you guys?” Cordo asked. “We haven’t gotten an RSVP, so is it safe to say you’ve had to postpone?”
“Yes,” Tom said. “We couldn’t do it this month because the gluten-free caterer was previously booked for an Alaskan cruise and my cousins and their children will explode if they have gluten and no one else apparently has mastered the art of cooking without it. And we can’t do it next month because Mark’s grandmother doesn’t wanna travel at Christmas and New Year’s. Can’t do it in January because all the kids go back to school, can’t do it during spring break ‘cause all the little bastards have different spring breaks.”
“So now we’re shooting for summer,” Mark concluded.
For Amelia’s birthday she, Cordo, Lila, Tom, Mark, Rachel, Hester, and Margaret hiked Mount. Rainier and listened to Amelia lecture them on the flora with all the authority of a tenured professor.
At the start of the new semester, she applied for several grants and scholarships offered by various private and nonprofit foundations and by individuals vetted by the university and by mid-February, she was informed she had been selected for most of them and her funding totaled a little more than $15,000. After Cordo could foresee no impending conflicts of interest, he allowed her to accept the money.
Cordo and Lila discussed the issue of whether they should move in together into one of their houses or buy a new house altogether.
Lila ruled out moving into her house, which she’d shared with her ex and which, for her, still carried the poison of their marriage in the air, like mold in the walls, termites in the floorboards.
Cordo said there were no negative feelings for him in this house but wondered if Lila and Rachel would be comfortable here, considering…
“Rachel doesn’t know about…Lourdes,” Lila said. “And as for me…you had a happy marriage…it was obviously good enough for Amelia to prosper.”
Considering Amelia’s college costs and Cordo’s own student-loan debts, both of which he was tactfully dealing with in the long run, as well as Lila’s debts from her divorce and student loans, they agreed Lila and Rachel would move into Cordo’s house, convert his office into another bedroom, and would move in no more than three years to someplace bigger.
And this eventually led to another topic.
“Do you want more children?” Lila asked him one night in March, after she’d moved in, and they sat in Cordo’s papasan chair for two in front of the crackling fireplace.
“Not on my own,” he said. “It’s too hard.”
“But with me?” she asked, stroking his arm as it hung around her neck.
Cordo thought.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Me too.”
She kissed his wrist.
Everything and everyone finally aligned for Tom and Mark, who married in June at Belle Gardens in Deer Park, near Spokane.
People started arriving at noon. Valets provided by the owners of the grounds parked the cars of th
e cousins from Texas, the aunts and uncles from Colorado, the grandparents from Florida and North Carolina, friends from Oregon, Seattle, and California.
The gardens’ epicenter was the two-story white Victorian house at the top of the asphalt driveway off a desolate backwoods road.
In the top floor of this house, Mark and his groomsmen—his brother and people from school and work—got ready while in a cottage across the driveway, Tom and Cordo got ready, Tom nervously talking.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately?” he asked as he fastidiously examined himself in a mirror.
Cordo looked at him in the mirror, shook his head.
“Have you ever met anyone from Delaware?”
Cordo thought.
“Nope.”
“Have you ever known of any celebrity from Delaware?”
“Nope.”
“Exactly. I don’t think Delaware has any people. I think at some point, the federal government said, ‘Oh shit, it’s been a long time since we heard anything from Delaware,’ and when they went to look, it was empty.”
“Like the Roanoke Colony.”
“Yes. And the government was like, ‘People’ll lose their shit if they hear about this,’ and then someone else said, ‘What’re we gonna do?’ and someone else was like, ‘Let’s not do anything, see if people notice,’ and no one has yet! It’s like the Area 51 of states.”
“Area 52.”
Tom laughed. He turned around, took a deep shuddering breath.
“He’s the one, right? The right one?”
Cordo chuckled.
“Is he?”
Tom nodded.
“I think so.”
Cordo cocked his head.
“You think?”
Tom shook his head, turned back to the mirror, wiped his palms on his blue suit pants.
“No, no, he is. Just…”
Cordo watched him.
“How do you feel about him?” Cordo asked.
“I love him.”
Most Unnatural Page 10
