Left for Garbage

seen Denise. She went from like zero to a hundred in terms of losing it in about five seconds flat. She got right in her mom’s face and started telling her she never supported her in any way and that she treated her like, pardon me, that she treated her like … uhm … shit, and that if she didn’t want to be a part of her only daughter’s wedding, she – Denise, I mean - would just move in with me until our wedding day and her parents didn’t even need to show up. As a matter of fact, she told her mom they’d better not show up.
    I was embarrassed for both of them , and didn’t know what to do since I’d never seen anything like that at my own house, but, surprisingly, her mom backed right down, calling Denise ‘Sweetheart’ and saying maybe they could take out a second loan on the house, and that kind of thing.
    I felt terrible for her mom right then and tried to dial it back in terms of emotion by grabbing for Denise’s hand and saying , like, you know, ‘I don’t care if we have a big wedding or not. We can get married in my dad’s church and have a barbecue in the back yard. It’s not the wedding that counts, it’s just being married to Denise I care about,’ that kind of thing. But it totally backfired on me.
    Denise snatched her hand back and turned on me , saying that if I didn’t think she was good enough for a real wedding, that I probably didn’t think she was good enough to be my wife, either.
    And before I could defend myself, her mother jumped in and attacked me , too. It was all about how Denise was her only daughter, and she said real sarcastically, “Please don’t worry about it, Bobby. I don’t want you to have to strain yourself by contributing to your own wedding. Believe me, Keith and I will manage. You see, we do care about our daughter’s happiness and I’m only sorry you don’t.”
    And this was after she’d just got done telling Denise the opposite and I was trying to defend her. I mean, it was bizarre, I’m telling you.
    I started thinking about how my dad was always saying to me, “Bob, what do you truly know about this girl and her people?” and asking how I knew the baby was mine … and speaking of the baby, by then I was beginning to wonder if Denise had even told her parents she was pregnant. I mean, if she had, they were sure acting weird about it. They never said a word about the baby, and when I asked Denise about it, she said they were “a couple religious assholes” who were ashamed about it, so they were going to keep it quiet until after the wedding, which even then struck me as odd because I’d overheard her mom call my parents ‘religious assholes’, and so I never got the impression that things like an out-of-wedlock baby would have mattered to them.
    I didn’t argue about it with Denise , though, because I was already learning by then that she didn’t like to be questioned about things she said, whether they made sense or not.
    At the time I guess I also thought that if her parents didn’t know right then , that they probably would notice it pretty soon, whether she said anything or not, since by then she was like five months along and we weren’t even planning to get married, at least as far as I knew, until August, which would have made her eight months along.
    Anyway, I wasn’t feeling too good after the scene with her mom , and I said something like, ‘I’m out of here’ and started to go, but then Denise, who could switch moods in a second, came over and threw her arms around my neck, saying stuff like, ‘I’m sorry’, and ‘I love you’, and ‘let’s go into my bedroom and cuddle, okay?’
    I knew what that meant , and even though it was kind of weird with her mom in the house, I wasn’t saying no - something I’m ashamed of now but at the time not so much.
    That day, after we were together, she kind of curled up against me and asked me if I still wanted to marry her even though she was so messed up. By then I’d forgotten all about how she’d acted with her mom , and I kissed her and told her that, yeah, of course I still wanted to marry her.
    She started to cry , which didn’t really make sense to me, but Denise was my first real girlfriend, so I don’t know, I thought maybe all girls were kind of moody like she was. Anyway, I asked her what was wrong and she said she wasn’t good enough for me, not pure enough. I remember that so well: not pure enough.
    I asked her what she meant and that’s when she told me