One Last Thing Before I Go

there all along, temporarily camouflaged against the sandy texture of his brain.
    Denise looks up from her magazine. “You’re up.”
    She doesn’t look terribly concerned, which might be a good sign or might be because she doesn’t particularly give a shit either way. His death, at this point, wouldn’t have much in the way of ramifications for her. Or anyone else, really. This realization is enough to get him to close his eyes and try to reconnect with dreamless oblivion. He hears the high-pitched wail of dry hinges, and then footsteps.
    “Dad?”
    He opens his eyes to see Casey standing over his bed, holding a bottle of Diet Coke with a chewed straw sticking out of it.
    You called me Dad.
    “Can you talk?”
    I’m fine, Casey.
    She turns to Denise, alarmed. “Why can’t he talk?”
    Denise leans over him and says, loudly, “Silver, can you talk?” like he is a three-year-old. She used to talk to the Mexican gardeners like that too.
    Of course I can talk. This is me, talking.
    Denise stands up and positions her face right in front of his. “Blink if you can understand me.”
    What the fuck, Denise?
    “I’m going to get Rich,” Casey says, running out of the room.
    “You’re OK,” Denise tells him, but she’s looking at him with that old familiar gaze, the one that says that, to no one’s great surprise, you’ve gone and shit the bed again.
    * * *
    They met at his cousin Bruce’s wedding. She wasn’t the most beautiful bridesmaid, that was Andrea Lumane, whose plum-colored gown clung to her like shrink wrap, and whom the photographers followed around the reception as much as they did the bride herself. Neither was Denise the runner-up. That honor went to Hannah Reece, who could have sailed through on her unassailable cleavage alone. But Denise was a strong third place, maybe a bit plain-looking, but her soft features had a certain understated elegance, and her smile was full and honest. She seemed like someone who could laugh at herself, which was a trait he looked for in the women he attempted to date. It made it less likely that they would laugh at him.
    So he downed a few shots to tranquilize his innate introversion, fixed his wild mane of hair as best he could, popped a breath mint, and then boldly sat down in the empty seat beside her.
    “You look like you could be having a better time,” he said.
    She had been a bridesmaid one too many times, and was drinking more than she generally did, more than he would ever see her drink again. She was tipsy, funny, and he knew, within the first ten minutes of talking to her, the way a man knows only when a woman lets him, that if he listened and nodded sympathetically, and danced all the slow dances with her, that she’d let him be the one to peel off that ridiculous dress when the wedding was over. The reception was at the Hilton, and for the sake of convenience, she had booked herself a room for the night, which meant no car ride during which she might sober up and reconsider.
    So they danced, and he made her laugh with his moves, and refreshed her drink just the right amount to maintain her buzz without crossing over to staggering drunkenness, and a few hours later, after only some minor awkwardness, they were in her hotel room, where she fucked him with a drunken energy that bordered on anger before passing out facedown on his belly. And seeing her like that, vulnerable and spent, awoke something in him, and he studied the graceful slope of her spine down to the roundness of her ass, the smoothness of her skin, the way her small breasts held their own in pretty much any position, and he decided that hers was a beauty that revealed itself in stages, and congratulated himself on discovering it and getting laid at the same time.
    He had planned to leave in the morning before she woke up, but by the time he opened his eyes she was already in the shower, and it seemed inexcusably rude to leave while she was there, somehow not at all the same as her waking up to find him gone, although he couldn’t have said why. So he stayed for breakfast, and she told him she was getting her real estate license, and he told her about his band, and he was inordinately touched by the fact that she wasn’t bemoaning their night together and saying things like “I never do this” or “I was so wasted,” which he would have taken personally. So sex led to a relationship, and the relationship led to a marriage, and the marriage to a baby, and only after it was