“Oh, God, don’t tell me you’ve broken up already,” Gwen said.
“We were never really together.”
“Okay, fine, but you liked her,” Gwen said before turning to her boyfriend. “You should’ve seen him the first time I met her. He spotted her, and it was as if I was no longer there.”
Eric raised his brows. “Then what’s the problem, man?”
“There’s no problem,” Duncan replied. In fact, he was doing well. His mood wasn’t as sour, and he had plans to go out next weekend to a bar for the first time in months.
Before they could engage in a back and forth, a delicate tinkling sound drew their attention to the front of the room. It was time for speeches. In all honesty, Duncan had done his best not to think about this function too much. And as a result, today would be the first time he looked at his speech since he proofread it several weeks ago.
One by one, people got up to stand behind the podium and tell stories about Trudy and Malcolm’s life together. A lot of those stories made their marriage sound like a quirky sitcom where the main couple simply bickered about empty milk cartons in the fridge.
“They look great together,” Duncan’s aunt, his mother’s sister, said during her speech. “I think they stayed married this long because they were scared they wouldn’t find better-looking people than each other. I can’t blame them. It’s rough out here.”
Each speaker would end their spiel by raising a toast to an amicable separation and continued happiness. And when his sister was up, it was no different. She delivered a speech that was absolutely beautiful but wholly skimmed over the mess in their childhood.
By the time it was Duncan’s turn, he was mildly irritated. He walked to the front of the room, looking out to the dining area that held forty people who’d played some role in his life in the past twenty-nine years. Duncan studied his cue cards and said, “Good afternoon, distinguished guests…and Uncle Peter.”
There was laughter as everyone turned to the man who’d shown up to the event in jeans and a Toronto Maple Leafs cap.
“I thought this was a casual thing!” he shouted good-naturedly.
Duncan looked down at his notes where his next points were perfectly laid out. He was supposed to share a story about how his family missed their flights one summer because his parents couldn’t stop arguing long enough to get them to the airport on time.
But the combination of the previous sanitized speeches and thoughts that had been ruminating since Anthony’s pseudo-intervention made him pause. Duncan was so opposed to risk, to conflict. It had been in the very fabric of his childhood and that made it especially tiresome.
He looked back up to the audience, who must’ve thought he’d suffered some sort of stroke because they were looking at him with furrowed brows.
Discarding the cue cards on the podium, Duncan pulled out his phone where he’d typed out the vent speech Retta had suggested he write. He’d written this alternative reflection a week or so after he’d returned from the wedding. There’d been a night when he had trouble falling asleep. Instead of scrolling through social media, he’d opened up his notes app and let the words flow.
He knew the whole point was not to read it out loud, but it wasn’t like he cussed out his parents in it, so what the hell.
“We’re gathered here today to celebrate the demise of my parents’ marriage,” Duncan said. “At first, I was annoyed that this celebration was even happening, but if we can’t celebrate these two agreeing on something, what can we celebrate?”
People in the room laughed.
“My parents loved my sister and me. Still do from what I’ve been told, but I won’t lie and say growing up with them in the house was easy.”
The mood in the room shifted with his last sentence.
Looking up he said, “I won’t go into detail because that’s probably best done with a therapist. Which, while I speak, I’m realizing I should probably get one.”
He took a breath and read once again from the screen. “You both taught me a lot. Mom, you never believed in gender roles, and I credit you for me being self-sufficient.”
He’d been around too many grown men who didn’t know how to cook or only changed their bedsheets twice a year to take that aspect of his rearing for granted.
“Dad, you’re curious and humble. I’d ask you the most inane questions and instead of brushing me off or pretending like you knew the answer, you’d tell me you didn’t know. I’d forget I even asked the question, and two days later, you’d come to me with an essay with all the information you’d found. I thought it was the teacher in you, but now I think you just gave a shi—crap.”
Duncan stopped. He wasn’t really sure where he was heading with this runaway speech, this was never meant to be cohesive. But nobody had thrown tomatoes at him yet, and his sister wasn’t giving him a signal to shut up, so he continued.
“But I think the biggest thing you taught me is I don’t want a love like yours.”
Again, he looked at his sister to gauge how far he was going. Though she looked melancholic, there was no indication that he needed to quit while he was ahead.
“I thought love only equaled strife, like it was supposed to be hard and filled with angst, and I’ve run away too often from anything close to that. Which I think can be a good thing because you avoid horrible relationships. But you also give up early because you anticipate the bad…”
Duncan looked up at his audience. “Even when the woman is the most creative, vibrant person you know. You end up pushing her away or not saying something because you’re scared that it’ll end badly. But how is that fair to her or me, for that matter?”
