The Uniform My Father Tried To Destroy

I let that one go. I let a lot of them go. I had learned in the Marine Corps how to absorb an insult without answering it, how to let something roll off a flak jacket instead of a bare chest. I told myself my father would come around once there was a wedding date on the calendar, once it was real. I was wrong, but I did not know that yet.

We planned a small ceremony at the church on Church Street, the same church I had been christened in, the same church three generations of Bellamys had married in, wearing the same charcoal wool suit that had belonged first to my great-grandfather, then my grandfather, then my father on his own wedding day. It had been let out and taken back in so many times over the decades that the tailor in the next county over kept a card with our family’s measurements on file. My mother had pulled it out of the cedar closet herself, pressed it, and hung it on my closet door two days before the wedding, and for one soft afternoon, I actually believed we were going to be fine.

“Your grandfather would be proud to see you in this,” she’d said, smoothing the lapel with her hand. It was the kindest thing either of my parents had said to me in a year.

I should have known better than to trust the quiet.