The Slap Two Days After Our Wedding

The one thing that worried me, in the months before the wedding, was Kayla.

Kayla is Dustin’s younger sister, twenty four at the time, and she had been living in his house, the house I was about to move into, for almost a year. Dustin always called it temporary. “She’s going through a hard time,” he told me more than once, usually right before some small moment where Kayla needed something from him. “Just be patient with her, Lauren. She hasn’t had it easy.”

I believed him, mostly because I wanted to. I told myself that any family worth marrying into would have a Kayla in it somewhere, a sibling who needed more help than the others, and that being patient with her was simply part of loving Dustin. I did not understand yet that patience, in that house, was not a virtue. It was a job description, and I had been hired for it before I ever said a single vow.

Our wedding was in June, out at the Lindqvist barn on the edge of town, string lights strung between the rafters and two hundred mason jars of black eyed susans on every table. My father walked me down a gravel aisle in his one good suit, and when the officiant asked who gives this woman, his voice cracked on the word gives, which is the only time in my whole life I ever heard my father’s voice do that. Dustin’s father, Walter Lang, gave a toast about family being the only inheritance that actually matters. Kayla gave a toast too, shorter, about how excited she was to finally have a sister. I remember thinking, in the particular golden stupidity of a bride on her own wedding night, that everything in my life had finally arranged itself correctly.

We did not go on a honeymoon right away. Dustin had a framing crew mid job on a commercial build out by the highway and said we would take two weeks in the fall once the weather turned, and I agreed, because that seemed like the reasonable, grown up thing a wife does. So on Sunday night, the day after our wedding, I moved the last of my boxes into the house Dustin had bought three years earlier, the house Kayla had been living in the entire time, the house that was, as of that weekend, supposed to become ours.