Sing You Home

melody and then sing the next line: “I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”

With a strong chord I finish. “You know,” I say, as if this thought has just occurred to me, instead of being a lesson I’ve planned all along, “the thing about lyrics is that they work really well when they connect personally to the musician-or the listener.” I start playing the same melody again, but this time I improvise the words:

Didn’t you ever feel like you were all alone, well yeah,

And didn’t you ever feel that you were on your own.

Honey, you know you do.

Each time you tell yourself that you’re out of luck

You wonder how you ever, ever got so stuck.

I want you to listen, listen, listen, listen already

Gotta know that I am ready to help you, Lucy.

Gonna show you I am ready to help you, Lucy-

Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.

“Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.

Sometimes you make me feel like.____________________

Don’t you know that I____________________?

I do a fill-in-the-blank pattern like this for the entire song, and then set it on the table between us. For a few minutes Lucy just ignores it, focusing instead on a tangled strand of her hair. And then, slowly, her hand reaches out and pulls the paper closer.

I try not to get too excited about the fact that she’s taken an active step toward participation. Instead, I pick up my guitar and pretend to tune it, even though I did this before Lucy arrived today.

When she writes, she hunches over the paper, as if she’s protecting a secret. She’s a lefty; I wonder why I haven’t noticed that before. Her hair falls over her face like a curtain. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.

At one point, her sleeve inches up and I see the scars on her wrist.

Finally, she shoves the paper in my direction. “Great,” I say brightly. “Let’s take a look!”

In every blank, Lucy has written a string of expletives. She waits for me to look at her, and she raises her eyebrows and smirks.

“Well.” I pick up my guitar. “All right, then.” I put the paper on the table where I can see it, and I begin to sing, certain that if anyone would understand anger and anguish it would be Janis Joplin, and that she won’t be rolling over in her grave. “Sometimes you make me feel like a motherfucking asshole,” I sing, as loud as I can. “Don’t you know that I… cocksucker-” I break off, pointing to the page. “I can’t quite read that…”

Lucy blushes. “Uh… fucktard.”

“Don’t you know that I… cocksucker fucktard,” I sing.

The door to the hallway is wide open. A teacher walks by and does a double take.

“Come on, come on, come on, come on and take it… Take a motherfucking shithole asswipe…”

I sing as if this is any song, as if the swear words mean nothing to me. I sing my heart out. And eventually, by the time I finish the chorus, Lucy is staring at me with the ghost of a smile playing over her lips.

Unfortunately, there is also a small crowd of students standing in the open doorway, caught on the tightrope between shocked and delighted. When I finish, they start clapping and hollering, and then the bell rings.

“Guess that’s all the time we have,” I say. Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and, like usual, makes a beeline to get as far away from me as possible. I reach for my guitar case, resigned.

But at the threshold of the door, she turns around. “See you next week,” Lucy says, the first time she’s acknowledged to me that she has any plan to return.

I know it’s supposed to be good luck if it rains on your wedding, but I’m not sure what it means when there’s a blizzard. It is the day of my wedding to Vanessa, and the freak April snowstorm the weathermen have predicted has taken a turn for the worse. The Department of Transportation has even closed patches of the highway.

We came to Fall River the night before, to get everything sorted out, but the majority of our guests were driving up today for the evening ceremony. After all, Massachusetts is less than an hour away. But today, even that seems too far.

And now, if a weather disaster isn’t enough, there’s a plumbing snafu, too. The pipes burst at the restaurant where we were planning to hold our reception. I watch Vanessa try to calm down her friend Joel-a wedding planner who took on our nuptials as his gift to us. “They’ve got three inches of standing water,” Joel wails, sinking his head into his hands. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”

“I’m sure there’s somewhere that can hold a party on short notice,” Vanessa says.

“Yeah. And maybe Ronald McDonald will even agree to officiate.” Joel looks up sharply at Vanessa. “I have a reputation, you know. I will not, I repeat, not have French fries as an hors d’oeuvre.”

“Maybe we should reschedule,” Vanessa says.

“Or,” I suggest, “we could just go to a justice of the peace and be done with it.”

“Honey,” Joel says. “You are not wasting that gorgeous peau de soie dress on a city hall wham-bam-stamp- you-ma’am wedding.”

Vanessa ignores him and walks toward me. “Go on.”

“Well,” I say. “The party’s the least important thing, isn’t it?”

Behind me, Joel gasps. “I did not hear that,” he says.

“I don’t want everyone to drive up here and risk their lives,” I say. “We’ve got Joel as a witness, and I’m sure we can drag in someone else off the street.”

Vanessa looks at me. “But don’t you want your mother here?”

“Sure I do. But more than that, I just want to get married. We’ve got the license. We’ve got each other. The rest, it’s just gravy.”

“Do me a favor,” Joel begs. “Call your guests and leave it up to them.”

“Should we tell them to bring their bathing suits for the reception?” Vanessa asks.

“Leave that part up to me,” he says. “If David Tutera can fix a wedding catastrophe, so can I.”

“Who the hell is David Tutera?” Vanessa asks.

He rolls his eyes. “Sometimes you are such a dyke.” He takes her cell phone off the table and presses it into her hand. “Start calling, sister.”

“The good news,” my mother says, as she closes the bathroom door behind her, “is that you’re still walking down an aisle.”

It took her five hours, but she managed to make it to Massachusetts in the storm of the century. Now, she is keeping me company until it’s showtime. It smells of popcorn in here. I look at myself in the wide industrial mirror. My dress looks perfect; my makeup seems too dramatic in this dim light. My hair, in this humidity, doesn’t have a prayer of holding a curl.

“The minister’s here,” my mother tells me.

I know, because she already popped in to say hello to me. Maggie MacMillan is a humanist minister we found in the yellow pages. She’s not gay, but she performs same-sex marriages all the time, and both Vanessa and I liked the fact that there wasn’t a religious component to her ceremony. Frankly, after Max’s visit, we’d both had about as much religion as we could stand. But she really sold us in her office by whooping with delight when we’d told her we’d be crossing the border to Massachusetts to get married. “I wish Rhode Island would get with the program,” she’d said with a smirk. “But I suppose the legislature thinks if they give gays and lesbians civil rights, everyone in the state is going to want them…”

Joel sticks his head inside the door. “You ready?” he asks.

I take a deep breath. “Guess so.”

“You know I tried to get you a gay magician for the reception, but it didn’t work out,” Joel says. “He vanished