Left-Handed Engineers From MARZ
Marlone's wedding, part IV

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Reg had escaped the children and the crowd entirely by going into the house. Zephyr had set him up in the guest room with some tools, Portia's old broken VCR, and the excuse that he was making himself useful. Portia had fed Bryce and put him up for a nap, and Zephyr was now completely alone as he sat and watched Jack and Marlone dance. They swung and dipped to some Big Band tune. They were very good at it, Zephyr noted; Jack led confidently, his physical strength apparent, and Marlone spun and stepped with practiced agility. They must have taken ballroom dancing lessons together.

It also occurred to him that in the three years he'd seen them together, this was the first time they'd shown any real chemistry between them. Instead of their usual comfortable tolerance, now they exhibited mutual trust and affinity.

"Hey." Portia slid into the chair beside him, looking flushed and frazzled. "It's going pretty well, don't you think?"

"Yup." Zephyr nodded over to the deck-turned-dance floor. "I had no idea they could do that."

"Pretty impressive, I know. I think they learned especially for this, but they're so good they should stick with it. Which reminds me... the next dance is traditionally the one where the bride dances with her father, and you're once again the obvious alternative."

"Oh, god. No. Can't we work around that?" He had never danced with another person in his entire life, and he'd rather not take a crash course in front of a bunch of strangers. If he had to choose between that and getting involved in a public confrontation with his mother... maybe he still had time to disappear into Reg's hiding place.

"I thought you'd say that. Don't worry, I've got you covered. I talked to Mom last night and she and I agreed to dance together."

Zephyr laughed appreciatively. "Those nutty Decastles... they just get weirder and weirder."

Portia darted up onto the deck, still the tireless ball of energy she'd always been, and when the next song started she and Marlone took each other's hands and slipped into a slow dance. Even from that distance, Zephyr could see them bickering as they swayed to the ballad. They never seemed to stop, he mused. He wondered why it was that Portia's relationship with their mother was so much better than his own. Maybe it was because of their nonstop bickering rather than despite it. Could it be that if only Zephyr knew how to fight back, he and Marlone would get along better? He dismissed that thought; Marlone had always treated her two children very differently. It wasn't just his fault.

Marlone and Jack danced to several more songs, and Portia paired up with her husband, Dan. The dance floor filled up with couples of all ages and groups of children. Tammy was especially beautiful in her increasingly colorful dress (which now sported ketchup red and soil brown in addition to the original bright green streak) and a fresh batch of dandelions woven into her dark curls. Zephyr watched.

The sun was just starting to duck behind the monstrous pines lining the edge of the backyard by the time the party started to wind down. Marlone disappeared into the house to change clothes. Jack, showing the strain of physical exertion, heaved into the chair next to Zephyr. Portia joined them shortly.

"Having fun?" Portia asked Jack. "That must have been the most time you've spent with Mom all day!"

"Yeah... and I'll be glad when this whole shindig is over. I ain't one for an all-day party."

"But... it's your wedding," Portia pointed out.

Jack shrugged. "Just icing on the cake, so to speak. Your mother and I've been good as married for a couple years now. When you reach our age, it's not a big deal anymore."

"I don't know... it seems like a big deal to her."

"Well," Zephyr said, "she's been trying to get married all her life. My father was out of the question, but she clung to your father for years. This is like a lifelong dream come true - she finally found a good man, we failed to scare him away, and he loves her too!"

"Oh yeah... we made driving off men into a sport when we were little!" Portia laughed. "Good thing you didn't try dating her back then, Jack. We would have been horrible to you."

"I don't know," Zephyr countered. "You're so laid back, we might have cut you a break."

"Yeah, that's true." Portia nodded her emphatic agreement. "I never would've expected Mom to hook up with someone, y'know, sane. What's the story behind you two? I know where you met, but I don't know anything beyond that."

Jack drained his glass of cola, forcing a dramatic pause into the conversation. "Well," he finally said, "it's like this. We were both going through big changes in our lives. Our families had all moved out, my second wife divorced me, we were pulling ourselves together and getting cleaned up. We found ourselves in the same place at the same time - nothing to look forward to, nothing to work towards. One thing they tell you in the Program is you gotta have a goal, something to hope for. First we started seeing each other for support through all that nothing, but then we started seeing that spending the rest of our lives together was the goal we needed."

"Mmm, that's nice," Portia said appreciatively. "With Dan and me, it was different."

"Do tell," Zephyr encouraged her.

"We were young, so that right there makes it different. Not that you're old, just that we were really young. To me, he was just another guy to be with. Guys never stuck around very long; I thought that's what being a guy was all about. String the girl along for a few months and then go find a new girl. Then I got pregnant with Brittany. I figured I'd just be a single mother like Mom, but then Dan proposed. So I said yes. And, um, that's about it."

"So you got married, popped out a few more kids, and lived happily ever after." Zephyr grinned at her.

"Pretty much!" Portia said, laughing.

"Wow."

"Hey, what about you and Reg?" she asked.

"Er." Zephyr glanced at Jack, who appeared to be nothing more than mildly interested. "We're not married."

"You may as well be!" Portia said. "You've been together, what, ten years now?"

"Eleven."

"There you go! You put us all to shame."

Jack agreed. "The longest I've ever been with one person so far is nine years. That was my first wife. Sorry to interrupt. Go on with your story. "

"We, uh... it's really not much of a story." Two pairs of eyes refused to let him evade the topic. "All right. We met in college. Things were going really really bad for me, socially, and they weren't going at all for him. At first our friendship was based on the fact that we were the only people who could tolerate each other. But we also complemented each other. Whatever one of us was bad at, the other one was good at. It just sort of grew from there."

"When did you know you loved him?" Portia asked.

"Um. Right away, I guess. It's hard to tell. At the time, it was just so great to have somebody around who didn't criticize me or argue with me all the time, who didn't expect me to be someone I wasn't. I was infatuated, but it was hard to tell what I was infatuated with. And I didn't really understand him. He was so... it took me years to get to know who he really was."

"Now that you know, are you happy with it?" Portia inquired.

"Oh, yeah! Absolutely. Life without Reg... I couldn't even imagine it."

"I wish we hadn't been so out of touch all those years," Portia sighed. "We missed so much in each other's lives. I remember when you first told me you had a new roommate, and then it was like we stopped talking entirely."

Zephyr shrugged. "Not entirely, but we did stop telling each other stuff, didn't we? Every now and then you'd call me up and we'd chat for a while, and you'd say, 'By the way, I had another baby,' and that was about the extent of it."

"Yeah, and you never told me anything."

"I didn't think you'd want to know," Zephyr admitted.

"Of course I did!" Portia laughed. "I remember when I finally convinced you to come spend Christmas with us, after years of not seeing you at all. When you introduced Reg, you were all like, 'He's my ride.' And my in-laws bought it completely. When you finally admitted you two were a couple, they hit the roof! God, that was surreal. It was so obvious that he wasn't just your ride. God."

Zephyr regarded her skeptically. "If it was so obvious, why didn't you say anything?"

"Because it was all so weird! I mean, every time you looked at each other, sparks would fly... hell, you were setting off frigging fireworks! But you were so busy putting up this facade, I didn't know what you wanted me to do. And George and Janette were probably better off not knowing, anyway."

"I remember that," Jack added.

Portia blinked at him. "Oh, that's right! That was your first Christmas with us, too! What did you think at the time?"

"I didn't, really," Jack remarked. "Okay, maybe I was a mite annoyed at George Mueller for making such a big stink."

"What did Mom think?" Portia asked Jack.

"She was surprised," Jack said. "Not too bothered by it, though. She and I had a talk and she decided it didn't matter."

"Hmm," said Zephyr. "I wonder what changed her mind. Lately she's been giving me a hard time. All of a sudden, for no apparent good reason."

"It's because of your will," Portia informed him. "She's upset because you're leaving everything to Reg."

"But I'm not even close to dead yet! I'm only 32!"

"I dunno," said Portia. "Maybe it's the thought that counts. It's like a rejection to her. And who knows, maybe she really does still expect you to keel over and die any minute."

"And if I did, who would be more affected, her or Reg? I suppose, as long as she's no longer wishing me dead..." Zephyr glanced at Jack, hoping he hadn't offended or shocked the guy, but Jack showed no reaction. He was, in fact, gazing intently at something over Portia's shoulder. Marlone was back, her pale pink wedding dress replaced with a beige pant suit.

"Bryce is looking for you," she said to Portia when she reached them. Then she looked at Zephyr. "And Reg is looking for you. Hey, be sure and come back out, both of you. Jack and I will want to say goodbye before we hit the road."

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