“When whatever you’re feeling is so huge that it’s tempting to want to call it other big words, like fear or awe, and it’s soeasy, easy as breathing, that you think you can’t possibly have earned the right to be that happy, and so hard it can drive a proud man to his knees, where he will beg for forgiveness, for another chance, for rights to the remote...” Laughter greeted this. “It might be love.”
“And it might be the ‘L’ word,” he continued, “if you want to suddenly be a better person than you ever have been in order to be worthy of her, and you don’t even know where to start. This is how, by the way, I think the world becomes a better place. We want to be better for the people we love.”
“Preach it!” someone shouted. Britt thought it sounded like Franco, and it was awfully close to the mic.
“And it might be the ‘L’ word if you don’t want to say that word out loud, because calling it only one thing feels almost inadequate, a disservice to the actual condition, because it’s actually a million feelings.”
“Oh my God,” Britt murmured, her hands on her face. Tears poured down through her fingers. “Oh, J. T.”
“You will feel needed. Absolutely essential. Not because of your fine face and projected grosses”—he paused for the laugh he’d anticipated—“but because you are what turns the movie of her life from black-and-white to color. By some miracle, you are lucky enough to be precisely what makes her life better, even if you don’t always make her life easier. And you will finally feel at home, which is less about a place than about where she is.”
“Oh...” Britt breathed.
And with a few words born of fear and anger and wounded pride, she’d told him she didn’t need him. That he didn’t belong here. What had shedone?
“It will make you feel stronger than you’ve ever been, and weaker than you’ve ever been. And you somehow realize that weakness is in fact a strength you didn’t know you had.
“The hard part, the irony, is that sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until you experience the world without her in it. When you’re with her, it’s like the first time anyone anywhere saw a movie in color. You never knew the world contained such brilliance, such music. Without her, the world is suddenly two-dimensional and black-and-white and soundless and there are no subtitles.”
The wedding guests were dead quiet. Moved unto speechlessness, remembering, perhaps, or reviewing their own loves.
“And I think the surefire way of knowing? Nothing, nothing, not even jumping a stunt car through a hoop of fire, scares you more than the notion that she might not love you back.”
He paused. He took a steadying breath.
“And so... maybe you don’t say it.”
He cleared his throat and looked down. You could have heard a pin drop.
Britt could have sworn everybody in the tent was frozen.
Shewas frozen.
She held her breath, and rooted for him to say the next words.
She thought maybe he couldn’t finish.
He finally lifted his head again.
When he spoke again, his voice was a little gravelly. “I submit to you: You’re not really brave, gentlemen, until you say that word to the person you love, and are prepared for the consequences of her answer. It might be the hardest and best thing you ever do. Even if you crash and burn. Butdon’t,don’t let that opportunity get away from you. It will end you.”
Britt was pretty sure all the rustling she heard in the background was caused by tissues plucked from pockets or shirt sleeves being dashed against eyes.
“I know it was a long road for Felix and Michelle. Some of us know their story a little better than others. And my brothers and sisters, Felix is ultimately a brave man, which is why he’s sitting up there right now, grinning like an idiot and is he... yep, he’s crying, too! Check it out, I made Felix Nicasio cry!” Laughter and whoops greeted this. “...next to a woman he probably feels he doesn’t deserve, and most of us agree. I jest, I jest. You got lucky, too, Michelle, y’ hear, and I know you’ll take care of each other.”
“I will, J. T.,” Michelle said, sounding quite sniffly. Felix handed her a handkerchief.
“So raise your glass to Felix and Michelle, who make each other, and us, and the world, better, because they love each other. May the movie of their life be an unforgettable triumph, like every movie we’ve all been in, according to our publicity.”
A great roar greeted this, laughter and cheers and thundering applause. And the cell phone recording it tumbled to the ground and stopped recording as whoever illicitly recorded it clearly got carried away and dropped it in the act of applauding.
Tears poured unchecked down Britt’s face. Obscuring everything, which was kind of ironic, given that everything was suddenly clear.
Sometimes you were the stunt driver, aiming for that flaming hoop, and soaring triumphantly through the air.
And sometimes you were the ramp that launched the driver into triumph.
Britt intended to be J. T.’s ramp.