Debbie, my maid of honor from 1984, opened the photo album to the middle and said, glancing at Jerry, And Pam, I have this one too. The one I promised him I would never show you.
It was a photograph from the night before our wedding. Jerry, young and drunk, with his arm around Debbie in a way a groom has no business doing the night before his wedding. Debbie told me, gently, in front of the luau and the tiki torches, that Jerry had made a pass at her that night, and tried to get her to run off with him, and that when she refused and threatened to tell me, he begged her to keep quiet and she did, for forty years, because she did not want to blow up my wedding day.
She carried it for forty years. She only came because my daughter Kristen found her on Facebook and asked for wedding photos, and Debbie decided a woman being called a desperate old punch line at her own anniversary deserved the truth more than Jerry deserved his secret.
He said I was the punch line. The joke, it turned out, had been on me since the night before I ever married him.
My three daughters stood around me in their grass skirts. My six granddaughters in their plastic leis. And Debbie, my old friend, who gave me back the truth after forty years.
Jerry started to bluster. The Hendersons, our neighbors, were still right there. Nobody was looking away now.
I did not scream. I took off my sunflower top worry and I put my grass skirt back on straight, and I danced with my daughters and granddaughters by the tiki torches at my own party, a desperate old woman having the time of her life.
Jerry and I are not married anymore. Forty years was thirty-nine too many, it turns out. I kept the grass skirt. I wear it every year now, at a luau my daughters throw for me, where the only men allowed are the ones who know how to treat a woman. Debbie comes too. We are the two oldest, and we dance the hardest.