My dad was outside playing his song “Savannah’s Serenade” when mom and I walked outside. I heard he’d composed it just for the wedding. I detected some Egyptian rhythms in it, too. Guess the adage of not being able to teach an old dog new tricks doesn’t really apply here. Despite his advanced age, his fingers still glide effortlessly across the guitar strings, just as they did when he was younger.
Dad and Ari took a seat with me at the reception. “Princess, such a beautiful ceremony,” he’d whispered.
“Yeah, it was nice,” Ari agreed.
“Hey Ari,” I whispered, “I have it on good authority that you’re dating Harper Phillips.”
Ari’s eyes shot up. “I am not!”
“Then how come the gossip pages say you were at a campaign fundraiser with him?”
“Oh, come on, Vanna, you know I don’t roll like that.” She then confessed, “I got a job in journalism and I covered his campaign for the Times.”
“You know,” I reminded Ari, “you are the last person I expected to be a political wife.”
“You’re the one who’s married to a farmer,” Ari teased back.
I had to correct her and tell her he’s in athletic, but gardens and fishes as a hobby.
“Mr. Phillips is not bad,” my dad chimed in. “He’s smart, he’s a hard worker, he’s ambitious --“
Meanwhile, Andrew and I took our time and enjoyed Halima’s feast. “Um, that was pretty intense with you and your mother,” he muttered.
“Yeah, a bit of history there, I’m afraid.”
“She’s going to come around. She has to.”
“She’s my mother, Andrew. What girl doesn’t want her mom around?”
Andrew and I have an unusual arrangement. Though we are married in the usual sense of the word, we do not refer to each other by the traditional terms of husband and wife. We prefer to talk about our union as a partnership.
There we were, dancing under the moonlight, with dad’s melodies serenading us.
I looked around and my children were sitting at a table, speaking to each other about homework – in Arabic, I might add. I will not take that away from them, their heritage and their memories. I only seek to give them new ones.
When Andrew took the kids home I found myself alone – with dad. “I get misty-eyed when I think of how much you’ve grown, Sweetpea,” dad began. I hadn’t heard “sweetpea” since I was a child. “You know, when you were born, I’d had 4 sons and was so thrilled that I finally had a little girl that I wrote a little kids’ book about it. I kept it in my files until the time was right, so now – the time is right.”
He handed me an illustrated little book, but it was so much more. It had pictures of me when I was younger and little captions underneath them.
I’m going to miss my father like mad.
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