Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) by Yona Zeldis McDonough Read Free Book Online

the cool crowd when they reached the ninth grade, leaving Lincoln to eat his dust. Blame, once you got started, was viral: pretty soon it was everywhere.
    Gingerly, Lincoln touched his tongue to the cracked tooth; pain shot through his head like a bullet. He pulled his tongue away, and the pain retreated a millimeter or two. Now what? He didn’t want to have to deal with this, not when he was on his way to Angelica’s wedding. It seemed wrong, selfish even, to complicate the day—
her
day—with his damn tooth.
    Lincoln glanced at his cheap Timex watch. Caleb should have been here by now, and Lincoln was getting antsy. But he did not want to call his son, not yet. He viewed this visit like an audition or a job interview: he was going to be judged by a lot of people, most significantly by his children. He didn’t want to start out by sounding petulant and whiny, so he’d suck it up and wait for Caleb without complaint.
    Lincoln knew that he had screwed up with his kids in so many ways great and small. His son Teddy had told him so more explicitly than the rest of them. But over the past decade Lincoln had put his life back together, piece by excruciating piece: he’d kicked the booze habit, moved out to LA, gotten an apartment, and held a series of jobs, none especially gratifying but still they were jobs. The latest, working for Jerry, had actually offered a glimmer of possibility: it turned out Lincoln was excellent at making the cold calls required for the time-share telemarketing position. With his low-key humor and ability to listen as well as gab, he’d been the top-selling employee four months running, and Jerry was tossing words like “promotion” and “supervisory responsibilities” into their conversations with some frequency.
    Lincoln dug through his carry-on bag again, found the bottle of Advil he had hoped was still there, downed two gelcaps dry, and hoped they would kick in soon. If he was careful about what and how he ate, maybe he could get through the wedding without telling anyone about the tooth. It would be his own private triumph, a little gift he could give Angelica without her ever knowing.
    Because he was doing this for her, that was the crucial thing. Angelica was getting married and she wanted him to be there. And for his other kids—Teddy and Caleb and Gretchen—he was doing it for them too. He hadn’t seen any of them in more than a year now, and no matter what they might think or like to tell each other, he did miss them. And his granddaughters too—Justine and Portia. A year made a huge difference at their age; they’d be grown-up before he knew it.
    The rest of the crew—his former wife, Betsy; her new husband in his hot-pink Ralph Lauren sweater (a six-feet-four, three-hundred-plus-pound guy in hot pink? Who knew they even made the damn sweaters, with their damn little ponies dancing across the nipple, so big? That sweater could keep a hippo warm), his erstwhile mother-in-law, Lenore; the friends he’d had from his marriage who’d dropped him like a clod of horse dung when he’d moved out, lost his job and had to spend those months in rehab—he was not doing this for any of them, so he would put them out of his mind. Zap. Gone.
    There would be no other members of Lincoln’s family present at the wedding. His parents were long dead, and his brother, Bruce, had died of cancer five years ago this August. In the years he’d been drinking, he’d lost touch with his remaining aunts, uncles, and cousins, and even after he’d stopped, he somehow never reestablished the ties.
    His cell phone buzzed. Caleb, no doubt, to say he’d gotten tied up in traffic. Lincoln was glad he had not broken down and called. But when he answered the call, it was not Caleb. It was Angelica, the dream daughter herself. “Hi, Daddy,” she almost purred into his ear. Nearly thirty years old, about to be married, and she still called him
Daddy
. Lincoln lapped it up.
    “What’s up, sweetheart?” he