Tying the Knot by Robert Vaughan

It was the morning after the dinner and I still lay in bed. I’d cut my thumb off the night before while carving the roast. I ended up at St. Vincent’s with my hand dripping all over the passenger seat of our Subaru, the bloody appendage throbbing. Fortunately Dexter had popped my missing thumb into an ice bucket. It sat on the adjacent seat. Apparently his Army medic training came in handy after all. Florescent lights. Shots. Stitches. Good meds. The rest is fuzzy. I wasn’t really in bed, not ours, anyhow. I’d slept on a futon on the floor, passed out from combining Percocet and this new Cabo-Choc wine our friends brought from Wal-Mart. I held up my thumb, bandaged, the pinkish tinge seeping through the outer layers of wrapping. It smelled putrid. I could just barely hear Dex chatting with our friends in the kitchen. Wah- wah- wah. Charlie Brown’s teacher. My head pulsed, felt like a cooked coconut. Our friends, Tina and Louise, were recently married. They were awfully patient. About my thumb, I mean. Not about getting married. Well, who knows, they might have been patient about that, too. Dex met Louise in boot camp. Our dinner was to celebrate the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell. Just before they’d arrived last night, I asked him, “Why didn’t we attend their ceremony?” It was just over the border, in Somerset, ten minutes from our Rhode Island beachhouse. He’d said, “We weren’t invited.”

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