Best of all, I got to mingle with the best man who, by luck, happened to be unattached and very handsome.
William Nelson’s Last Chance for Redemption
On the final Monday of winter 2020, William Nelson, a middle-aged man who was one of Silicon Valley’s most consulted lawyers, sat on a bench across from Starbucks and Baskin-Robbins in an affluent New York suburb. He had never been to the village. The sun was out but the air was chilled, and he watched the people pass by as he sipped his Caffè Americano, studying the faces hoping to see his daughter, Suzanne Neally.
He had not spoken to her since his surprise visit to her Manhattan office a year-and-a-half earlier. When she took him to a nearby park and ignored his attempt to convince her to return to California. This was shortly before she married Kerry Neally. He barely began his rehearsed and carefully chosen words about saving her soul and returning her to where she belonged that September when she stopped him. She was a rock, oblivious to whatever he planned for her. He could not accept that she was a lesbian. His faith would not allow it.
But she would not go with him. Her last words were, “I’ll leave the door open. But you will not walk through until you tell me that, with all your heart and with all your faith, you accept me and you love me for who I am. Not despite who I am. For what I am.” The words hung over him every moment since.
Since then, he had no communication with her. His only contact was when she was in his town for the wedding of a friend. He stood near the entrance to the church where the wedding took place and saw her and who he assumed was her wife walk from a limousine to the entrance, where Suzanne would be the maid-of-honor. They did not know he was there.
What happened destroyed his family. His wife, Kate, followed his daughter and received a civil divorce—they would never be divorced, as far as William was concerned, in the eyes of his Church—and moved to New York. She married another man a little over a week before the morning he was sitting across from that Starbucks. His son, too, was gone, to Yale instead of Stanford and not returning in the year-and-a-half since.
William long thought Kate gave up too easily. She, too, went to New York to retrieve Suzanne but had been won over by Suzanne and the family of Suzanne’s fiancée.
He was no saint since Kate, Suzanne, and Eric left him. He abused Maya Yang, a young lawyer he mentored, convincing her that he was interested in her but throwing her out when he finished having intercourse with her. He was fortunate that word of that had not circulated in San Francisco legal circles. He never found out what happened to her, but he carried guilt for it.
William had sexual liaisons with other women. Women he paid. Who trolled San Francisco hotels. Who would do things to him, and allow him to do things to them, that he fantasized about when he was married but never did. Then he could not do even that. He found he could not get an erection with a $1, 000 whore in his suite in a Chicago hotel. The failure happened again in a San Francisco hotel a month or so before he was in New York.
This news of Kate’s marriage came to William from Devlin Pugh, one of his brothers-in-law. The Pughs were, by default, William’s only family, and they were split into pro-William/anti-Kate and pro-Kate/anti-William camps. The Church’s teachings were clear. Yes, the Pope said it was not for him to judge, but William knew God had judged and God condemned sexual activity between two women. God condemned what his sister Elizabeth did, and her parents, and he, properly disowned her. God condemns what his daughter was doing with the woman to whom she believed she is married. Kerry Neally. The woman who was with his daughter when he watched from outside the church where Annie Baxter married a man not long before.
Shortly after he was told of Kate’s marriage, and the day before he sat on that bench, William drove up to visit her parents, about an hour north of where he lived. They were joined by the two of Kate’s siblings who resisted accepting Suzanne, and their spouses.
Kate’s marriage unsettled them all. Yes, they were clear about Suzanne and her sins. But Kate’s marriage somehow made everything permanent. Kate was not coming back. Suzanne was not coming back. Kate’s parents had several other grandchildren (though Suzanne was their favorite). They had a full house for Christmas and Thanksgiving and an annual get-together over Memorial Day Weekend. And Kate and Suzanne and even Eric inevitably were a subject of conversation, with words of regret for their having made the decisions they made.
“She’s your wife, William. You are again the one wronged here.” Kate’s father said, looking at his son-in-law as the group sat around the living room. “Comfortable” was the only word to describe the room, with well-worn chairs and a recently re-covered sofa. Pictures of the family were scattered about with one of Kate with Suzanne taken at their granddaughter’s Stanford graduation given a slight but noticeable prominence. It was clear that someone took it off its shelf regularly.