The McCain Marriage Contract

To me, Raymond was not just another young man. He was the son I never had. Elizabeth and I considered him Valerie's brother as well as her lover, if one could use that word concerning teens. He was a thoughtful and bright kid and, very much unlike many children his age then, he was focused and driven. He had no time for stuff like girls and clothes that reeked of swag. He was very level-headed and, besides the close-knit friendship that existed between his family and mine, it was the other reason I liked him for my Valerie. That was until he broke her heart into so many pieces.

As a rule, I did not like to mediate the petty squabbles between teen lovers. Back then whenever they fought I just watched them. I watched them argue back and forth and I watched them get to the point of ignoring each other for days. It was all a part of relationships that everyone went through at some point, and they would become better and stronger from it. I simply had no business getting involved. Always, they found their way back to each other. The both of them taught me so many valuable lessons with that funny relationship of theirs.

When he left her, he broke her heart. I didn't want to pick put so much of the blame on him because I was sure it wasn't his decision to make; it was clearly Tony's and was very little to nothing Raymond could do about that. But then I believed that if he cared so much about Valerie, he would have found a way to reach out to my little girl. After all, they only moved out; they didn't lose their phones or every other means of communication. Somehow he just avoided her, like nothing ever existed between them. Added to the fact that my wife became a stranger soon afterward, it was a double tragedy.

Tony McCain was more than a friend to me. Growing up lots of people assumed we were brothers because of how close we were, and we never corrected them. The manner in which we grew up was not much different from that between my Valerie and Raymond because, just like they did, Tony and I grew up as neighbors and attended all schools together, all the way from grade school. We went on to college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and while he studied software engineering I was drawn to the arts. It was in college I met Elizabeth and her best friend, Amelia. It all seemed so cliché, like the kind of thing that only happened in boring books and such but we soon found ourselves pairing up. I fell in love with Elizabeth and Tony with Amelia. After college, we all moved to Jacksonville, Florida. We got married on the same day a couple of years later -- me to Elizabeth and Tony to Amelia -- and just as if we planning everything simultaneously, our wives conceived and gave birth at about the same time, just a few months apart. The results of the pregnancies were, of course, Valerie and Raymond.

I loved both children with everything in me and I was happy that somehow our families stuck together for that long. Why I continued as a lecturer at the University of Florida, Tony kept on trying to develop different software especially those concerned with health. For a while, I was worried about him because it seems like nothing was going to come out of his struggles. His family was living from paycheck to paycheck and at some point, Elizabeth and I had to support financially. Of course, it was no big deal; this was my family too. And then because of some stuff the kids put on the internet Amelia's pottery was recognized and she soon became sort-of famous, so the money problem was reduced. However, one thing that did not change was Tony's philandering. It was sad because he wasn't always like that. I felt really bad for Amelia because I saw how much she tried to support him and manage the whole situation. I also felt bad for Raymond because no kid deserved to grow in an environment where the mother was disrespected; it was sure to take a terrible toll on him.

The only problem I had with the McCains was how they could wake up and suddenly move out. They did it so quietly and so suddenly that nobody noticed anything. Also, it coincided with the period my Valerie had a terrible accident at school, so Elizabeth and I spent most of our time by her hospital bed. Weirdly, none of the McCains visited her at the hospital. By the time we were back home, we discovered they no longer lived there. They just disappeared like that, without a trace. Success did not stay hidden for long. Soon Tony was making headlines all over international news platforms. His software finally gained the recognition they deserved and he was signing deals all over the place. My best friend and brother of so many years became a very wealthy man overnight. And he simply forgot all about us. I was very happy and very proud of him and I tried to reach out to him, just to congratulate him, but he never took any of my calls, and very soon it turned out my line had been barred from calling his. I could have easily ignored that but they were other things for me to deal with. My wife seemed to mourn the departure of the McCains as if her very existence depended on their presence, and my daughter cried over Raymond's disappearance. It was easy to understand Valerie's misery but Elizabeth's made no sense to me initially. After thinking about it for so long and observing that her tears were mostly for Tony, not Amelia who used to be her best friend, I came to the realization that perhaps she liked him. Perhaps, at some point, they had a brief fling or something. With the kind of person Tony McCain was with women, I wasn't sure what to believe. Was I to believe that my very best friend could hurt me in that manner? I didn't think so. But then the same person I called my best friend and brother had left just like that first of all; didn't that point to a guilty conscience?

After that everything became a blur. Two years passed and Elizabeth passed too. And then it was just me and my Valerie. I lost my love for teaching and quit, and then we moved to San Francisco.

The health crises came one after the other, in quick succession. One day, I woke up in a hospital bed and later found out that I was unconscious for quite a while. During my unconsciousness some things happened, things I figured Valerie tried to hide from me, and things I was sure Raymond was very well aware of and was about to tell me. I was glad to see him show up here finally.

"Don't stand there looking like you've just seen a ghost, Raymond," I said. "Come on in and talk to your father-in-law."