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Between his racing thoughts and Linda’s restless legs, Bob already wasn’t sleeping too well. So when his humming phone made the bedside table vibrate, he was relatively quick to respond.
“Hello?” he groggily answered.
“Daaaaad!”
Of course he’d know that chipper voice anywhere.
“Louise?” Bob sat up as fast as he could without making himself dizzy. “Is everything okay?”
The last time he’d seen his youngest daughter, she had demanded that none of her family members call her unless someone was dying – “and even then, they better be bleeding or suffocating.” She and Rudy had a morning flight to San Francisco, and knowing how carefully they’d saved for both the wedding and the honeymoon, Bob had taken her instruction seriously. But now she was calling him?
“Oh, it’s better than okay!” She sounded happy, but he couldn’t be too sure. She’d put this same cheery voice on when trying to cut a deal with a customer she wanted to strangle. “Rudy was hungry, so I walked down to this sushi place we’d read about – Sushi Stay or Sushi Go? Yeah, turns out they have a bunch of authentic Japanese cookware here.”
“Oh, really?” Bob rubbed his eyes open.
“Yeah! And it’s all discounted because it’s been slightly used, which is enough to make it basically worthless to rich chefs. I think I even saw a Fukinawa knife.”
“You’re kidding. A real Fukinawa knife?”
“Eyeballing it, I can’t be sure if it’s the real deal, but they just sliced an albacore in mid-air with it, so it’ll put asses in seats anyway. I’m sure you’ll clock it better than I can.”
Bob eased himself up onto the floor. “Where even is this place? You said it’s called… Sushi Stay? Sushi Go?”
“No, no. Sushi Stay or Sushi Go. One phrase. It’s like, right by our hotel. It’s open 24 hours. Big neon sign. You can’t miss it.”
“Alright, Louise. I’ll come check it out.”
As Bob sauntered over to get his coat, his wife began to stir as well. “Wussup, Bobby?” she yawned, not sitting up quite yet.
“Louise called.”
“Oh, is she okay?” Linda yawned, still winded from the reception. “Rudy ain’t already giving her a hard time, is he?”
“No, it’s fine.” Bob pulled his coat over his pajamas and stuffed his feet into his clogs. “It’s just… business stuff. Just a restaurant she wanted to show me before she left.”
“Okay, little night owls.” Linda settled back into her pillow. “Just don’t sleep all morning. Unless I do. Then don’t bother me.” She fell back asleep quickly.
Bob walked to his car, more anxious than ever. There was no Fukinawa knife, and he knew it. And honestly, Louise probably knew he knew it.
He already knew the route to Louise’s hotel, so finding the sushi place was pretty easy. It was well-lit, and through the glass, he could see their sole customer sitting up at the counter.
She still wore her wedding dress – well, more of a tuxedo-dress, with the skirt tattered like some kind of corpse bride. Her hair was still down, her idea of having anything “fancy” done with it, because she’d refuted all of Jocelyn’s offers to style it pro-bono. And of course, she had the pink beanie-turned-bandana tied around her head. There was no food in front of her, and as far as Bob could tell, no to-go box for Rudy.
Bob parked in a free spot and opened the door. Louise’s head turned when she heard the bell ring. “Ooooh, you just missed the salesguy.” She put on a facade of frustration. “He needed to get back to Japan for an expo in the morning, so he couldn’t wait up. Sorry.”
“It’s fine. I actually don’t have cash, anyway.” Bob took the stool next to his daughter. He noticed, on either side of him, little papers folded to look like fish and seaweed. He picked up a tiny origami fish. “These are cute.”
“Yeah, I think the owner’s kid made them, so he put them out front to cultivate this beachy aesthetic. He said we can take a couple home, the kid’s always making more anyway.” She scoffed. “Child labor, am I right?”
Bob curiously unfolded part of the fish, then immediately regretted it as he had no idea how to replicate all those seamless creases, and his re-folding attempts only seemed to mutilate it further.
“Great going, father,” Louise snarked. “You’re killing endangered marine life.”
“It’s too many creases. Here, you try it.” He handed the crumpled paper square to his daughter. “You know… paper. Better than I do.”
Having spent most of middle school turning red-marked assignments into paper masterpieces, and generally having younger and nimbler hands than her father, Louise re-folded the fish without hesitation. “Wow,” Bob remarked.
“I wonder if origami would suit our place,” Louise mused, making the fish swim through the air. “We hang little paper burgers everywhere or something. Maybe it’ll make us look quote-unquote cultured.”
“I don’t know,” Bob said, giving the same response he always gave Louise’s business ideas. “Half the time we redecorate the restaurant, people get freaked out. Or think we’re haunted. Or a…gay bar? That one time?”
“You’re right. Let’s think bigger. We’ll print our menus bilingually. And every hour, we’ll perform the 2.5D Burobu musical I wrote with Gene in high school. Full love scene included.”
Bob shook his head, giving a very small chuckle. Louise had spent most of her adulthood as his business consultant humbling him, and it had mostly paid off. It seemed she had a new marketing idea every week, and though it wasn’t without some serious costs (“Who cares about the wind? I nearly lost a foot getting these fireworks across the border!”), it definitely drew far more positive attention to the restaurant than they’d gotten in the past two decades. They weren’t booming, but they always had someone curious about the Burger of the Day they’d seen out front (after Louise suggested that, Bob had a week-long crisis about how stupid he’d been for not doing it sooner) and the somewhat unsettling chalk drawing that accompanied it.
“How about we meet in the middle?” He cracked a smile. “You and Rudy can hang up some of your old puppets.”
Something about that drained all the pride from Louise’s face. “Yeah, me and Rudy can do a lot of things now,” she mumbled, focusing narrowly on her paper fish.
Fatherly concern struck Bob once again. “Okay, Louise.” He knew he couldn’t put this off any further. “What are you doing down here in the middle of the night? In your dress?”
She scoffed. “What, a woman can’t swing by a 24-hour sushi place and take in the sights the night before her honeymoon?”
“I mean you can, it’s just… I figured you’d want to be with Rudy tonight. You both seemed pretty excited.”
“Yeah yeah, we were super excited! San Francisco is as close to a trip to Tokyo as I'll ever get! But, uh, well…” Her phony enthusiasm began to falter. “I think we might need to postpone the trip.”
“What?” Bob exclaimed. “Louise, you and Rudy have been saving to go to California for months.” He swore he saw her eye twitch.
“I don’t know…” Her eyes darted around the room. “The weather might be unpleasant? We’ll be sweating our asses off, and you know how easy Rudy burns. Honestly, June weddings are so overrated.” She chuckled, and it was clear she was running out of lies.
“Louise.” Bob made direct eye contact with his daughter – something both of them hated to do.
Louise scoffed and fidgeted for a few more moments, but when she couldn’t dig up any more excuses, she just groaned. “I don’t want a honeymoon, Dad!”
“What changed?”
“Oh, nothing much, just this little thing where I had to declare in front of my entire family that I’d be devoted to one man for the rest of my life.”
“Well, you love Rudy, right?” Bob felt a bit jittery. Louise and Rudy had been dating for nearly a decade before their engagement, so he couldn’t imagine her feeling rushed.
“Of course I do.” There was a softness in her eyes that always emerged when she spoke about Rudy. “He’s like, the nicest person in the world. And when I was looking right at him, telling him I loved him, I really wanted him to know that. I felt that.” She sighed. “But like… everyone else was saying things that just drove me crazy.”
“Like?”
“‘Congrats to you and Rudy.’ ‘You two will have such a great future.’ ‘You look great together.’” She scowled with every sentence. “It’s like I didn’t exist. I just became half of some… Rudy-and-Louise love monster. And when we got to the hotel, he kept introducing me as ‘my wife’ to everyone there.”
“That’s kind of sweet,” Bob said, and he meant it, but his tone didn’t quite convey it.
"Dad." Now she looked her father right in the eyes. "This one little kid in the lobby started calling me ‘My Wife Louise’.”
“Oh. Oh my god.”
“Yeah. Getting back to our room after all that did not exactly put me in a honeymoon mood. He even called room service to order champagne for ‘him and his wife.’ Fuck, how do other newlyweds hear that all day and still jump each other’s bones?” She gripped her dress like she wanted to tear it right off. “You're basically half-people now, so you’re half as sexy too.”
“Mmm.” Understandably, Bob didn’t really want to think about Louise and Rudy like that.
Now that she’d gotten that off her chest, she tried, awkwardly, to revert to her casual arrogance. “Anyway, I was gonna tell him you had an emergency and I couldn’t go to San Francisco with him. But you know I can’t lie to him. So I just wrote my feelings in a note, left it by his bedside while he’s sleeping off the liquor, and I’ll hitch a ride home with you to stay at the apartment. We’ll figure things out in the morning, or whatever.”
“Oh my god. Louise, no.” Bob felt so bad for his daughter, but he knew this was the wrong move. “You can’t just run off. Not after all this.”
“Relaaaaax!” She tried to wave him off. “I’ll still be married to him, legally. I just can’t do all that coupley shit right now. We can consummate our marriage and all that shit in a few months. And I’m not wasting the plane ticket, I’ll just pawn it or haggle for a different day. I’m a great haggler.”
“Still. It’s not fair to Rudy.”
“I know it’s not fair to Rudy!” Louise cried out, startling the chefs working in the kitchen. “I just can’t see any other option. I just know if I go on that trip with him, I’ll spend the whole time feeling like… ‘wife Louise,’ not normal Louise. And I can’t risk turning into that forever. I’m not Tina.”
“You won’t turn into Tina. Also, being Tina isn’t a bad thing.”
“Being Tina, I could survive – barely. Being wife Tina is my fucking nightmare.”
As much as Bob wanted to argue with that, seeing his son-in-law still made him inexplicably twitchy, and the way Tina spoke so fondly of him sounded like a foreign language. He only really understood it when he saw them with his granddaughter.
“But what sucks the most is that I know he’ll figure that out. I know he’ll know I’m upset, and he’ll think it’s because of him. I need him to know it’s not his fault. I’m just not good at being a wife. And I wish I knew that before we got married, because he’s been so terrified I’m gonna leave him for good. So I can’t tell him how fucked up I am to his face, but I can’t lie to him either.”
Louise swatted the fish off the counter, onto the floor, and slumped onto the counter. Bob got off the stool, bent down very carefully, and picked it back up.
“You know, your mother and I didn’t have a honeymoon on our wedding night.”
“Dad, I’ve seen the pictures. You barely had a wedding.”
“True. We’re not really… good at romance. I mean, your mother is. She’s really into it.”
“This to the girl who just endured an eight-minute musical wedding toast. Preaching to the choir, Dad.”
Bob chuckled. Linda had spent months workshopping that, and what she sang at the reception wasn’t even half of what she’d written. “My point is, I didn’t think I’d be good at being a husband. And maybe I’m not, to some people. Your mother usually thinks I am. But I guess everyone has a different idea of what a married couple should be. We're not all like Tina and Daniel. I mean, I love your mother, but if I did everything she wanted us to do, I’d be… really tired. All the time.”
“You would be?” Louise was smiling again.
“Hey, cut me some slack. It’s the middle of the night. Plus I just had to bend down.” He placed the fish back in front of Louise. “But you and Rudy can have fun together and still be your own people. Like, he can do his magic, and you can do your… delightfully creepy blackboard drawings.”
“You make my job sound like my only hobby. You make my life sound sad.”
“Mmm. And then both of you can do your puppet shows and anime conventions and hikes and stuff. And you don’t have to hold yourself back.”
“I kind of do. Rudy can’t walk too far without losing his breath.”
“I mean you don’t have to stop being Louise. You’re just…” He glanced down at the paper fish. “The same Louise, in a different shape.”
Louise ran her thumb along the creases. The paper had some awkward creases from being folded and unfolded, but they knew it was a fish. Just like Bob still knew she was Louise.
“Geez,” she scoffed, “if you’re gonna use them for corny metaphors, maybe we’ll ditch the origami idea.” She passed the fish to her dad. “Here. I hear some customers use these as tips in Japan. Consider it a tip for some good fatherly advice.”
“Honestly, I prefer being tipped with money.”
“Oh, hard agree.”
“But… coming from my daughter, it means a lot.”
The bride finally scooted off the stool. “Welp, I better get back to my hotel. I got a marital bed to sneak back into.”
“You should destroy that note.”
“Totally. It’ll feel good.” Louise held out her hand to help her aging father to his feet. “You know, the sashimi here isn’t even worth taking home to him. They need that cutesy beginner's origami more than we ever will.”
Louise held onto Bob all the way to his car, and he held the strands of her dress to ensure neither of them would trip. He sat in the driver’s seat and watched her walk back home for a few minutes, but he definitely wouldn’t follow her. After all, she was an independent woman.
Rudy Belcher was out like a light, still wearing everything from the wedding except his blazer and one shoe, which were draped over a chair. He looked so delicate, even as he snored up a storm. Louise always listened carefully as she fell asleep to make sure he didn’t choke.
As she undressed and crawled into bed, Louise carefully took the folded-up note from the bedside table. She quietly unfolded it, scrunched up her nose at the curt writing, then re-folded it into a paper fish and placed it under her pillow before wrapping her arm around Rudy.
Maybe in the morning before boarding, she’d throw it onto the runway and hope that it’d swim into a jet engine.
Or just rip it up like a normal person.
But that wouldn’t be very Louise of her, would it?