Death by Pride - Mark McNease Page 0,2

could do it in their home state. And now, with the Federal Government recognizing their marriage, there had been no reason to put it off any longer. So on May 12th, just six weeks ago, he and Danny had gone to City Hall in downtown Manhattan and gotten their license. The following Saturday they stood before seventy-five of their closest friends at Metropolitan Community Church and publicly declared their intention to spend the rest of their lives together. Danny had wanted the 12th as their wedding date, to honor the anniversary of their first meeting at the Katherine Pride Gallery, but it fell on a Tuesday. Nobody gets married on a Tuesday, at least not anyone with a mother-in-law flying in with her boyfriend from Chicago, another set of parents from Queens, siblings, nieces, bosses, and Kyle’s best friend Detective Linda Sikorsky from New Jersey, along with her own newly minted wife Kirsten McClellan.

The sheer logistics of a wedding were more than Kyle or Danny had ever anticipated. It starts out simply enough as a vision in which all these friends, relatives and loved ones magically appear to celebrate the happy couple’s bliss. In that first fantasy phase there are no hotels to recommend, no invitation list to cull, no feelings to hurt by being excluded from the guest list. And certainly no large pile of cash to drop for an affair that seemed to have $10,000 as its starting price. By the time they headed downtown for their license both men were frayed at the edges, ready to elope and send all these people a nice photograph instead. It was too late by then and the worst was over, so they went through with it and now would not have had it any other way. The cost only set them back three years’ worth of prime vacation travel, but that was okay. It had been a huge success and they were finally married.

The inevitable let-down after so much stress, planning and execution had lasted about a week for Kyle, less for Danny who was busy dealing with the imminent departure of his beloved Margaret Bowman. Margaret had started Margaret’s Passion, the restaurant Danny now owned with Kyle and Kyle’s mother Sally. She’d hired Danny almost twelve years ago, then sold the restaurant to him last year as she crept into her 80s. Now, as he had dreaded, she was preparing to move to Florida to spend her remaining days with her sister Rebecca, leaving Margaret’s Passion to Danny to fully make his own. As long as there was a Margaret’s Passion there would be a Margaret, if only in photographs on the walls with the many celebrities and politicians she’d served so well and lovingly over the decades. But the thought of her being so far away and likely never to return had left Danny in a funk for months. His wedding, despite the rigors of it, the anxiety and the stress, was a high point and a needed distraction from the loss he faced. There would only be one wedding for both men; there would only be one Margaret Bowman, too, and having her there in the front row with their parents was a memory they would cherish as much as the wedding itself.

Kyle was thinking about it all as he scanned the previous day’s mail at their kitchen table. It was his habit to get the mail when he got home in the early evening, but he’d been distracted and had forgotten, instead taking the elevator down to pick it up this morning, along with the New York Times that lay outside their door. In the age of online everything, Kyle still preferred reading the paper the old fashioned way—with pages that turned and ink that came off on his fingers.

The men lived on the edge of Gramercy Park, at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. Danny could easily walk to Margaret’s Passion just six blocks away, and Kyle could get to the Japan TV3 offices, where he worked as the personal assistant to firebrand and borderline has-been TV reporter Imogene Landis, with an easy bus ride and a cross town stroll. Their dear friend Detective Linda (now retired from the New Hope, Pennsylvania, police force) was asleep in the spare room, turning it once again from their shared office into a guest room. She’d come into town the day before for her first Pride weekend and parade and Kyle made plans for them to see the city