Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

After Ariel Prince’s feature on Torstein aired on the TV news, our park went up for grabs.

People came streaming downtown to see Torstein — lots of folks just looking for a hand-out, but lots of people who really wanted to be part of a movement that was doing some good, too. My frat brothers would sneak out of their offices and come check in from time to time throughout the day, it was like a carnival now.

Torstein couldn’t actually visit with everyone who poured into the park anymore, the crowds were too big. But it was never a mob. People would gather around him, and listen to him, and his theme was always the same: you want to make this the world you always wanted, start by loving the people around you and move out from there, and keep loving.

It had been a nice, warm message for winter, but it really began to bloom in the spring. The park was coming out in flowers again, and the weather began to warm up, people kept reaching out to anyone with a need to offer a helping hand ... and I started to be less afraid that anything bad was going to happen to Torstein, or us. We’d heard nothing more from Sig, and the law had not come after us as he’d feared.

And Angel came home!

You would hardly have known it was the same person ... she was still rail thin, but not emaciated like a crack addict. And she was dressed nicely, with her hair clean and combed out. I think she even had a little make-up on. She looked, now, like somebody’s mother. Maggie had picked her up at the bus station when she came back, and of course Sully had gone, too. Maggie said Angel held onto her son and cried, for a long time. She kept telling him she loved him, and she’d missed him, and she was going to make everything up to him.

She had other news for us, too: the program coordinator who had sent that Transformer toy at Christmas for Sully had proposed to her! He was a Jesus freak, too, and he had fallen in love with Angel while she was in the program. She wanted him to come to the city and marry her in a church where all her friends could come. She counted Maggie, Tawny, Mari — and all of us guys — as her friends! She wanted Torstein to give her away.

Tawny excitedly told her that she and Franz were engaged, too, and Angel begged them to make it a double ceremony with her. Tawny was delighted with the idea, and Franz agreed, saying: “The sooner the better now.” Only Marigold was sad about it, but Maggie promised she’d always be there for her, and Tawny promised that although she would be living with Franz she would remain Mari’s best friend. And Caroline told Marigold she could move over to her condo with her and Van. It was all very high school, but it was sweet in a way, too.

I think that’s what Torstein gave us: a way back to innocence, a way to value sweetness. We were tough guys, and we had to make fun of the tears the girls seemed inclined to shed at the drop of a hat. But in a way we valued it, too. He’d given us permission to believe in something perfectly good, perfectly right, perfectly honorable. He believed in it, so we had to believe, too.

It was like the sunflowers — they came up again in March, as Torstein had predicted, little green chutes where Sully had cleared away last year’s dead plants. He was so delighted with the new blooms, we had to be, too. We were grown men who had stopped caring about flowers a long time ago. But Torstein made something new blossom inside us, resurrected the wonder you think only kids can feel.

The wedding would be in March, which would make it during Lent, but none of the bridal parties cared about that because there was to be no booze at the wedding anyway on account of Angel’s being a recovering addict. It would be on a Sunday in March, and there would be pizza in the park afterward.

Bruiser, of course, was friends with the man who owned the pizzeria, and he could get us all the pizzas we wanted at a low discount price. Franz came up with the money for the pizzas. Angel’s fiancé Len came up with the money for the sodas. Maggie bought both the wedding dresses and two nice suits so Sully and his new best friend Van could each be ring-bearers. (It was lucky there were two sets of rings to be borne.)

So on a Sunday afternoon in March, Torstein walked two brides down the aisle to their nervous husbands-to-be who both appeared elated and a little bit awestruck by the women in white and the gravity of the occasion. Torstein wore his crazy green coat, and walked between the ladies, lending an arm to each, as the wedding march played ... and when the minister asked who gave these women in marriage, he said, “Their families, our family, and I do” in such a pleased and ringing voice, I got a lump in my throat, and Maggie and Phyllis started crying.

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