First Comes Love

by Emily Giffin

  Our friendship felt unusual because it was. Not so much because of the guy-girl thing, but because we really didn’t have all that much in common, even back when everyone in college had a lot in common. Gabe was outside the mainstream and a little bit of a hipster, nothing like my girlfriends or the guys I normally gravitated toward. I found him refreshing, though he had a tendency to playfully put me down. I quickly lost count of the number of times he looked at me, incredulous, and said, “How do you not know that?” or “You really need to read that/see that/listen to that.” But I could tell he appreciated my straightforward simplicity, just as I liked his layers, and somehow we just clicked.

  Over the years, Meredith and my other friends questioned our platonic deal, accusing us of covertly hooking up. At the very least, they thought Gabe had a thing for me—or I had a thing for him. I was always adamant that we did not. Yes, there would probably always be very fleeting moments of attraction between close friends of different genders, especially when drinking was involved. But with Gabe and me, it was never enough to trigger a lapse of judgment, or worse, an ill-fated attempt at an actual relationship. And it became an unspoken given that neither of us wanted to risk our cherished friendship in the name of lust, loneliness, or idle curiosity. In other words, we were living proof that guys and girls could, in fact, be just friends.

  It also helped, of course, that Gabe wasn’t my type, nor was I his. I was curvy and blond and girl-next-door cute, and Gabe liked petite, rail-thin brunettes, the more exotic the better. His last two girlfriends had been Asian, and from the neck down, they both looked like teenaged boys. Meanwhile, I preferred broad-shouldered, clean-cut, blue-eyed jocks, a far cry from Gabe’s lanky build, dark eyes, and omnipresent five o’clock shadow, which often veered toward an actual beard (which I downright disliked).

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Gabe says now, signaling the bartender for another beer. I can tell by his expression that he’s still on the subject of Will. Sure enough, he finishes by saying, “I’m glad you guys broke up.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I say. “You’re happy I’m thirty-seven and single and desperate?”

  He grins and says, “Kinda.”

  I smile because I know what he means and feel the same. I’m always a little happier when Gabe is single, and felt total relief when he broke up with his most recent girlfriend, an insufferably snobbish, name-dropping gallery girl. It isn’t that we don’t wish the best for each other, because we truly do. I want Gabe to fall in love and get married and have a family (even though he isn’t sure he’s cut out for that), and I know he wants the same for me. But it is hard to deny an element of classic misery loves company, not an uncommon dynamic among close, single friends. As an aside—and a backstop—we have always vowed that we will never date someone who isn’t cool with our grandfathered-in friendship. In fact, Gabe once called it a screening device, a way to weed out unstable, jealous girls, whom he also calls “the psycho set.”

  Interestingly, the only person who ever really had a problem with Gabe was Will, who called him “the depressed poser.” It was an unfair charge, as Gabe never tries to impress anyone, and really cares little what others think of him, almost to a fault. He isn’t exactly depressed either, just a little moody and caustic—which can sometimes wear on people. But he can also be really funny, with a generosity and sense of loyalty that offset his edges. There is no doubt in my mind that Gabe would do anything for me.

  “So what’s up with Meredith?” he says, changing the subject.

  I sigh and tell him the latest—that she and my mother have some big plan they’re working up for this December. “You know, it’s been fifteen years….”

  An intent listener, he looks at me, waiting.

  “They want to visit Sophie. In New York,” I continue.

  “Sophie?” Gabe asks.

  “You know, the girl he was dating.”

  “Oh, right…” Gabe shakes his head and whistles.

  “Exactly,” I say. “So unhealthy, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a little strange…I’ll give you that.” I can tell he is treading carefully, the way he always does around any mention of Daniel.

  “It’s very strange. Bizarre. They all need to move on with their lives, already.”

  He raises his eyebrows and looks at me, and I can tell that he is thinking about Will again. I can almost read the bubble over his head: Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?

  “What?” I say, feeling defensive.

  “Nothing,” he says with such purposeful wide-eyed innocence that I’m forced to take drastic measures. I pick up my phone and bang out an email, both my thumbs flying.

  From: Josie

  Sent: August 18

  To: Andrea Carlisle

  Subject: Re: Room Mom

  Dear Andrea,

  Thank you so much for your kind note. Edie is a pleasure, and I can’t wait to get to know her better this year. I hope the Tooth Fairy is good to her tonight! Thank you for volunteering to be our room mother—I would love to accept your kind offer. Look forward to meeting you at Open House. And yes, it is a small world!

  Best,

  Josie

  I scan it quickly for errors, then send it, listening to the sickening swooshing sound of an irreversible decision.

  “There,” I say, showing him the sent message.

  He quickly skims it, then hands me back my phone and smirks. “Whoa. Look at you, Little Miss Well Adjusted.”

  “I am well adjusted,” I say, and for one second, I actually believe it.

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I wake up around two and can’t fall back asleep. I tell myself that it’s just first-week-of-school jitters, or adjusting to an earlier bedtime, but as morning approaches, I know it runs deeper than that. I know it has something to do with Daniel and Sophie, Mom and Meredith, Will and Andrea. And maybe, most of all, it has something to do with Edie, fast asleep at this very moment. I imagine her blond curls spilling over her pillow, the shiny coin underneath it, as she dreams her magical dreams. I think of my conversation with Gabe, the person who knows me best and the only one who knows my secret. My heart aches with regret over so many things, big and small, including mistakes that have relegated me to manufacturing boyfriends on faraway continents who are as imaginary as the Tooth Fairy herself.

  chapter four

  MEREDITH

  On Friday night, forty-five minutes before Nolan and I are leaving for dinner with friends, our babysitter cancels via text. So sorry I’m sick and can’t watch Harper tonight. I have food poisoning.

  “Liar,” I say before slamming my phone onto the bathroom counter, hard enough so that I check to make sure I haven’t cracked the screen. Even if I believed she were sick, which I do not, her flippant “so sorry” along with those three emojis would still have pushed me over the edge.

  “Who’re you calling a liar?” Nolan calls out from our closet, where he is getting dressed.

  “The sitter,” I answer. “She just canceled.”

  “Who is she?” Nolan asks, emerging in boxers, socks, and a new light blue linen shirt. One of the many luxuries of being the husband, at least in our household, is that Nolan does not concern himself with domestic logistics like hiring sitters. All he has to do is pick out his own shirt.

  “The middle Tropper girl,” I say. “I bet she’s canceling because of a boy.”

  “She could have food poisoning,” Nolan says. “People do get food poisoning, ya know.”

  “No way. Who gets food poisoning at six-forty-five on a Friday night? And by the way—if you truly do have food poisoning, then lie and say it’s anything other than food poisoning. Because food poisoning always sounds like a lie when you’re canceling.”

  “It really does,” Nolan says with a laugh. “Why is that, anyway?”

  “Because it usually is….I should call her out on it. Tell her to go ahead and come anyway, since it’s not contagious.”

  “You can’t babysit with food
poisoning,” Nolan says, missing the point. I watch him unbutton his shirt, then put it back on one of the padded hangers from my end of the closet.

  “What are you doing? Put that back on,” I say. “I’ll see if my mother or Josie can come watch Harper.”

  “Really?” he says, looking disappointed.

  “Don’t you want to go out?” I say, thinking that I’ve been looking forward to our plans with the Grahams all week.

  “I guess,” he says. “But I’m just as happy to stay in. We could order Chinese and watch Homeland. We have three episodes left.”

  I cross my arms and glare at him. “We hardly ever go out,” I say.

  “That’s not true,” he says. “We just went out to dinner last Saturday.”

  “Yes, but that was with work people. That doesn’t count,” I say, knowing that if we stay in, Nolan will watch TV while I put Harper to bed, an arduous, frustrating task that can take hours. I stop short of telling him that I’m desperate to have a few drinks and a grown-up evening without our daughter, in no particular order, and instead say again that I’m going to try my mother and Josie, maybe one of them is free.

  “You know Josie’s going to be busy. When has she ever not had plans on a Friday night?” Nolan says, in shirtless limbo. Always in good shape, he’s even more fit than usual, gearing up for his next triathlon, his morning training conveniently conflicting with getting Harper ready for school and out the door.

  I text them both just in case, but just as Nolan predicted, Josie types back immediately that she is otherwise engaged. My mom writes that she would love to, but already has plans to go to the movies with Kay, her friend from church.

  “Dammit,” I grumble to myself.

  “We could call the Grahams and ask them to come hang out here instead?” Nolan says.

  I shake my head, feeling annoyed by the suggestion. “The house is a mess, and we have nothing to eat here.”

  “So what?” he says. “We can order a pizza.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” I say, thinking that I will still be the one stuck putting Harper to bed. “Besides, the Grahams don’t want to pay for a sitter for their children only so they can spend the evening with ours.”

  “All right,” he says. “Well, I’m sure we can think of something else fun to do.” He gives me his little double-finger gun and wink, and although I know he’s trying to be funny, it’s also a serious suggestion on his part.

  I give him a little noncommittal grunt, wondering where I’d rank sex with my husband these days—before or after putting our daughter to bed.

  —

  I KNOW HOW I sound. I sound like a shitty mother and wife. Or at the very least an inadequate wife and ungrateful mother—which is in stark contrast to the image I try to portray on Instagram. Hashtag happy life. Hashtag beautiful family. Hashtag blessed. Sometimes, like tonight, I find myself wondering which is more egregious, to pretend to be happy when you’re not, or to feel so consistently dissatisfied when you should be happy. My therapist, Amy, tells me not to be so hard on myself—which probably has a lot to do with why I keep going back to her. She says that everyone creates a version of her life that she wishes were true and tries to believe. In other words, everyone lies on social media, or at least puts her best foot—and photos—forward. Amy also points out that although I have a lot to be thankful for, I did lose my brother in a tragic accident that rocked my family to the core, either directly or indirectly caused my parents to divorce, and left me with a sole sibling who is some combination of selfish and self-destructive. In other words, I’m entitled to my frustration and deep-seated sadness, regardless of how many positive things have happened to me since that horrific day.

  As an aside, I also appreciate Amy’s forty-something perspective that the thirties are a grind for many, and motherhood isn’t the constantly blissful journey everyone thinks it will be when they attend their pink or blue or yellow baby shower. She swears that things get easier as your kids get older and become more self-sufficient, but she also maintains that no matter what their age or yours, motherhood is hard. Really hard. Stay-at-home mothers have it rough; working mothers have it rough; and part-time working mothers, like myself, have it rough, even though the first two camps annoyingly insist that we have the best of both worlds when I think we actually have the worst of each. There. I just did it again. Bitch, bitch, bitch. And I mean that as a noun and a verb.

  To be clear, I love my daughter more than anything or anyone in the world. She is the best thing I have ever done or will ever do with my life. It’s just that taking care of a small child often feels tedious to me, a fact I can admit only to Amy, the person I pay to give me one-hour increments of complete honesty. I can’t tell my husband, who labeled me unmaternal in a recent argument. I can’t tell my friends, because it would undermine my perfect Facebook façade. I can’t tell my sister, who desperately wants a child of her own. And I can’t tell my mother, because I know she’d do anything to get back a few moments with her firstborn, even the kind of miserable, exhausting moments that I routinely gripe about. Besides, my mother needs me to be okay. The child she doesn’t have to worry about. The only one who hasn’t fucked up or died.

  The more pressing issue, and even more closely guarded secret, is the way I feel about Nolan, my husband of nearly seven years. I’m not sure where to begin, other than at the beginning, with the answer to that question So, how did you two meet? Every couple has their canned answer, their story that’s told again and again. Sometimes the husband will take the lead in the retelling; sometimes the wife will. Sometimes it’s a tandem effort, scripted down to the smallest one-liner, suspenseful beat, wistful glance, fond chuckle, serendipitous plot twist. And then he said this. And then I did that. And now here we are. Happily ever after.

  Sometimes I wonder if part of my problem with Nolan isn’t our story itself, the how and why we got together. Because even if I stick to the abridged, upbeat, dinner-party version, and avoid maudlin details such as “Nolan was a pallbearer at my brother’s funeral,” we always return to Daniel.

  Growing up and for as long as I can remember, Nolan was my brother’s best friend, although with a four-and-a-half-year age gap, I actually didn’t pay much attention to either of them, at least when I was really little. He was just a fixture, like the tweed sectional in our family room or my father’s workbench in the garage, part of the backdrop of my childhood, one of the many older boys who came to trade baseball cards or throw a football in the backyard or spend the night, sleeping in the trundle pulled out from under Daniel’s twin bed.

  By the time I reached middle school, it was harder to ignore Daniel and his friends, if only because Josie was paying such close attention to them. I remember her carrying on about Nolan in particular, and I had to agree that he was easy on the eyes. With wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the kind of skin that easily tanned, he had such obvious Malibu lifeguard good looks that Daniel teasingly called him Baywatch. He also happened to be Daniel’s most athletic friend, a natural at every sport he played, though he didn’t have Daniel’s drive or work ethic, which evened things out for them on the playing fields. But what stood out to me the most was Nolan’s sense of humor, the laid-back way he approached everything, in stark contrast to my type A brother. In many ways, they really were opposites, their differences becoming more pronounced over the years, as Daniel graduated as Lovett’s valedictorian, then headed north for Harvard, while Nolan focused on girls and parties at Ole Miss, barely eking out a 2.0 GPA (all he needed to return to Atlanta to work at his family’s printing business). Yet despite their divergent paths, the two stayed close, always picking up right where they left off. In fact, just a few days before Daniel died, I overheard him telling Sophie that Nolan would one day be his best man.

  So it was both fitting and gut-wrenching when we returned home from the hospital the morning after the accident to find Nolan leaning against his black Tahoe parked haphazardly in our driveway, his front door open. As my
parents and I got out of our car and neared him, he must have been able to tell that something was wrong—very wrong—yet he calmly asked, “Where’ve y’all been? Where’s Danny? We’re supposed to shoot hoops at ten.” He was eating a glazed donut and licked his thumb, waiting for a reply.

  I held my breath, and looked at my father, still wearing the crumpled suit from his business trip, his red tie stuffed into his pocket. He started to answer, but then put his head down and hurried into the house, my mother clutching his arm. Nolan stepped out of his truck, his smile fading.

  “Meredith?” he said with a questioning look. “What’s going on?”

  I was only twenty, not even old enough for a legal drink, yet it was clear that I would be the one to tell Daniel’s best friend that he was gone.

  “Daniel was in a car accident last night,” I said, somehow finding my voice, though my throat was constricting, my heart pounding in my ears.

  “Is he okay?” Nolan nodded, as if cuing me for the right answer. “He’s going to be okay. Right, Meredith?” He nodded again, his eyes wide.

  I took a deep breath, then made myself say it aloud for the first time: Daniel died.

  Nolan stared back at me, his face blank, as if he hadn’t heard what I said or simply couldn’t process the meaning of my words.

  “A truck hit his car at the corner of Moores Mill and Northside,” I numbly reported, still in shock. “He was wearing his seatbelt, but his internal injuries were too great. They said it happened fast….He didn’t suffer at all.”

  I repeated the words exactly as I’d heard my mother tell my grandparents: He didn’t suffer at all. I wanted so desperately to believe it was true, but would always doubt it, always wonder about Daniel’s final thought and whether he knew what was happening to him.