“She’s in the old-lady section, sitting with your grandmother, I believe. They’re discussing bunions and meat loaf and the true meaning of Thanksgiving and how great the Pilgrims were.”
“What are you talking about?” says my father.
“It’s all nonsense, sir. Just making things up.” He keeps smiling. To me he says, “What do you think is going to happen next?”
“I think I have to have a very hard conversation next,” I say. “With Judd.”
“Yes, apparently you do,” says my father. “So is this what it looks like?”
“Maybe,” I say. I bite my lip. “Adam, will you stay? I have to tell you something about my novel.”
“I’m staying,” he says. “For the duration. I have some personnel issues I might want to discuss with you. And I do need to know how your novel is going.”
“Oh, Adam. What a bad thing I did!”
“You had to.”
“But I did it in the worst possible way! I’m so ashamed.”
“We’ll discuss all that. How’s Gnomeo?”
“Good God almighty,” says my father. “I’ll send Judd up. Young man—Adam—maybe you and I should go outside and wait this one out.”
“In a second, Daddy,” I say. I can’t seem to take my eyes off Adam. I reach for him, but he intercepts my hands before they reach his shoulders.
“No kissing,” he says. “Not until you’re not engaged anymore. I don’t make out with engaged women.”
I look over and see my father shaking his head. But he is smiling. “I’ll send Judd up,” he says. “Adam, son, you need to follow me out.”
“Daddy, I just need to tell Adam one thing in private before he goes,” I say, and my father shrugs and slips outside the door, and I turn to Adam. My head feels clearer than it has in such a long time. My face already hurts from smiling.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s going to happen here, and I can’t quite put this into words that make sense, but . . .” I stop talking and stare at him. And then I start up again: “Listen, I don’t care about figuring out the future anymore. I tried to pin it down, let it be recorded on spreadsheets, wrestle it into a kind of orderly submission: marriage, babies, safety, fidelity. And it gave me a big stomachache. That is all.”
Adam is smiling at me, and he’s holding both my hands.
“So that’s all I want to say,” I tell him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen here.”
“No one does,” he says. “We have eons to figure it out. Or not figure it out. Just going where it leads us. How would that be?”
I would like to tell him the part about how I really, really want children, and I might be running out of time, no matter what he thinks—but I realize that all I really want is to be with him. Just to see, you know, because I haven’t felt so light in such a long time and that’s worth checking out.
“I have to go talk to Judd,” I say. “First I need to get out of this ridiculous wedding dress and put on my other one, the real dress. So I’ll see you downstairs.”
Judd knows. He knows. I see when he opens the door and comes in and finds me sitting on the floor. I’m leaning against the bed, with my head resting on my hands. He’s looking stiff and overdressed in a navy-blue suit and a tie. His mother insisted he wear a suit to his wedding, Maggie had told me.
“Oh boy,” he says. “On the floor, are we? What a picture this is!”
He closes the door. And then he lowers himself down on the floor across from me, tugging at his suit as he does, and he looks at me. It hits me that he hasn’t really looked at me for more than two seconds since we made up this cockamamie plan.
“So is this what I think it is?” he says.
“Judd.”
“I know,” he says.
“What were we thinking, that we could do this without being in love?”
“Ah, shit, Phronsie. We said it was going to be better,” he says.
“Blazing a new trail in relationships, we said. It will be perfect, we said. No jealousy, we said.”
“Something like that.” He laughs. “When did you know?”
“I think two minutes after you asked me to marry you.”
“Then why the hell did you say yes?”
“Because I’m an idiot.” I start to cry. “And because I wanted to believe in it. I got so hurt with Steve Hanover that I never wanted to feel all those things again. I didn’t want to ever take another chance. Even those forty-four dates—deep down, I think I made sure they wouldn’t work because I didn’t want anything to work. But now I see that being safe isn’t any way to live. Not really. And it’s not fair to you. You deserve someone who loves you with their whole heart and soul. You deserve mad crazy love, Judd.”
He nods and reaches over and wipes off my tears. My mascara is probably smeared.
“I knew this, too,” he says. “For me, it was clear when I went to write vows.”
“Oh God, yes,” I say. “That. I never did do any, did you?”
“I figured I’d wing it. I was going to say something about how I knew we’d be friends when you laughed at my best burps in kindergarten.”
“Huh. So rarely do burps get mentioned in vows. I’d considered putting those in, too.”
“I didn’t think beyond that. I scrapped the whole idea and made Russell look up something more flowery and marriage-y.”
“And so not us.”
“And so not us.”
“You know what the worst part is?” I say after a moment. “If I’m just seeing you as Judd, my friend, I think the whole situation is kind of funny. But if I’m the one standing next to you, freaking marrying you, then I’m devastated.”
“That is the worst part. You’re right.”
I feel my heart turning over. “I want to be in love. Really in love.”
“Me too.”
I look at him for a long time. His handsome face, which has been so closed to me. Turning away on the pillow. Never lighting up when he sees me.
And now he’s smiling.
“You want to know something?” I say. “I think I like you so much better at this moment than I’ve liked you ever since we decided to get married. We kept saying we were best friends, but the truth is, we had even stopped being friends.”
“I know,” he says slowly. “It was so weird, really. We decided to get married and lost our friendship.”
“So, then, we’re calling it?” I say.
“Calling it. Let’s go have a party.” He does a fist bump.
“I see that Karla Kristensen is here. Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Phronsie. Don’t make me tell you everything right now. The wounds may be . . .”
“There are no wounds,” I say. “We’ve just got this one little thing to do—tell everyone outside—and then we’re having a massive blowout beach party. And then we’re back to being best friends.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll tell you later then.”
And we shake hands. He kisses me on the forehead.
And we go outside to share the great news.
We stand together on the grass in front of the crowd of friends, both of us barefoot and holding hands. He’s rolled up his suit pants above his ankles, and I’m in my boho dress with my hair looking just the same as it does every day.
I talk about the kindergarten day. (He interrupts me to tell them about the burps, and everyone laughs.) I tell them about our millions of conversations, about the Dissect-A-Date campaign, about the old ladies he helps.
And then I stop talking and look at him, smiling at me there, his eyes crinkled in the sunlight.
“It was a beautiful friendship,” I say, “but it wasn’t being in love.”
“Because, no offense to the rest of you, but we said being in love might be stupid,” he says.
“But it isn’t. As it happens.”
He nods so enthusiastically that people laugh. “And now,” he says, “we get to be best friends again because we don’t have t
o do all those pesky things like—”
“Never mind,” I say. I put my finger on his lips. “Let’s not kiss and tell.”
“So we’re sorry if we made you come all the way to Wellfleet thinking you were going to get to hear some lifetime promises,” he says, “but maybe you can be consoled by the idea that you were here to witness Phronsie Linnelle and Judd Kovac saving their friendship from a dreadful fate. Marriage!” He shudders and people laugh.
“To friendship!” I say. Someone hands me a plastic tumbler of champagne.
“To friendship!” he says back.
“And may I just add one thing?” I say. I’m smiling at Adam when I say this part, but I give a glance toward Karla Kristensen, too. “I don’t know this for sure, but I think it’s just possible that after years of dating other people—that it was the giving up and deciding to marry each other that ended up being the secret to finding what we both wanted anyway. Here’s to the law of relinquishment!”
“And to the magic of found objects!” yells Tenaj.
Because she always needs the last word.
“What the hell just happened?” I hear Daisy Kovac say.
And her husband says, “I’ll tell you later.”
“Was it a good thing, though?” she asks.
Maggie, standing nearby, goes over and takes Daisy’s hand. “Yes,” she says. “I think it might have been the best possible thing.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Wow! What an amazing, unsettling time this has been lately—writing a book during the beginning of a global pandemic, during lockdown, when bad news seemed to be everywhere we looked. I felt incredibly lucky to have a deadline looming for this book, if for no other reason than it gave me permission to stop scrolling through the endless loop of news reports and remind myself that my job was to simply write my novel.
I owe so much to family and friends who helped make life possible during these last months of scariness. Thank you to my husband, Jim, who, working from home alongside me, kept my spirits up, as did our children, Ben, Allie, and Stephanie, even though often we could only be together remotely. And I offer so much love and thanks to their spouses, the best of the best: Amy, Mike, and Alex. Zoom calls with Charlie, Josh, Miles, and Emma were always lovely and crazy and made me laugh. And to little Mila, who was born right at the end as I was turning the book in. New life!
Thank you also to Kim Steffen, Leslie Connor, Linda Balestracci, Nancy Antle, Beth Levine, Alice Mattison, Holly Robinson, Deborah Hare, Andi Atkins Hessekiel, Mary Ann Emswiler, Grace Pauls, Marcia Winter, Alice Smith, Marji Shapiro, Thea Guidone, and Sharon Wise, all of whom supported me with phone calls, snacks, socially distant walks, and often the willingness to read drafts over and over again. (I’m especially looking at you, Kim, Beth, and Nancy!) Bill Squier has earned my undying gratitude for telling me everything I needed to know about gnomes—and it turned out to be a lot! Thank you to everyone who told me their Woodstock stories. (I was too young to attend, but my Uncle Bob was in a rock group, Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys, produced by Jimi Hendrix in those days—and it’s family legend how he and his band “almost got to accompany Jimi to Woodstock.”)
And huge thanks to Darlene Faster Burmann, who once drove me all over the Northeast while we promoted a book of mine—and who took the time to tell me everything I needed to know about Phronsie’s job as a publicist.
Fellow authors Kerry Anne King, Marybeth Whalen, Barbara O’Neal, and Nancy Star were always happy to jump on the phone and share stories. I am so grateful to have you four in my corner.
My editor, Jodi Warshaw, is absolutely the best any writer could hope for. Not only does she offer encouragement during the most uncertain times, but she’s always available for phone consultations, plot talks, and a thoughtful analysis of where the book is going. Also, she is brilliant. I treasure our talks more than I can say. Christina Henry de Tessan is a tireless and wise editor who helped me shape the manuscript. My agent, Nancy Yost, offers guidance and wit and is always so much fun to talk to. Suzanne Weinstein Leopold is fabulous at helping me get the word out about my books. Kim Yau, my film agent, has been a tireless champion. And I’m sending so much gratitude to Danielle Marshall, Dennelle Catlett, Gabriella Dumpit, Jessica Preeg, and the entire Lake Union team for all their support and help.
Lastly, thank you so much to the readers who have not only bought my books but have also left wonderful reviews, invited me to talk to their book clubs, and have sent me their own heartfelt stories. I treasure each and every one of you. Please keep writing to me! Your words mean so much.
You can visit me at www.maddiedawson.com, or by emailing me at [email protected]. Or on Instagram at @maddiedaws, and Facebook at www.facebook.com/maddiedawsonauthor.
BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS
Phronsie tells us that she was born to a witch and a farmer as an explanation for why she can’t figure out love. Do you think that’s the real reason? If not, what do you think is the real reason she’s having trouble with her love life?
How do Phronsie’s impressions of her parents’ marriage and split-up differ from the story that has been told to her? Do you think she has any evidence for her theories?
How did Phronsie’s marriage to Steve Hanover affect her future dealings with men? Did that have something to do with her failure to fall in love with any of the forty-four men she subsequently dated?
Judd offers her a marriage that’s based on friendship, loyalty, and an agreement not to ever cheat. He says that being in love is overrated and in fact is the cause of the demise of most marriages. Does he make a strong case for this?
How important is romantic love in a happy marriage? Can best friends form a perfect union, do you think?
How did Phronsie’s treatment of her stepmother evolve over the course of the book? Was there any reason for her change of heart? Did Maggie make mistakes as a stepmother that made things harder?
Why do you think Tenaj stopped seeing her children? Did she have a legitimate reason?
How did Tenaj’s explanation to Maggie of the Woodstock experience change things between them and between Maggie and Robert? Was she telling the entire truth?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Dan Mims
Maddie Dawson grew up in the South, born into a family of outrageous storytellers. Her various careers as a substitute English teacher, department-store clerk, medical-records typist, waitress, cat sitter, wedding-invitation-company receptionist, nanny, day care worker, electrocardiogram technician, and Taco Bell taco maker were made bearable by thinking up stories as she worked. Today Maddie lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with her husband. She’s the bestselling author of seven previous novels: A Happy Catastrophe, Matchmaking for Beginners, The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness, The Opposite of Maybe, The Stuff That Never Happened, Kissing Games of the World, and A Piece of Normal. For more information visit www.maddiedawson.com.
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