I take her hand. “How are you, Lana?”
“Eh.” She shrugs, then tries to hide her wince. “Hey, I’m sorry I was such a mess at our party.” She slurs the last word, and I can’t help but smile; she’s much more of a mess now. “Also, guess what? Two bottles of bourbon disappeared along with Charlie. Typical, right? I could use some bourbon right now.”
“The doctors must have you on some pretty strong stuff here, right? You’ll be better in no time, I just know it.” I don’t know what I’m saying. I plaster a grin over my anxiety, relaxing my facial muscles only when Lana drifts off to sleep again.
I monitor the minutes in anticipation of when it would be not totally inappropriate for Gabe and me to leave. At the one-hour mark, I announce that we have to go. Leo pulls me into a hug, his shoulders heavy as boulders. “Lana will be okay, right?” I ask. He mumbles something indecipherable. “We’ll be back on Tuesday.” Gabe is working the Labor Day brunch shift tomorrow, and I don’t think I can handle this scene without him. Plus, maybe after her epidural Lana will get discharged, and then we won’t have to return at all. I picture my sister-in-law up on her feet again, in four-inch heels, her former happy and healthy self—for the briefest moment, I imagine I can will this picture into existence, and then I chide myself for the fantasy.
My mother escorts Gabe and me back to the elevator bank. “Leo puts up a good front,” she says, “but underneath, he’s suffering most of all. It’s worse to understand it all medically.”
“You think so?” I would’ve thought the opposite.
“Back when Dad was sick, I kept convincing myself that if I just learned everything there was to know about his condition, I could somehow control it.” She shakes her head. “Well, our Leo will do all he can for his wife.”
I’m struck by a memory: “Do you remember how Leo would take Dad’s temperature and feed him juice through a straw?”
“A very good doctor, even as a child. And you’d crawl into Dad’s bed and wouldn’t budge for whole afternoons. I couldn’t drag you outside that summer, even to go to the beach. You’d been such a water baby before.” I can feel it in my gut, the fear of leaving my dad’s side tied to a sudden fear of the ocean.
“Anyway,” my mom says, turning to Gabe. “Thank god, or should I say ‘Thank Gabe,’ we have good, hearty food to eat until the cows come home. If only worrying burned calories, right?”
“I’ll bring reinforcements on Tuesday,” Gabe says.
I wonder, is Gabe actually right about good news mitigating the bad? Maybe this would be a nice time to tell my mom about our engagement. But when I nudge Gabe, he seems irritated, so I let it go. My mom kisses us as the elevator doors open.
On our descent, I notice Gabe has gone quiet. “What’s up?” I ask.
He doesn’t look up as he responds: “You didn’t tell me Charlie was at Leo’s party. You know, the party you told me I shouldn’t bother coming to.”
“Oh, Gabe, come on.” I take his hand. It remains limp in my grasp, but he doesn’t pull it away. How can I explain that these two things are unrelated? I’m not sure I can, I realize. So instead, because I’m overwhelmed by Lana and the hospital, or irritable from the heavy food, or anxious to turn the tables on Gabe, or perhaps all of the above, I say, “I’m the one who studied abroad in Spain.”
“Excuse me?”
Already I regret my words. With less conviction, I add, “What I mean is, you can’t just steal my stories and spin them into your own.”
Gabe guffaws. “Oh, is studying abroad in Spain your intellectual property, as if about a million other people haven’t done the same thing?” His tone is harsh. “Are you also planning to copyright living in Brooklyn and working in an office? Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, it’s off-limits to write about your monotonous desk job. The rights belong to one Molly Stone!”
Gabe’s words are unfair and ridiculous, not to mention mean. I decide to wait for him to cool off. But when I attempt a joke ten minutes later—“Aw, our first fight as an engaged couple!”—Gabe doesn’t even crack a smile.
I toss and turn that night, and wake up with my mother’s voice in my head: “Life is short. Just apologize.” It’s a refrain she’s repeated to me my whole life. So, I write Gabe a note: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about seeing Charlie. It was inconsiderate. I love you. I doodle a cartoon of a girl who looks a lot like me, only bustier and with hearts for eyes, next to a boy who looks a lot like Gabe, only taller and with more muscle tone. I fold up the note and tuck it into Gabe’s shoe.
When I reach for my Metrocard on my way to Netflix-and-Spill Club the next morning, I find a paper folded around it with Gabe’s chicken scratch: Sorry for being a jerk yesterday. I love you. It’s a relief that we can both come back to kindness.
Still, I have a nagging feeling that neither of us is really sorry for the things the other accused us of: Gabe didn’t apologize for co-opting my life events, only for defending doing so in such an obnoxious way. And although I apologized for omitting the fact that I saw Charlie, I didn’t reassure Gabe that he has nothing to worry about. He doesn’t, but for some reason I didn’t want to commit to that in writing. It occurs to me that my mom’s oft-repeated advice is sweeping: If someone believes they’ve been wronged by you, you should apologize, period. There’s no consideration of whether you really mean it, or who’s truly at fault, or whether there’s more to the story. The important thing, my mom drilled into me, is just to say you’re sorry.
All day long, my hand keeps returning to my pocket to find the evidence of Gabe’s apology and his love. I imagine Gabe’s hand doing the same, reaching again and again for reassurance that everything is all right.
Chapter 10
KIRSTEN IS ALREADY settled in when I arrive at the restaurant. She’s spreading jam on a popover and cooing at a nearby baby, who’s making a valiant effort to propel himself out of his mother’s grip and over to my friend. Kirsten is a magnet for the under-two set. “Sorry to interrupt the courtship,” I say, pecking her on the cheek.
“I’ve missed you,” she says, passing me half a popover.
“Me too.” I see Kirsten quickly scan my hand, I assume for a ring; she’d guessed that my anniversary trip would come with a proposal. Kirsten and her husband, Caleb, got hitched fresh out of college, and she’s been waiting ever since for the rest of us to join the married club. I don’t like withholding my news, but I’d feel bad telling my friends before my mother.
Sam shows up at the same moment as our waitress, who says, “I’m Felicity, and I’ll be taking care of you today.”
The three of us erupt into laughter, leaving poor Felicity bewildered. Kirsten, Sam, and I met in the back row of our freshman Psych seminar during our first week at NYU. We became instant best friends, and since then, we’ve bonded over having three out of four of the names of the original American Girl dolls; Felicity is our missing fourth.
“Did you by any chance grow up in Virginia and rescue a horse named Penny?” Sam asks the waitress, citing the origin story of Felicity the American Girl.
“Should we warn her the British are coming?” I add.
“Please ignore my friends,” says Kirsten. “We’ll take three coffees, milk and two sugars in each.”
As a kid, I was more interested in the American Girl books than the dolls. I raced to read them one after another. The Molly series was my favorite, naturally, especially since the fictional Molly’s father wasn’t around, either—although in her case, he was off fighting in World War II. Sometimes I secretly pretended my dad was away at war, too. Kirsten, who, like her American Girl counterpart, grew up in a family with little money for extras, longed futilely for both the books and the dolls. Sam, who had all the books and all the dolls, plus enough clothes to change all their outfits for a week, rewrote the books into sci-fi thrillers and restyled the dolls’ hair into mohawks and mullets.
“All right,” says Kirsten in her down-to-business voice. We’ve met up to discuss The Americans
, our most recent pick for Netflix-and-Spill. “What’d you guys think of the husband and wife? They, like, murder people and then just take off their spy wigs and go home to make dinner for their kids? Totally chilling, right?”
“It’s so fun,” says Sam. “They come off as so boring and picket-fence, but really they’re working to take down our whole country. Mwa-ha-ha.” Her evil laughter makes the baby at the next table giggle; Sam scowls back.
“The real question is, how does the Keri Russell character look so amazing?” I ask. “She must be at least forty.” Ever since our club abandoned books for TV, I’ve wholeheartedly embraced its lowbrow-ness.
“It’s because she’s carrying around all that guilt for being a cold-blooded killer, probably too anxious to eat,” says Kirsten.
“No,” says Sam. “It’s because she’s in an open marriage, having loads of thrilling sex on her secret spy missions. It’s an ideal situation: companionship, but also wild flings; love and devotion, but freedom, too.”
“Well, I think it’s tragic,” Kirsten says, “and I wouldn’t call that love and devotion, unless you mean for Mother Russia. Their marriage is basically a business arrangement.”
“Whatever it is, it’s hot,” Sam says. “It’s exciting, not monotonous—I mean, monogamous.”
I jump in: “It’s funny how supposedly we all share one definition of marriage, but in practice everyone defines it differently.”
“Yeah, think about The Good Wife or The Crown,” says Kirsten. Both shows were previous club picks. “One marriage is a front for friendship with co-parenting duties, and the other’s this complicated bond that’s as much about a commitment to their country as to each other.”
“I wonder,” I say, “if behind closed doors, most marriages aren’t at all how they appear to be.” I can’t help wondering what my own marriage will be like.
“Eh,” Sam says, “I just don’t think most people are that interesting.”
Kirsten snorts. “I think you’d be surprised.”
“Oh really?” Sam leans in. “Do reveal to us the inner workings of matrimony, oh wise married one.”
She swats Sam away. “I meant what I see in court.” As a public defender, Kirsten spends her workdays witnessing private dramas turned public. But my mind goes to what she’s told me about her own private drama: her struggles to get pregnant. The oldest of six kids, Kirsten has been anticipating motherhood since before I knew how to do my own laundry. For years, she and Caleb have been on a merry-go-round of fertility specialists, hormone injections, and false starts ending in miscarriage. But she doesn’t like to talk about it; I’m guessing she’s told nothing to Sam, who isn’t exactly shy about expressing her dislike of kids.
“Anyway, if you find the right person, monogamy doesn’t have to mean monotony.” Kirsten smiles mysteriously, and Sam and I both laugh at our sweet friend. “Right, Molly?”
I feel myself turning red, and now both of them are laughing at me. Discussing fictional TV relationships is one thing, but my friends know how uncomfortable it makes me to talk about myself.
Sam shakes her head. She and her boyfriend, Tom, have dated for years, on and off, the offs usually prompted by Sam’s extracurricular activities. “I’d happily get hitched if Tom said, ‘Sure, baby, you go out and fuck whomever you please, and I’ll do the same.’ If he didn’t throw fits about random sex like he was a goddamn twelve-year-old.”
The woman with the baby at the next table glares at Sam. Kirsten smiles back, apologetic on our friend’s behalf, but Sam’s look is hostile as she meets the woman’s gaze. “Is there a problem?” she demands.
“Could you please watch your language? There are children here.”
Sam scoffs, and I touch her shoulder. “Sam, chill.”
Ignoring me, she says, “I just don’t think that because you’ve procreated, you get to be the fucking language police. Last I checked, this is a public restaurant and I’m a paying customer.” Her volume is rising. “Speaking of which, where the fuck is Felicity with our goddamn omelets?”
Kirsten and I are silenced by this display, but the baby has the opposite reaction: His face wrinkles in distress, a split-second preview to an ear-splitting wail. His mother leaps up and whisks him toward the door, away from the dirty look Sam is burning into her back.
“Some people!” Sam says.
Kirsten and I exchange a look. “Sam,” I say. “Did someone slip cyanide in your coffee? You talked to that woman like she murdered your mother.”
I expect her to brush me off, but instead, something unprecedented happens: Water begins pooling in her eyes.
“Hey, it’s okay,” Kirsten says. “What on earth is the matter?”
I’m mesmerized. After a decade of friendship, I’m finally seeing how Sam cries—and it involves plenty of sniveling and wheezing. “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” she says, wiping at her nose. “I’m fucking pregnant.”
“Holy shit.” It just slips out of mouth. I point my focus at Sam like an arrow; I can’t bear to glance at Kirsten. “Like, pregnant pregnant?”
Sam rolls her eyes at me; it’s a relief that she’s no longer blubbering. “Yes, and spare me the birth control speech. The condom broke, okay? The worst part is, Tom wants me to keep it.”
“Okay,” I say, “so you don’t want to keep it?”
Sam is tearing her napkin to shreds. “I don’t fucking know. I mean, I want a kid, eventually, I guess. Probably with Tom. But like, years from now. On the other hand, I’m a grown-ass woman, not some destitute teenage idiot. Did you know that, on average, American women have their first baby at twenty-six? That’s a full four years younger than we are!”
Sam continues this debate with herself, making no effort to lower her voice, and people around us start sneaking glances. My heart aches for Kirsten, and I realize how imperative it is that she not be subjected to any more of this, so I cut off Sam’s rambling: “Let’s get out of here. No one has an appetite anymore, right?”
Outside, Kirsten stutters, “Um, I just realized I’m late for an appointment.”
Sam barely hears her, quarantined as she is in her own distress.
“I’ll call you later,” I say to Kirsten, meaning “I hope you’re okay” and “I love you,” and then I watch her walk away.
• • •
Sam and I end up by the Gowanus Canal, leaning over the bridge, staring down at the muck. The sulfur stink is particularly strong today. “What a hole,” Sam says. “Do you think breathing in this garbage is hurting the embryo?”
“Yep, it’ll probably grow twelve toes.”
“If it ever gets to grow any toes,” Sam says idly.
To distract her, I tell her about my run-in with Charlie. I play up the sight of him in Leo’s refined apartment wearing his muddy ranger gear. Soon she’s chortling—unlike Kirsten, Sam has always indulged my soft spot for Charlie. She respects him for being one of the few people who can drink her under the table.
“That Charlie is so sexy,” she says. “I mean, a total alcoholic, but a very hot one. Good thing you found Gabe.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” I suddenly feel desperate to share my news. “Gabe and I got engaged.”
“No shit!” Sam’s clap on my back knocks me off-balance. “That’s fantastic!”
“I haven’t told my family yet, so don’t say anything.”
Sam makes the sign of zipped lips. “Can I tell you a secret?” She balances herself on the bridge’s guardrail and tees out her arms. “I think I’m going to have this baby, become a mom, the whole freaking shebang.”
I feel tears form in my eyes. I’m about to say something sappy, but Sam preempts me: “Look at us, all grown up and shit. Let’s go for a celebratory swim!”
She grabs my arm, counts to three, and right at the moment I think she might actually be crazy enough to propel us over the bridge and into the rank, polluted water—I feel proud to have such a brave friend, even as I’m bracing myself, pleading to stay on
solid ground—Sam lets go.
Chapter 11
UPON ENTERING THE office Tuesday morning, I hear squeals. I’m unsurprised to discover that they’re coming from Melinda Lowe’s cubicle. The junior copywriters and assistant designers are all clumped around, reacting to what I assume is some celebrity Twitter feud or Snapchat scandal.
The diamond’s glint catches my eye from several feet away—for a moment I think I’ve gone blind—and subsequently I notice that all the gazes are focused on Melinda’s fourth finger. “My fiancé worked with Larissa Laraby’s jewelry designer,” I hear her boast. What a strange point of pride, to share a ring designer with a reality TV star. I congratulate Melinda as I pass by, and she beams, like she’s achieved something grand.
I’m halfway down the hall when I overhear, “You must be so excited to start wedding planning!” Rapid-fire questions follow: “Who’ll design your gown?” “What’s your vision for flowers arrangements?” “Where will you register?” “How would you describe your bridal style?” “Which color palette will you pick? What kind of ceremony?” “Big or small reception?” The words get warped on the way to my brain, so it all sounds like a foreign language. I’m rattled, but I chalk it up to needing coffee. I hurry to my office, thankful for the door I can close.
Not until now has it hit me that, unless I want to go the route of Gabe’s parents and commemorate a major life event at a depressing municipal office, I too will be planning a wedding. I’ve never been one to fantasize about my wedding day. It’s not just the unsavory indulgence of imagining an entire event set up just for me, but also the daunting prospect of having to consider exactly how I’d hope the event to unfold. Planning such an affair will require a thousand different decisions—just thinking about it overwhelms me.
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