Josh kept looking at me, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say that I was right—that he wasn’t going to marry Meryl, or that Elizabeth and Grace were going to be okay either way. He didn’t tell me that love fell second to commitment, sometimes, if for no other reason than people were too scared to let things be any other way. That they had trouble even beginning to know how to be so honest.
He didn’t tell me this—he didn’t tell me anything—in part because, before he could, out of the shadows, came Dr. Moynihan-Richards. He was holding a package from CVS Pharmacy—the only all-night drugstore anywhere in town. He was still wearing his suit.
Josh stood up, smoothing out his tie as if this were the main problem. “Dr. Richards,” he said. “I had no idea you were there.”
“Clearly,” he said. And walked away.
I looked up at Josh in disbelief. He was looking toward where Meryl’s father had just been. I knew he was trying to decide whether to go after him. But what was he going to say anyway? What was there to say even if he caught up to him, and could— somehow—convince him to listen for a second? I really do love your daughter, sir, but I can’t quite be sure if she’s the best person for me to spend the rest of my life with.
“Josh,” I said, “I had no idea he was standing there. You don’t think he heard us, do you?”
“The part where you were yelling? Um . . . yeah. I think he may have heard that part.”
I didn’t know what to say. I watched him sit back down, pull the tablecloth back toward him. It knocked the candle and remaining flowers off the table. It knocked away a stranded fork, the wet-naps.
“This is fucking great.”
I leaned across the table toward him. “Listen to me, okay? He couldn’t have known what we were talking about. Not really. You can make something up if it comes to that.”
He looked over at me, but it was like he didn’t see me. Like he was trying to figure out who I even was, really. He had never looked at me like that before. It made me feel scared.
“Look, Emmy,” he said. “I don’t think I want to be around you very much right now.”
“Well, I don’t want to be around you right now either,” I said, and with that, I stood up.
And I left him there. For the first time, maybe ever, I left my brother behind. I knew he would just keep sitting there in our parents’ backyard, in his vacated rehearsal dinner tent—the tablecloth bunched up, red table exposed beneath it—at a total loss.
I knew Dr. Moynihan-Richards was still out there, somewhere, in the shadows, or that he was on his way back into the basement to share his information. I knew that in a minute or two, Josh would start to cry.
I didn’t turn around.
part four
Maybe I’m wrong, but there does seem to be something buzzing around in the air on wedding days, this all-encompassing fragrant thing that gets caught there the same way it does on Christmas or on a snow day. The second snow day in a row when you’re ten years old, say, and, even inside, everything is all frosty and hidden, the static creeping up from the radio in the kitchen, the broadcaster just about to tell you the very best news you could ever imagine hearing. You almost can’t believe it. And yet somehow, instinctively, you’ve been waiting for it.
Three of the happiest wives—Nancy #1, Josie #3, and Jill #4—had all said they’d had a version of this feeling on their wedding days. And even Kristie #2, who was currently in the middle of a divorce, smiled when she remembered feeling certainty on her wedding day. “We got married at Pete’s friend’s place on Block Island,” she said. “And even now, I know I was absolutely supposed to marry him that morning. I was supposed to become his wife.”
When I opened my eyes that morning of Meryl and Josh’s wedding, this was the first thing I felt—that a wedding was going to happen today, that it absolutely would (which meant it should), and that everything was going to move forward as planned. It was bizarre to me that this was my gut reaction.
And yet, for that first seemingly honest minute after I awoke, I got to believe that this feeling cemented something—that any doubts I had been having about whether or not they should get married had turned out to be misguided. For that first minute, it didn’t seem to matter much what had happened yesterday. All of it—the farm and Elizabeth and even Grace—felt like a dream. Maybe I had dreamed it. Because a wedding was going to take place today. I was sure of it. I was so sure of it that I didn’t want to think about the rest of it, and it was the only time since Friday night, since sitting with Josh at the fireworks, that this felt like the right move. Maybe it would all die, disappear somehow, under the importance of what was about to happen.
Then, as if in a rush, I started feeling around for something else that was going on inside me—the stirring up in my stomach—and I remembered. I got to remember again. Matt. Seeing Matt. The two of us sitting together by the waterfall. What was said.
I ran my finger over my lower lip, replaying the scene in my head, slower this time, looking for hints in it. Not so much as to what I should do—which I still couldn’t begin to think about—but what had been done. Was Matt a stranger to me now? Was he anything close to the version of himself that had been living in my head—my heart—for the last several years? Which version was I really holding on to? I wasn’t sure I could formulate anything resembling a real answer. All I knew was that his coming back to me felt so different than I’d imagined it feeling. There wasn’t that element of relief I’d anticipated. It was more complicated than that, less precise. And I didn’t know for certain what had inspired it—his decision to want to try again. But part of me knew him, knew him still, and understood that despite what he had told me, despite his saying that nothing else made him as happy as we had made him, he was also just scared. I had seen it in his eyes. He was scared to go to Paris, scared to take this next big step alone, and he could be sure I would back him up there.
What would happen, though, when Paris wasn’t scary anymore? Would he still be so sure that I was the one he wanted to be with, or would other things—other people—again hold more interest? Would I have to feel again like his love could disappear at any time?
I got out of bed, heading straight to Josh’s room, but he wasn’t in there. The bed was already made, the window wide open. If he had even slept in there at all, he was already up and gone.
I rubbed my eyes, trying to really wake myself up, and moved over to the window. Outside was all sun: the ground dark and hot, everything tinted red. It wasn’t even nine, and it was burning out. I didn’t have to turn on the radio to hear for sure what everyone had been saying. A summer heat wave was raging. Heat already here, and getting stronger. Stay inside unless you really have to be somewhere. Stay inside with the air conditioner on until this whole thing passes us by.
It gave me hope.
The wedding was scheduled for four, but the house was already busy with all of it. I could hear my mother downstairs—sausage frying, the phone ringing. I went down into the kitchen to find my mother by the stove, cooking two large griddles’ worth of pancakes, fresh blueberries melting into them, bananas already in the mix.
“Don’t tell me no one’s going to eat this,” she said as I sat down on the stool, leaning my elbows on the counter.
“I’m going to eat it,” I said.