I quickly switched my attention to Kara. “Let’s eat,” I said to her.
Manning had wanted to work the grill tonight—probably because it would’ve gotten him out of socializing—but with over fifty guests, I’d convinced him to hire a local barbeque restaurant to cater. I took Kara to a buffet table of warming dishes, salad, and a meat station managed by the head chef.
“Thank you so much for the invitation to stay with you,” she said as I handed her a plastic plate. “We would’ve, but with the baby, it was easier to get a hotel.”
“I understand. I figured with a newborn it might help if we offered.”
“We appreciated it.” She served herself salad and passed me the tongs. “The ceremony was beautiful. Manning looked so happy during your first dance. He must really love you. Or Aerosmith.”
I snorted. We’d slow-danced to “Crazy,” possibly the worst wedding song in history, but Manning had wanted it. It’d been playing on our bus ride to camp in 1993, and Manning had later told me it was one of the first moments he’d realized how deep into trouble he was getting with me. Mostly because as a man normally in control, he couldn’t get himself out of trouble.
“Manning’s been happy in general lately,” I said. “I know he’s glad you and your dad could be here.”
“They have a great relationship. I think my dad would’ve loved to have him as a son-in-law if I’d been older when Manning had started coming around.” As we worked our way toward the meat station, she elbowed me. “Good thing I was only seven.”
Kara had a warm, nonjudgmental smile; the kind that put me instinctively at ease. “I met Manning when I was sixteen,” I confessed. I hadn’t said that to many people, and certainly not those I barely knew. Manning and I were married now, and while our age difference had once seemed like the world, it was now an anecdote of a hard-earned history nobody could take from us. “He wouldn’t touch me, but that only made me want him more.”
“I understand completely. I wasn’t going to say, but I definitely had a small crush on him from about ten to seventeen.” She giggled. “He was so handsome and mature and serious. Nothing like the boys I went to school with.”
“So serious,” I agreed. It made me laugh now to think of how tense Manning must’ve been when I was around back then. “How’d you meet your husband?”
“Work.” She shrugged, spooning mashed potatoes onto her plate. “Not nearly as exciting as stealing my sister’s ex-con husband.”
I laughed too hard at that. “Exciting is one way of putting it.”
I introduced Kara to the restaurant’s head chef, and he sliced us some steak and pork. The moment she and I stopped talking, I could almost feel Manning’s adoration radiating from thirty feet away. Part of me wanted to look back and glean some hope from the sight of him with Abby, and the other part worried it’d be an image that would haunt me more and more with each month my period returned. “What’s it like having a newborn in the house?” I asked Kara, both out of curiosity and to distract myself.
“It’s . . .” She half-laughed. “It’s as amazing as everyone says, and about as awful as nobody says. Everything you hear about—lack of sleep, shit everywhere, tension in your marriage—times it by ten.”
“It sounds like more of an adventure than anything.”
“It so is. Magical, too. That part you can’t really describe.” At the end of the buffet, we each picked a fork and knife from a pile of silverware. “What about you and Manning?” she asked. “I mean, not to add pressure. I know how annoying it is to get those questions, especially on your wedding day.”
Maybe it wasn’t just that Kara had an open, trustworthy face, but also that she was one of the few people in attendance who’d shown up for Manning. She’d known him before I had, and she cared about him. “Between you and me,” I said, “Manning and I are trying. It’s soon, but sometimes it feels like we waited our whole lives to get to this day. Life is short. We shouldn’t have to wait for the things we want anymore.”
“That’s so romantic,” she said, sighing. We set our plates and silverware on a high-top table to eat. “I can’t get over the way he looks at you. It’s every girl’s dream.” She forked some spinach leaves and grimaced. “I hope I didn’t scare you off the baby thing.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know if we really grasp what we’re getting ourselves into. Admittedly, we didn’t think it through very hard. I only graduated a few months ago, and I’m about to start work . . .”
“Yeah, but there’s never really a good time, you know?” She nodded behind me. “I mean, seems like Manning might be thinking it through pretty hard right now.”