The First Husband Page 6

  I looked up at her, bowled over in surprise. No, that doesn’t do it justice. I almost passed out.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  She nodded. “It’s a lovely thing. A gift, really, when you see love like that. It doesn’t happen often.”

  I had lost the power to speak.

  “I can see it in his eyes,” she said. “Gil, can’t you?”

  Gil could.

  This was when my mother reached over and took my hand.

  “I’m happy for you, baby,” she said, squeezing my thumb. “I’m happy for you and I’m happy, selfishly, for me. To get to see you so much . . . like yourself with someone.”

  It was the single nicest thing she’d ever said to me.

  Then, as if remembering herself, she got quiet.

  “But shouldn’t he wear his hair shorter if he works in a kitchen?” she said. “I mean, is that even sanitary? Does he at least wear a hairnet?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom.”

  “Shouldn’t you at least try to find out?” she said.

  I shrugged, shaking my head.

  “What? I was just asking.”

  Apparently, she was still my mother.

  That night, before we fell asleep, Griffin said, in the dark, “Your mother is lovely.”

  I took my hands off my eyes, tried to see the outline of his face, the moon shining through the bedroom window, that California moon, on a perfect November night.

  “My mother is many things, Griffin,” I said. “I’m not really sure lovely makes the cut.”

  With Nick, this is the moment when I would have spun it, when I wouldn’t have wanted to walk up the edge of where I was so vulnerable. His family was so picture-perfect: his loving sister, his generous parents, their solid marriage. We would see them regularly, talk to them weekly. I never wanted Nick to know how loaded it was for me with my own family, even in the smallest increments. He didn’t seem to want to know that.

  But Griffin was waiting. He was still waiting, apparently, for me to say something.

  “You’re pretty close to your family?” I asked.

  “Well, they’re certainly not the easiest people in the world, but then again, whose family is?” he said. “And yes. In answer to your question. I’d do anything for them.”

  I shook my head. “Well, we’re not like that. Once my father left, my mother was mostly focused on whoever the new husband was. She tried the best she could, but she just wasn’t so focused on me, on our day-to-day life, on making our home . . . a home,” I said. “And with all the moving around after that, it was a little like I didn’t have one.”

  “A family or a home?”

  “Dealer’s choice?” I shrugged. “It’s probably why I travel so much now. At least partly. I don’t know how to do it another way.”

  He was quiet for a minute.

  “It all may be hard for you to understand. . . .”

  “Well, what if I don’t try?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “What if instead of trying to understand all of it, I just agree to be on your mother’s side?”

  I turned toward him. “Don’t you mean my side?”

  “No, I mean your mother’s side.”

  “I’m not following . . .” I said.

  “I’ll just assume that whatever your mother did wrong, she did one thing great. That’s you. She figured it out enough to make you. I can overlook the rest. And you can have the freedom to feel whatever you want toward her. With no judgment.” Griffin kissed me on the cheek, slow, imprinting me. “I’ll still think she’s lovely.”

  I started to cry. It was the most generous thing anyone had ever offered me, and he had done it without even trying.

  “That’s a nice plan,” I told him.

  He smiled. “I’m glad we have one.”

  8

  He asked me a month later. Three months to the day from when we first met. Three months. Ninety-one days. The other side of the winter solstice. A season had passed. But only one.

  The question didn’t start as a proposal. He didn’t ask me to marry him at first. First he just asked me to go with him.

  “It’s coming up,” he said. “I have to head back East.”

  “When? ”

  “Next week. We’ve talked about it.”

  We had. We had talked about it, but I’d avoided thinking about it. January—an entirely different calendar year—had always felt so far away. Where was I going to be in January? I was living in a way that I couldn’t think that far ahead. I was living in a way where I couldn’t really think.

  But now there we were again: sitting at the bar, after hours, two bar stools down from where we had been sitting the first night. Where it all began. People always say that things come full circle, but I think that’s not accurate. I think they just come very close. You find yourself almost back where you started, but you’ve moved slightly. Like evidence of the time that has passed, of the things that have happened. We were, physically, two stools over. And so I could see it, like a recently given-up promise: the image of myself, then, on the bar stool. Hiked up dress. Getting ready for it before I knew I was. The beginning of things.

  “Now comes the harder part,” Griffin said. “We have to talk about what we’re going to do about it.”

  “What we’re going to do about it?” I shook my head. “What can we possibly do about it?”

  “I would stay here. I would stay here to see where things go. But I have to get back. I should be back there already, really. I’m finally getting the chance to have my own place. It’s what I’ve always wanted. Right off Main Street by the bookshop and the church.” He started to make me a diagram with his hands. “It’s a big opportunity for me. And you can write your column from anywhere, right?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  “Why? ”

  I hadn’t said a word about Nick, not a word, not since my best thing/worst thing explanation of us. That was no small miracle. But immediately I thought, I wish I’d told Griffin. I wish he already knew. I can’t follow someone else somewhere. I had followed Nick across the county, and where had I ended up? I wasn’t heading back, just because he was asking me.

  Which was when—as if reading my mind—Griffin did something I wasn’t expecting. He got down on one knee.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Then we said this next part at the same time: “This is crazy.”

  Sometimes you don’t know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don’t know it until it is happening.

  “The thing is I know that we are supposed to be together. I knew it the second you walked in wearing that dress. . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t exactly explain why. Really, I’m not sure I’d want to, even if I could.”

  He was right. A part of me agreed with him. But it was also crazy. A part of me agreed with that more.

  “I will give you an out here if you want it,” he said. “I will give you whatever you want. But I don’t think we should take it. I think we should be brave here. I think we should start this life right now. Right where we are. . . .”

  The words were out of my mouth before I could think about it. When it all started happening—everything that came next—I asked myself: Wasn’t that how it was supposed to happen? Wasn’t that how it was supposed to begin?

  “I can’t,” I said.

  He looked downtrodden, and I felt it in my gut. I had never felt anything exactly like it before. It was like I was hurting myself and he was showing me how it looked. It was right there on his face. How it looked when we listened to our fear. Our uncertainty. When we let it be the thing that guides us. How, even if it may masquerade as safety, it almost always, ultimately, does more damage than figuring out how to do something greater, braver. Something bold.

  Be the opposite of yourself. Jordan’s words rushed back into my head, reannounced themselves to me. Then Nick’s did: Sometimes it feels like you’ve neve
r really been here, like you couldn’t be even if you wanted to be. Which was when I knew I had to say what I really meant.

  I shrugged. “I know it’s crazy and impossible and any therapist worth her salt would tell me I’m an insane person. And maybe I am an insane person. Maybe that’s true. But I can’t, for the life of me, stand here and say no.”

  He stood up.

  This was the way I said yes.

  Part 2

  Happily Ever After

  Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

  —LEWIS CARROLL

  9

  One of the first things “Checking Out” taught me was how amazing the beginning of a trip could be. How there was nothing at all like the realization, early in one’s travels, that all options were readily available. A day could be a top-down convertible car ride from Brussels to Amsterdam, or a warm afternoon at Don Alfonso in Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi eating the world’s freshest lemon (skin and all), or an evening singing karaoke at the Townhouse in Tokyo. You could make a million choices, or none, and it barely counted yet. It took me time to realize just how invaluable that feeling was—and why.

  It isn’t only that at the beginning of a trip the entire world is shiny and bright and possible, but also that we get to believe it again. Before any fractures show, before we feel like we are running out of time, before we make a bad choice. Before we realize that we are the reason something is going terribly wrong. In the beginning, we get to believe that, this time, we’re going to get it exactly right.

  When Griffin and I drove into Williamsburg for the first time—drove down its very sleepy Main Street, past the church steeple and the post office, all the Christmas trees still standing, light snow falling onto the remnants of a previous day’s thick snowfall—I wasn’t quite sure what moved me so much, why I felt so content. But I pulled out my camera and immediately started taking photographs. I had, over the years, driven down a hundred Main Streets made up of similar components. I could, in fact, think of many that were more picturesque. But there was something different this time. Something oddly specific. Like I had been there before. Or maybe like I knew I’d be there again. Seeing it for the thousandth time instead of the first. Something you’d only recognize one way—as a place you were supposed to be.

  And I must have been wearing my enthusiasm on my face because Griffin lowered my camera and met my eyes. Gave me his biggest smile.

  “Makes a good first impression, doesn’t it?” he said.

  I nodded. “It does,” I said.

  Griffin took a right off Main Street, and then another, until we were crawling into the outskirts of town: the picture-perfect Craftsman houses lined up like jewelry charms, shiny and bright against the snow. We drove farther out—the houses separating out from each other, space growing between them, farms starting to pop up. Then we took a final right onto Naples Road, and he slowed the car down.

  There it was. A modest Craftsman, all by its lonesome. Griffin’s house. My dream house. I don’t mean that in any overly indulgent way—like it was the most special house I’d ever seen or the house I’d always longed for—I mean, quite literally, it was a house I’d seen in my dreams. Nighttime dreams, daytime ones. Same blue shutters and strong posts, a wooden porch complete with rocking chairs. Two windows peeking out from the second story, like eyes. A white brick chimney. Making me smile.

  There was the wedding, of course. In a small chapel right near the Las Vegas border, on our way across the country. It involved an ivory sundress, a pair of seventy-year-old witnesses, simple gold wedding bands, and a poem “Happiness” that Griffin read out loud to me. There was a very fun (and too-fast) car trip minimoon across the rest of the country together. There was all of that. But the two of us sitting in the car, on Naples Road—the world’s smallest U-Haul trailing out behind us, carrying the pieces of my old life that I’d decided to bring (a few striped chairs, my file cabinets, my favorite photographs of Mila)—that was the moment. I was staring at this house I was sure I’d seen before—and that was the beginning of my new life, my new marriage.

  I twirled my wedding ring around my finger. “So,” I said, “This is where we live now?”

  He nodded. “This is where we live now,” he said. “You ready to head in?”

  Before I could answer, Griffin shut off the car and walked around to open the passenger door. He opened the door for me and proceeded to pick me up in his arms, carrying me down the snowy sidewalk—pausing at the front door, preparing to carry me over the threshold, into the house.

  I was laughing, a little uncomfortably, mostly because I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t good at displays of romantic affection, especially traditional ones. I used to think that I found them corny. It would only occur to me later that it wasn’t so much that I found them corny, but that I found them unfamiliar. But Griffin seemed determined to change that, moving us confidently in the direction of the front door, turning the knob while holding me, moving us both inside, onto the green hallway mat that read WELCOME.

  “We’re here,” Griffin said, and kissed me.

  Only someone else answered. “Hey there . . .”

  A man’s voice came from deep inside the house, and Griffin dropped me, bottom first, onto the welcome mat, right on top of the WELCOME.

  I looked up, shocked. First at Griffin, who looked angry, then at the guy he was staring angrily at, who was casually standing in front of us, eating a Fudgsicle. He had a four-day shadow, his dark hair uncombed. But that couldn’t hide how handsome he was, with piercing green eyes and a smile that matched Griffin’s. There was a small child on either side of him—one with his own Fudgsicle, one holding what looked like a plastic yellow watering can. They were five-years-old, six at the oldest. And they were twins. Practically identical, very adorable redheaded twins.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” Griffin said.

  “Will you watch your language for Christ’s sake? ” the guy said. “We have impressionable children here.”

  Griffin leaned down to pick me up off the floor. “You okay?” he asked. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No . . .”

  I shook my head, as Griffin lifted me up. I was more startled than anything else, looking up at him, looking over again at the two small boys. They smiled widely, seemingly enjoying all of this. They were beautiful little boys with that red hair and enormous green eyes. They looked quite a bit like the man I was assuming was their dad—same shape to their faces, those same green eyes. But their awesome red hair, that must have come from somewhere else.

  “Aren’t you guys going to hug your Uncle Griffin hello?” he said. Then he simultaneously patted the boys on their heads.

  Uncle Griffin.

  This was Jesse. Of course, it was Griffin’s brother Jesse. Griffin hadn’t had family photographs with him in Los Angeles, but it made perfect sense. He had told me that Jesse had little boys—had he told me that they were twins?—Sammy and Dexter, if I was remembering correctly. I knew they lived in Boston, which wasn’t so far from western Massachusetts. Jesse was a graduate student working toward his PhD at MIT. And Jesse’s wife—what had Griffin told me her name was?—owned a flower shop in Cambridge. That was what I knew. And now I knew this: behind those eyes, and that Fudgsicle, Jesse was looking a little crazed at the moment.

  “They’re having a silent contest right now,” Jesse said, gently pushing both boys in Griffin’s direction. “Go on, guys. No talking necessary.”

  The twins ran to Griffin, who scooped them up into his arms, holding both of them close—one hand cupped under each small body, his eyes still drilled into his brother.

  I noticed it, right on the other side of Griffin and the boys, at the foot of the stairs: several enormous suitcases and piles of clothes. Sporting equipment. Children’s toys. All of it partially unpacked and spilling up the stairway, spilling all the way down the upstairs hallw
ay, which, from my angle at least, was a total and complete disaster: paintings falling from their hangers, carpet ripped up. And the distinct smell of grape juice, coming from somewhere that I wasn’t sure I wanted to visit.

  Griffin must have followed where my eyes went because he looked that way too, and then back at his brother.

  “Jesse, how long have you been staying here?” Griffin asked.

  Jesse shrugged. “Not long.”

  “How not long?”

  “Not long,” he answered. “Like five weeks.”

  “Five weeks? ” I said.

  It was the first thing I’d said. And Jesse turned to me—for the first time—as if just noticing I was there. Standing in front of him. After falling out of his brother’s arms.

  “Hey there,” he said.

  “Hey there,” I repeated.

  Then I gave him a small wave, more than a little surprised I had opened my mouth at all.

  “How could you not have told me you were here?” Griffin said.

  Jesse tuned back to his brother, offering up a shrug. “Didn’t want to worry you,” he said. “Seemed unnecessary.”

  Griffin put down the twins, who raced wordlessly up the stairs, fighting back their laughter, fighting hard not to tumble and trip over the massive amount of belongings covering the floor. I watched them go, my eyes shifting back to Jesse once they’d disappeared, a bedroom door slamming behind them. The only noise.

  “What do the kids get for winning the silent contest? ” I asked. “They seem incredibly committed.”

  “A hundred bucks,” Jesse said.

  “That’s some prize,” I said.

  This made Jesse smile. “I believe it breeds a certain level of commitment,” he said.

  Griffin drilled his brother with a look. “Where’s Cheryl, Jessie?”

  “Cheryl kicked me out,” Jesse said.