“No. He has to work early.” Collin, my boyfriend of roughly five months, manages the brunch place where we met. At first, when he’d scrawled his number on my to-go cup, I’d assumed it was his move, what he did to every girl he noticed who came in. But Stevie had stopped me from tossing it, even crafted my first message to him.It’s probably time you try actually dating someone, she’d said as she tapped out the text for my approval.You haven’t had a boyfriend in years.She was right. I had been telling myself that when I liked someone enough, I’d make room for them, but there was always something just off enough that I found a reason not to get too close.Collin was something of an experiment, and so far, to my pleasant surprise, nothing terrible has happened.
“Well,” she says. “Enjoy the disgustingly hot subway platform.”
I ignore her comment and flash her a puppy-eyed look. “Are yousureyou don’t want to drop everything and come to the wedding?” I ask her. “We could even splita cabto the airport.”
“I’m sure I’d like to time travel back to March and convince myself not to take summer classes,” Stevie says around a yawn. “I’d so much rather drink with you and Mom on a goat farm instead of studying for finals. Besides,” she says. “If I go, what will Ren do?”
“We’ll miss you,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “Tell Ren I’ll take his thanks forallowinghim to replace me as your plus-one in the form of student loans payments.”
“Totally even trade,” I say, tucking the heels into my bag.
Stevie watches as I sort through the pile of folded laundry next to me. “So how do you think Amanda feels about this whole weekend?” she asks me.
I pause, a shirt half-folded over my arm. I’ve only met Ren’s girlfriend once, and briefly, during the holidays, when she and Ren walked into my parents’ Christmas Eve party with the Websters looking fresh out of some ad that involved a lot of cross-country skiing and mulled wine by an enormous fire. Stevie and I were stamping out cookies on the kitchen counter and while I’d been excited to meet Amanda, I suddenly felt a little like I’d been banished to the kids’ table. Here was Ren, the best friend who I’d once won a flip cup tournament with in college, walking into my childhood home with the air of someone with a mortgage and more than a surface-level understanding of Roth IRAs, a beautiful, tall redhead at his side.
The conversation I had with Amanda—short, polite, nothing profound—was enough to tell me Ren’s significant other wouldn’t suddenly become my other best friend, like I’d envisioned growing up.Some joint wedding situation, houses next door to each other, things that seem weird to me now but made perfect sense in the mind of a teenager.
“Feels about what?” I fit the shirt and a pair of shorts into a corner of my suitcase.
Stevie scoffs. “About her boyfriend being your plus-one to Aunt Charlene’s wedding.”
“Stevie, Ren would tell me if it was a problem.”
“If you say so.”
She doesn’t bring it up again, instead passing out across the foot of my bed, which is where she stays the rest of the night. Eventually, I curl up next to her to try to catch a couple hours of sleep, kiss her head goodbye as the sky turns gray out my window.
When the plane touches down in San Francisco, my brain is foggy but wired in an all-nighter kind of way, but I’m sort of used to it now. Because of Novo’s production deadlines, I’ve been staying at work later and later. The schedule is so hectic that I have to miss the week at the beach this year, so this weekend is especially important. Not only for seeing my parents, our promised twice weekly phone calls getting shorter and shorter over the past months, but also for making sure Ren and I take full advantage of our time together, and not in the way we did in Chicago. No lists, just us.
It’s three hours until Ren lands, so I pick up our rental car and point it toward the closest coffee shop, where I order a heavily sweetened and extra-large cold brew and slump into a window seat.
My phone dings with a notification from Collin.
Safely there, he sends, no punctuation.
Here!I reply.Grabbing a coffee before I pick up Ren.
He responds with a thumbs-up.
As I sip my coffee, I scroll to the directions Charlene sent about how to get to the venue—Google Maps will lie to you about the turn!—and let my mind wander to the weekend ahead. Tonight is the rehearsal dinner, and my mom wants to go on a hike before the wedding tomorrow, so we can, as she puts it, “test out” the screws she had to have put in her ankle after she broke it mountain biking in the spring. A continuation of the facing-your-fears trend, something she claimed has changed her life and has continued to try to get all of us to participate in, even following the accident. Stevie and I had a shared minor meltdown when my dad sent a text that said onlyMom, E.R., call please, in true parent fashion, but my mom has been intrepid about the whole thing.
Ren calls as I’m winding my way back to the airport.
“Shit,” I answer. Even without a list to contend with, I don’t want to miss a minute with him. “Are you here?”
“Flight landed a little early,” he says over the sounds of the terminal, a muffled announcement and conversations building and fading as he walks. “You’re stressed.”
“I’m late,” I say.
“For?”
“You.” I crane my neck to see around the line of cars waiting to exit toward the pickup area. “I should have just stayed at the airport.”
“Joni, it’s good,” Ren says. “I’m barely off the plane. I’ll hang out. Don’t worry.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard his voice. Between our busy schedules, now we mostly just text, usually mundane things.Grocery store officially has peaches. Faucet is dripping but only in the middle of the night? Neighbor got a cat and it takes naps on the front porch now.All these tiny details shared to prove we’re still intertwined.
