“The same,” I repeat. “It looks the same.”
It hadn’t been Ralph at the front desk, a jarring start to this week here that had me worrying it was some kind of sign until Everett had reached over on our drive down to the house, settling a warm hand on my knee.
“It’s going to be a good week,” he’d said, and he was right. There was no reason it wouldn’t be. But it felt big, somehow, all of us gathering like this again. We’d tried and failed to make the trip work for as many summers as we’d missed it before, and while I knew things were different, while I knew that this place or this trip, even, weren’t what we were made of, it was still significant. It felt like returning to some time in our lives none of us had seen in a while.
A blur of gauzy white comes barreling out the front door, Laurel’s tanned arms pumping as she hurries across the driveway toward us.
“Where is she?” she asks as Everett and I climb out of thefront seats, completely ignoring us in favor of yanking the back door open and leaning in over the car seat there. “My baby June!” she exclaims as she lifts the wriggling body out, settling June onto her hip. “She’s grown so much.”
“You saw her last week,” I say, laughing as June snuggles her head into Laurel’s neck, one of her favorite places in the world.
“I know, but they grow so fast when they’re this age,” Laurel, who is already planning June’s second birthday, still three months off, says.
“It’s true,” Everett says from behind me, settling his hands onto my shoulders. I lean back against him, watching as Laurel walks over to the house, pointing out the flowers in the pots out front to June as she goes.
“I’ve got it!” she calls over her shoulder before they disappear inside. “You two can go now!”
Laurel took to being June’s aunt like she’s taken to most things in her life: quickly and with a zeal that shouldn’t have, but did, surprise us. It started even before she was born, when she’d come over to the house I’d moved into with Everett two years prior every day after we shared the news, bringing baby books and supplements she’d read about, special tea once we were close enough to June’s due date.
We haul our things inside, Gabe and Mia arriving shortly after us, their now three kids spilling into the house behind them.
“How was the drive?” I ask as I hug Gabe hello.
“It was good,” he says, bending to pick up their youngest, who is stretching his arms up toward him.
“It waslong,” Mia adds from behind him. “We’re glad that we’re here.”
“When is Davi arriving?” Gabe asks.
“Don’t you mean Davi and—” Laurel starts from whereshe’s bouncing a laughing June on her lap, and we all whirl on her at the same time.
“Don’t be weird!” we say in unison, the mantra Davi has burned into our brains since he announced a month ago that he’d be bringing his girlfriend of a year on this trip.
After he didn’t get the promotion he was up for at his firm in New York, Davi started looking for other jobs, burned-out on how relentless the pace of his work had been. After a year of hunting, he found one in Seattle, which put four of us in the same time zone again, and all of us a three-hour flight away from each other. The biggest surprise, maybe more to him than anyone else, was meeting Sydney, who changed his tune about relationships almost overnight. He was happier when we talked, lighter, in a way I hadn’t really noticed he wasn’t until he suddenly was.
“I’m not beingweird,” Laurel says. “It’s just that the man swore he’d never settle down and now here he is,bringingsomeone on this, our sacred trip?”
“I think it’s already a pretty different kind of trip this year,” Everett says as Gabe and Mia’s twins go hurtling by him, already deep into some game.
It takes longer to get settled than usual: There are naps and getting more people unpacked and different dinnertimes and very muchnot being weirdwhen Davi and Sydney do show up. It’s not until after ten, when all the kids are finally asleep, that we emerge onto the back deck, one by one, like something called us there.
Everett and I are the first outside, and I curl up against him on one of the wicker couches, rest my head against his shoulder. “What are you thinking about?” he asks, lips against my hair.
I glance out at the ocean, where the dark of the water and the starry sky meet at the horizon. I’d thought there werecountless nights in my life when I’d looked out at this view, but in reality, there are only a handful. Flashes of perfect summers I thought needed to be flawlessly re-created for them to mean something. But what’s happened in the five years since we were last here is better, marked by moments that feel as important as this one.
“Just this life of ours,” I say, tilting my head back to look up at him. Everett smiles, and it’s as good as it was the first time I saw it, lighting me up from the inside.
At first, because of the structure of our jobs, we were able to work from our respective cities a lot of the time, and so we set up camp in my apartment and in his house in LA. What used to be two days was now two people, two cities, two homes that we traveled between.
Two homes, but really only one: each other. We talked about our future and what it would look like, jobs and homes and kids and places we wanted to visit and things we wanted to do. When I asked Everett where he wanted to be at seventy, his answer was always the same:With you. It was my answer too, and we asked each other all the time, more often than we should, because I think we both liked hearing it. A refrain of the promise we made to each other. That we would want this. That we would love each other for as long as we’ve got. That there was no controlling today or tomorrow or next week, but there was always this—Everett’s hand to hold, his shoulder to rest my face on in the mornings, conversations in the middle of the night. Us. Not the us I started out with, but the one I needed.
It still doesn’t mean that everything is wonderful every day. After all, there is the bad. A few weeks into things, Everett finally called his father, talked to him about the movie, had the hard conversation, and the studio cast him anyway. His fatherdidn’t turn them down. Hank started to talk about retirement and I had to face the fact that the restaurant would go to someone else, if it stayed a restaurant at all.
But with all of that, there came so much good.
In having to see his father every day, Everett carved out a place for him in his life—small, but there, something healing in it. My own parents remained the same: hard to connect with, distant, but our door stayed open to them, phone calls scheduled more regularly especially once June was born.
Because he started to have a little more free time, Hank met Rebecca, an artist who had a place in a small coastal Oregon town where they started spending more and more of their time.
