Page 24 of The Snuggle Is Real

I can hear her side of it while I pretend to watch a toddler try to throw a beanbag. The florist for a wedding in Franklin next Saturday has apparently double-booked. The bride is crying. The bride's mother is threatening to sue. Emily is saying things like, "No, I understand," and, "Here's what's going to happen.” Along with a reassuring, "I'll have a replacement confirmed by six p.m. tonight, and she'll never know the difference."

She ends the call, then sends multiple text messages in rapid succession, tapping furiously. Then she sits down on a straw bale at the edge of the cornhole court, puts Spice the stuffed pumpkin in her lap, and stares at nothing.

I sit down next to her. The straw pokes through my jeans. "Everything okay?"

"Fixed," she says. "It's fixed. It's always fixed. That's the job."

"You're very good at it."

"I know." She says it flatly, not because she’s bragging, but because it’s just a fact. "I'm incredible at it. I'm the best in Nashville. Brides fly in from Atlanta and Charlotte for me."

"But?"

She's quiet for a moment. A leaf lands on her knee and she brushes it off.

"This is my first weekend off since March," she says. "As you know. Not March of this year. I actually don't remember the last time I took a weekend off. I did the math last night while you were snoring⁠—"

"I don't snore." And she fell asleep before me, so that’s just bullshit.

"You wheeze delicately. I did the math. I've planned three hundred and twelve weddings, Malcolm. I have stood in the back of three hundred and twelve receptions and watched people have the best night of their lives, and I've been holding a clipboard and an emergency sewing kit every single time." She turns the pumpkin over in her hands and gives it a vicious squeeze like it’s a stress ball. "I used to cry at the vows. Every wedding. Now I'm checking the time to make sure the officiant doesn't run long because the caterer needs the salad plates out by seven-fifteen."

I don't say anything. I've learned, over fifteen years, that Emily talks her way to the truth if you leave her enough room.

"I spend my whole life making sure everyone else gets their perfect day," she says. "And I go home to an apartment where the most meaningful relationship I have is with my Doordash driver, Bill. He’s seventy-five and he’s great, but what the hell, Malcolm? I'm so tired. I'm tired in my bones. And I don't know how to stop, because if I stop, then what am I? What was it all for?"

Her voice cracks on the last word. Just barely. Emily would never allow a full crack.

I want to fix it. Every instinct I have is telling me to fix it—build a plan, a timeline, a five-year exit strategy with contingencies. That's what I do.

But she doesn't need a plan. She has a thousand plans.

"I know," I say instead.

She looks at me sideways. "You know?"

She sounds like she wants me to expand on that. Cough up a major amount of sympathy, instead of a minor amount.

I rub the back of my neck. Across the square, MacKay is carrying Faith piggyback toward the corn maze while she shrieks with laughter. Ian and Winnie are sharing a funnel cake and fighting over the last corner. Dylan has Lauren pulled up against his side at the cider stand, and she's laughing at something he said like he's the funniest man alive, which he is not.

"I know, because I get it,” I tell her, putting my hand on her knee. “The distillery turned a real profit this year," I tell her. "Not a projected profit. Not a someday profit. Real, sustainable numbers. We're in eleven states. We're about to be in fourteen. Everything I've been working toward since I was twenty-six, it's done. It works."

"Malcolm, that's amazing."

"It is." I nod. "And I got the final quarterly report, and I read it at my desk at nine o'clock at night, and there was nobody to tell. So I closed the file and I opened next year's budget."

Emily is very still.

"You know the house I bought in Nashville?" I continue. "I bought it for an investment. Remember I talked about having a housewarming party? You know I never had it. There’s that porch swing that came with the house…I've never sat on it. Not once. I walk past it every morning and every night, and I think, that's for later. And lately I keep wondering when later is. Because my brothers figured it out. Look at them." I nod toward the square. "They work just as hard as I do. And they still found time to…"

I don't finish. I don't have to.

"To have a life," Emily says softly.

To fall in love.

"I hear what you’re saying because I want to slow down too," I say, and it's the first time I've said it out loud, and it feels like setting down something heavy I didn't realize I was carrying. "I want to sit on the damn porch swing. I just don't know how to do it without feeling like I'm failing at something."

Emily laughs, but it's watery. "Look at us. Two workaholics at a fall festival, having an existential crisis on a hay bale."