AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Bobby readjusted the lollipop bucket in his arms. “You know what, Manhattan? Forget it. Just get going already. Weddings wait for no man. Believe me.” He turned to head back out to the front.
The clock on the wall said 3:35 P.M. I was supposed to meet my brother at the Scarsdale Pool in exactly four hours and ten minutes to watch the fireworks. I had promised Josh, promised my whole family, that I’d be home in time for that. Considering the inevitable holiday weekend traffic I was about to face, if I didn’t leave right then my lateness would be the first thing I’d need to explain.
From the shop’s back exit to the driver’s side of my car takes forty-eight seconds. I knew this now because I counted as I went—nine fast paces across the parking lot, closing the car door behind me, adjusting the rearview mirror, buckling myself in. It stopped me from thinking for a minute. But then I saw all my bags in the backseat of my car, the greater half of everything I owned staring back at me, and I still couldn’t help but wonder if I’d forgotten something important. If I’d forgotten the one thing that would tell everyone I was okay. What was the one thing that I thought would convince them I was doing just fine, here, on my own? A short-sleeved purple sweater? That seemed doubtful.
I put my car in reverse, pulling out of the parking lot just as June Martin (aka June #2) was making a left into it, riding close to the wheel in her red Volvo station wagon. Her kids weren’t in the backseat, but all of their things were clogging up the back windows, the trunk windows even: car seats and balloons, candy-food wrappers, stuffed toys.
June had three girls: Dana, Carolyn, and Holly. Tomorrow was the youngest one’s birthday party. June brought an invitation to me at the shop last week. It was still in my glove compartment—all pink and shiny—like a leftover wish. When you were hoping to attend a kid’s birthday party, you knew you were in trouble.
“You going this way?” June mouthed, pointing in the direction of my house, moving her wagon forward so I could make the right that way.
But I pointed in the other direction, pointed—with something like reluctance or resolve—in the direction of the highway, and New York.
“This way,” I mouthed back, giving her a small smile, a wave good-bye. She waved back. Then I headed where I said I would.
I was going home.
Here’s the thing about going home again.
You don’t always know what you’ll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that—if you paid close enough attention—you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. There had been at least a dozen times over the course of my childhood that I had gone with my brother Josh to the Scarsdale Pool to watch the fireworks on July 4. If you wanted to watch Independence Day fireworks in my hometown, there weren’t a whole lot of other options. But tonight, from the moment we arrived, it felt different. We were sitting in our usual spot on the hillside—looking down over the main pool, a little outside of the main crowd—when everything started moving into this bizarrely sharp, almost etched focus. And suddenly I felt oddly aware of how clear the sky was, how blond and happy the family on the blanket next to us was, how everything was bright and fluid even while it was happening—already existing closer to memory than reality. It was like a warning shot that something intense was coming.
And even though I had agreed to go to the fireworks—had agreed to sit on that small hill and eat hot dogs and watch the bright colors in the sky—part of me wanted to suggest we leave right then, get out early and beat the crowds to the parking lot, head home. Because given the right set of circumstances, given an intense moment, those things can certainly mess with you— fireworks and clear air and happiness—can make you think the world is a way it isn’t, can make you say things that, on another night, you would never say.
That Josh would never say. Such as: “I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. You know, getting married this weekend.”
I turned and looked at him in disbelief. He was staring straight ahead, taking a bite of his hot dog. It was enough to make me think I’d imagined what I’d heard. That I’d made it up. I mean—who would eat a bite of hot dog right after saying something like that? A crazy person. My brother wasn’t crazy. At least I hadn’t thought so.
But then it happened again.
“Emmy,” he started—using my name this time, emphasizing the “m” sound the way he’d always do, turning my name into one small letter. “Are you going to just pretend you didn’t h
ear me?”
“You were chewing,” I said.
“Not until after. Don’t ignore me.”
One of the first things Josh ever taught me, maybe the very first, was that you absolutely had to ignore everything you weren’t ready to deal with. It was your only shot of keeping it at bay. Like the first day of school, for instance. This was his favorite example. If no one talked about the first day, he’d say—if no one planned it or agreed to it or worked toward it—it couldn’t happen. How could it happen? What a little genius he’d been! If everyone had just shut up about school starting, it could have stayed summer forever.
I put my hot dog down, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I’m not ignoring you, Josh,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Because there might be a problem here,” he said. “I love Meryl and everything, but there really might be a big problem.”
In demonstration, he made a “big” rectangle sign with his hands, his hot dog in one of them, a large Coke cup in the other. The little girl from the blond family was staring at him. I wondered what she thought she saw—this child-man in his dirty baseball cap, white button-down shirt, bare feet. My big brother. Best friend since birth. Childhood hero. Huge baby. He was going to be thirty-one next month. In less than seventy-two hours, he was supposed to be someone’s husband. Someone who, even if it wasn’t the point, I really loved.
“Does this problem have a name, Josh?” I asked.
He was quiet for a long minute in which I got to imagine that my instinct was wrong. Maybe this had nothing to do with another woman. It would be easier if it didn’t. I figured that he’d be more likely to get married this weekend if it didn’t have something to do with that.
“Elizabeth,” he said.
My heart dropped. I could actually feel it—the hollowing out of it—until it filled my whole stomach, like a drum. I couldn’t remember having heard about anyone named Elizabeth from him, not during the year he’d spent alone in Boston, not since I’d been living in Rhode Island. The fact that he’d kept her to himself made her seem bigger, somehow, more important.
“Elizabeth?” I said.
“Elizabeth, yes. Elizabeth.”
I couldn’t look at him, not when he wasn’t looking back at me. I stared at the main pool instead, blocked off with a fat orange rope so that nobody could fall in. Or jump. One of the first times Josh brought Meryl home with him, we swam in this pool—all three of us, together. She was wearing this backless green bathing suit that revealed a thin line of freckles right along her spine. I was only sixteen. I’d never seen anything like that.
