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Josh looked up at me. “What?”
“For some reason, when Meryl told me she ran into him, I assumed it was in the city.” I shrugged. “But it was here. She ran into him here. And, are you ready for this? He has a child. A thirteen-month-old son. Can you believe that? Matt is someone’s father.”
Josh didn’t say anything, but he looked down too quickly. He started focusing again on the candle. Balling up the hot wax.
“Josh, you didn’t know, did you?”
He looked back up at me, his eyes confirming his answer even before he confirmed it out loud. I felt my whole body drop, fall completely into itself. He had known that. He had known something so huge about Matt, and had not needed to tell me? I felt it all going—my ability to handle any of this.
“I heard something about it when I was in town a few months ago for Meryl’s and my engagement party. Someone had heard from someone who said they had heard from his mother. Or something like that. I don’t even know. But I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, and I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t want to upset you unless I confirmed it myself.”
“No, I can see how this is much better. I’m much happier that I found out this way. Really.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
But his words meant nothing to me—not after everything I had put myself through for him this weekend. I felt myself getting really angry. I didn’t know how to stop it. I didn’t know how to halt what was coming next.
I pulled the candle away from him. It was a silly thing to do, but it was all I had right then. So I took it, and put it down in front of me, daring him to take it back again.
He looked down at his empty hands, then looked over at me. “Emmy, I really can’t do this right now, okay? We can deal with it tomorrow if you want. For as long as you want. Or . . . I don’t know. I just can’t talk about it now.”
“Well, that’s the whole problem, Josh, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re totally unwilling to talk about anything. Because you think that once you say it out loud, it becomes a little too true.”
His look of irritated pity switched before my eyes to something closer to mine—something also displaying anger. “Why?” he said. “Because I didn’t tell you something about Matt the second I heard it? When I didn’t have confirmation that it was true? He’s not even in your life anymore.”
Not in my life anymore. The year Matt’s brother had turned three, we’d had a birthday dinner for him in the city: pizza and ice cream sundaes and bottomless cream sodas. We put up a Superman tent up in the living room and let him stay up as late as he wanted and watch all his favorite cartoons. When he finally fell asleep—Matt in a sleeping bag on one side of him, me on the other—Matt turned toward me and said, “Isn’t it amazing? You’ll have known him his entire life.” My entire life. Tonight he was offering it to me again.
I turned away from Josh now. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Really? I know how long it’s been already. I know you keep asking these fishermen women to tell you how to do it.”
“Tell me how to do what?”
“Wait long enough. For Matt to come back.”
He looked at me so intensely that it was all I could do to look back at him, to try to stand my ground. But my burning desire to tell him that Matt had, in a way, come back to me made me wonder if he did know. It made me wonder what I wasn’t seeing about my own life. What I really didn’t want to see, at all.
“You don’t even want to try to understand,” he said. “What I’m going through now.”
“Maybe that’s true,” I said.
And maybe I didn’t. I didn’t, for sure, want to get into what Berringer had said to me earlier about not supporting Josh, but as soon as Josh said I wasn’t trying to understand him, Berringer’s voice came ringing back in my ears. I didn’t want to talk about—let alone think about—how much Berringer’s opinion was affecting me. And I certainly didn’t want to think about how much I hadn’t liked seeing him with Celia. The other truth was that I felt done trying to understand what Josh was doing because he wasn’t doing anything. He was just going to keep worrying about all of this until the decision was made for him, until he walked down the aisle, and let someone else tell him how he was going to be spending his life. But, I saw now, even that wouldn’t be about making a choice. It would be about taking the path of least resistance, which was a totally different thing.
“You’re just so mad at me, Emmy,” Josh said, misunderstanding my look. “You won’t even see that I’m confused. I’m just confused about what the right thing to do is. Can’t you understand that at all?”
I shook my head. How could I tell him what I really thought? That, inside, he knew exactly how this was going to play out? He knew it exactly, but he just kept doing what he wanted to anyway, so he could keep everyone in, keep them hoping.
But he was going to marry Meryl. Or he would have done something else. He would have done something else a long time ago. It was the most unfair and wrong way to go about it that I could think of.
“The thing I don’t get, Josh,” I said, “is what’s so great about you? What’s so great about you that both these women should want to be with you regardless of
what you’ve done? What makes you so special?”
He leaned toward me, and, for a second, I really thought he was going to knock the candle off the table—my brother, who had never so much as jokingly slapped me growing up. But instead he just stayed leaning in, toward me.
“You want to know a secret? Nothing’s so special about me,” he said. “That’s what they’d both find out. They’re both better than me. I haven’t done anything yet to deserve either one of them.”
I leaned in too. “Then why don’t you do something now?”
