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He put his hands on her shoulders, the same way I had moments before, and leaned in to give her a kiss hello on the cheek. “You okay?” he asked.
She shrugged, giving off a little sigh. But then she turned and actually looked up at him, and a smile started growing on her face. He matched her smile—the same half-baked expression they each were prone to wearing—an undeniable reminder of how alike they looked: same baby nose, hazel eyes. Same skin. Watching them, from my side of the counter, I had the feeling I used to have when I was little—that she must love him more because he looked so much more like her than I did. Now, though, that feeling held relief in it instead of the opposite.
Berringer appeared in the kitchen doorway, his T-shirt wrinkled from his fake nap, his dolphin boxer shorts sneaking out from beneath the top of his jeans.
I wanted to reach out and touch them.
My mom looked over at him, wiping her hands on her robe. “Jaime here really saved the day with everything,” she said. “They probably would have slept in the RV if it weren’t for you.”
He smiled. “You just got to know how to talk to people,” he said.
“Is that what you’ve got to know?” I said, meeting his eyes. He looked back at me, but didn’t say anything.
Josh looked back and forth between us, and announced that it was probably time to go, unless someone thought he should go and say hello to his future in-laws in the basement.
“They’re probably sleeping now,” my mom said, shaking her head. Then she looked down at the platter of food, arranged decoratively in several half-moons.
Before anyone could comment, she said, “There’s a mini-fridge down there, remember?” No one said anything. “I can’t talk about it.”
Josh laughed, and then motioned toward me. “You ready to get out of here?” he asked.
For a second, I thought I’d misheard him. I was sure of it actually. “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not a bachelor.”
My mom pointed at me. “You’re not married either,” she said.
I turned back to Josh, confused. While I had helped with the b-party planning, I had never intended on actually attending. I intended on being in my childhood bedroom—sleeping—and getting a hung-over thank-you from Josh tomorrow morning for sending out a very nice e-mail invite.
“Look,” he said, “it’s not like there’s a team of strippers you’ll be interrupting. I want you there.”
When Josh was a teenager, he hadn’t wanted me anywhere for a long time, the entirety of our conversations from the time he turned fourteen until he left for college occurring from either side of his closed door. I was always standing there, longingly, hoping he’d decide that day to let me in. It still surprised me more often than not how much he seemed to want me around now.
Berringer said, “I’m driving.”
I started to follow them out of the kitchen, but before I could, Mom reached out to hold me back for a minute. Once their footsteps receded, she pulled me toward her and kissed my cheek.
“You are just the most beautiful in the world. You know that?” she said, stepping back and looking at me, smiling. Then she started pushing my hair back behind my ears, trying hard to flatten it down, make it stay.
“There,” she said. “Much better.”
That first summer after Matt and I were together, we planned a trip to Europe—a trip my mother pretended wasn’t happening until after we’d already gone. It had been my first time leaving the country, my first time ever stepping foot off the continent. Every summer before that, I’d taken these nonnegotiable “Everett family road trips” to a different locale somewhere in America—Philadelphia,
Virginia Beach, Wyoming. Always by car, always somewhere we could drive to, even if the drive took the better part of a week.
The one—and only—time my parents had let me decide on our family’s destination, I chose London. I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. But even when my father tried to show me on our map-of-the-world chessboard that Europe wasn’t drivable—wasn’t even in the United States—I wouldn’t pick somewhere else. I flat-out refused, and told him he should just let Josh pick instead. I told him I hated chess anyway.
Which meant that going to Europe, especially with Matt, meant a lot to me. I think my mom was comforted somewhat that during the France leg of the trip, I was going to be staying with Berringer—we were going to be staying with Berringer—who was living in Paris that year. He was taking some courses at the Culinary Institute, and apprenticing in a fancy hotel kitchen.
Only, when we arrived at his apartment, he wasn’t there. He’d left a note that he had to go with his girlfriend to see her parents in England, but make ourselves at home and help ourselves to whatever we needed and there was cereal in the cupboard.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the reason Berringer had gone with his girlfriend—Naomi, a British girl—to see her parents was that he’d asked her to marry him, and they’d gone together to tell them. Naomi was ten years older than Berringer and absolutely striking: long red hair, winter skin, thin fingers. She’d come into the fancy hotel restaurant for dinner—that was how they met—and, the way the story went, Berringer asked her to marry him that very first night, in the alley outside. This wasn’t confirmed for me until their actual wedding ceremony the next December—when it was confirmed, again and again, usually along with the expression: When you know, you just know.
The wedding took place in Katonah, a quiet town thirty miles north of Scarsdale, at an inn on a farm. It was a small wedding, but my whole family went. I hadn’t wanted to go because I was in the middle of finals. “Since when do you study?” my mom had asked. It wasn’t a bad point. Josh was the best man and had to read this long poem about roses. Beautiful Naomi wore no shoes.
Now I stared at Berringer’s reflection in the rearview mirror, his eyes hard on the road and both hands on the wheel, and I wondered, with Josh’s looming nuptials, if Berringer was thinking about Naomi, if he still often thought about Naomi. They’d moved to New York after that year in Paris when Berringer got an assistant chef position at a new restaurant on the Lower East Side. And it was three years later, closer to four actually, that Naomi asked him to quit and find a job in London instead because she was homesick. Because she wanted to go home again.
But less than a week after they arrived in London, she woke up next to him in their new apartment and said that it turned out she hadn’t been homesick after all—she just didn’t want to be married anymore.
That was the last I heard about Berringer for a long time. He disappeared into the recesses of northern California by way of Santa Fe, New Mexico, by way of Austin, Texas. Josh would give me updates occasionally, but I was too wrapped up in my own thing to pay good attention. That same summer, the one that Naomi asked Berringer to leave, was the one that Matt asked me to marry him. It was the day after my college graduation—a few days after Matt finished his first year of architecture school—and we were driving down south to spend a couple of days with my father’s family in Savannah. We spent the first night camping outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and, right before we fell asleep, we thought we heard a bear outside the tent, rummaging through the trash. It turned out be a raccoon that—through a mix of shadows and strange moonlight and too much dinner tequila—seemed bigger than he was. And when we figured out what was really going on and stopped laughing, Matt asked me. Right then. In the midst of the imaginary bear. He just pulled the ring out of his bag and said he didn’t want to wait for the special dinner he had planned for us in Savannah. That he didn’t want to wait. Did Berringer even know that? I doubted it.
