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“No,” I grabbed the wine and poured myself a huge glass. “Let’s leave them alone. They’ll come out when they’re ready. You can help me get the food.”
“Sure.” Marianne sounded distracted. “I’d love to help.”
We stood up, and I deliberately turned the stereo up a bit louder, then yelled over to Rob, “We’re going to get dinner on the table.”
He raised his eyebrows at me and nodded, as shell-shocked as the rest of us. Kudos to us. We had now thrown the most awkward gathering of the holidays. We were used to the heightened emotions of my family. Crying wasn’t unheard of even when everyone was happy. But you were supposed to be able to get drunk and happy with your friends out of relief that they werenothinglike your family.
As I put on the oven mitts to take the food out, Marianne exclaimed, “Holy shit! What is that on your finger?”
“Rob and I got engaged,” I answered as casually as I could. “It’s his grandmother’s ring. Pretty, isn’t it?”
She grabbed my hand and pulled the ring off my finger—it happened so quickly that I barely registered it wasn’t on my hand anymore. “Oh my god, it’s gorgeous!” She held it up to the light. “What perfect cut and clarity!” She shouted, “Cash, this is anengagementparty! We should have brought champagne too.” She turned back to me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not a big deal. We’ve been living together forever.”
The warmth from the oven exploded onto my face, and I wondered if I’d be more comfortable at the top of a volcano than having this conversation with Marianne.
“I thought you hated marriage. Aren’t you and Beth always going head-to-head about it? The pair of you are always blabbing on about how you couldn’t possibly handle the pressure of something so ‘totally serious.’”
“Beth got engaged, too, last week, and I’m coming around to the idea,” I said. “But I need the ring back.”
“Oh, right, sorry, here you go.” Marianne handed it to me as Garrett and Jen came out of our room and rejoined the party. Marianne rushed from behind the island and gathered Jen up like she was a bunch of fresh-cut flowers—gently and tenderly—and whisper-yelled, “He’ll come around,” with Garrett standingright therehearing everything.
“Let’s eat!” Cash said. “That smells so delicious, Kelly. I don’t know how you could possibly manage to cook Indian food from scratch with everything else going on during the holidays. When I’m attempting a curry, I always give myself a good two days to get it right.”
Rob laughed. “We didn’t make any of this food. We ordered from down the street. Awesome takeout. Here, let me help you, Kelly.”
We got the food on the table, poured some more wine, and everyone sat down. Our table was big enough for all six of us to comfortably sit around it, surrounded by serving dishes filled to the brim with aloo gobi and dal, spice-dusted cauliflower, and delicious-smelling buttery naan. Conversation during the start of the meal was mainly Marianne oversharing about her intense family, who had moved to Banff to live as close to the mountains as possible, give up all their worldly possessions, and “tent it,” as she called it, for the first two years there—winters included. “I’ve got cold bones!” She laughed at her own jokes and generally sucked all of the air out of the room.
I drank. And drank some more. Watched Rob from the other side of the table as he and Garrett went deep diving into the differences between the films and books. Garrett was in his element defending how much richer the worlds were on celluloid. And Rob backing up the predictable “the book is always better” line about Tolkien. Deep down, I should be happy they were getting along. Deep down, I shouldn’t think about throwing away the hope of a life with Garrett because we wanted the same things. Deep down, I shouldn’t want the people I love to hurt in any way.
And then I settled into a melancholy that rested on the fact that I had to get the fantasies about me and Garrett out of my head, forever. There was to be no realization that we should run off together and start again in New York or somewhere equally exotic. Deep into a bottle of wine and even deeper in my own bitterness, I couldn’t see my selfishness. If he and Jen moved back west, that would take Garrett even farther away from me and pull him into proper adulthood. Not the playing at adults we did every day at work, but late nights, responsibility, and eventually supporting a family. I was being ridiculous. I had a gorgeous engagement ring and an equally gorgeous man, and I, too, was about to cross a bridge that would collapse as soon as I landed on the other side. If I was in it with Rob, I was in it for the long haul.
“Kelly,” Rob said from across the table, “you’ve barely touched your food. You’d better get in there before I start in on seconds.” He turned back to Jen and politely asked about her job, whether she enjoyed it or not, how she had come to work for the nonprofit industry.
“I hate it,” she answered. “I’m doing cold calls, always asking people for money. It’s a good cause, but it’s not like I’m dying to go back after the Christmas holidays. I was an outdoor rafting guide back home on the Kicking Horse.”
The tension fell again. But Marianne lightened the mood. “That’s not a safe career, Jen.”
“I love being outside. I miss the mountains.”
“I know,” Garrett said, a bit sharply. “But the industry is better for me here.”
Marianne piped up. “Cash worked for a rafting company for a while, too, didn’t you babe?”
Babe.
Cash cut the tension by telling some stories about the kind of tourist who would come to the river completely unprepared for the adventure. How they lost themselves, and were shocked when the boat would bounce them into the river. He told us one completely sobering story about how they almost lost someone who got stuckunderthe boat. Then Garrett piped up about a documentary he was working on, his first acquisition, about the history of mountaineering on Everest. “They’ve even got Peter Hillary and Jon Krakauer as talking heads. Do you know how much garbage is on the mountain? They’ve got expeditions to clean it up. The world’s most dangerous garbage collection.”
“We were going to go to base camp,” Jen said. “Now you’re making videos instead of doing the thing. You know what, Kelly? Pass me the white.”
I could read the look on Garrett’s face. One part anger, the other embarrassment. I passed the bottle down the table. Jen was on Rob’s right, Garrett on his left. He looked down the table at me with an expression I could easily read aswhat the absolute fuck is going onandwho are these people?
“You were,” Marianne interjected, “going to go to base camp after university, I remember that now.”
Marianne was the least socially cognizant person I think I’ve ever known. She was sitting to my right, Cash on my left. He was on his third plate of food and was surprisingly fun to talk to; my go-to party question of apocalypse survival was enthusiastically received. Turns out he had a whole escape plan mapped out, which even rivaled mine and Meghan’s.
“Okay, so fight or flee? What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?”
