“Sure,” he said, sitting down beside her.
“Someone rang the doorbell today. I wasn’t going to answer it, but I was up and on my way to the bathroom and I just … I don’t know. I felt like answering it. It was a woman and she wanted to talk to me about the election.” Kimmy looked down at her lap and then back up at Josh. “I didn’t know what she was talking about.”
It was 2004 and John Kerry was up against George Bush and gunning for the presidency. Josh wasn’t the most political guy, but he did know that. The number of calls they received and the messages on their answering machine made it hard to ignore. At the time, politics were far from his mind. He had a job and a wife who seemed to be fading right in front of him and his plate was too full for much more.
“What did she want?” Josh asked.
“She wanted to know if I was registered to vote. I said no. She wanted to know if she could help me with that. And you, too. I said yes because it seemed like the right thing to say. We’re old enough. We should vote,” she said.
“Yes, absolutely.” His parents had always voted, and he remembered them casting their ballots in 2000. Registering to vote would feel so grown-up and different from anything they had done together at that point in their lives. Each step forward erased one of the missteps they’d had, and Josh was fully on board. He would have been on board with anything that got his wife out of bed.
“She asked if maybe I’d want to volunteer for the Kerry campaign.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said I wasn’t working and that I thought maybe that was something I could do. I know I need to get another job, but maybe I could find something part-time until I felt a little better. And I’d like to volunteer. I need to be a part of something.”
“I get it, Kimmy. I do. And I think you should do it.”
So, she did, and he noticed a change in her immediately. Gone were the days of lying in bed all day; Kimmy was up early, and she smiled more often, and Josh took pride in the fact that they were finally nailing this thing called life.
They couldn’t afford cable back then, but they started watching the TV show Lost, and settling in on the couch together every Wednesday night with a bowl of popcorn at the end of a long workday felt good and right and grown-up. In time, the feeling of being disconnected from Kimmy started to lift and he was glad he’d never confided in anyone just how hopeless he’d felt and how frustrated he’d been. How utterly terrified that he might lose her. He almost felt ashamed when he thought about it. This was marriage. This was honoring your commitments and getting through the rough patches.
Kimmy did find a part-time job at the mall, this time at a Pottery Barn. Slowly, she brought home things she’d purchased with her employee discount and their place started looking less like a frat house and more like an actual home. She had immersed herself in the campaign, and though Kerry didn’t win, she spent hours learning everything she could about how the government worked. They were twenty-three by then, and when she asked Josh what he thought about her enrolling in college, he was all for it, although it would strain the finances he’d worked so hard to improve. He was starting to get a taste of what his income would be like in a few years, but he wasn’t quite there yet. But they could swing it and it was a good investment in their future, and this was so much better than the dark days when she could hardly get out of bed.
Kimmy kept her Pottery Barn job and went to school at night. When she was at work, Josh took on extra jobs because there was no reason for him to sit home alone in an empty house. They bought their first home and moved out of the crappy rental, and late at night, even though they were both exhausted, they were never too tired to reach for each other in bed. And afterward they would lie in each other’s arms, and one night, as the sweat cooled their naked skin, Kimmy said, “It’s just like that song, Josh. Our future is so bright we should be wearing shades.”
He’d laughed and he’d kissed her, and he’d agreed.
His single coworkers headed out to the bars three to four nights a week. And when they weren’t at the bars, they were at the college football game or a concert or flying off to Vegas for the weekend. The few times he did go out with his coworkers for a drink, businessmen in suits threw mild looks of disdain their way, which made Josh laugh to himself. He and the other electricians might have been wearing uniforms with their names stitched on the front, but their wallets were bulging and none of them had had to pay six figures for their education.
More importantly, he was happier with his career choice than he’d ever dreamed he could be.
Kimmy was halfway through her junior year of college by then and she’d started coming into her own. His memories of her dark days and the lean times had faded and left him with the kind of longing he didn’t understand. He didn’t really want to go to the bars or the football games or Vegas. But what he sometimes wanted was the option to do those things without having to consider another person. He began to idealize the freedom that his single coworkers had when it came to making decisions, even if he didn’t really mind that he and Kimmy made their decisions together. The juxtaposition confused him. Josh seemed happy on the outside, but every now and then he’d think about the seeds he hadn’t sown. The itch he’d never scratched. He’d begun to feel something when he thought of his relationship with Kimmy, and the word that kept popping into his head was “trapped.” But that wasn’t fair, because no one had trapped Josh into getting married. He’d done that all on his own, and he loved his wife. Maybe this was just another one of those rough patches and in time whatever he was feeling would go away.
It hadn’t gone away, not completely, but Josh beamed with pride when Kimmy walked across the stage and accepted her diploma for the political science degree she earned a month shy of her twenty-ninth birthday. Two years after that, he came home from work one night and Kimmy laid a positive pregnancy test in his palm. A child was something they both wanted very much, so he put the thoughts he’d had out of his head for good and he never looked back.
* * *
“Josh,” Layla said.
“What? Sorry. Did you say something?”
“I asked if you could add the onions you just chopped.”
“Did you know these are called scallions?” he asked as he scraped them off the cutting board and into the pan.
“Yes.” She tried to hide her smile. “I did know that.”
“Of course you did.” He poked her in the ribs, teasing and tickling her and making her squeal. “You’ve probably never had to ask random strangers for help in the grocery store,” he said.