“Is something really weird going on?”
Georgie turned her head toward Heather and tipped it against the dryer. “Yeah . . .”
Heather mirrored her, laying her head against the washer. “I can’t even remember you without Neal,” she said.
Georgie nodded slowly, then took another, more careful, drink of soup. “You were in our wedding, you know. Do you remember?”
“I think so,” Heather said, “but I might just be remembering the photos.”
Heather was supposed to be the flower girl, but none of Georgie’s friends had been able to afford the trip to Nebraska, so Heather became her only bridesmaid—besides Seth, who just assumed he’d be standing up for Georgie.
Georgie wasn’t even sure she should invite Seth (because the wedding was in Omaha, and because Neal), but Seth started calling himself Georgie’s best man, and she wasn’t sure how to argue. . . .
He wore a brown three-piece suit and a pale green tie to the wedding. Heather wore lavender shantung and a green cardigan. Seth carried her down the aisle.
And he insisted that Heather come along for Georgie’s bachelorette party—a “bridal-party only” dinner at some thousand-year-old Italian restaurant near Neal’s house. They ate spaghetti with sugar-sweet tomato sauce, and Seth talked nonstop about the sitcom he was working on, the one he’d just convinced to hire Georgie. Georgie drank too much Paisano, and Heather fell asleep at the table. “Good thing I’m the designated driver,” Seth said.
There was a photo from the next day, at the ceremony, of Seth signing the marriage certificate as Georgie’s witness. Heather was standing on tiptoe to watch. Seth in his brown waistcoat. Georgie in her white dress. Neal beaming.
Georgie took another gulp of soup. “You were adorable,” she told Heather. “I think you thought it was your wedding—Neal danced with you, and you blushed the whole time.”
“I remember that,” Heather said. “I mean, I’ve seen the pictures. I looked just like Noomi.”
Georgie and Neal hadn’t had a traditional church wedding—or much of a reception. They got married in Neal’s backyard. The lilacs were in bloom, and Georgie carried a handful of branches that his mom had gathered into a bouquet.
Everything was on the cheap. She and Neal had both just graduated, and Georgie didn’t start on the sitcom until they got back from their honeymoon. (Five days in rural Nebraska, in a cabin somebody owned on a muddy river.) (The five best days.) They’d tried to pay for the whole wedding themselves; her mom and Kendrick were already digging deep to buy plane tickets, and Georgie didn’t want to ask Neal’s parents for help.
Georgie was the one who suggested they get married in Omaha. She knew Neal would like it. Their breakup, their almost breakup, was still fresh in her memory, and Georgie wanted Neal to look back on their wedding day and feel happy—about all of it. She wanted him to be happy that day, to be completely in his element.
Neal’s family ended up helping out anyway. His parents bought the cake, and his aunts made cream cheese mints and sandwiches. The pastor who’d baptized and confirmed Neal was there to marry them. And after the ceremony, Neal’s dad moved his stereo out onto the patio and played deejay.
The only song Georgie insisted on was “Leather and Lace.”
That had started out as a joke.
“Leather and Lace” was playing in a restaurant on one of their first dates, and Georgie cracked herself up telling Neal that it was “our song.” Then they both tried—and failed—to think of a more ridiculous “our song.” (Neal suggested “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”; Georgie pushed for the theme from Taxi.) After that, “Leather and Lace” kept coming on the radio at significant moments in their relationship. . . .
Once when Neal was kissing her in the car outside her mom’s house.
Once on a road trip to San Francisco.
Once when Georgie thought she was pregnant, and they were waiting in line at Walgreens to buy a Clearblue Easy. (Neal with his hand on her back. Georgie holding the pregnancy test like it was a pack of gum. Stevie Nicks crooning about having her own life and being stronger than you know. At some point, “Leather and Lace” just became their song. For real.
When it started to play on their wedding day, on Neal’s parents’ patio, Georgie got all choked up.
Was that the moment she realized she was actually getting married?
Or was it just the moment she realized she’d landed a guy who would dance with her, totally sincerely, forehead to forehead, to “Leather and Lace”? (“Stay with me, stay-ay.”) After “Leather and Lace,” Neal danced with his mom to “Moon River.” (The Andy Williams version.) Then Georgie danced with Seth, and Neal danced with Heather to “Both Sides Now.” (The Judy Collins version.) A few hours later, when everyone else had gone or gone inside—Seth left for the airport right after the cake—Neal and Georgie stayed out on the patio, slow-dancing to whatever came on the oldies station.
They’d never really danced together before that day. Or since. And, truthfully, they weren’t doing much dancing even then. . . . Neal held Georgie with one hand on the small of her back and one on the back of her neck, and Georgie leaned against him with both hands on his chest, and they swayed from side to side.
It wasn’t dancing. It was just a way to make the wedding last. A way to stay in the moment, rolling it over and over in their heads. We’re married now. We’re married.
You don’t know when you’re twenty-three.
You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten—in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.
She didn’t know at twenty-three.
That day, out on the patio, it just felt like the biggest day of her life so far, not the biggest day of her life from now on. Not the day that would change everything. That would change her, at a cellular level. Like a virus that rewrites your DNA.
That day, that evening, out on the patio . . .
Georgie pretended to dance. She clung to Neal’s shirt. They rubbed their noses together. “You’re my wife,” Neal said, and then he laughed, and she tried to catch his dimples with her teeth. (Like if she caught them, she might get to keep them.) “Yours,” she said.
Maybe Georgie had gotten a glimpse of it then, the way infinity unspooled from where they were swaying. The way everything she was ever going to be from then on was irrevocably tethered to that day, that decision.
Neal was wearing a navy blue suit, and he’d waited to get his hair cut until the day before the wedding, so it was a little too short.
“Yours,” she said.
Neal squeezed the back of her neck. “Mine.”
The dryer stopped.
“I’ve never been in love,” Heather said. “I don’t think I’m susceptible.”
Georgie set down her soup can and pushed her glasses up to rub her eyes. “How could you possibly know that?”
Heather shrugged. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, has it?”
“Maybe you haven’t ordered enough pizza.”
“I’m being serious, Georgie.”
“Okay—seriously, Heather, you’re only eighteen. You have plenty of time to fall in love.”
“Mom said she’d been in love three times by my age.”
“Well”—Georgie frowned—“she’s unusually susceptible. She’s got a compromised immune system when it comes to love.”
Heather played with the drawstring on her sweatshirt. “I haven’t even really dated anybody yet.”
“Have you tried?” Georgie asked.
Her sister wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to try.”
“It’ll happen in college.”
“You dated in high school,” Heather insisted. “Did you fall in love before Neal?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because I need to talk to somebody,” Heather said, “and Mom is aberrant.”
“Can’t you talk to your friends?”
“My friends are at least as clueless as I am. Did you fall in love before Neal?”
Georgie thought about it. There was a guy in the eleventh grade who’d been something more than just another moving target—for a few weeks, then it passed. And then there were the years she’d sat on the couch with Seth.
“Maybe,” Georgie said. “Maybe I came really close to falling in love, cumulatively, over two or three relationships.”
“But not like with Neal.”
“Not like with Neal.”
“How’d you know he was the one?”
“I didn’t know. I don’t think either of us knew.”
Heather rolled her eyes. “Neal knew—he proposed to you.”
“It’s not like that,” Georgie said. “You’ll see. It’s more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you hope that that person is the one—and then at some point, you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you’re right.”
“No one else describes love that way.” Heather frowned. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“Obviously I’m doing it wrong,” Georgie said. “But I still think love feels that way for most people.”
“So you think most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they’re feeling is real.”
“Real isn’t relevant,” Georgie said, turning completely to face Heather. “It’s like . . . you’re tossing a ball between you, and you’re just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn’t love each other, you wouldn’t be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other—and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.”
“What’s the ball a metaphor for?”
“I’m not sure,” Georgie said. “The relationship. Marriage.”
“You’re really depressing,” Heather said.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be talking about marriage to someone whose husband just left her.”
“He didn’t leave you,” Heather said. “He’s just visiting his mom.”
Georgie looked down at the empty soup can in her lap.
“I keep waiting for you to say that it’s all worth it . . . ,” Heather said.
Georgie swallowed. “That’s a meaningless thing to say.”
They sat quietly for a minute until one of the pugs—the bulging pregnant one—scuttled down the stairs into the laundry room. Watching a pug run down stairs is a lot like watching a pug fall down stairs. Georgie winced and looked away. It ran over to her and froze, barking aggressively.
“I don’t like you either,” she said, turning back to the dog.
“It’s the shirt,” Heather said. “She hates that shirt.”
Georgie looked down at the pug that was BeDazzled on her borrowed shirt.
“They’re very territorial,” Heather said. “Here, move—let her climb into the dryer.”
“I may not like her,” Georgie said, “but I don’t want to cook her.”
“She likes it,” Heather said, pushing Georgie over and opening the dryer door. “It’s warm.” She lifted the dog into the dryer, on top of the clothes.
“What if it’s too hot in there?”
“Then she’ll jump out.”
“This is so dangerous,” Georgie said. “What if you don’t know she’s in there, and you start the dryer?”
“We check first.”
“I wouldn’t have checked.”
“Well, now you will. Look—she likes it.”
Georgie watched the little dog settle down on a pile of darks, glad that her own clothes were still in the washer. She frowned at the dog, then at Heather. “Remind me never to ask you to babysit again.”