I think back to last Christmas, when I’d found so much joy from adopting a family in need, spending hours carefully choosing their gifts and wrapping them beautifully with the biggest bows I could find. Or when I’d given up a chance to attend the live Survivor finale to stay home and care for Max when he threw his back out playing flag football. Sure, I’d been known to forget to replace the toilet paper roll on more than one occasion, but I was definitely someone who always wanted to do right by other people.
Like right now. Excitedly I type, I can’t believe they’ve found a cure for cancer, and hit post. I click over to CNN.com, expecting the website to be flooded with the news. Nothing. So I try again. This time I ask to end hunger in the world. But still, nothing. I quickly delete them both off my page before anyone can start peppering me with questions about why I’d write such a thing. It didn’t make any sense. I could give Jules a flatter stomach and eff with Courtney’s hair, but I couldn’t help starving children in Africa? Why do certain wishes come true and not others?
The sound of the front door opening startles me. I hear Max walk in and quickly slip the dry cleaning into the front closet, not prepared to lie about how it had ended up in our house. It was the same reason I wasn’t wishing to win the lottery or for a new car. After Max questioned me about my instantaneous blowout, I realized how hard it would be to explain even the smallest of things, especially when I had always been a terrible liar.
“How you doing?” Max says, kissing my cheek and grabbing a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator. He pours himself a glass, then leans back to drink it, his quads showing the results of running over ten marathons. It was Max who’d introduced me to running, although I’d never felt as passionate about it as he did, only running occasionally, barely completing one 5K last year. Maybe I should start being more consistent? See if he wants to help me train?
“I’m okay, how are you? How was your run?”
“Really good,” he says, rinsing his glass out in the sink and putting it directly into the dishwasher.
As I watch Max put detergent in the tray and push start on the machine, Courtney’s text to him crosses my mind for the thousandth time.
I hope she appreciates you.
I need to show him that I do. I need to prove that I value his opinion and care about the things that matter to him. Maybe that’s what’s making him feel connected to Courtney. I think back to the analytical questions she’d asked Max when he was talking about his job—the thoughtful follow-up questions that would never have crossed my mind. Magda has always said Courtney and I worked well as a team because Courtney was OCD and I was ADD. And interestingly, I have always had a similar dynamic with Max—our differences seemed to smooth out each other’s edges. But now I wonder if he has been craving someone more like-minded.
“Hey, so I was thinking about the wedding—”
“Oh?” Max smirks. “I know that look,” he says, stepping closer to me. “What is it? You want to switch out the color of the flowers again?”
“No! God, you make me sound so frivolous,” I say, hoping he’ll correct me. But instead he pulls a container of cottage cheese out of the refrigerator and starts to spoon it into a bowl.
I shake off his silent agreement and continue. “Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the gerbera daisies, silly. I was thinking about you. I feel like I’ve been planning this without you and it’s something we should be doing together. I want it to feel like our day, not just mine.”
Max offers me a small smile. “It is our day. And it’s fine that you’ve taken the reins. You know what you want and I want you to have that—I want you to be happy.”
“Great. Then you want to know what will make me happy?” I press on before he answers. “Let’s call Stella and toss out everything and start over. Let’s plan this party together.”
“You feeling okay? First you had that crazy dream and now you want to scrap the ideas you’ve been planning for a year and start over? With only”—Max looks at his phone—“twenty-seven days to go? Is that even possible?”
Yes, anything’s possible when the rest of your life depends on it.
“Don’t worry about that. Just tell me, what would you do if it were up to you?” I walk over and kiss his neck. “Because your wish is my command,” I say with a smile, Max having no idea how true that statement really is.
“You really want to know?” he says, frowning slightly and studying my face.
“Yes,” I say, excitement brewing inside of me as I watch his eyes start to animate.
“Okay. Here it is. I don’t want to wear a suit. And I don’t want the groomsmen to either. It’s too stiff for Maui. Let’s be casual. Maybe even wear flip-flops.”
Oh, gawd.
“Okay,” I say, forcing my head to bob up and down.
“And forget the hoity-toity rehearsal dinner on the roof—let’s have a pig roast with a couple of guys juggling torches. That will be much better on my parents’ budget too.”
I’m beginning to remember why I didn’t push him to be involved.
“Great.” I smile.
“Really?” He squints at me.
“Really,” I say firmly. If buying some linen pants and burying a pig in the ground is going to get my man back, then so be it.