IT WAS MY THIRTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, and I had just been told that I was as fertile as someone approaching menopause. I tried to remember how to pretend that I wasn’t dying inside, which was hard for the woman who wore her heart on her sleeve.
I couldn’t escape the incoming demise of my unrealized dreams, but I could get drunk and high. I was crushing both of those things, swaying against the summer heat on the Great Lawn in Central Park, surrounded by fifty-five thousand strangers as the Dave Matthews Band jammed onstage. Concerts in the Park had been my favorite thing. They were free, they made the park come to life with a melody, and they were absent of New Yorkers who were too good for summers in the city. The loyal lot of us got to party inside my favorite park in the world, while lamenting about how we almost suffocated underground waiting for the C train. Beginning Memorial Day weekend, affluent New Yorkers fled the city’s humidity, camping out in the Hamptons for the summer like absolute assholes. I wanted very much to be an asshole. It was hashtag goals. Summer was a rich asshole who owned a home in East Hampton, but she had stayed behind to embrace the heat and celebrate me amid a sea of Dave Matthews Band bros, like a true best friend and masochist.
I stood on an oversized towel, swaying drunkenly with a charcuterie board, Summer and Valeria below me. Summer’s eyes were the size of saucers as she scanned the crowd, experiencing a specific kind of culture shock: her first Dave Matthews Band concert.
“I’ve never been more of a lesbian than I am right now,” Summer announced to Valeria. Valeria held her tighter, as if physically shielding her lover from a sea of straight white men in cargo shorts.
“Let’s donate to feminist causes when we get home,” Valeria said.
I smirked at the grown men in the crowd. Dave had reduced them to mere teenagers: dudes fumbling over lyrics that housed the emotions of their easy-breezy nineties childhoods. They were booze-soaked and high, clutching their koozies, reliving the memories of their first few Dave concerts. None of these guys had attended just one DMB concert. Seven, minimum. This Dave Matthews concert was an attempt for forty-year-old men to recapture the magic of their long-lost youth.
I let my cheeks find the violet sky, and I closed my eyes, promising the music gods that I would go home and cry to some Phoebe Bridgers to offset my secret bro-ey heart. I couldn’t fake it, or fight it: I was a product of nineties music.
I looked down, seeing Summer’s body wrapped around Valeria’s. No one had held me like that in public since I was seventeen. Men had held me, with passion and lust on their fingertips, but not in a way where I could exhale into their chests—not in a way that felt permanent. The lawn was lit up by the neon spotlights on the band stage, and the glow of the city’s skyline surrounded the stretch of freshly cut grass as the bass and saxophone plucked through the air. The dusty purple clouds gave way to the dark night as I swayed to my favorite Dave song. I’d had a lot of sex to this song. A lot of sex with my first boyfriend, Asher Reyes, to this entire album, which is why I defended Before These Crowded Streets with an ache. It was like I was defending my fragile teenage heart. Young love had a qualifier for a reason: it was made to get smaller in the rearview. But our love felt too big to fade—and the strange ache inside me was a reminder that it had done just that. I breathed in the epic yearning inside the lyrics.
“God, I want you so badly.”
I was right there with Dave—I wanted It All, so badly: the American dream, the road less traveled, the blue skies, the fireworks. Summer was not swayed, as evidenced by her pursed red lips.
“C’mon, you can’t not like this song.”
“Stop trying to make me fall in love with Dave Matthews!” she yelled, rather viciously.
I raised my hands to the sky, backing off. Suddenly, I tilted my head, seeing Valeria own an expression I had never seen from her: a wistful smile. I followed her eyes across the lawn, toward a woman swaying with a BabyBj?rn strapped to her body—her infant asleep against her chest. Valeria smiled at Summer, nodding to the infant. Summer smiled back, but as Valeria brought her focus back to the child, Summer swallowed hard, the smile fading into a straight line.
My eyes widened in alarm, just as Summer looked my way. I had caught a glimpse of something I wasn’t supposed to see, as evidenced by how quickly Summer stitched on a pointed grin. She grabbed her phone, using the screen as an emotional shield to hide behind.
I turned away to study the crowd, and my body froze.
There he was. Standing on the other side of the fence, curiously, his eyes were dead set on mine. My expression brightened, as I realized Garrett looked like a version of his old after-hours self. Tight white V-neck that his biceps wore too well. Thick, untamed blond hair. Garrett hadn’t looked this ways in years. Usually, he was loosening the tie strangling his neck, with his hair combed neatly out of his eyes. He’d stepped down as lead singer of the band a handful of years ago and traded in his sweaty rock and roll nights for midnight finance deals and IPOs. But here he was, looking ready to grip a mic and unleash his soul onstage. His eyes were drawing me in, but with a hardness that I did not recognize.
Below our chins, there were groups of people drinking out of red plastic cups, cackling, chatting, singing off-key. We stared at each other like two empty bookends standing above the crowd—no one and nothing else needed to exist between our bodies.
The chords of “Crash Into Me” plucked though the air as tall bodies filled in the gap between Garrett and me. The park was thick with nostalgic romance. Maybe that’s what pulled my bare shoulders through the crowd and outside the lawn’s fence so effortlessly. Maybe that’s what landed me right in front of his strong body.
We stood inches from each other. We’d been here a couple times before. And this time didn’t feel any different—like if our lips didn’t touch, the world might end.
My chest pounded as the verse moved into the chorus. “I’m bare-boned and crazy for you.” Garrett’s eyes searched around my face, and I waited for his usual grin to cut through my intensity. My heart beat faster with the realization that there wasn’t a joke in sight.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
Garrett managed a quick smile, but his expression hardened into something else. His eyes washed over me like a tidal wave engulfing the shore, rendering me powerless. But I wasn’t. I was a grown woman. Suddenly, I felt my age: all of thirty-five. I felt every painful moment under my skin: from my dream getting callously torn from me, to time refusing to be on my side, to watching the men I love slip away. I felt what it was like to come so close, and I didn’t want to feel it anymore.
Happy birthday felt like a dare.
A yellow spotlight warmed the entire park, and I took a step forward.
“Kiss me,” I said.
7
TWENTY-FOUR
I SAT ON THE TOILET seat in the dingy bathroom of Arlene’s Grocery as Summer applied bronzer to my pale cheek.
“So, I finally get to meet Grocery Garrett.”
“You were there when I met Garrett,” I reminded her, through my sucked-in cheeks.
“Doesn’t matter. He didn’t get to meet me.”
Summer was bitter. For a year, she’d listened to me wax poetic about a gorgeous guy who existed only on Mondays inside a Trader Joe’s. “If you don’t ask him to your birthday, I’m going to march to TJ’s and do it myself,” Summer had threatened two weeks prior. It was the nudge I needed to ask Garrett to see me outside of the frozen food aisle—to ask him to come to my birthday party at our original meeting place, Arlene’s Grocery. He said “I’ll be there” faster than I’d ever seen a word fly out of his mouth.