“I do not,” she replied immediately, clearly dismayed. “No, no. I say that certain aspects get on my nerves, and specific brides or circumstances. But the job itself? Never.”
I sat back, trying to process this. It did actually fit, now that I thought about it. “So what you’re saying is that all those times I wanted to go the beach, or the mountains, or the amusement park, we could have and you just didn’t want to?”
She bit her lip. “Well, maybe not every time.”
I shook my head. “Wow.”
“I’m sorry,” she told me. She squeezed my hand. “Look. There was a point in my life, when I was still married to your dad, when I was free to do whatever I wanted. I felt like I should have been so happy. And I wasn’t. Then everything fell apart, and I ended up at Linens, Etc. as a single parent, and didn’t expect to be happy ever again. But when I met William, and we started doing this business, it was like suddenly things just clicked for me. I’d found my thing, you know, my It. When you come to something like that late, you’re always afraid you’ll lose it again. It makes everything about it feel precious.”
“Mom, you were, like, twenty-two when you started this business,” I pointed out.
“Twenty-two, divorced from a trust-fund poet, and I’d spent the last few years raising chickens and making bracelets for a living.” She sighed. “Finding my calling felt like a blessing. And you don’t take blessings for granted.”
“You’re allowed a day off, though. Even God took one.”
“And like Him, I get my Sundays,” she said. “That’s enough.”
She got up then, crossing the kitchen to refill her coffee cup. On the TV, Dan Jersey, the news anchor, was somberly reporting on the stock market while a graphic of highs and lows hovered over one shoulder. I studied it, thinking about what she’d said. The calling part I couldn’t relate to, not yet anyway, and I loved vacations. But this idea of coming across something so right for you after feeling like you never would, and then being terrified of scaring it away—well, that wasn’t so hard to understand.
“We have four weddings left before Bee’s,” I said to her now, as she took her seat again, folding one leg up underneath her. “They won’t be affected by you relaxing a bit. I’ll make sure they’re waiting for you the minute you return. Promise.”
“Well, it looks like I don’t have a choice,” she said, sighing. “William already bought us matching hats and caftans. I’m going, like it or not.”
The way she said this, you still would have thought she was being packed off to work camp in Siberia. But you never know what you can do until you try, and if you’re lucky, what you love will always be waiting for you. That’s just how it is in most cases. Not all. But most.
“The thing is,” Julian said, leaning over the table, closer to me, “what most people don’t realize is that discounting alien life isn’t just foolish. It’s arrogant.”
I picked up my iced tea, taking a sip. In the first fifteen minutes at the Thai restaurant, we’d covered the basics—school, family, music—just like every other date I’d gone on so far. Then, suddenly, we were talking extraterrestrials. It hadn’t even been a natural segue, either. Julian, the nephew of one of the ladies who owned the stationery store beside our office, just plunged right in.
“I’m sorry?” I said, as our waitress paused by my elbow, refilling the tiny bit I’d already consumed.
“It takes a lot of balls to just assume you are the only form of life in the universe,” he explained, taking off his baseball cap and smoothing back the dreadlocks beneath it. “That’s what my talk is about this weekend. The full title is ‘The Hubris of Earthlings: How Narrow-Mindedness Endangers Our Understanding of the Universe.’”
His aunt, Florence, had mentioned he was in town for a conference at the U. That’s what I got for being so worried about the bet that I didn’t ask questions. When she said he was my age, a nice guy, and looking for someone to hang out with, I’d just jumped right in.
“So you’re, like, an expert,” I said now, as he checked his phone—prominently between us and lighting up with messages regularly—on the table. “You must be, if you’re speaking.”
“Well, anyone can give a talk if you sign up early enough,” he said, typing some response while not looking at me. “But, yes, I consider myself a scholar when it comes to outer galaxies. We should all be students of the greater world, though. It’s our duty. To do otherwise is, frankly . . .”
He looked down at his phone again as a new message came in.
“Arrogant,” I finished for him. He didn’t hear me.
After the entrees arrived, I excused myself to the restroom, where I took as long as possible washing my hands and reapplying lipstick. If I had to kiss a few frogs to find another prince, I was definitely working my way through the amphibian world. Why was it so hard to find someone I actually liked to talk to? Although really, at this point, I would have taken just some continuous eye contact. Or, well, attention.
Just as I thought this, my own phone beeped. When I pulled it out, I saw a text from Ambrose. CHECKING IN, he wrote. We’d agreed on this, for safety’s sake, as it was a date not at a party or with another couple. YOU GOOD?
HE LIKES ALIENS, I responded.
WHO DOESN’T?
I sighed, ignoring this, then put my phone in my pocket and headed back to the table. I knew the drill now. All I had to do was get through dinner, politely decline dessert, and then offer a firm handshake before heading home. I had to admit, though, that even week and three dates into the bet, I was already kind of over it. But I couldn’t quit, after all my big talk. Even if August seemed ages, even galaxies, away.
“How’d the airport go?” Ambrose asked.
I sank into one of the leather chaises of the office, letting out a big breath. “Excruciating. But they are on the plane. I went into the terminal and watched the screen until it said DEPARTED, just to be sure.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “When she unpacked her entire carry-on searching for her passport and it was in her hand, I thought for sure she was going to just bag the whole trip.”
“Oh, we had, like, two more incidents like that while en route,” I told him, rubbing my eyes. “I’m starting to think it’s a good thing she never goes away. I don’t think I could take it.”
“But she’s gone,” he said, wrapping a rubber band around the stack of place cards he’d been counting and dropping them into the bin at his feet. “And we have the weekend off. Just as soon as we finish all this.”