London Is the Best City in America (27 page)

Josh took out a pair of tweezers and some gauze, and started patting down the area. “In case you’re wondering,” he said, “I came back here because all I wanted in the world was to be somewhere very, very quiet.”

I pulled my foot back as soon as the metal touched. “Is that your way of telling me that I’m out of here after you do this?”

“That’s my way of saying no screaming.”

I gave him back my foot. The flashlight was shining off his face, making him look both younger and older than usual: a stern face staring back at me, trying hard to concentrate.

“So is it the most awful time to ask you what you’re planning to do now?” I said.

He stayed quiet for a while, staying focused on my foot, the tweezers before him.

“I know I’m a bad guy,” he said.

“You’re not a bad guy, Josh,” I said. “A bad guy would have gone through with it.”

“But a good one wouldn’t have let things get that far in the first place.” He shrugged, offering a half-smile. “I just keep thinking that I’m not the kind of guy you root for.”

“Not yet maybe,” I said, but I smiled back at him when I said it. Because he almost was. Or maybe because I believed that he could be. Inside, I was still really sure of that.

“It was weird earlier, you know? I always thought that when I actually got to the wedding day, I’d remember all the reasons I’d loved her, and that would be enough to carry me through.”

“That didn’t happen?”

“No, that was exactly what happened. But it was like the opposite effect. When I loved her the most, I realized it just wasn’t enough.”

I bent my knee, moving my foot closer to him, making it easier for him to get to the base of it. “I’m going to pull now,” he said. “It will feel like a tight pinch, but that’s it.”

This was of no comfort to me. Josh had told me a long time ago that “pinch” was the word he told his patients when he really meant pain. I was going to tell him so, but it was nice watching him focus. Even when the “pinching” started. It made me remember something else about him. Something beyond all this.

“When are you heading back to Rhode Island?” I said.

He hesitated for a minute, but I could see it in his face. He knew exactly. “Tomorrow morning.”

I nodded, and stayed quiet. I wanted to ask him about the rest of it. I wanted to ask if he thought she’d let him stay, if he thought he even deserved that chance to try to work things out. But that really didn’t seem like the point. The point was that he knew where he wanted to go. For once, on that, he was clear. And he was actually doing something about it. Something brave. And that made me proud of him.

“Maybe you can come down to Narragansett in the next couple of weeks and help me move out.” He looked up at me, and I could see the questions in his face: I was packing it in? Just like that? No more wives? No more any of it? “It’s funny, isn’t it?” I said. “Just when Mom and Dad are finally going to get me out of Rhode Island, you’re going in.”

“I’m sure they’ll find it hilarious,” he said. He shook his head, taking one last tug. It hurt so much, it almost burned. “God, can you picture Mom coming to visit me there? She’ll have a heart attack when she sees those dogs.”

I thought of how Josh had looked at the farm with Elizabeth and Grace: so certain, ready. I knew now that
that
was all she wanted for us—that kind of hope. “Yes,” I said. “I can.”

Josh put the tweezers away and wrapped my injury in two thick layers of gauze, tightly wound tape. Then he gave my foot a little pat to signify that my mini-surgery was complete.

“I’m all set?”

“You’re all set.”

I shook my foot out, which was looking a little like an oversize snow cone. It felt pretty good though.

“Are we not going to talk about it?” Josh asked, trying to catch my eye. “How you’re leaving the wives project behind?”

My wives project. All of it resting in its new home on the side of the Hutchinson River Parkway. I felt a pinch again, thinking about it. But, the truth was, even 900 wives wouldn’t be able to do what I’d thought I needed: they couldn’t make my first love story end happily. And they couldn’t tell me how to move on, until I actually started moving. It was a nice thing, at the very least, that I didn’t need them to anymore. And maybe an even nicer thing that they had taught me something after all—not about figuring out how to wait, of course. But about living, fully, even while you’re waiting for whatever it is you think you want.

“Whenever you’re ready to start with your I-told-you-so lecture, Josh,” I said, “let me know. I’ll just close my ears.”

He shook his head slowly. “No, you know what? I think I’m going to pass.”

I smiled, and watched as he gathered up his things, picked up the flashlight, and stood—stretching his arms out. Then, with his free hand, he reached down to pull me up to standing too. “I just don’t know how you walked around with that in your foot all day,” he said. “It seems like a fairly painful enterprise.”

“Well, I think both of us have been creating some pain for ourselves for a while now,” I said.

He rolled his eyes at me, which I guess I deserved. “Can we save the philosophizing, please?” he said.

“Sorry. It felt like the moment was calling for it.”

He turned the flashlight on, shining it at my face for a second, before motioning with it in the direction of the parking lot. We started heading that way, Josh staying about half a step behind me. In four weeks though, on my way to Los Angeles, I would come back here to take a photograph. I’d want to remember how I had felt sitting here—to take it with me, this sense of relief I knew we were both feeling, the quietly growing momentum that eventually I’d understand comes from letting go of the things you were holding on too tightly to in the first place. But it was daytime when I came back, and everything felt different. In our spot was an enormous rainbow umbrella, the edges of two red beach towels sticking out from beneath it. It seemed important to take the picture anyway. So I did. From the angle I shot it, you could only make out the top of the umbrella: a swirl of bright colors against the August sun, intense and glowing, but distant from me, benign. Which, really, turned out to be the most hopeful epilogue to the weekend, to the whole crazy time, that I could hope for.

“So did you ever figure out my toast, by the way?” Josh said now, falling in step beside me. “What you were going to say today, if you ended up having to stand up and say something?”

“I didn’t get that far.” I shrugged. “But I probably would have kept it pretty short.”

“How short?” he said, starting to smile. I could hear the amusement creeping up in his voice, the familiar sarcastic tone.

He was enjoying himself way too much. I smiled back anyway though, mostly because it didn’t matter anymore—what I would have said, or would have done. Other things mattered more now. There are words and there are feelings and somewhere between where the two meet is the truth. Here was my truth: I was ready to go home. We were both ready for that, I thought, and—finally,
finally—
for whatever was coming next.

I stopped walking, but only for a second. “Just, you know, the really important things,” I said. “Be well, be happy, be true. And, then, of course . . . cheers.”

This was when I raised an imaginary glass in my hand, gave it all one last moment, and kept going.