London Is the Best City in America (5 page)

“What are you talking about?” Josh said.

“The Moynihan-Richardses are in the basement,” he said.

Josh sat up taller, his face turning worried—wrong—before my eyes. The Moynihan-Richardses were Meryl’s birth parents. The Ozark professors. The weirdos. From the back, they each looked more like how you might imagine the other looking: Dr. Moynihan-Richards with a long ponytail, wiry legs, Mrs. M-R with short, cropped hair and a black leather jacket that she never seemed to take off.

Under the best of circumstances, which these certainly weren’t, the two of them staying here was a weird thing.

Berringer shrugged. “There was some sort of issue with them parking their RV near Meryl’s parents’ place in the city. It was like three hundred bucks to put it in the garage for the weekend or something crazy. So they showed up here about twenty minutes before you guys did. Your mom’s in a bit of a tizzy.”

He sounded so apologetic when he said the last part that I wondered if he knew that something else was going on with Josh. I bet he did. I bet he knew a lot more than I did. Like Elizabeth’s last name. And where she lived. And what might happen next.

I looked over at Josh, who was starting to stand up. I quickly waved him back down. “I’ll find out what’s going on,” I said, meeting his troubled glance, trying to calm him. “Just stay out here.”

“You sure?” he said.

“Positive,” I said, opening the door. I looked at Berringer, who was looking at Josh with so much concern that I immediately forgave him for his age joke. I’d immediately forgive him everything, if he could somehow just make this okay again. “You want a beer, Berringer?” I asked him.

He turned back toward me, giving me a smile. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know I don’t have to.”

He smiled. “I’d love one then.”

I smiled back at him, tapping on the doorframe, before walking into the front hall. Maybe this would be okay. Maybe Josh would talk to Berringer and they’d work it all out, the confusion or hesitation or whatever you wanted to call it that Josh seemed to be feeling. Maybe Berringer would know, better than me, the right thing to say to calm him down.

Only I didn’t close the door completely, and unfortunately, I was able to hear Josh’s next question.

“Meryl didn’t come with them, did she?” he said.

Berringer said, “Not that I saw.”

This was when my brother, sounding not at all like himself for the second time that night, said: “Well, thank God for that, at least.”

The thing I was starting to learn about wedding weekends was that they encourage people to revisit the past. Isn’t that what wedding toasts are all about, really? This bringing to the surface of all the old stories, the private anecdotes, that we want to relive in order to feel like we all really know somebody—feel reinforced as to who they are—so we can let them go? Even before the actual wedding, even over the course of a wedding weekend, you can start to see this freshly minted need to disclose—everyone talking to each other a little differently, more honestly.

One of my mother’s favorite stories, which I knew would come up before any future wedding of mine—and probably in some capacity over the course of Josh and Meryl’s wedding also—was of the time that I asked her to marry me. I was maybe seven. Halfway through first grade. And when I asked her, she told me no. She gently explained that she couldn’t marry me because she was my mother, to which I apparently responded, “Then I’ll marry Daddy.” Getting the same answer on that end—
You can’t marry your father because he’s your father
—I said with great reluctance that I would marry Josh. And when she told me there would be no dice on that end either, I had the first of several complete breakdowns. ‘You mean to tell me that I’m going to grow up one day, and have to marry a
complete
stranger?’

As many times as I’d heard it, I actually always looked forward to this story because it reminded me about what I’ve always loved most about my mom. (Aka Sadie Meredith Everett. Born 1949, Reading, CT. Steadfast Virgo. Former schoolteacher.)

Sadie’s favorite part of the story wasn’t—nor had it ever been—the arguably cute moment at the end when I said that I didn’t want to marry the stranger. It was the beginning.

When I picked her first.

I found my mother now in the kitchen, standing at the kitchen counter in her silk robe, fixing a ridiculously large platter of fruits and cheeses and crackers. She didn’t look up at first when I walked in, which gave me a chance to watch her: her hair pulled back, sharp cheekbones, little elbows. I walked up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. She was so little, my mother, much smaller than me, finer, with bones as tiny as pearls. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I did it. It still scared me when I touched her.

“They’re sleeping in sleeping bags down there,” she said. “They won’t even take my blankets. I can’t even talk about it.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said into her shoulder.

“But don’t you think that’s bizarre?” she said, turning and looking at me—wild-eyed, devastated. “He doesn’t even let her talk, really. He looks at her like she’s crazy when she opens her mouth.”

“What does that have to do with your blankets?”

“I think she wanted one.”

I gave her shoulders a final squeeze and walked around to the other side of the counter, leaning up against it. I kept watching her. I was worried that she was going to ask me how the fireworks were. Knowing, if she did, she would hear too much of the real answer in my voice.

“What’s going on?” she said, looking up. “I feel your eyes.”

“You don’t feel anything,” I said, too quickly, and with a little more force than necessary. What else was I going to say, though?
I’m looking at you like this because out of nowhere, actually, Josh told me he might be in love with someone I’d never even heard of before tonight. Interesting turn of events, no?

She looked at me for another second before returning to her cutting, unconvinced. “I know when I feel eyes,” she said.

I shook my head no, and tried to figure out how to change the subject. The first thing I could think of was my documentary—the entirety of my fishermen’s wives footage, all 107 interviews on thirty mini-DV tapes, sitting in the trunk of my car. I had run back into my house at the last minute that morning—pre-tackle shop—gathering the videotapes up to bring them home with me. This was due to a fleeting fear that the Narragansett house would burn down in my absence, the only copies of all of my research going up in flames. It was a baseless fear. I knew that somewhere inside. Except that I hadn’t
not
slept in that house for so long that part of me did believe it was actually possible it would self-destruct in my absence.

“You know, I brought the fishermen’s wives footage home with me. To show you guys,” I said quickly, before I could change my mind.

Maybe this wouldn’t be the worst thing—showing the tapes to my family. Maybe when they watched it, they would think the footage was brilliant. And they could explain to me what I was missing.

“Not tonight, Em,” she said. “Dad’s already at the bachelor party.”

“He’s what?”

She shrugged. “He just thought someone needed to be there to welcome everyone,” she said. “And you two didn’t exactly seem to be doing great on timing tonight.”

This was true. But I hadn’t even known my dad was planning on going to the bachelor party in the first place. It was hard to picture him holding down the bachelor party fort, casually ordering drinks and making small talk with Josh’s friends. I pictured him calling home every few minutes to ask my mother what he was supposed to do next.

“You know,” my mom said, keeping her eyes averted, “you
did
have a visitor earlier this evening. He was very disappointed to have missed you.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. I couldn’t imagine who would have come by to see me. I couldn’t even think of anyone I had told that I was coming home. I hadn’t told anybody. I knew I hadn’t. Because I didn’t
talk
to anybody from home—the entirety of my exchanges with friends from high school were exceedingly limited since I dropped out of a life I thought they could recognize. It wasn’t that they all were becoming doctors and lawyers and bankers—though many of them were. It was more that they were becoming something. And I—one fragmentary interview at a time—wasn’t.

My mom put down her knife in a grand gesture of emphasis. “I’m talking about Justin Silverman,” she said.
“Justin Silverman!”

Justin Silverman and I had “gone out” in junior high before either of us was allowed to go out anywhere without our parents. “I don’t understand,” my mother loved saying back then, “how are you going out with someone you never go anywhere with?” If she didn’t dial down her excitement level, I was going to have to remind her of that.

“Justin Silverman came by?” I said. “To see me?”

“Well, Justin Silverman’s mom,” she said. “But the point is, Justin just graduated at the very top of his class from Northwestern Law School, and he’s back in New York now! Is that not so exciting?”

Here we went. This was the first of what I knew would be many attempts by my mother to remind me, over the next couple of days, of the many opportunities in New York—men, jobs, hope—all the things that I was giving up in my makeshift life too far from home.

“It’s so exciting, what he’s doing. All this work with intellectual property. You know who would be totally interested in all the work he’s doing with intellectual property?
You.
Which is why I told Evelyn to bring him by the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night so the two of you could catch up.”

“What? Mom, why on earth would you do that?”

“Emmy.
Because.
Justin’s back in New York now.”

“Does he know I’m not back in New York now?”

She put the apple down, looking up at me. “What can it possibly hurt to spend five minutes with an old friend? Evelyn says he’s gotten very handsome.”

“Evelyn is his mother.”

“So shouldn’t she know?”

I crossed my hands over my chest, in amazement at this standoff. There was not—and never had been—a way to argue with my mom. At least not one that I had found. And before I could even
not
attempt to this time, Josh walked into the kitchen, coming up behind our mom.

He put his hands on her shoulders, the same way I had moments before, and leaned in to give her a kiss hello on the cheek. “You okay?” he asked.

She shrugged, giving off a little sigh. But then she turned and actually looked up at him, and a smile started growing on her face. He matched her smile—the same half-baked expression they each were prone to wearing—an undeniable reminder of how alike they looked: same baby nose, hazel eyes. Same skin. Watching them, from my side of the counter, I had the feeling I used to have when I was little—that she must love him more because he looked so much more like her than I did. Now, though, that feeling held relief in it instead of the opposite.

Berringer appeared in the kitchen doorway, his T-shirt wrinkled from his fake nap, his dolphin boxer shorts sneaking out from beneath the top of his jeans.

I wanted to reach out and touch them.

My mom looked over at him, wiping her hands on her robe. “Jaime here really saved the day with everything,” she said. “They probably would have slept in the RV if it weren’t for you.”

He smiled. “You just got to know how to talk to people,” he said.

“Is that what you’ve got to know?” I said, meeting his eyes. He looked back at me, but didn’t say anything.

Josh looked back and forth between us, and announced that it was probably time to go, unless someone thought he should go and say hello to his future in-laws in the basement.

“They’re probably sleeping now,” my mom said, shaking her head. Then she looked down at the platter of food, arranged decoratively in several half-moons.

Before anyone could comment, she said, “There’s a mini-fridge down there, remember?” No one said anything. “I can’t talk about it.”

Josh laughed, and then motioned toward me. “You ready to get out of here?” he asked.

For a second, I thought I’d misheard him. I was sure of it actually. “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not a bachelor.”

My mom pointed at me. “You’re not married either,” she said.

I turned back to Josh, confused. While I had helped with the b-party planning, I had never intended on actually attending. I intended on being in my childhood bedroom—sleeping—and getting a hung-over thank-you from Josh tomorrow morning for sending out a very nice e-mail invite.

“Look,” he said, “it’s not like there’s a team of strippers you’ll be interrupting. I want you there.”

When Josh was a teenager, he hadn’t wanted me anywhere for a long time, the entirety of our conversations from the time he turned fourteen until he left for college occurring from either side of his closed door. I was always standing there, longingly, hoping he’d decide that day to let me in. It still surprised me more often than not how much he seemed to want me around now.

Berringer said, “I’m driving.”

I started to follow them out of the kitchen, but before I could, Mom reached out to hold me back for a minute. Once their footsteps receded, she pulled me toward her and kissed my cheek.

“You are just the most beautiful in the world. You know that?” she said, stepping back and looking at me, smiling. Then she started pushing my hair back behind my ears, trying hard to flatten it down, make it stay.

“There,” she said. “Much better.”

That first summer after Matt and I were together, we planned a trip to Europe—a trip my mother pretended wasn’t happening until after we’d already gone. It had been my first time leaving the country, my first time ever stepping foot off the continent. Every summer before that, I’d taken these nonnegotiable “Everett family road trips” to a different locale somewhere in America—Philadelphia, Virginia Beach, Wyoming. Always by car, always somewhere we could drive to, even if the drive took the better part of a week.