I wanted to act cool in front of my friends and my brother. That impulse never changes. But I needed support. “Do you guys really think I should go for it with Amelia?”
“She tried to have your baby, man,” Spence said. “If you’re waiting for a sign, I think that was it.”
Spence’s wife, Christina, stepped out of the gazebo, and their toddler daughter wriggled out of her mom’s arms and ran down the brick sidewalk, squealing, “Daddy!” as he lifted her up into the air.
Watson was saying, “You’ve got to get back out there.”
Watching one of my oldest, best buddies hold his daughter, I realized that Amelia wasn’t all I wanted. I wanted to be a dad; I wanted to be a family.
“You’re just getting started,” Spence chimed in.
Walking down the brick sidewalk with two of my oldest, best buddies and my brother in the town that raised me, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Spence was right.
AmeliaWISTFUL AND ROMANTIC
“I PROMISE YOU THAT THEY’LLteach you,” I lied for the millionth time.
“But what if I throw up? What if we have a huge fish, and I’m trying to reel it in and I lose it, and then they lose the tournament because of me?”
Harris and I were watching fishing videos on YouTube, and I truly couldn’t decide if I was doing the right thing. I mean, yeah, I was feeding Harris to the wolves. In 2045, I would be hearing about the time they had to take that pretty city boy on the boat and he nearly drowned or some other hyperbolized account of how unmanly Harris was. I had never seen him the least bit vulnerable, and it made me like him even more. I felt such an outpouring of compassion for him in that moment that I leaned over and kissed him.
He smiled. “Are you going to tell your parents we’re moving in together?”
I grimaced. “I think I’ll just keep paying for the apartment indefinitely and pretend I live there.”
He laughed. “You’re not honestly telling me that they are going to be scandalized by their thirty-five-year-old daughter living with her boyfriend?”
I didn’t say anything, but he had no idea. My mother would not care that her friends’ children had all lived with significant others before marriage. She would not care that I was old enough to make my own decisions, that I liked Harris and I loved the agreement about our lives that we—as grown-ups—had reached. She would only care that she had not raised me to live with a man I wasn’t married to and that I was directly defying those orders. “Maybe we should tell them at Christmas?” I smiled encouragingly.
He laughed. “Amelia, that’s, like, six months away.”
“Oh! Oh!” I said. “Maybe we could make up an elaborate story about something horrible that happened at my apartment and you are sacrificing and lovingly taking me in, as a friend, and letting me live in your guest room.”
My new favorite thing in life was going to Harris’s after a long day at work and making dinner together with soft music playing in the background and drinking sophisticated wine and talking about everything—the new story idea I had, how far I had gotten into my research, his funny miscommunications with a new overseas client, the state of the environment and the world, and our separate friends who were quickly becoming our mutual friends. I really, truly, solidly looked forward to doing those things without having to pack an overnight bag. But did Ilovehim? I couldn’t tell. I felt like he was a good friend that was also super hot and who I liked to sleep with. Maybe thatwaslove.Stupid Thad, I thought. I couldn’t even tell if I was in love anymore, for heaven’s sake.
I looked at Harris again, studied the lines in his forehead, which were deeper when he was being sincere, the boyish sandy blond of his hair, how adorable he looked lounging in his Peter Millar athletic wear.
“Babe, look,” he said. “I get it. The South is different, your parents are old fashioned. Maybe I don’t understand it completely, but I’m trying to. All I know is that we’re good together. We want the same things. I can tell them with you, if you want, but it would be a shame to ruin something great over some outdated idea of what a relationship should look like.”
Maybe the salt air made me feel wistful and romantic, or maybe it was how sincere he was. But in that moment, I decided firmly that being with him—in the way that worked for us—was worth the scrutiny of my family. I was thirty-five years old, for heaven’s sake. “I’ll tell them now,” I said. I could give them time to get used to the idea of us moving in sometime, pretend it existed in a hazy and far-off future.
He picked up my hand and kissed it. “You still have a tan line where your ring used to be.”
That was true. “I know. I should probably get something to fill up the space.”
I didn’t love how that sounded. And I had to wonder if filling up space was exactly, precisely what I was doing with Harris.
Three hours later, I was kissing him goodbye, saying, “Are you sure you’re okay if I go? I feel just terrible leaving you here.”
Harris had a conference call in China that couldn’t be rescheduled, so he was going to take a Benadryl, go to sleep now, at seven, so he could get up at two, take the call, grab a quick nap, and be on the dock at five. Bless the man’s sweet heart. I felt awful. But he had to go fishing. Even though the ridicule would be significant, it was nothing compared to what would happen if he didn’t go. I had left out the part about how the prize money, depending on the size and number of the fish caught, could be upwards of a million dollars. He was nervous enough when he just thought this was for fun.
I kissed him gently, marveling that I had brought a new boy home to meet my parents. Lo and behold, Mom and Daddy—who sighed and rolled their eyes and made considerable fuss about why I couldn’t find a nice Southern boy—really loved Harris. In fact, he kind of made Mom swoon, which was a real plus.
Daddy wasn’t a huge fan of the Summer Splash, and he wasn’t going, which I thought made him a bad sport, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I took Mom as my date. As she climbed in the passenger side, her yellow-and-white-stripedshirtdress’s full skirt swishing around her calves, toned from her Pilates regimen, I said, “So, Mom, what do you think?”
She looked at me very seriously and said, “I was prepared to hate him. Iwantedto hate him. But, darling girl, that man is a doll. He is perfection roaming the face of the earth.”
I was doing my best to back out of the very long driveway when she said, “And what’s more, he is madly in love with you.”
