He pulls back, rests his forehead against mine, and breathes out.“I’m sorry. Too fast, I know. We should talk more, and figure things out.”
“No, I mean—we should go somewhere where I could get this suit off.”
He exhales on a laugh. I feel the air of it on my chest, ruffling the delicate fabric of my camisole. It feels like happiness, a new beginning.“Kit,” he says, almost a whisper. He’s not looking at me. He’s kept his head down, and I’d make a joke about him peeking at what little cleavage I have on offer in this top, but I can sense something about Ben, in the way his fingers flutter against the backs of my knees, in the way his breaths are a little reedy. So I wait for him, stroke my hands up and down his arms, relishing the feel of him again after all these weeks apart.“Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Anytime,” I say, my throat tight again with emotion.
“I’m going to mess up, I’m sure. I’ve never done this before. I’ll do things that are going to make you really mad or annoyed.”
“Ben,” I say, squeezing his forearms, once, twice, until he looks up at me.“Anytime, okay?” Ben is part of what home means to me now—he’s not everything, but he might be the biggest thing, and he’s going to change every careful arrangement I had set up in my life, but for once I’m so excited about that prospect. I can’t wait to see what’ll happen.
“I’m so lucky,” he says, almost a whisper.
“Nah,” I say, pulling him toward me for a quick, hard kiss.“But you’re about to be.”
Epilogue
Ben
One Year Later
“Rain is good luck for weddings, though,” Greer says, looking out from the dining room into the backyard, which is puddled and muddy, sheets of rain still falling from the sky, streaming down the windows.
“Tell it to the bride,” says Zoe, and I snicker, checking my watch.
Forty-five minutes until this thing gets underway, and the storm isn’t quitting, so I’m guessing we’re all going to have to cram into the living room. It’s a good thing it’s a small group, and I wave River over so that he and I can start pushing furniture out to the sides of the room. He’s wearing ripped jeans and Converse, a blazer his mother bought him at the Salvation Army, and a vintage-lookingTucker’s Salvaget-shirt underneath, which he’d designed sometime last year in spite of my father’s repeated protests that we’d never sold anything new at the yard, ever. He’s brought a date to this—a quiet, pale-faced girl named Amy who has a streak of her mostly white-blonde hair dyed hot pink—and I can tell, when he moves to the other side of the couch to heft it up, that he’s trying to impress her. Greer lights candles on the mantel. That’s where we’ll have the minister stand, and Zoe takes the big basket of rose petals that were planned for post-vows tossing and scatters them from the bottom of the staircase to the fireplace, a makeshift aisle that I’ll have to sweep up later.
It’s not perfect, but it’ll be fine. With the candles and rose petals, it at least looks the part of a place you could get married. I check my watch again, and Zoe nudges me.“She’ll be here,” she says.
“I know,” I mutter, but I’m nervous, sweaty and tense under my suit, which feels heavy and unnatural on my body these days. I’m not quite used to Kit’s travel schedule yet. When she’s gone, I sleep with my phone turned up on high next to the bed, and I check flight plans, making sure her connections run smoothly. She teases me about how I’d made my living traveling all over the world and now get“fussy” when she does even a short trip up the eastern seaboard for the private consulting she’s been doing for the last six months. It’d been her idea, the consulting, and I’d at first thought she’d meant the kind of work I was most familiar with—visiting corporate labs, lending her expertise on various materials or equipment. But Kit, I don’t think, will ever be interested in that kind of science. Instead, with Jasper’s help, she’d taken half time at the university and has been doing educational rep work for the manufacturers who make the microscopes themselves—running training sessions, reconfiguring the way they operate their schedulers, maximizing experimental time for faculty and graduate students, offering suggestions for undergraduate education on experimental equipment. She’d gone back and forth a bit, before those first few trips—maybe I shouldn’t do this, I don’t evenliketravel—and I’d listened patiently, every time.
Because every time, Kit got on the plane, and made the best of it. Kit was trying, with her work and with me, not to be afraid anymore, not to cling so hard to the familiar, to let herself explore different parts of herself without worrying that something would be taken away. She’s talked, over the last couple of months, about wanting to teach, about how she might make that a reality. But she’s as committed as ever to this place, her hometown, she’s started to call it. Last weekend she made me spend two hours with her filling out some kind of survey for a local paper about our favorite spots.
I check my watch a third time. Maybe we shouldn’t have planned this for this weekend. The schedule is too tight now that there’d been a flight delay that had kept Kit away an extra night, and despite her new willingness to get out there and make a different path for herself, she relishes coming home. Sometimes, we spend whole weekends without leaving here, eating and talking and puttering around with various house projects, making love late into the night, early in the mornings before falling asleep again.
I’ve never been so happy in my life.
“Ben!” my dad hollers from upstairs, and I turn to hustle up, finding him in the guest room standing in front of the full-length mirror there.“Tie this,” he barks at me, holding out the pale yellow necktie he has for today, the one that’s supposed to match Sharon’s pantsuit, though since she hasn’t let us see it, we’d only made our best guess at the department store this week.
“Relax, Dad,” I say, taking the tie from him and looping it around my own neck to make a loose knot that I can pass over his head.
“Relax? You try getting married at my age! I haven’t had this much flop sweat since I saw you come out of your mother’s…”
“Dad. No,” I say, contemplating self-strangulation for a brief moment.
“I fainted then, you know. Do you think I’m going to faint down there?”
“You won’t faint,” I say.“Sharon’ll hold you up, anyway.”
Sharon had proposed to Dad three weeks after I’d moved back from Houston—“all business-like,” Dad had told me, but she’d also told him that she was never going to have him go in the hospital again and not be his next of kin, and anyways, she loved him and it was about time they made it official. The day after, Dad and I drove to an auction in Pennsylvania to buy her a ring. Since so far, they were both keeping their houses—“I said I wanted to marry him, not clean up after him!” Sharon said, but Dad thought she’d change her mind—Kit had offered ours as a neutral spot for the wedding, an idea that had seemed to hold more appeal for Dad and Sharon than something at city hall.
“You got the rings?” Dad asks, as I tug the tie over his head, tightening it around his neck.
“Yeah,” I say, touching my pocket. Two wedding rings in there, and one that I’ve been holding onto, since that auction in Pennsylvania—a dark green emerald, surrounded on all sides by tiny diamonds of varying cuts, marquise, round, tapered baguettes—a starburst around a verdant planet. I’d never seen anything like it, and had decided right then it was the ring I want to give Kit, sometime, when the time is right.
“Jeez,” Dad says, wiping his brow.“How much longer?”
“Seventeen years and now you’re in a hurry!” shouts Sharon, from our bedroom next door, where she’s getting ready. My mom is helping her. She brought a makeup bag the size of my toolbox, and as weird as this whole situation is, somehow, it feels right that my mom’s in there, helping out with this day. Richard is downstairs too, having spent the last hour trying to talk Zoe into joining his firm, and while I’ve been getting along with him better these days, I have no problem admitting that I thoroughly enjoyed watching her turn him down flat.
