“Sorry. My phone died somewhere over the Atlantic.” I watch his throat move as he swallows. “Listen, can we talk?”
“George,” Nate says, coming to my side. My fiancé puts an arm around my waist and extends his hand.
Nate wins people over with his smile and his uncanny ability to recall the tiniest of details from previous conversations. He’s self-assured, kind, and respected by both his colleagues and his students. He’s immensely likable.
To everyone but George.
While I’ve felt time and distance pulling at the seams of our friendship, no one knows me better than George. And I know him, too.
I clasped his hand while a doctor sewed eight tidy stitches into his side when we were kids.
I sat with him as he sobbed on our apartment floor, holding him as tightly as I could.
I was the person George called the night he thought he was going to die.
I have his name tattooed on my rib cage, just like mine is tattooed on his.
So I know that when George looks at my fiancé and his right eye gives an almost imperceptible flicker, it’s because he doesn’t like him. His smile is a suggestion—the smooth grin veiling his true feelings. When George shakes his hand and tells Nate it’s good to see him, I know he isn’t being genuine, but I don’t mind. Because George is here, and he’s going to pretend to like Nate. He’s going to do it for me. I’m certain that the next few days will change his opinion of Nate. Once he spends more time with him, he’ll love him like everyone else does.
“We’re so glad to have you,” Nate says sincerely. He doesn’t dabble in jealousy, and he believed me when I told him George and I have no romantic history. Like any decades-spanning relationship, there’s been plenty of drama. But no kissing.
Unless you count that one time.
(I don’t.)
We’d make a terrible couple. We’re Laurie and Jo, too similar and too hotheaded to bend the way a relationship requires.
“I’m Frankie’s best man,” George replies simply. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Before we can say anything more, George is surrounded by the Gardiners. Mimi watches from the table, laughing at the fray. George is on the receiving end of hugs from Darwin and Moby, then my parents. There’s a strong family resemblance.We’re all fair-haired, and I have my mom’s strange purple-blue eyes. Darwin and Dad are almost comically similar—six feet tall, barrel-chested, uncomfortable in formal wear. They even work side by side in the family cabinetry business. Moby has the height but otherwise couldn’t be more different. He lives in Ottawa and works as a cybersecurity engineer. He’s thirty-two but acts like he’s a teenager. Tonight, he’s dressed in a trompe l’oeil T-shirt that looks like a tuxedo.
George has always been treated like family. He’s my mom’s favorite child. It’s Darwin who eventually pries her off him.
“Let him have some air, Mom,” he says, then proceeds to hook an elbow around George’s neck. “He’s not strong enough to hold you up forever.”
“Now, now,” Moby says, squeezing George’s biceps. “It looks like little Georgie’s been bulking up.”
George does look thicker than he did in December, but maybe it’s the suit. The Gardiner men are tall, but George stretches even higher. When we were thirteen, he went to live with his dad for seven months in Montreal, and when he came back, he’d outgrown fifteen-year-old Moby and had almost caught up to Darwin, who was seventeen. The sudden shock of height had transformed him from a husky, baby-faced boy into a skinny, soon-to-be fourteen-year-old with long limbs and a deep voice that didn’t seem to fit right.
“You look tired,” my mom says to him. She frets about George—how much he travels, whether he’s getting enough rest. She reaches up to push a curl off his forehead. A lost cause. “But better than you did last month.”
“You were home?” He didn’t tell me. There was a time whenGeorge and I spent every waking hour together, when I knew where he was at all times.
“It was a quick visit,” George says. “Less than thirty-six hours.”
George is an environmental journalist and spent most of his twenties reporting from all corners of the country. But for the past three years, he’s traveled so much farther and so regularly that I rarely see him. Our birthdays are four days apart and we try to celebrate together, but sometimes it’s not feasible. Last year he was in Brazil, researching for a story about the deforestation of the Cerrado savanna. He bought a condo in Toronto as a home base, although it’s usually occupied by a rotating cast of short-term renters.
“I would have come,” I say. It’s only a two-hour drive from the city. “You should have told me.”
George looks at me in that direct, all-seeing way of his. His glasses are smudged. They’realwayssmudged. I force myself not to take them from his nose and clean them, the way I normally would.
“Give him a break, Frankie,” Darwin says. “He’s not even in this time zone yet.”
George was just in Bologna for a climate change conference.
“Let them battle it out,” Moby says. “It’s always good for entertainment. It’s been months since their face-off at Christmas.”
Nate frowns, or the upper half of his face does. His mouth stays set in a smile, albeit a confused one. “What face-off?”
