It meant more to me than she’ll ever know.
Our dinner arrives, and Gin and I unload the goods from a seemingly bottomless brown paper bag: tightly packed takeout boxes stuffed with white rice, plastic containers of curry with clear lids splashed in tomato reds and golden yellows. Just when I’m sure I’ve unpacked the last of it, I fish out one more piece of foil-wrapped naan.
“Did you order the whole menu?” Gin teases.
“I just got you everything that was marked dairy-free.” I rip the receipt off the bag and read it aloud. “One chana masala, one chicken vindaloo, one aloo gobi, one yellow daal, two naan, and two orders of samosas.”
“So there’s a secret third person coming to dinner,” Gin guesses.
“Cute,” I say, “that you think I have a second friend.”
The air thickens with the smell of garlic and turmeric, and we scoop up double servings of everything, then settle into the couch with a stack of napkins and a seltzer apiece—a boozy black cherry one for Gin and a regular lemon sparkling water for me.
“Why do you have these?” Gin asks, tapping the side of her hard seltzer.
“I just got ’em today,” I say. “For you.”
Her eyes narrow the tiniest bit, a flicker of worry shining through.
“I’m serious.” I tuck my legs beneath me and hold a hand up in oath. “It was kind of weird, actually. My first time buying alcohol in…shit, three years?”
“Three years.” Gin glances between me and her seltzer. “You swear?”
“On my original DVD copy ofThe Princess Diaries.”
Satisfied, Gin nods and snaps the pop tab open. “Well, cheers to that.” But it doesn’t sit right, the way she’s raising her alcoholic beverage to my sobriety.
“Cheers to…putting in the work,” I try, and Gin accepts the revision with the tinnyclackof her spiked seltzer against my sparkling water. I take a sip and, on the subject of sobriety, prepare to deliver the latest update on The Handful when Gin slams down her can with the conviction of a judge banging a gavel.
“So.” She straightens. “I have news.”
“You’re pregnant,” I blurt, and Gin looks terribly unamused.
“No, Alice,” she sighs, and I roll my lips in, sealing my mouth shut as Gin tries again. She smiles and says, “We set a date.”
“You set a date?!”
“We set a date,” Gin repeats, “and picked a venue.”
“And you’renotpregnant?”
Gin rolls her eyes and shoots me a look that saysShut up and stop interrupting, so I scoot back on the couch, a perfect, silent listener. “So.” She starts again. “We kind of took things in a different direction.”
“You’re eloping,” I guess.
She swats my arm. “Alice! Stop!”
“Sorry, sorry!” I hold my hands up in surrender. “I’m just excited. I’ll shut up. Just tell me.”
Gin pulls her legs up onto the couch, folding herself into a perfect crisscross applesauce. “Things kind of changed after the engagement party,” she explains. “It felt more like a party for Rishi’s parents than for us.”
“I can see that,” I admit.
“Right? I hardly knew anyone there! So on the drive home,Rishi and I talked about it. We don’t want to spend our wedding day with strangers and pay for them to eat chicken or fish.”
“Plus Indian weddings are supposed to be huge, right?”
“Huge,” Gin echoes with a slow, knowing nod. “And the ceremony will still have plenty of Indian elements, but we don’t want the big production. We want something small and intimate and fun with the people we love the most.”
