“Doyouwant to settle down?” Rae had pictured that she and Ellen would both get married around the same time and have kids around the same time. The idea of Ellen settling down three whole years before they turned thirty was highly unsettling.
“Honestly, yes,” Ellen said. “I’ve scoured the bachelor market for the past decade, Rae. I’m tired of all the buying and selling and arbitraging of options. I think I’ve found my unicorn.”
Rae wasn’t sure if Ellen meant the double entendre of unicorns as start-ups valued at a billion dollars, but her friend’s eyes glowed with a billion watts, which was the only key performance indicator that mattered.
“That’s great,” Rae said, fighting self-pity at having lost stature in Ellen’s ranks, though the same could be said for Ellen’s place in Rae’s life since she had gotten back together with Dustin.
They hadn’t let men come between them exactly, but they’d allowed for new entrants that had tipped though not toppled the balance.
The waiter came by. “Could we get one more Croque Monsieur sandwich?” Rae asked, pinching her voice into her best attempt at a French accent.
She wanted to redeem herself by pronouncing it correctly, and more than that, she wanted one more thing to share with Ellen so they could stretch this Saturday brunch for two just a little longer.
“It should be the day of our first date,” Dustin told Rae as they lay in bed forehead to forehead, covers tugged up to their chins. They shared a pillow out of preference rather than necessity. “December fifteenth, in the teahouse.”
They were basking in an email-free Sunday morning a couple weeks after Thanksgiving, debating their official anniversary. Through the Lorimer Loft windows, snow was falling in clumps rather than crystals.
The trip back to Indiana had gone reasonably well, even if her mom had made Dustin sleep on the couch and not-so-subtly probed into his family’s marriage history (she’d seemed satisfied with what she learned but still showed doubts about Rae being with an East Coaster). Her grandpa had grumbled that Dustin didn’t look to be eating enough venison, but he’d poured him his finest whiskey, as sure a sign of approval as any. Mr. Non-Right had blended into the wallpaper as seamlessly as ever.
Dustin hadn’t fallen in love with Indiana, but he had fallen in love with the way Indiana had shaped Rae. He’d insisted on riding shotgun in Fordable Francine as Rae gave him a tour of all the sacred spots of her childhood—the old town hall where she’d won her second-grade spelling bee, the friendly tree stump next to her high school that she’d sat on to study during lunch rather than suffer through cafeteria popularity games, the Even Butter Diner where her parents had taken her every Sunday after church, the cornfield running trails she’d put so many miles on after her dad left, trying to sprint so fast and wheeze so hard that her body would be in too much discomfort to pay attention to all the pain underneath, the pain that would still be there when she caught her breath.
They’d gone to the local grocery store, too, to get ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner, and Rae had spontaneously bought marshmallows to make her dad’s famous sweet potato marshmallow recipe. It was the first time she’d ever made it without him, and she’d gotten a little carried away stacking the marshmallows high like rainless clouds. Her mom hadn’t touched the dish, though she’d looked like she wanted to.
Rae had texted a photo to her dad with aHappy Thanksgiving!message that she mostly meant. Something about being with Dustin made Rae want to try a little harder to repair things with her dad. Dustin’s presence gave her a certain confidence—even if her dad ghosted or rejected her, she’d have Dustin’s arms to curl up in. And seeing Dustin’s pain up close made her wonder more about her dad’sdemons and the lasting damage that may have been done when his own father had walked out when he was a kid. Though it wasn’t yet forgiveness, an uncomfortable sort of empathy was wriggling in through the holes in her heart so that she could start to see him as an aching soul who was emotionally stunted by his shattered past rather than an immoral man who’d so carelessly abandoned his family.
They hadn’t made it up to Elmer Lake during the trip. There wasn’t much to do there in the fall, and if they went, Dustin would want to hear all about the summers she’d spent there. In her retelling, Rae knew she’d make Stu sound much less attractive, much less wonderful, than he was. She hadn’t wanted to lie about Stu or deny the love she’d felt for him—still felt, on some level—she’d just wanted to hang on to the truth that what she’d found with Dustin was another realm of connection, something that couldn’t be compared to a summer fling.
“No, our anniversary shouldn’t be our first date,” Rae said to him now. She was wearing one of Dustin’s T-shirts as a nightgown. “It should be the night of our first kiss. December eighteenth, at the Christmas party.”
“Or maybe the day we matched on the dating app?” Dustin mused. “If we’re being technical about it?”
“If we’re being technical, it should be September twenty-third, when you asked me to be your girlfriend.”
“But that was only a couple months ago. And we were basically together that whole time we were ‘friends’ anyway. I was just being difficult and wouldn’t call it that.”
“Well, at least we agree on something.”
“Let’s not have an anniversary,” Dustin decided. “Drawing attention to one specific day inherently means diminishing the importance of all the other ones.”
“With that logic, I’d say the optimal solution is to call every day our anniversary,” Rae said, running her hands through Dustin’s curly hair, her favorite texture to wake up to.
“You’re just looking for an excuse to eat pancakes and whipped cream in bed all the time, aren’t you?”
“It might’ve factored into my thought process.”
Dustin laughed, the sound vibrating up from his diaphragm and filling Rae with the feeling that yes, of course they could do this—they could lift Dustin out of the darkness and keep him there. Since the Thanksgiving trip, his ratio of good days to bad days had seemed to be increasing, almost like the Midwest had massaged him with its slowness.
“You make the batter, I make the whipped cream?” Rae said.
“And by ‘make the whipped cream,’ you mean squirt it from the bottle?” Dustin clarified.
“Don’t diminish the artistic prowess needed to create an elegant swirl.”
“My mistake. Can I ever redeem myself?” Under Rae’s T-shirt nightgown, Dustin ran his hands over her stomach and worked his way up.
“I think you might be able to,” Rae said, flipping on top of him to fully seal the gap between their bodies.
“Happy anniversary,” he murmured, the words passing from lip to lip without any oxygen dilution.
