Just as well, she says, because there’s no room for any plus ones at this wedding of mine.
This spontaneous sometime wedding, Bren says.
This long-time-coming, maybe-spring, maybe-summer wedding, Nora says.
Wait. If you don’t get a cancellation by the summer, do I have to. I mean, would you want me to –
The venue guy thinks we’d likely be married by June, Nora says. July, latest. And if not, we regroup. There are fewer weddings come the autumn, see. Fewer cancellations.
Got it, Bren says, after a pause. So if you’re not married by July, you’ll relieve me of my best man duties?
He is coming up the driveway now, boots crunching on the gravel.
Yes, is all that she says.
The surrealism continues. He is fine with this; she’s fine, too. They are both fine or both figuring out how to be, and isn’t that, he thinks, essentially the same thing.
What duties does a best man actually have, he asks her, as he reaches the door.
I don’t know, Nora says. Hand out cake, maybe? Tackle Freya if she objects, halfway through the ceremony?
There’s another, longer, pause.
Two things I can do, Bren says, and Nora says thanks, well, I better go. Attempt to get at leastsomesleep before this big week.
And when he asks her why, what’s this week, he expects her to say just work, my commute, but instead she says she’s made a wedding dress appointment for next weekend. Seeing as they’re moving fast, now, on this thing.
This thing.
Bren stands on the doorstep, not wanting to go inside. It is cold, and his dad died in this driveway, and he hasn’t thought about that properly until this very moment and yet all he wants to do is stay on the phone, talking to Nora; filling himself up with other feelings.
Sure, Bren says, eventually. Are you.
He clears his throat.
Going alone?
Nora laughs again, but it takes on a wooden quality, this time, like her voice earlier that evening. Shay has to watch the café, she says, and it’s not really Freya’s scene, and beneath the wood there is a sadness which means before he can think he’s asking – is it a best man thing?
Quiet, then. Clear of her own throat.
If we’re going to do this, Nora, Bren says, let’s do it right.
His words hang like the night around him. He wonders if she remembers that this is what she used to say about the ice cream in his mum’s freezer, raspberry ripple, always, three scoops not two, and while she doesn’t acknowledge the memory, she does say … okay. And he doesn’t quite know why he said it. Doesn’t quite know why it poured out of him, boiling, like kettle water, maybe just because – like he’d thought – they can handle the heat. Nothing’s changed. Best friends first, right, even as two grown adults with a history;becauseof it, even, a history that feels far away and yet too close, taking up all of his air.
A goodnight, then, in the dark sea of the driveway. She tells him she’ll text him, when she’s confirmed her appointment. And after the call ends he stands there for another minute outside his mother’s door, thinking. His hands, so numb with the cold by the time he tries, that he can’t get his key in the lock.
_
He does not wake with the light, because for that he would have had to have slept. Josie was dozing in her chair when he got in; he’d covered her with a blanket, turned off her reading lamp that, as far as he knew, she never used for books. Word searches, she’d always liked. The ones in true-life magazineslikeTake a Break.They’re sofascinating, she told him once, when he’d caught a ludicrous headline about falling in love with a Ferris wheel. Stranger than fiction, Bren, you wouldn’t believe.
He gets up and showers off his lack of sleep. Towels himself down and untangles the St Christopher Nora gave him for his sixteenth birthday. To protect you when we’re travelling, she’d told him, which only brings up more thoughts, the smell of her bedroom, Freya bringing them lemonade while they flipped through travel guides, and he is taking the stairs afterwards, fully dressed, hair damp and mind elsewhere when he stops halfway down, because it is entirely silent.
There is no noise from his mother.
No footsteps or radio, no porridge turning in the microwave. Two more steps and he can see that her bedroom door is still closed.
Rush of heat, then, through his body.
