Wonderful.
“Ta-da!” I say, and usher her into our two-queen bedroom with a balcony overlooking the swimming pool. It’s not particularly upscale, a chain hotel on the outskirts of Charleston that does a weekend deal—breakfast and spa treatment included—but it feels special all the same. It’s not every day I do something like this, and I’m pretty sure Emmy does it even less.
“Wow.” She comes into the room and does a twirl. “This is fantastic.” She stops mid second twirl to gaze at me seriously. “Thank you, Abby. I really think I needed this.”
“I needed it, too.” I put my overnight bag down on one of the beds. “I keep feeling like I forgot something, but I think it’s my kids.”
“You didn’t forget them,” Emmy declares. “You intentionally left them behind. Big difference.”
“Too true.”
We grin at each other, then she laughs and claps her hands. “Do you think we have time for a swim before our spa treatment?”
I glance at my watch with a shrug. “Forty-five minutes or so, so why not?”
Just five minutes later, we’re down by the pool in our swimsuits.
By swim, I soon realize, Emmy meant lying on a sun lounger and sipping a cocktail, which is fine by me. My maternity bathing suit is a tent-like piece of black Lycra, and I’m happy to stay supine with a towel draped over me, sipping a fabulous mocktail called a Tropical Sunrise.
We left our phones upstairs so we can’t check on anything, and no one can contact us. It’s definitely a two-way street. We’ve only been gone for about four hours, and I am already feeling a little twitchy, wondering if Josh is going to remember to feed the dog or hang out the wet laundry. Am I going to come home to starving pets and a washer full of mildewy clothes?
I don’t think I am, and it’s a far cry from the kind of military-level planning that was required for our old New Jersey lives if I went away. Back then, I had to leave multiple typed pages of instructions for getting kids to various sports practices, filling out permission slips, and packing lunches.
Life really is much easier now, in many ways… and I miss it.
I sip my mocktail and try to relax.
“It’s like I don’t know what to do with myself,” Emmy says after a moment. She’s wearing an enormous sunhat to protect her fair skin from the sun and a banana-yellow tankini with a ruffled skirt. She looks fabulous.
“I know what you mean,” I tell her, relieved she’s feeling the way I am—like fifteen minutes of relaxation might be fifteen minutes too many. “It’s kind of weird.”
“Ed was really happy for me to go, in the end,” she tells me. “He practically insisted.”
“That’s great,” I tell her, although if he hadn’t let her go, considering he just had his own corporate getaway, I would have been annoyed on Emmy’s behalf.
“He’s been really sweet lately,” she says, then pauses in a way that makes me instinctively brace for more. “I had a mammogram a couple of weeks ago.” She’s speaking in her usual, matter-of-fact way, but there’s a waver to her voice that fills me with alarm. “Something came up on it—a cluster of cells.”
I open my mouth to ask her why she hasn’t told me this, then shut it again. Not important right now.
“They referred me for a biopsy, and I had that, and Idon’thave cancer. So.” She gives a shaky smile. “But Idohave some kind of weird cell activity that couldleadto cancer, like one day in the future, but also maybe won’t. Probably won’t. So really, it’s nothing.” She presses her lips together and gives a shake of her head. “I mean, I’m not worried at all, but Ed got a little panicked. So, here I am.”
“Oh, Emmy.” I reach over and take her hand. “That must have been scary.”
“Well.” She shrugs. “You try not to think about the worst-case scenario, right? I would have told you, by the way, but I was trying not to think about it, and I didn’t want people worryingand asking me if I’d heard and all that.” She sighs and squeezes my hand. “Sorry. I can see on your face that you wish I had told you. I guess I should have.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I assure her and squeeze back. “As long as you’re okay.”
“I am,” she affirms, “but it did make me think. One day, I may not be. I mean, that’s guaranteed, right? You grow old. You get sick. You die.”
Wow, this is not the kind of conversation I anticipated on our girly weekend away, but I appreciate that Emmy’s got something on her mind. “I guess so,” I say after a moment. I am wondering how far she’s going to go with this.
“Sorry, I know this is a little grim for a poolside conversation,” she tells me with an uncertain laugh. “But it did get me thinking. We have to make the most of our lives—not just the great things, the Christmases and the birthdays and the parties and all that, but the small moments, too. The boring and drudgery-filled times, which frankly is a lot of my day. But… there can be a gratefulness of those moments, can’t there? And a joy found in them? Instead of wishing I was in Paris or Arizona, I can be glad I’mright here, even when right here is boring or hard.” She looks at me anxiously, like she needs me to agree, which is new for Emmy. I guess this health scare has made her reconsider her life, which I can understand.
“Of course, there can,” I reply, which feels like the only answer. And yet I find myself thinking of just how much of my time and energy is spent worrying about what I can’t control or grousing about what I don’t like but is also no big deal.
Emmy is right. We can choose to be grateful.
And right now, I am grateful for my Tropical Sunrise and my imminent massage. I smile at Emmy and squeeze her hand one last time.
