“I can’t believe you just said terra-cotta,” I said.
“Like today in the village,” he continued, ignoring me. “As an example. This very loud redheaded woman was screaming at her friend from across the street about what kind of scooped-out bagel she wanted. Cinnamon raisin. Doesn’t that scoop out all the raisins?”
“That could be anywhere, Josh,” I said.
“But it wasn’t,” he said. “It was here.”
My parents’ house was coming up on the right. It looked exactly the same to me as it always had—a two-story white Victorian with green shutters, a balcony, screened-in wraparound porch with large plants. I could see the edge of the backyard, which was rocky and curved upward into a small hill. When I was little, I’d thought it was a mountain.
The blinker was still going. “Hey, you have to flip the wheel harder than that, or it’s never going to stop,” I said, pointing at the dashboard.
He looked down, pulling the wheel as tight as it would go, the clicking shutting down.
“You shouldn’t be driving around like this. You can’t have a broken blinker. Let’s go over to Billy’s and see if he’ll take a look at it. Isn’t he open until midnight on weekends?”
I looked at the dashboard clock. It said 10:48. Josh was supposed to be at the Heathcote Tavern a half hour ago. He was supposed to be having drinks with his friends and telling stories and being a little too happy for himself. Now, considering the knowledge I’d recently acquired, I wasn’t sure if he should even try to pull that off.
“You can pretend to be sick tonight, you know,” I said.
“Why would I do that?”
“No reason,” I said, though I could think of twelve right off the top of my head, high on the list being that he didn’t seem particularly certain that a wedding was even going to take place.
“Don’t go stirring the pot, Emmy. I love Meryl. You know I do. I don’t want to do anything to ruin this weekend for her.”
“I know, but, Josh, if you’re thinking about not getting married . . .”
He turned the ignition off. “Who said anything about not getting married? I never said that. Who do you think I am, you?”
I let that go.
“And don’t go saying anything to Mom either,” he said. “She has enough to worry about with the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night. She has enough going on. You know what I’m saying?”
I actually had no idea what he was saying. And I really didn’t know how we were getting lost in wedding logistics again, on the tail end of what he had told me under an hour ago.
Only there didn’t seem to be much for me to do about it now. Josh was already out of the car, and heading up to the house. I closed my own door quickly, hurrying to catch up to him anyway.
“I shouldn’t have said anything in the first place,” he said, as I fell into step with him. “Just please don’t say her name again.”
“Which one?” I said.
He gave me a dirty look, and I looked down at the ground, at our feet, mine so small next to his, barely half their size. Josh had always been the one who had taken care of me, always, even when he hadn’t wanted to: the one who had to walk me to the bus stop everyday, the first one to babysit me, the one to teach me how to play kickball, how to lie to our parents (poorly, but still), how to drive. I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for the first time, maybe, he was the one who needed the taking care of. And that, somehow, he needed me to do it.
“I just don’t believe you would tell me what you told me if you wanted to pretend it didn’t matter,” I said.
He stopped walking, reaching for my arm. “Why are you pushing this? Don’t you want me to marry Meryl? Wouldn’t that be the happy ending here?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want, Josh,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m just trying to understand what’s going on with you.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and put that on my list of things to figure out, okay?”
Then he gave me a small, sad smile and started walking again toward the dim light of our front porch.
It seems important to mention that this was only the third time I had been to my parents’ home since moving to Narragansett—and both of the previous visits had lasted for less than twelve hours. No sleepovers, no late-night talks that would end with me explaining again why I refused to leave my small fishing town. They couldn’t hear me. Just like I couldn’t hear them when they’d plead their case to move back to New York, to reapply to film school, to reapply to a different school, to get my life back on track. On track was a very big thing for them—almost as big as leaving Rhode Island in the first place.