“Preach my girl.” Molly holds up a hand Julie immediately high-fives.
I look over at Hallie, perched on Ben’s lap on an armchair in the corner. I expect to see her looking sad, but instead she’s snickering at Julie, clearly unbothered by her mom acting like an asshole.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Jules. After you grabbed that wedding binder away from my mom and told her you knew a judge who would sign a restraining order if she so much as whispered the word wedding, I think she got the hint.”
Everyone laughs, and I hear Asher whisper something about “claws-out Juliette” being his favorite Juliette, and Ben duckshis head and whispers something in Hallie’s ear that makes her face go soft, and his arms tighten around her. They’re all so happy, and happiness is what I want for my best friends. But I wonder again what it would feel like to have someone who is in your corner like that. Who knows you the way Julie knows Asher and Hallie knows Ben.
I have my friends, but I’ve never had aPerson. Not that way. I wouldn’t even know how to. Growing up without parents, bouncing from one foster home to another, and losing my hockey career before it even really got started doesn’t teach you how to keep people. It teaches you that people don’t stay. That nothing is permanent, and you shouldn’t expect it to be. I’m old enough to understand that this isn’t exactly a healthy way of thinking, but knowing that and knowing how to change it are two entirely different things.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Emma murmurs.
It takes me a second to realize she’s talking to me. I’m used to Emma talking around me, or to someone else near me, but rarely directly to me.
“What’s nice?”
“Seeing them this way. Together. Happy. Even when everything isn’t perfect, they’re still just so happy. Can’t you feel it?”
If my feelings had a look, it would be the expression on Emma’s face, and it punches me right in the gut. It’s like my insides match her outside. I know a little bit about Emma’s past and how she lost her parents, and I’ve always felt like a part of me recognizes a part of her, but I’ve never known what to do about it. The one time I tried, I fumbled it so badly that we’ve barely recovered eight years later. After the way I left her house that morning, I’m lucky she even speaks to me at all.
“Yeah, Ems, it’s really nice.”
I don’t quite understand what she means bycan’t you feel itand I want to ask, but that’s all I can manage through my roiling emotion. I feel like I should say more. Take advantage of her actually talking to me for once. But between the happy couples and the reminder of all the ways my childhood and my early retirement fucked me up, and Emma and I having what passes for a real conversation, my brain is a five-way intersection at rush hour, and I can’t grab onto a single thought.
Instead, I stretch my arm across the back of the couch, just barely making contact with Emma’s shoulders. And I don’t think I’m imagining it when she moves a little closer to me, tucking herself just the tiniest bit under my shoulder.
And I’m definitely not imagining the fact that it’s only with her closer to me that my brain finally quiets.
Chapter Three
Emma
Two weeks after Hallie’s wedding dress fitting, I’m at one of my favorite places in the city, the running trails at Frick Park. Running has always been the way I get out of my own head, my constant companion during every stage of my life. It especially helps when it feels like my body is too small to hold all my feelings, which is often.
I was eight years old the first time I ran, on the day of my parents’ funeral. Afterward, my whole family went back to my grandparents’ house, aunts, uncles, and cousins scattering all around the first floor. There were hugs and whispered conversations and so many tears and, in the case of some relative or other who I swear barely even knew my parents, actual wailing. I was curled up in the corner of the living room couch trying to make myself as small as possible. I thought if I could make myself tiny enough, I could keep everyone else’s feelings from overtaking my brain that still hadn’t processed the fact that the two people I loved most in the world were gone.
It didn’t work, of course. Everyone wanted to take care of me, and I hated that because there were only two people I wanted to take care of me but they weren’t available anymore. They all kept asking me if I was hungry, which I wasn’t. And they wantedto know if I was okay, and I remember thinking how stupid that question was because of course I wasn’t okay. It doesn’t take much for me to remember how I wanted to cry, yell, and scream at the injustice of it all. I don’t think I even felt sad. I was angry, and that anger buzzed like electric volts under my skin, making it nearly impossible to sit still. And when the fifth aunt approached me with a plate of food I didn’t want, it all finally became too much. Without a word, I jumped up from the couch, went straight out the front door, and started to run.
I circled my grandparents’ Cleveland, Ohio block over and over again, the sneakers I insisted on wearing to the funeral instead of dress shoes slapping against the pavement and the fall breeze cool on my face. With every turn around the block, the weight on my chest got a little lighter, and I could breathe a little easier. My brain cleared, and I could think a little straighter. When I finally stopped running, my grandparents, Mimi and Pop, were waiting for me on the front porch. I walked straight into their arms, and for the first time since my parents died, I cried.
I ran every day for months after that first time, my laps around the block gradually stretching out to laps around the neighborhood. Sometimes Mimi or Pop would run silently alongside me, knowing that my runs were not time for conversation. And if they didn’t, they would always be waiting for me on the front porch when I got home, glass of water in hand, and ready with a hug if I needed it. They always seemed to know what I needed. They still do. If I couldn’t have my parents, I was lucky to be blessed with the greatest grandparents in the world.
As if on cue, my phone beeps. I stop running to pull it out of my shorts pocket and check the message.
Mimi
Ready for the big date tonight Emma love?
I groan at the reminder of why I’m out on the trail at six-thirty on a Saturday morning when I’m usually an evening run kind of girl.
The whole thing started off innocently enough. I was at a fundraiser last week for an organization I represent in my practice. For me, social events are the worst kind of hell, but the executive director is a friend of Mimi’s, and when she invited me to the fundraiser, I couldn’t say no. I was doing my best to blend in with the wall, my signature move at parties, when a guy came up and asked me to dance. Normally I would say no, but he was tall and had the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen, and this messy brown hair. He was hot in a preppy, clean-cut kind of way, and I haven’t had sex in forever. The way he was moving on the dance floor made me think he would be really good at it and, well, I’m human. The next thing I knew, he was asking me out and I think all the hotness made me stupid because I said yes. I never date, and the anxiety over this one woke me up before sunrise and had me lacing up my running shoes.
Me
You’re kidding right?
Mimi
I would never kid about potential great-grandchildren.
