The Engagements (6 page)

Toby raised an eyebrow. “Oh, don’t we?”

After that weekend, a mania took Jeffrey over, as it did all of them, all the brides she had ever known. When she spoke to him about anything other than the wedding, she could tell that she didn’t have his focus. He told her that he lay awake in the middle of the night thinking about whether to have the caterer serve scallops as an hors d’oeuvre during cocktail hour, or whether he ought to jump to the next price level and go with mini lobster rolls. Were they perfectly whimsical or just goofy, and out of place so far from the ocean? He could spend hours consulting old weather charts and the
Farmers’ Almanac
online to try and deduce whether there would be rain. Once, in the middle of a phone call about their sick great-aunt, he had said, “Mason jars are huge right now. Have you noticed?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“People use them for everything at weddings; candles, cocktails, centerpieces. I have to admit I like them. But are they overdone?”

He was stressed all the time. He told her his hair had started falling out, that he woke up some mornings covered in hives. He’d go to his office, but instead of doing any work, he’d find himself manically Googling the wedding photos of strangers, so that he could steal ideas about flowers and lighting. Entire days were lost to TheKnot.com. He became obsessed
with Pinterest, which was basically online wedding porn: pictures of gorgeous tents and tables, golden retrievers in bow ties, freckled ring bearers out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Jeff obsessively read a blog called Near Mrs., about women who had broken off their engagements. He showed her a site called Wedding-Whine—he had started looking there for tips about vendors, but got suck, feminism, an

Good Lord, she needed a cocktail.

The copy read,
A man who is his own man is my love. Strong and proud and sure. And now he’s going to share his life with me. A diamond is forever
.

“I should probably warn you that De Beers is a conservative client,” Frances said. “They have strict ruln in the advertising. Men and women can never be—That is, nothing at all can suggest—touching.”

After leaving Toby and Jeff behind at the inn, Kate wished she had some other errand to run, something to keep her mind off the ring. As it was, there was nothing to do but go home and keep looking.

Back at the house, her brother-in-law Josh stood in the yard throwing a football around with his boy“Thankall">“Yes.” about the s.

“Well?” he said. “How did they take it?”

“I didn’t tell them yet,” she said, a bit annoyed by his curiosity.

Through the screen door, she could hear the sound of Dan singing Marvin Gaye while he washed the breakfast dishes. Her own father had been a great cook when they were growing up. His job had the most flexibility, so he was home with the girls more often than their mother and usually made dinner. Kate did all the cooking in their household now, and Dan took care of the cleaning. They were trying to have an egalitarian partnership, though parenting had made her realize how hard that truly was. When he dressed Ava, Dan might put her in two different colored socks. When he washed her hair, he used about fourteen times more shampoo than seemed necessary.

Still, she could not imagine parenting without him. Kate had a couple of friends in Brooklyn who had decided to have kids on their own, without a mate—one through adoption, the other sperm donation. She herself could never have done it.

She entered the kitchen.

“So?” he said, looking hopeful.

“I didn’t tell them.”

“Okay. Well, that’s good. Gives us more time.”

She shrugged. “I just don’t understand how the ring could be there one minute, and the next it’s gone. You don’t think I subconsciously hid it, do you?”

Dan laughed. “Uhh, no. Did you?”

“No! But you know how I feel about diamonds.”

“Yeah, and for good reason.”

“Thank you.” She lowered her voice. “Do you think one of the kids could have taken it?”

“Olivia?” he said.

“That’s what I was thinking. How are we gonna handle that?”

“If she has it, she’ll probably become riddled with guilt at some point and hand it over.”

“Hope so. Hey, guess how much their rings cost.”

He shrugged.

“Fourteen thousand apiece.”

The look on his face made her more terrified than she had previously let herself be.

“Holy shit. We gotta find that thing.”

“I know.”

Suddenly every napkin and shoelace and jar of Play-Doh seemed like its only purpose might be to obscure the ring. Kate opened the junk drawer, and pulled out old screwdrivers and stamps, a box of paper clips, a few alphabet magnets that had traveled from the fridge.

“You think it’s in there?” Dan said skeptically.

“I don’t know.”

He poured a cup of coffee. “Here, drink this,” he said, kissing her neck as he handed it to her.

“You seem downright chipper compared to the guy I woke up with this morning,” she said.

“Well, I’m happy for them,” Dan said. “I was just thinking that marriage equality may well be the one bright spot in what’s otherwise been a terrible millennium so far.”

“Yeah, I suppose when the last decadebottle of winealgron’s been marked by terrorism, genocide, a depression, a tsunami, hurricanes, earthquakes, war, and torture, marriage does look good in comparison.”

“You forgot to mention the demise of the record store.”

“Oh yeah, that too.”

“Not like the nineties were so great, though,” he said. “Rodney King, Columbine, Waco. The Oklahoma City bombing. O. J. Simpson.”

“Yes. And all of those seem practically quaint compared to this last decade.”

“True. Hey, never let it be said that we’re not one cheery couple.”

She grinned. “Two rays of sunshine.”

The day’s mail sat on the table. She sifted through it—a cell phone bill, a birthday party invitation from one of Ava’s playground friends, and a few junk flyers addressed to Mrs. Daniel Westley. The fact that they weren’t married never stopped anyone from calling her by Dan’s last
name, or referring to him as her husband. For the most part, she didn’t really mind.

The first time Ava got sick as a baby, Kate rushed her to the emergency room in Brooklyn. After she filled out the requisite forms, the woman behind the desk said coldly, “Can I ask what relation you are to the child?”

“I’m her mother.”

“She has two last names,” the woman said. “Our system can’t process that, you’re going to have to pick one.” As if it were 1952. As if scores of married women didn’t keep their maiden names all the time, and hyphenate their children’s.

It pissed her off most of all because things like that weren’t supposed to happen in Brooklyn. She might have expected it in the town where May lived, a place where everyone prided themselves on the sheer throwback of it all; where a little girl whose parents had never married would probably get mocked, and all the women took their husbands’ names, like the feminist movement had never happened.
It was just easier that way
, friends told her. They wanted to be family units, and in a family unit everyone was called the same thing.

She could admit that words were tricky, but that didn’t mean you should dismantle your whole belief system to keep things simple. It was awkward when people struggled to figure out how they ought to refer to Dan. If forced, she’d call him her partner, but to most strangers the word conveyed that she was either a lesbian or a lawyer. She tried not to call him anything—just “Dan.”

She wandered into the living room. May sat on the couch between Ava and Olivia. The girls were watching an episode of
Barney
on TV. May had her laptop turned on, but she was gazing out the window, possibly asleep with her eyes open. She liked to say that she hadn’t slept through the night for the past decade, ever since Leo was born colicky and screaming.

Olivia and Ava each wore a pink plastic tiara with a medallion in the center that featured a different Disney princess. Olivia had a pink tutu on over her pajamas, and Ava wore a pink feather boa draped across her shoulders and hard plastic pink high heels on her bare feet. The shoes in particular, and all that pink in general, made Kate uneasy. She had never seen any of this stuff before. May must have brought it along. No doubt, after they left, Ava would start asking for her own cotton-candy-colored, gender-normative crap.

Kate” P.J. saidalgron wanted this day to be over. She wanted her family to go home and stay there, and just leave the three of them in peace.

“Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I just saw on Facebook that my friend Rachel is pregnant again,” May said.

“Oh.”

“I swear to God, if she names that baby Amelia, I’ll slit her throat.”

Kate glanced at Ava. Her sister’s choice of words seemed a tad violent for Saturday morning public television time. But Ava’s attention was on the screen.

“What do you care?” Kate asked. “You’re not having any more. Are you?”

“Maybe. Two girls and two boys would be nice.”

She knew that it was now fashionable for couples on the Upper East Side to have four, five, six kids. A way of saying,
Look how freaking rich we are! We can afford to raise this many children at once in the most expensive city on earth
. Now apparently the trend had made its way to Jersey.

“Any updates on the ring?” May said.

Kate shook her head.

“Girls, listen to me,” May’s voice grew stern. “If either of you has that ring, you’d better tell us right now, or else.”

Ava looked terrified—they never talked to her like that. (
Or did she look guilty?
Kate considered this.)

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Olivia said dramatically.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Ava repeated. She cast an adoring glance at her cousin, who at the age of five qualified as an older woman, wise in the ways of the world.

On the television screen, Barney and his odd child friends were starting to sing a song about family. She hated the kids on
Barney;
they seemed like miniature cult members, their words overly cheerful and without affect.

How many in your family?
Barney asked his audience, in the exaggerated, enthusiastic tone of a born-again Christian.

“How many?” May asked Olivia, sounding bored.

“Five!” Olivia said. “Ava. How many in your family?”

“Five!” Ava shouted.

Olivia crumpled her face in disappointment. “No. Three, dummy.”

“Olivia!” May snapped. “Language. That’s strike one.”

On the screen, a kid in overalls climbed onto a picnic table and declared with effervescence,
There’s a girl I know who lives with her mom, her dad lives far away. Although she sees her parents just one at a time, they both love her every day!

“Why does she see her pareg up everythin

nts one at a time?” Olivia asked. Then,

“Probably,” May said.

“My friend Lily’s parents are divorced,” Olivia said, sounding almost proud to know something about the topic at hand. “And also Joe and Sarah on our street, but I don’t really like them. e their parents are divorced, just because I don. Can you imagine?”r” Mona said

For Kate, it was a matter of getting drBut not becaus

Frances was up late, stewing. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. Most women her age avoided caffeine after noon, but she had been an insomniac all her life, and she found that it didn’t make a bit of difference whether she drank coffee or not. Either way, she wouldn’t sleep.