Getting Married Read Free Page A

vein of, “What, you think she’s prettier than me? You want to fuck her?” Then comes the hours-long protest that no, no, of course he isn’t attracted to the twenty-two-year-old brunette with enormous breasts.

    A fresh wave of hate for X washes over me. Yes, she’d also trained him to put the toilet seat down and put the cap back on the toothpaste and having him house-trained is undeniably convenient, but the fact that she taught him not to look at other women meant she’d also had jealous feelings about him, and I do not want any more common bonds with this woman than I already have.

    Will squeezes my hand, then drapes the arm closest to me across my shoulders. I love how snuggly he is, always holding my hand and giving me hugs.

    There’s a lot more I like about him, naturally. Sixteen years of dating the wrong guys makes me appreciate all the good things about Will. He’s nothing, for example, like my ex, Rick. Rick and I were together nearly three years. Rick was painfully tightfisted with money, so even though at the time we were together he made a great salary and I made no money since I was in school getting my MBA, he made us split everything fifty-fifty. He would gripe endlessly every time he had to spend money on anything—the unfairness of having to spend twelve dollars to get a haircut, the price of gas, the cost of cereal. He was an obsessive bargain-hunter, constantly talking about things like how we could save eleven cents or something ridiculous by switching phone plans. Personally, I’ll gladly fork over a few extra bucks if it means not constantly doing research and paperwork on phone plans and rebates and comparing one can of soup to another. My time is more important to me than money.

    Will, unlike Rick, is incredibly generous. He tips well, he purchases things based on quality and not whether he can save six cents, and he’ll take me out to a nice meal without telling me the entire time how it’s wrecking his budget to do so. Early on in our relationship we were at a bar with friends and the waitress brought our check and he reached for his wallet. “But you got dinner and drinks last time,” I said.

    “Eva, no one’s keeping track.”

    I felt so freed when he said that. A cloud lifting and all that. Instantly I felt I could exhale and relax. After constantly having to pay attention to who had paid for dinner last time and who got the movie tickets last, it was absolutely liberating not to have to keep score.

    Also, Will is thoughtful. I’m allergic to nuts, and whenever we go out to eat, he asks if the dish is prepared with any nuts in it. He tells his friends who invite us over for dinner to cook something without nuts and to be careful of the sneaky places nuts can pop up, such as in things like salad dressing and snack foods and even root beer. I love how he looks out for me.

    Thinking about how lucky I am to have found Will puts a smile on my face again, temporarily averting my earlier self-esteem crisis. I look into his eyes and we exchange one of those dopey smiling-deliriously sort of gazes that people who are in the first stages of love are wont to do.

    We just can’t help ourselves.

Chapter 2

    T he next morning I head over to see my friend Rachel at her shop. Rachel owns her own secondhand clothing store in Highlands, a cute neighborhood in northern Denver. Her shop, Recycled Chic, is in the downtown area, sandwiched in between restaurants, coffee shops, a bakery, a couple of pubs, a bookstore, and some artsy shops selling the work of local artists and jewelry makers.
    I really love Rach. We met two years ago at a meeting of the Denver branch of Women Entrepreneurs Incorporated. We were sitting next to each other at a table, waiting for the keynote speaker to go on, and I asked her about how she got started with her business.

    Rachel told me that she was the mother of two kids and she launched her store because she had wanted a job where she could be more in control