Ruby Read Free

married, she was already disappointed.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “So just because you tend to be bossy and domineering—”
    “Excuse me?” Olivia said.
    “And also fly off the handle over the stupidest things—”
    “Like being called bossy and domineering, Mr. Disorganized? Mister Can’t Make Up His Mind? ‘I don’t know if I want the Bay Burrito or the Enchilada Embarcadero? I can’t decide. They’re both good, but I’ve been eating a lot of poultry lately—’”
    “My point is, we should just get married now.”
    Had that been in my brain waves? Olivia thought. She blinked hard and shook her head from side to side.
    “This,” David said, satisfied, “is our height.”
    “And to think all you wanted was a hat,” Olivia said as they waited in line at City Hall to get married.
    “What ever happened to her?” Winnie asked. She was one of the witnesses.
    Olivia felt very cranky. She and David had had an argument in the cab on the way down here and Winnie was wearing brown. “It’s the new black,” Winnie had explained. Being an editor at the women’s magazine You! made her say things like that all the time. “No,” Olivia had told her, “it’s brown.” Some wedding day, Olivia kept saying to herself.
    “What was her name?” Winnie was saying. “The doctor.”
    “Rachel,” David said.
    “Yes. Rachel. What ever happened to her?”
    This was what the fight had been about. After so many years together—seventeen gross, nine net, David liked to say—he thought he should track her down in goddamn Central America to tell her that he was getting married. Rachel, for an ex-girlfriend, was a pain in the ass. Josh, who only lived across town, stayed out of their lives. But Rachel sent them a clever computer-made change-of-address card with her head back in San Francisco and her feet lifting up and out of New York, the whole country in between strewn with clever images of her things: a stethoscope, a Jack Russell terrier, various plants. Even a Stickley chair.
    “What do you want to know?” Olivia said, hearing the snap in her voice. “She keeps us posted, constantly.”
    David looked pained, and Olivia found herself wondering if they were going to call the wedding off, right here in the line. Imagining it, she realized how much she wanted to go through with it. She was meant to marry David. It was that simple. The thought of packing up Arthur and moving him back to that little apartment, of living out the rest of her life without David, was so terrible that she actually gasped.
    “What?” David said.
    “God,” Olivia said. “I want to marry you.”
    “I want to marry you, too,” he said, laughing.
    “I hope so,” Winnie said. “I went all the way to midtown to borrow this dress from You! Brown is this year’s black, you know,” Winnie said, for what seemed like the hundredth time.
    “So I’ve heard,” Olivia said.
    Winnie could always be counted on for information like that. Of course, she could be counted on for scores of other things, too: sample shoes in exactly Olivia’s size (ten) and give-away moisturizer and shampoo and books in galley form. She could be counted on to come with you in the middle of the night to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet all the way on the Upper East Side when your cat got mysteriously sick. She could be counted on to move your stuff across town when you moved in with your boyfriend, whom you hardly knew. She could be counted on to tell you that you were crazy to move in with him so soon; that clearly the two of you were crazy for each other; that you should, every now and then, throw caution to the wind. She could be counted on to show up at a moment’s notice with a bouquet from the deli, a love poem, and even something blue—lapis earrings that had been her grandmother’s. Which made them old, borrowed, and blue, Winnie had pointed out.
    She could be counted on for everything, Olivia knew.
    “I don’t care what you say,” Olivia said, softening.