Chapter One #2
But the moment had passed, and he swiveled away with a shrug. It wasn’t in his nature to press for more information or overstep boundaries.
The words issued forth in an out-of-body experience. “Cory moved out.”
Macon stilled. His chair swiveled back in my direction.
I twisted my necklace around my fingers again. “It happened over Christmas.”
“What happened over Christmas?”
The question emerged before its speaker, a woman with a round face and round glasses, who turned the corner behind Macon. We both startled. Alyssa had been in the children’s section in the back, replacing a display of winter holiday picture books with one featuring snowmen.
Scrambling for a response that was honest yet withholding, I settled on the beginning of the story. “My sister got engaged.”
Macon’s brows lifted.
“Engaged!” Alyssa predictably lit up. “To the basketball player?”
“Yep,” I said. I glanced at Macon, and his brows settled back down into impassivity. He understood that we were having a different conversation now.
“Thank goodness.” Sue appeared from the annex. “Have we officially stopped working? I’m too distracted to get anything done this afternoon.”
“Did the email arrive?” Elijah asked, wheeling an empty cart behind the desk. He was the page, which meant he reshelved the books. Sue was the branch manager, and Alyssa was the children’s librarian. The five of us comprised the entire staff.
“Not yet,” Macon said. The desired email would come from the director at the main library downtown, and it would give us permission to close early.
“We never get the email until it’s actually snowing,” Sue explained.
“Damn,” Elijah said, removing his earbuds to fully join the conversation.
He listened to nonfiction science books and sci-fi novels while he worked.
He was the youngest employee, only two months shy of his twenty-first birthday.
He knew the policy but was still young and optimistic enough to hope it might have suddenly changed. Like the nameplates.
“Ingrid’s sister got engaged,” Alyssa said.
Sue looked interested. “To the basketball player?”
Everybody was always interested in Jess.
My sister’s fiancée was a shooting guard in the WNBA and a two-time Olympic gold medalist. She had met my sister, Riley, when they were in a COVID bubble together during a shortened WNBA season that the press dubbed “the Wubble.” Riley was one of the nurses who did the daily testing.
“To the basketball player,” I confirmed.
“How tall is she again?” Elijah asked. Everybody always asked.
“Regular tall. Five ten.”
“Who proposed to whom?” Alyssa asked.
“Jess proposed. They’d splurged on a Disney cruise for the holidays”—this got a laugh; everyone enjoyed the fact that my no-nonsense sister and her pro-athlete girlfriend were adorable Disney nerds—“but apparently, Jess was so nervous that she didn’t notice my sister was seasick.
She got down on one knee at the exact moment Riley puked over the side of the ship. ”
The others kept laughing, but Alyssa looked taken aback.
“They thought it was funny, too,” I assured her.
“If Tim had proposed to me while I was throwing up, I would not have said yes.”
“That’s unfair,” Macon said. “Poor Tim.”
I exchanged a glance with Macon, but we both managed to keep our faces straight.
We liked Alyssa despite not having much in common with her.
She was only a year younger than me, but she was a bit naive.
And she could be overly critical, especially of her husband, which was unpleasant.
But Tim had these same qualities, and he was a bore. Alyssa was mostly fun.
“Would you have asked Dani while she was throwing up?” Alyssa asked Macon about his longtime, but notably ex, girlfriend.
Macon’s expression flattened. “There were no circumstances under which I would have proposed.”
“Snow or not,” I said, eyeing Macon as I steered everyone back to a safe topic, “at least the two of you get to leave soon.” I turned my gaze to Sue and Alyssa, who would be off at six o’clock, the usual time.
Tuesday was one of our branch’s late nights, and if the snow didn’t start soon, Macon and I would be there, along with Elijah, until eight.
Sue glanced at the wall clock and sighed. “Not soon enough.”
Unlike Macon, who only acted as if he were two years away from retirement, Sue actually was, a fact that she mentioned on a near-daily basis.
She was always as ready to go home as the rest of us, but her attitude was relaxed and efficient, and she ran our branch the same way.
I admired her and secretly thought of her as a maternal figure—my Ridgetop mom.
It was the main reason I didn’t want to tell her what was going on with Cory and me.
I didn’t want her to worry. And I didn’t want Alyssa’s judgment, and Elijah was too young.
It took ages, but eventually the three of them drifted back to work. The instant we were alone again, Macon pivoted toward me, his brow furrowed with concern. But I shook my head. I didn’t dare resume our conversation until Sue and Alyssa actually left the building.
Cory and I had moved to Ridgetop seven years earlier, the day after we graduated from college.
Born, raised, and educated in Orlando, we’d driven up for a getaway during our senior year, and that first crisp bite of mountain air had tasted more like home than Florida’s sticky humidity ever had.
Although both cities were driven by tourism, Ridgetop was an arts haven that attracted dreamers and wanderers.
Known for effortlessly—some might say mystically—welcoming its new residents, Ridgetop had a way of making you believe that things would work out, and they had for us.
So it made sense that the fateful call had come while we were back in Orlando, just over a week ago, visiting for the holidays.
We were in my parents’ kitchen on Christmas morning, glazing a spiral-sliced ham that neither of us would eat—Cory had a limited diet, and I was mostly vegetarian, though my parents never remembered or maybe kept assuming we’d grown out of it—when the landline rang.
Riley and Jess were docked in Tortola and asked to be put on speakerphone.
When we heard their news, my mother exclaimed with joy and my father chuckled with satisfaction, and then the rest of our day was spent in a frenzy of marveling and speculating, discussing and planning.
It wasn’t until that night, after the tins of homemade cookies had been passed around for dessert, that my parents finally realized how quiet Cory and I had become.
Tension cloaked the sugar-dusted atmosphere.
My parents didn’t ask what was wrong, but they didn’t have to.
They loved Cory and treated him like family.
But they also fervently believed in minding their own business, so the subject of us getting married had crossed their lips only once, after my mother had drunk too many blue margaritas at our graduation party.
Cory’s family, on the other hand, was loud and boisterous and teased us frequently about the subject.
His parents also lived in the suburbs of Orlando, and we always spent half our vacation time with them.
But they were laid-back and had never put any actual pressure on us.
Riley’s happy news was an unexpected blow.
And the more it churned in my mind, the more perturbed I felt.
This was my sister. My baby sister. Who had only been dating her girlfriend for two and a half years.
And, sure, two and a half years was plenty of time to know if you wanted to marry somebody. Except.
Except.
Cory and I had been together for eleven.
We had met during our first week of community college.
The first minute of the first day of our first class , we liked to brag to new acquaintances.
He took the seat beside mine in Psych 101, and because college was an ideal opportunity to take risks, he didn’t wait to ask me out.
I was so startled that I said yes. We had lunch together that same day, then more lunches, then dinners, and it was easy, and it had never been easy for either of us before.
We’d both been unpopular kids, genuinely awkward, lonely and bullied.
Cory had been my first and only boyfriend, just like I was his first and only girlfriend.
But despite our inexperience, our relationship had always been healthy and enviable.
We made each other laugh, rarely fought, had a good sex life.
And although neither of us was interested in having children, it was understood that we would get married someday.
But for whatever murky and uncomfortable reason, we had never discussed when .
Even as our friends hit their late twenties and began marrying around us, we’d shrugged off their nosy inquiries.
We’ll do it when we buy a house , we would answer vaguely.
But we had never discussed doing that either.
I finally summoned the courage to ask him about it a few days after Christmas. During our long and atypically solemn drive home, the question swelled and throbbed and gurgled inside my throat until it became more uncomfortable not to ask.
“Why do you think we’ve never gotten married?”
To his credit, Cory didn’t seem alarmed.
He continued to stare straight ahead at the road before us as if he’d been contemplating the same mystery.
“I don’t know,” he said, although it sounded like he might have an idea.
“Maybe there’s just some part of us that isn’t willing to commit until we’ve experienced something else. ”
The interstate didn’t crack open and swallow me whole. Our life as a couple didn’t flash before my eyes. It was as if he’d said what I’d been thinking, even though the thought had never occurred to me before.
“Some one else,” I said.