Chapter 11
THE CARD FROM NATE happened to arrive in the mail the same afternoon Julia started bleeding.
She had just picked up Veronica from her morning at preschool, stopped at the mailbox at the bottom of the driveway, and noted the cream-colored envelope with Nate’s return address on top.
But right after she started unhooking Veronica from her car seat, she felt the trickle of something warm against her inner thigh.
And then the sudden sensation of a menstrual cramp she definitely should not have been having.
“Ronnie, sweetie, can you put the mail on the kitchen desk? Then go wash your hands for Mommy?” Julia tried to keep her voice even as she planted a soft kiss on Veronica’s forehead, finished unbuckling the straps, helped Veronica hop out of the back seat of her Lexus SUV, and then handed her the pile of mail.
After Ted had brought up having another kid, she’d found herself wistful, thinking about her own childhood.
She’d gone off the pill, and they weren’t really not trying for a while.
But months passed and then Julia read every book on fertility she could find, working diligently to time sex with her exact ovulation window, month after month.
It had taken almost another year of real trying, but here in the beginning of May, she was nine weeks pregnant.
Then she felt it again, the warm, sticky trickle, and she ran toward the bathroom.
She lowered her jeans, sat down on the toilet, and there was a jarring bright red splash of blood in the toilet water.
She knew instantly, this wasn’t right. This had never happened to her when she’d been pregnant with Veronica.
In that moment, all the hope of so many months of trying, of a sister for Veronica, left her body, and she suddenly felt chilled. The so-far easy pregnancy that lacked the morning sickness of her last had always felt too good to be true. Maybe it was.
And Julia forgot all about the cream-colored envelope she had seen on the top of the pile of mail with Nate’s return address.
Nora found the card in a large cardboard box that her roommate, Kim, had stuffed full of mail and sat waiting outside her bedroom when she finally made it home to Brooklyn after six weeks out on the road.
After Beauty and the Beast had ended, she’d joined the national tour of Hairspray.
She’d spent a good part of the last year traveling with the show as a member of the ensemble and understudy for Amber Von Tussle.
And now she was making a quick three-day stop home in Brooklyn before she would fly to meet her sisters in Coronado.
She picked up the cream-colored envelope from the top of the pile and noticed the return address on Ocean Boulevard. Nate?
She tore the envelope open and pulled out the photo card—Nate and Becca, standing out on the beach, their arms wrapped around each other, Becca’s red hair blowing sideways from the wind.
The sky was cerulean, and the sun was an orange ball, just about to drop behind the horizon.
Save the Date, it read just below that. We’re getting married! Five is our lucky number: 5-5-5.
Well, that would be adorable if it didn’t suddenly hit her in the gut with a small wave of nausea. Nate, who had always strangely been theirs, the keeper of the Trouble Trio. He was going to be Becca’s starting next May. Till death do they part?
She stuffed the card back into the envelope now, sighed, and fell back into her bed. Then, for the first time in weeks, she thought about Leo.
They hadn’t exactly broken up before she went out on the road on this latest tour, but they hadn’t been keeping in touch either.
His wife, it turned out, was pregnant, so not only had they stayed married all this time, but that bit of news had made it abundantly clear to Nora that Leo and his wife weren’t any closer to getting a divorce.
I’ll call you, Nora had told him the night before she left for Hairspray, after a goodbye drink at Playwright, and months later, she still hadn’t reached out. Although he knew her number and hadn’t called her either.
She picked up her cell phone now and thought about it. She was in the city for three days. They could meet for a drink later, reconnect. But instead, she found herself dialing Julia’s number.
“Nora?” Julia answered without a hello, and her voice sounded strange, timid, underwater. But maybe it was just a bad connection.
“Five is their lucky number,” Nora said. “I mean, give me a break, right?”
“What are you talking about?” Julia’s voice sounded oddly strained.
“Nate’s Save the Date card. I just got back from my tour, and I’m going through all my mail.”
“Oh,” Julia said. “Right, I think maybe I did get that. I haven’t…
opened it yet.” Why hadn’t she opened her mail?
Julia was the type to immediately open every envelope, file the important things, and shred the rest. Was it possible Nate hadn’t sent it to her?
They had dated a million years ago, but he and Julia now seemed to have an easy enough relationship managing the details of the rental.
“Are you okay?” Nora asked her.
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be? Ronnie, get down from there! Mommy’s on the phone and you’re going to fall. Sorry, we’re at the park,” she said.
“Oh, I’m bothering you,” Nora said. Nora remembered the last time they’d spoken on the phone, back in early March when she was trying to discuss the ridiculousness of Nipplegate with Julia, and Veronica had suddenly grabbed the phone and shouted: What’s a nipplegate?
Julia had not been happy with her, and now Nora felt like she was interrupting.
“No, no, you’re not bothering me,” Julia said, sounding somewhat disingenuous. “How’s the show? Ronnie, I said get down! I’m sorry, Nora, can I call you back later?”
“Yeah, of course,” Nora said. “Or… I’ll just see you on Sunday in Coronado.”
“Email me your flight,” Julia said before hanging up.
Nora considered for a moment calling Emily, but Emily probably wouldn’t care about the Save the Date. She might even, annoyingly, be happy for them.
Instead, Nora found herself dialing Leo’s number.
In fact, Emily didn’t know about Nate’s upcoming wedding.
She was the only one of the Trouble Trio who hadn’t gotten a Save the Date card in the mail.
Which, to be fair, was not Nate’s fault.
She’d moved to Florida to start graduate school last fall, and she had either subconsciously or intentionally or just out of a lack of interest never figured out how to forward her mail.
For one thing, she never got any mail of importance, and for another, in a way, it felt like a giant fuck-you to Cara.
If she could disappear, just like that, well, Emily could too.
Of course, Emily would be easy enough to find in Florida and had kept the same cell phone number. But still.
Seeing Nora finally start to achieve her dream onstage last year had inspired her to quit her job at the bank and find something better to do with her own life.
Then she had applied and gotten accepted into the museology master’s program at the University of Florida on a whim after randomly catching an episode of CSI: Miami.
Florida felt like it would be a different world—everything that Boston was not: lush and tropical and warm and fifteen hundred miles away from the temptation of walking by Cara’s apartment on Beacon Street.
She could not work at Fleet Bank forever (unless she wanted to literally die of boredom), and a master’s degree might finally help her get that elusive job at a museum.
In reality, though, Florida was more swamp than beach.
Emily’s hair seemed to have puffed out three times its size and her ankles had been covered in mosquito bites for months.
At first, she weirdly missed the cold, the white of snow, the bright red scarf she used to wear walking to the bank each morning in Boston.
But by the spring she had become more accustomed to the sight of towering palms, spraying down with bug spray before she left her apartment.
She had chopped off all her hair, dyed it blonde, and found a decent frizz serum.
And she realized she felt vaguely happier being back in school again. Being with other people who loved art and history. Spending her days contemplating things aside from the crisp, boring bills in her teller’s drawer. Learning, studying, memorizing, writing. Thinking.
She would have her master’s degree in two years, just in time to turn thirty, and it occurred to her that maybe she was finally on the path to getting her shit together.
On her flight to San Diego for sisters’ week, she amended her silent promise to Grandma Vera again in her head. She didn’t need to find a person to love, she needed to find a job she loved. And maybe that’s what would finally set her on the course toward being happy.
It had been two years since the May sisters had seen Becca or Nate, but this year, Nate invited the three of them over for dinner on Wednesday night so they could get to know Becca better and toast their engagement.
The invitation came through Emily, who ran into Nate in Vons on Sunday afternoon when she was buying chocolate.
And when she mentioned it casually to her sisters, later that night over s’mores, Nora made a face, and Julia picked up a pen and her schedule and crossed off her original Wednesday night dinner plan—fish tacos at Miguel’s. Then wrote in pen: Nate.