Chapter 8
EIGHT
Jed calls you. He calls you when you are editing at home at the kitchen table, which you promised Nora you wouldn’t do, when weekends aren’t for working, but she’s out shopping for a wedding dress with Bren so what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.
You’ll do other things too, before she’s home, things that are still work but of an acceptable Saturday kind: hoover the hallway, wash the bedding, clean the gutters, even, if you have time, after the mulch of winter has you both lamenting how, every time it rains, it ends up flooding the yard.
Robin, it’s Jed, he says when you answer, and you say it’s nice to hear from him and he says you bet it is; we’ve had a cancellation, already.
A light goes on, inside you. Already? you repeat, leaning back in your chair then standing up, instead, going to the window.
For the twenty-second of April, Jed says, if you want it.
We want it, you say. Details, then. This, that, yes, you’ll pay the deposit right now, and course, you’ll firm up the guest list, the bridal party – you’ll be in touch! Wow! And you trust, well, you hope everything’s okay with the other couple.
Jed pauses, says ah, well. Broken engagement, this one. It happens.
Oh, you say. That’s a – a real shame.
Sometimes it’s not meant to be, Jed says, and you nod, feel momentarily terrible that your mood isn’t dimmed by this news, but then again, maybe he’s right; maybe those people, whoever they are, will go on to find what is meant for them, instead; you trust in that, always have.
You thank Jed, promise again to make payment, smiling so much once he ends the call that you feel almost drunk; look it, too, when you catch sight of yourself in the kitchen window.
Laughing, then. Scrolling to speed dial.
Not for Nora: she’ll be in the dress shop, right about now, and you don’t want to interrupt.
S’up, your brother says, picking up just before his voicemail kicks in.
S’up, bro, you say back: a greeting the pair of you traded in irony, for years, because you were the last two people on earth who’d say such a thing. We’ve got a wedding date! you tell him. Write it down, please, before you forget.
Kay, Goose says, and you say are you doing it?
I’m in the middle of a boss fight, Robman, Goose says. I am literal moments away from beating this dude, after weeks of trying. I am not getting up to get a pen.
And yet you answered the phone?
You never call on Saturdays. I figured there was an emergency.
Oddly touched, you tell him to call back, which he does, ten minutes later; ten minutes of jotting things down in your notebook, ideas bouncing around like ping-pong balls.
You are just scribbling something else when Goose appears on your phone, a photo of you and him in a bumper car, and then he’s saying okay, when is it, what do you need.
Did you beat the boss? Obviously he did, what do you take him for.
Take advantage of his good mood, he advises you, and so you do; talk logistics immediately, how you’ll get your parents to the venue, your grandma, too, who hates any form of public transport, any food that isn’t packet ham, any outfit that isn’t her tattered lilac cardigan.
Leave it with him. He’ll pack the ham. Tempt her out with a sherry, buy her an untattered lilac blazer, perhaps.
He is a good guy, your little brother. Blatantly uninterested in weddings like most men (aside from yourself) and stepping up all the same because he senses it’s important.
You spend ten minutes rattling through your ideas, the surprises you want to keep under wraps, and then he says so you’re not going to tell her the biggest surprise of all?
You go quiet, that light in you fading, for the first time since Jed’s call.
I wasn’t planning to, you say. Do you think I should?
I don’t think anything, Goose says. I’m just covering my bases.
You’re such a lawyer, you say, and he says he doesn’t want to put his foot in it, that’s all. Or maybe he does. Maybe it’s good fodder for his speech.
Unease in you, then, but he says I’m kidding, Robin, chill. It might just hurt her ego, a little bit, if it comes out later down the line.
The word ego stirs something in you, and you remember a personality test that did the rounds at art school.
Picture a room. In that room is a cube. Describe that cube.
Yours, sort of standard sized, like the box you’d use for jump squats at the gym, Nora’s small as a sugar cube, Shay’s so big it filled the room.
That represents the size of your ego, you were told, and you’d all cracked up, amazed at the accuracy.
You reckon? you say, but Goose says hey, you know her better than I do. You’re just always straight with her, usually, so why keep it a secret?
Why, indeed. The question hangs heavy in your chest as you hang up and pay the deposit, shoot Jed an email to say it’s done, can he confirm receipt as and when, cheers, exciting!
Unease transferring to panic, just briefly, as you close your laptop, because maybe you should have checked with Nora first. But you’re sure it’ll be fine.
You’d agreed to be spontaneous, after all.
It’ll be a surprise. Like when you first asked her out for a coffee and she said make it a croissant and you’ve got yourself a deal.
Unexpected, you’d thought, and irresistible. The start of something good.
And there have been many more surprises like that, since. Your shared love of animation and show tunes and hot, drinkable Marmite.
The launch of her art café, which left so little in your joint bank account you couldn’t afford champagne, to celebrate; instead bought her a bottle of Shloer, astonished at how good it tasted, of pipe dreams turned sparkling success.
Because, against the odds, that dream turned a profit two years later: real champagne then, shared with Shay, all three of you drinking it out of plastic cups on the shop floor, thrilled and tipsy and triumphant.
Surprise gifts, too, like oil paintings or embroidered socks. Surprise special dinners simply because it was a Thursday and more recently, you think, as you tidy your laptop cable away, something that surprised you, as much as her.
The biggest surprise of all, Goose had called it.
Which worries you, more than this impulsive wedding date you’ve just booked, as you check your watch, knowing she’ll be out of the dress shop by now.
It was innocent, though. This thing you have not told her. Which is not what you’d lead with, if you did tell her, because that suggests that it’s not, so you’d just have to launch straight in. Tell the whole story.
Tell her you were doing your client a favour one day for his antiques store; Myke with a Y, remember?
Anyway, he’d acquired this vintage ring he’d asked you to collect on your lunch break because you’d be passing by the auction house – course, sure thing.
Happy to. So you took the paperwork and had a chat with the man at the desk who checked it over then handed it to you in a leather box, which you put in your pocket to take back to the shoot.
And you texted Nora because her café was nearby.
You bought her a bagel, she bought you one back, and you had a glorious half-hour by the water and the memory is so vivid it’s like you’re back there as you kiss her goodbye.
As she warms her hands in your coat pockets, pulls the ring out and looks at it as though you’d meant it to be hers.
You see it all cross her face, like this memory, now, crossing your mind.
The surprise – that word, again, that feeling, that fork in the road – and her stunned, slow-dawning comprehension.
You see the crease at the bridge of her nose and then you see the joy, the unbroken wash of it as she looks up and says yes when you didn’t even ask the question; had agreed you never would, because she didn’t want that, and all you wanted was her, ring or no ring, so it had never occurred to you to argue.
But all of a sudden it seemed like she did want it, and who were you to take that away?
Who were you to say, you’ve got this all wrong, because actually, she’d got it right, as ever.
And it seemed so obvious as you stood there with that centuries-old ring that you’d need to buy off your client now, but he’d love the story, would see it as a romantic blunder come good, turned life-changingly charmed, you’d figure it out, somehow, seeing as she’d answered three times, yes yes yes, to a question you’d wanted to ask but hadn’t.
So you did not let it go.
You took it, and ran with it, and now you’re getting married. Soon, now that there’s been a cancellation. Now that the twenty-second of April, your wedding day, is only six weeks from now, which you’ll text her, right now, surprise.
Mad, how these things happen.
What life throws at you. If you’re ready to catch it, and run.