Next Year, for Sure Read online

  CHAPTER 17

  Feelings

  CONFUSED

  Confused at first, when Kathryn is there waiting for him at baggage claim, smiling and jumpy-eyed, saying she has slept with someone. Confused that it is Moss—weird, silent, brooding Moss—that she has slept with, is sleeping with. Confused about the timeline. Confused about how it’s possible that Chris could’ve phoned every day, spoken to Kathryn every single day, and yet somehow there wasn’t time between Kathryn realizing she might like to sleep with Moss, and Kathryn actually sleeping with Moss, to say to Chris, Hey, I might want to sleep with Moss.

  JEALOUS

  He does catch glimpses of jealousy. He sees its tail slithering around corners. When Kathryn tells him the whole story—they’re home by this point, in bed, still dressed, and holding each other—there are moments in the telling when Chris knows that they are not alone in the room, that two people are never alone in a room, that there is always some other thing there with them, ugly and pitiless and waiting.

  NOT JEALOUS

  It surprises him how not jealous he is. Once he is sure that he has heard everything Kathryn has to tell, once he no longer has to steel himself for what might be coming, it turns out Chris is fine with everything.

  Kathryn is suspicious of this. She pokes at it. First because she doesn’t believe him and later because what does it mean that he isn’t jealous? Isn’t he scared of losing her? She had been scared of losing him.

  But Chris isn’t scared, not right now. Should I be? he asks, which exasperates Kathryn.

  THE OPPOSITE OF JEALOUS

  That’s what it is. It isn’t the absence of jealousy, it’s the opposite of jealousy. It’s some kind of joy. Because Chris can’t remember the last time he saw Kathryn this excited about anything. He can’t remember the last time she told him a story in such detail and with so many tangents and footnotes and curlicues. There is something bouncing around inside her and it’s making something inside Chris bounce around, too.

  I don’t get that, Kathryn says.

  It’s like falling in love sideways, he says.

  RELIEVED

  He wants everyone to know. Kathryn is already asleep beside him, but he wants her to wake up and tell everyone right now. He wants Sharon to know that it is Kathryn who can’t keep it in her pants, not him, so ha! He wants his mom to hear the way Kathryn talks about Moss, to hear how giddy and almost stupid with happiness she is. He wants Cynthia Welland to wake up somewhere in the middle of the night and know that Chris is not an asshole. No one is an asshole for falling in love.

  WEIRD

  It’s weird to wake up to Kathryn writing in her journal, weird that she doesn’t put it down when Chris snuggles up against her. He hasn’t seen her touch this journal in years. It’s weird that when Chris gets out of bed, the heat is already on. Kathryn normally makes him get up and do that, will beg and cajole, but this morning it feels like it’s been on for hours. The apartment is uncommonly warm, as if the world has shifted on its axis.

  WEIRD

  It’s weird to call Emily in San Francisco and tell her the news and have her not find it weird at all. Emily finds it sweet and delightful and wants him to put Kathryn on the line. It’s weird to hand over the phone and not get it back.

  WEIRD

  It’s weird to go to dinner with Kathryn and Moss because Moss is weird. Chris had only imagined Kathryn with someone like himself, someone he could relate to, connect with. You can’t connect with Moss. He’s like a mountain.

  Kathryn says he’s not always like that, that he opens up when it’s just the two of them, that he giggles. Knowing that only makes it worse.

  SWEET

  It is kind of sweet, the way Moss watches her. The way he empties his water glass into hers when hers runs out. The way he blushes behind his beard when she teases him. The way he shakes both their hands at the end of the night, awkwardly, sincerely. He is a good guy, just weird.

  OKAY

  Yeah, it’s mostly okay the first time Kathryn stays over at Moss’s. Chris reads two hundred pages of a book he’s been meaning to get to and falls asleep at nine. And when Kathryn calls the next morning and says Moss made breakfast and does Chris want to come over, that’s okay too.

  Chris wonders as he walks up the steps of Ahimsa why it should be so okay. He wasn’t this okay when Emily was in Los Angeles. But he never worries that Kathryn will disappear on him. Because he and Kathryn are a team.

  FEBRUARY

  CHAPTER 18

  The Wedding

  Sharon is mad at Kathryn, maybe for the last time. The ceremony starts in forty-five minutes and they are both counting down the hours left in this friendship.

  Kathryn honestly wasn’t trying to make Sharon mad. In fact, Kathryn had spent weeks preparing to be the good best friend, building up love in her heart, deliberately, methodically, piece by piece, like a ship in a bottle. But Sharon is pissed.

  The supposedly horrible thing Kathryn has done is bring a date to the wedding. Specifically, she brought Moss. She also brought Emily, though Kathryn is content to let Sharon believe that it was Chris who invited Emily. Sharon is mad about that, too. Kathryn isn’t sure what the big deal is.

  Because it’s a fucking wedding, Sharon says, though this does not clarify anything for Kathryn. People do bring dates to weddings, Kathryn thinks. It said so right on her invitation.

  But how does it look, Sharon says, what does it say, when my maid of honour parades in with her entire free-love harem?

  This strikes Kathryn as funny, the parading. In reality, Moss and Emily and Chris will sit quietly in a room of two hundred people and eat lasagna.

  No one even knows, says Kathryn, about all that.

  They know, Sharon says, and she gestures to the other bridesmaids—Maura and Leslie and Lori and Ann-Marie—who are pretending to be occupied on the other side of the room. Occasionally, Ann-Marie sidles over with a bottle of Chardonnay and waves it over Sharon and Kathryn’s glasses, but neither Sharon nor Kathryn have touched their wine. Kathryn wonders if Sharon is pregnant already. Kathryn herself has vowed not to drink until her official duties are over, because she’s trying to be good.

  —

  Sharon is saying something now about Kathryn rubbing people’s faces in it, but Kathryn is finding it hard to follow the argument. She keeps leaving her body.

  Five years from now, Sharon will have friends that go with her cream carpets, and Kathryn will be a hilarious story that Sharon tells about her wedding—the thoughtless best friend who decided to stage some kind of sex orgy in the middle of Sharon’s special day.

  Sharon will tell this story not too often, but often enough that her friends will have favourite lines and will, as these lines approach, make a show of biting their fingers in anticipation or covering their eyes.

  Kathryn could tell her own version, certainly, in which it is Sharon who is the bad friend and Kathryn the long-suffering hero. She wouldn’t have to embellish a thing. But Kathryn will never tell this story to anyone, because no matter how blameless Kathryn made herself in the telling, no matter how insufferable Sharon was shown to be, in the end it would still be the story of Kathryn being thrown away by her best friend. Anyone listening to the story would know that Kathryn had had a best friend once, and had been judged not worth holding on to. And the person listening would never be able to forget that about Kathryn. She’d be forever tainted in their eyes. So Kathryn won’t tell.

  —

  You just don’t invite extra people to someone else’s wedding, Sharon is concluding. And Kathryn gets that. She is ready to apologize for that. In Kathryn’s mind, though, she wasn’t inviting Moss and Emily to Sharon’s wedding, she was inviting them to her own birthday. She wanted, on this day, to be with people who love her. Kathryn doesn’t include this detail in her apology. She doesn’t want to rub it in Sharon’s face. Also, she wants to see if Sharon will remember on her own. There are still ten hours until midnight.

  —
>
  The ceremony is long and strangely religious. Jesus comes up a lot; more than you might expect from a justice of the peace. Kathryn can’t tell if this is something Sharon and Kyle agreed to, or if it is being sprung on them. Kathryn has never heard either Sharon or Kyle mention Jesus, but you never know what couples talk about when you’re not there.

  Kathryn sneaks occasional glances to where Chris and Moss and Emily are standing. Chris and Emily are holding hands, and admittedly, Kathryn could do without that right now, but it fortifies her to see the three of them there, her people. Moss looks like a tree whose roots go down for a mile. Emily waves, discreetly, with her free hand.

  —

  The vows that Sharon and Kyle have written are vague and unactionable. I will love you forever. I will always be there for you. Kathryn isn’t sure what forever means in Sharon’s mouth.

  Sharon and Kathryn used to make these agreements. Sharon would say, Promise when we’re old ladies in the nursing home, we’ll still listen to Love Cats at least once a day. Or, Promise me if my hair falls out when I’m ninety, that we’ll both get fun wigs so I don’t have to be the only one. Kathryn had agreed to wear fun wigs and to never learn to crochet, and in doing so thought they had agreed to much more.

  —

  After the vows, there are photos to be taken. Kathryn is sometimes in the picture, other times not. She stands where she is told, while the hired photographer shuffles people in and out of the frame.

  Moss and Chris and Emily have been herded off to the reception and probably have wine. Kathryn would like to hold a glass of wine, even if she couldn’t drink it. Holding it would give her a sense of purpose.

  From the sidelines, Kathryn watches people pose. She watches Sharon, in one shot, rest her hand briefly on her stomach, and Kathryn knows that five years from now Sharon will sit on the floor with her little girl and say, You were inside me at Mommy and Daddy’s wedding, hiding in my belly, and nobody knew you were there but me, not even Daddy.

  And when the child puts a jammy finger on Kathryn’s face and asks who is Mommy hugging, Sharon will say, Oh, you don’t know her (though Kathryn realizes that kids don’t really ask about people in old photos, because kids don’t care).

  Kathryn is called forward to pose with the best man. There is this obsession at weddings with symmetry, with pairing, like they all are boarding an ark. The best man is Kyle’s older brother, Carl, just in from Ottawa.

  We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Carl says.

  Kathryn only met him an hour ago when he walked her down the aisle, and already he wants out.

  —

  The bridal party has to eat on stage, in front of everybody, like a chorus line. It makes each mouthful a performance.

  Every few minutes, some keener in the crowd will tap tap tap their flatware against a wine glass, and then other people will join in, until Sharon and Kyle have to stop eating and kiss. People whoop and clap approvingly. Kathryn watches one man instigate this three separate times. He can’t get enough, this guy.

  From the stage, Kathryn can see Chris and Emily and Moss sitting at a table in the back where the seating is not assigned. Back there, they are still waiting to be called to the buffet. Emily appears to be telling a story with her hands. Kathryn leans forward. She would like to hear that story.

  —

  Is that the girl? says Maura, beside her. Maura is the only bridesmaid who is still speaking to Kathryn, for better or for worse.

  It must be so hard, Maura goes on. I could never do it.

  Yes, you’ve said that, Kathryn says. It annoys Kathryn that this near stranger keeps volunteering her own inability, like it is a point of pride.

  I just couldn’t is all.

  Could you drink your own urine? Kathryn says.

  Maura looks at her with concern.

  If you were dying of thirst, Kathryn says, alone on a life raft, would you drink your own pee to survive?

  Is that what you’re supposed to do? Maura says.

  But Kathryn isn’t sure it’s what you’re supposed to do.

  —

  What Kathryn would like is to stand up and walk away. And then she does. She scoots back her chair, places her napkin carefully on the seat, and steps away, discreetly, purposefully, as if there were some bridesmaidenly duty that required her attention elsewhere.

  Her people receive her with quiet cheering and hugs. Chris and Emily and Moss. They have all taken to calling her Kathryn the Amazing. They are all not drinking.

  We drink when you drink, Emily says, and Chris hitches up the tablecloth and shows Kathryn the four bottles of wine they have secreted away.

  —

  When their table is finally called to the buffet, Kathryn is left behind. She watches the three of them make their way through the line, choosing, discussing, considering. She has never felt this much love at a wedding.

  Kathryn is struck by a sudden urge to make vows. What promises could she make to these three people right now?

  All she can come up with is I will love you forever, which is barely a promise at all.

  —

  Moss brings back enough food for two, and extra cutlery. Kathryn didn’t know how hungry she was until he handed her a fork. The food on stage was prop food, ineffectual like a rubber knife or breakaway bottle.

  They take turns telling stories about the worst wedding they’ve ever been to. One had a fist fight.

  Worst one I’ve been to was mine, Moss says, and they spend twenty minutes trying to get that out of him.

  Kathryn keeps glancing up at the head table and her empty chair. They’re still eating up there, making slow progress with the incessant clinking of glasses and Sharon and Kyle having to stop what they’re doing and kiss like gladiators.

  I should probably get back up there, Kathryn says. She’s already been gone too long. Some internal alarm clock is going off in her stomach.

  Oh, wait until Chris gets back, Emily says. Chris has disappeared somewhere. Kathryn looks again at the head table, trying to discern whether Sharon has even noticed her absence. Maybe it’s true about your wedding day, that you’re barely there at all, circuits overloaded, unable to take in anything.

  —

  When Chris comes back, he is carrying a cake and the cake says Happy Birthday. How they got a cake here, Kathryn does not know. The four of them rode here together, smashed into the cab of Moss’s pickup truck. It was a two-hour drive, and there was no cake.

  It’s carrot cake, too, which is the best cake, and with cream cheese frosting. Now Chris and Emily and Moss are whisper-singing Happy Birthday, and then the neighbouring table joins in, and by the time they get to the dear Kathryn part, half the room is singing and craning around to see who to fit into the blank. There’s applause, and someone starts clinking their glass, and then others clink along.

  Kathryn feels the soft press of four hundred eyeballs. She’s supposed to kiss someone.

  The clinking grows louder, more insistent, like a thousand glass bells about to break. She’s supposed to kiss someone, so she kisses Chris and Moss and Emily, each once on the cheek, and the room explodes with glee.

  This probably counts as rubbing it in people’s faces, Kathryn thinks.

  —

  A microphone appears on the stage and is tapped and blown into. The best man, Carl, will give the first toast, then Kathryn, and after that Kathryn has no idea. Her duties end the moment she raises that glass.

  Carl’s toast begins before Kyle is born and takes its time getting to the present day. Kathryn sneaks back on stage around puberty, which apparently hit Kyle hard. Sharon doesn’t acknowledge Kathryn’s return, but that’s fine. Kathryn brought cake.

  Carl goes on. He talks like he has been waiting his entire life to deliver this speech, and maybe he has. It strikes Kathryn now what it must be like to have someone in your life who has been around since your first words, your first haircut. The closest thing Kathryn has is Chris, who’s only known Kathryn since she
became this version of herself.

  —

  Kathryn’s toast is a smash. She sticks closely to the early material, all the hits—Sharon and Kathryn meeting each other on the first day of grad school only to discover that the first day of grad school was actually tomorrow; and then Sharon and Kathryn missing the first day of grad school because they had stayed up all night talking about how excited they were about grad school. It’s a good story, even if it’s not entirely true.

  Kathryn also tells the mostly true story of how Sharon and Kyle fell in love, in which Kathryn played a key role. Kathryn’s role was saying, What about Kyle?, over and over for months until Sharon noticed Kyle. What about Kyle, What about Kyle, What about Kyle, Kathryn intones into the microphone. Kyle gives Kathryn a thumbs-up, and this gets a big laugh.

  There are other toasts Kathryn could give—toasts that would sound loving and affection-filled to anyone listening, while driving long needles into Sharon’s organs. Kathryn has already given those toasts to Chris and Moss and Emily. All the way here, Kathryn gave those toasts and then shot them into the fiery heart of the sun.

  That was Emily’s idea. Every time Kathryn would finish a venomous toast, Emily would roll down the window and say, That was perfect. Now shoot it into the fiery heart of the sun.

  So in the end, all that’s left for Kathryn to do is raise her glass and say: To best friends.