Landline

They’d never really danced together before that day. Or since. And, truthfully, they weren’t doing much dancing even then. . . . Neal held Georgie with one hand on the small of her back and one on the back of her neck, and Georgie leaned against him with both hands on his chest, and they swayed from side to side.

It wasn’t dancing. It was just a way to make the wedding last. A way to stay in the moment, rolling it over and over in their heads. We’re married now. We’re married.

You don’t know when you’re twenty-three.

You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten—in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.

She didn’t know at twenty-three.

That day, out on the patio, it just felt like the biggest day of her life so far, not the biggest day of her life from now on. Not the day that would change everything. That would change her, at a cellular level. Like a virus that rewrites your DNA.

That day, that evening, out on the patio . . .

Georgie pretended to dance. She clung to Neal’s shirt. They rubbed their noses together. “You’re my wife,” Neal said, and then he laughed, and she tried to catch his dimples with her teeth. (Like if she caught them, she might get to keep them.)

“Yours,” she said.

Maybe Georgie had gotten a glimpse of it then, the way infinity unspooled from where they were swaying. The way everything she was ever going to be from then on was irrevocably tethered to that day, that decision.

Neal was wearing a navy blue suit, and he’d waited to get his hair cut until the day before the wedding, so it was a little too short.

“Yours,” she said.

Neal squeezed the back of her neck. “Mine.”

The dryer stopped.

“I’ve never been in love,” Heather said. “I don’t think I’m susceptible.”

Georgie set down her soup can and pushed her glasses up to rub her eyes. “How could you possibly know that?”

Heather shrugged. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

“Maybe you haven’t ordered enough pizza.”

“I’m being serious, Georgie.”

“Okay—seriously, Heather, you’re only eighteen. You have plenty of time to fall in love.”

“Mom said she’d been in love three times by my age.”

“Well”—Georgie frowned—“she’s unusually susceptible. She’s got a compromised immune system when it comes to love.”

Heather played with the drawstring on her sweatshirt. “I haven’t even really dated anybody yet.”

“Have you tried?” Georgie asked.

Her sister wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to try.”

“It’ll happen in college.”

“You dated in high school,” Heather insisted. “Did you fall in love before Neal?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Because I need to talk to somebody,” Heather said, “and Mom is aberrant.”

“Can’t you talk to your friends?”

“My friends are at least as clueless as I am. Did you fall in love before Neal?”

Georgie thought about it. There was a guy in the eleventh grade who’d been something more than just another moving target—for a few weeks, then it passed. And then there were the years she’d sat on the couch with Seth.

“Maybe,” Georgie said. “Maybe I came really close to falling in love, cumulatively, over two or three relationships.”

“But not like with Neal.”

“Not like with Neal.”

“How’d you know he was the one?”

“I didn’t know. I don’t think either of us knew.”

Heather rolled her eyes. “Neal knew—he proposed to you.”

“It’s not like that,” Georgie said. “You’ll see. It’s more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you hope that that person is the one—and then at some point, you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you’re right.”

“No one else describes love that way.” Heather frowned. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”

“Obviously I’m doing it wrong,” Georgie said. “But I still think love feels that way for most people.”

“So you think most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they’re feeling is real.”

“Real isn’t relevant,” Georgie said, turning completely to face Heather. “It’s like . . . you’re tossing a ball between you, and you’re just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn’t love each other, you wouldn’t be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other—and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.”

“What’s the ball a metaphor for?”

“I’m not sure,” Georgie said. “The relationship. Marriage.”

“You’re really depressing,” Heather said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be talking about marriage to someone whose husband just left her.”

“He didn’t leave you,” Heather said. “He’s just visiting his mom.”

Georgie looked down at the empty soup can in her lap.

“I keep waiting for you to say that it’s all worth it . . . ,” Heather said.

Georgie swallowed. “That’s a meaningless thing to say.”

They sat quietly for a minute until one of the pugs—the bulging pregnant one—scuttled down the stairs into the laundry room. Watching a pug run down stairs is a lot like watching a pug fall down stairs. Georgie winced and looked away. It ran over to her and froze, barking aggressively.

“I don’t like you either,” she said, turning back to the dog.

“It’s the shirt,” Heather said. “She hates that shirt.”

Georgie looked down at the pug that was BeDazzled on her borrowed shirt.

“They’re very territorial,” Heather said. “Here, move—let her climb into the dryer.”

“I may not like her,” Georgie said, “but I don’t want to cook her.”

“She likes it,” Heather said, pushing Georgie over and opening the dryer door. “It’s warm.” She lifted the dog into the dryer, on top of the clothes.

“What if it’s too hot in there?”

“Then she’ll jump out.”

“This is so dangerous,” Georgie said. “What if you don’t know she’s in there, and you start the dryer?”

“We check first.”

“I wouldn’t have checked.”

“Well, now you will. Look—she likes it.”

Georgie watched the little dog settle down on a pile of darks, glad that her own clothes were still in the washer. She frowned at the dog, then at Heather. “Remind me never to ask you to babysit again.”

Georgie’s bra fell apart completely in the washing machine. Her mom had a Speed Queen with an old-fashioned agitator, and the loose underwire had wrapped around the center and caught on something inside the drum. Georgie yanked the wire free.

It hadn’t even been ninety minutes since Neal hung up on her. He might not have made it to his aunt’s nursing home in Iowa yet. Georgie couldn’t just sit here, waiting all day. She should go to work. . . . God, no, she couldn’t deal with Seth right now.

She held up the bra, trying to decide whether she could get by on one underwire, then shoved it into the dryer with the rest of her clothes (dislocating the pug first) and ran back into the house.

Heather was sitting on the couch, messing with her phone.

“Do you want to go to the mall?” Georgie asked.

“On the day before Christmas Eve? Sure, that sounds like a great idea.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Heather was already narrowing her eyes; she narrowed them to a squint. “Aren’t you going to put on a bra?”

“I’m going to the mall to buy a bra.”

“Why don’t you just go home and pick up some clothes?”

Georgie thought of her house. Sitting dark and too far away, almost everything just as Neal had left it. “I need to get back here before Neal calls.”