After I Do (4 page)

THREE YEARS AGO

I
had just started a new job, still in the alumni department but now at Occidental College.

My former coworker, Mila, recommended me for the position. We’d worked together in the alumni department at UCLA, and she’d left for Occidental the previous year. I was excited by the idea of working with her again and eager to branch out. I loved UCLA, but I’d been there my entire adult life. I wanted to learn a new community. I wanted to meet new people. Plus, it didn’t hurt that Occidental’s campus was breathtaking. If you’re looking for a change of scenery, choose beautiful scenery.

And since I was making more money, Ryan and I decided to find a new place. When we saw a house for rent in Hancock Park, we pulled over. Sure, it looked too big for us. It looked too expensive for us. And we technically didn’t need a second bedroom or a yard. But we wanted it. So Ryan picked up the phone and dialed the number on the sign.

“Hi, I’m standing outside your property on Rimpau. How much are you renting it for?” Ryan said, and then he listened intently.

“Uh-huh,” he said. I couldn’t hear what the other person was saying. Ryan was pacing back and forth. “And is that including utilities?”

I was eager to hear what number this person had given him.

“Well, we can’t do that,” Ryan said. I sat on the hood of our car, disappointed. “I’ve noticed, though, that this sign has been out for a while.” He was bluffing. Ryan knew no such thing. “So I’m wondering what your wiggle room is.” He listened and then looked at me, and I smiled at him. “OK, is it open now? Can my wife and I take a look?”

Ryan directed his eye to a drainpipe. “Yeah, I see it. We’ll take a look, and I’ll call you back.” He hung up, and we ran to the front door. Ryan got the key from the drainpipe and let us in.

While so much of Los Angeles is crowded roads and cramped buildings, Hancock Park is almost entirely residential, full of long, wide streets and houses set far back from the curb. Most of the neighborhood was built in the 1920s, and this place was no exception. The house was old, but it was gorgeous. Rough stucco exterior, dramatic interior archways, hardwood floors, checkered tile kitchen. The rooms were small and tight but perfect for us. I saw my life in there. I saw where our couch would go. I saw myself brushing my teeth over the prewar porcelain sink.

“We can’t afford this, can we?” I asked him.

“I will make this work, if you want it,” Ryan said to me, standing in the middle of the house. It was so empty that his voice traveled quickly, finding its way into the farthest corners of the room. “I will get this woman down to something we can afford.”

“How?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what the starting number was, and Ryan wasn’t telling, which said to me that it was much higher than the figure we had in mind.

“Just . . . Do you want it?” he asked me.

“Yes, I want it. Bad.”

“Then I’m gonna get it for you.” Ryan left the house through the front door and walked back to the sidewalk. I walked through the kitchen and opened the sliding glass doors that led to the backyard. It was small and useless, a patch of grass and a few bushes. But there was an old lemon tree in the corner. Lemons were scattered around the trunk, most of them rotting where the peel touched the earth. It looked as if no one had taken care of the lemon tree. No one had watered it or pruned it. No one cared about it. I walked out and reached high above my head to a lemon still on the branch. I twisted it off the tree and smelled it. It smelled fresh and clean.

I took it out to the front yard to show Ryan. He was still on the phone, pacing up and down the sidewalk. I stared at him, trying to decipher how the conversation might be going. Finally, he looked up at the sky and smiled, pumping his fist into the air and looking at me as if we’d won the lottery. “September first? Yeah, that works.”

When he hung up the phone, I ran into his arms, jumping up and wrapping my legs around his waist. He laughed.

“You did it!” I said. “You got me the house!” I handed him the lemon. “We have a lemon tree! We can make fresh lemonade and lemon bars and . . . other lemon stuff! How did you do it?” I asked him. “How did you talk her down?”

Ryan just shook his head. “A magician never tells.”

“No, but seriously, how did you?”

He smiled, evading me. For some reason, I liked it better not knowing. He had made the impossible possible. And I liked that I didn’t know his secret. It made me think that maybe other impossible things were possible. That maybe all I needed was to want it badly enough, and I really could have it.

That night, I was already looking at paint colors and thinking about packing up our stuff. I was so committed to our new house that I could no longer stand the sight of our current apartment.

I was on my computer, mentally decorating and online shopping, when Ryan walked over to me and closed my laptop.

“Hey!” I said. “I was looking at that!”

He smiled. “Well, looks like you can’t use the computer anymore,” he said. “So what should we do to pass the time?”

“Huh?” I asked. I knew what he was getting at.

“I’m just saying . . . it’s late, and we should probably get into bed. What should we do when we get in there?” He wanted to have sex. He wanted me to say it.

“I was looking at that, though!” I told him. My voice had bounce to it, but the truth was, I really wasn’t in the mood.

“You sure you don’t have anything on your mind? Anything you want to do?”

Maybe if he’d said what he wanted, I might have given it to him. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do. And I wasn’t going to pretend it was.

“Yeah, I know exactly what I want to do,” I said. “I want to continue looking at curtains!”

Ryan sighed and opened my computer back up. “You are no fun,” he said, laughing and kissing me on the cheek before leaving the room.

“But you still love me, right?” I joked, calling out to him in the other room.

He popped his head back in. “Always will,” he said. “Until the day I die.” Then he threw himself onto the floor, lying on the ground with his tongue out and his eyes shut, pretending to be dead.

“Are you dead?” I teased him.

He was silent. He was freakishly good at remaining perfectly still. His chest didn’t even rise and fall with his breath.

I got on the floor next to him and playfully poked at him.

“Looks like he’s really dead,” I said out loud. “Ah, well.” I sighed. “That just means more time for me to look at curtains.”

That’s when he grabbed me and pulled me toward him, burying his fingers into my armpits, making me laugh and scream.

“So how about now, huh?” he said, when he was done tickling me. “What do you want to do now?”

“I told you,” I said, standing up and smiling at him. “I want to look at curtains.”

• • •

The day after we moved in, I was still unpacking boxes and considering painting the bedroom when Ryan came in and said, “What would you say if I told you I think we should get a dog?”

I threw the clothes that were in my hand back into their box and started walking into the hallway to get my shoes. “I’d say it’s Sunday morning, there might be dog adoptions right now. Get your keys.”

I was half joking, but he didn’t stop me. We got into the car. We drove around looking for signs. We came home with Butter, a three-year-old yellow Lab. He peed and pooped all over the house, and he kept us up all night scratching his neck with his hind leg, but we loved him. The next morning, we renamed him Thumper.

Ryan and I installed a doggie door a few weeks later, and the minute we were done, Thumper jetted into the backyard. We watched as he ran around and around, jumped on the fence, and then settled on a spot to lie out in the sun.

I was sitting on the floor, stretching, when he finally came back into the house. He walked right in and sat in my lap. He was done playing outside. He wanted to be near me.

I cried for a half hour because I couldn’t believe I could love a dog so much. When I finally gathered myself, I noticed there was sticky dirt in my lap and all over his paws. He smelled clean and sweet.

It turned out Thumper liked playing with lemons.

TWO YEARS AGO

I
was washing the sheets one evening and decided that it was probably time to wash the mattress pad. So I pulled everything off the bed and threw it all in the laundry.

When I went to put the mattress pad back on the bed, I noticed a huge, well-worn, darker spot in the middle. It was oblong and graying where everything else was bright white.

I laid it on the bed and showed it to Ryan.

“Weird, right?” I said. “What is that from?”

Ryan gave it a good look, and as he did, Thumper came into the room. He hopped onto the bed and fit his furry tan body right into the faded gray stain, his big, dirty paws crossed over his black nose, his big, dark eyes looking at the two of us. Mystery solved. We had found the culprit.

We looked at each other and started laughing. I loved watching Ryan laugh that hard.

“That’s how dirty he is,” Ryan said. “He can permanently stain layers of fabric.”

Thumper barely looked at us. He wasn’t concerned with being laughed at. He was blissfully happy in the middle of the bed.

We kicked him off briefly so we could put the sheets on. We gathered the pillows and blankets. We got into bed, and then we told Thumper he could get back in.

He jumped right back into his spot.

Ryan turned out the light.

“I feel like this,” I said, as I gestured to Ryan and me with Thumper in the middle, “is enough. Is that bad? I mean, I feel like the three of us, you and me and this dog, are all we need. I don’t feel like I’m aching to add a kid to this. That’s bad, right?”

“Well, we always said thirty,” Ryan said, as if thirty was decades away.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But you’re twenty-eight. I’ll be twenty-eight soon, too. We’re two years from thirty.”

Ryan thought about it. “Yeah, two years doesn’t really seem like a long time.”

“Do you really think we’ll be ready for kids in two years? Do you feel like we are there yet?”

“No,” he said plainly. “I guess I don’t.”

It was quiet for a while, and since we’d already turned out the lights, I wasn’t sure if maybe we were done talking, if we were on our way to falling asleep.

I had started to fade a bit, started to dream, when I heard Ryan say, “That was just a guess, though, when we said thirty. We could do thirty-two, maybe. Or thirty-four.”

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “Or thirty-six. Plenty of people have kids when they are past forty, even.”

“Or not at all,” Ryan said. It wasn’t loaded. His voice wasn’t pointed. It was just a fact. Some couples don’t have kids at all. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with not being ready, not knowing if you are up for it.

“Right,” I said. “I mean, we can just play it by ear. Doesn’t have to be thirty just because we planned on thirty.”

“Right,” he said. The word hung in the air.

We had plenty of time to decide what we wanted. We were still young. And yet I couldn’t help but feel a type of disappointment that I’d never felt before: a sense that the future might not turn out exactly the way we pictured it.

“I love you,” I said into the darkness.

“I love you, too,” he said, and then we fell asleep, Thumper in between us.

A YEAR AND A HALF AGO

I
was reading a magazine in bed. Ryan was watching television and petting Thumper. It was almost midnight, and I was tired, but something was nagging at me. I put my magazine down.

“Do you remember the last time we had sex?” I asked Ryan.

He didn’t look over from the television, nor did he turn it down or pause it.

“No,” he said, not giving it another thought. “Why?”

“Well, don’t you think that’s . . . you know . . . not great?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Can you pause the TV for a second?” I asked him, and he did, begrudgingly. He looked at me. “I’m just saying, maybe it’s something we should work on.”

“Work on? That sounds awful.” Ryan laughed.

I laughed, too. “No, I know, but it’s important. We used to have sex all the time.”

He laughed again, but this time, I wasn’t sure why. “When was this?” he teased.

“What? All the time! You know, there were times we would do it, like, four times a day.”

“You mean, like the time we did it in the laundry room?” he asked.

“Yes!” I said, sitting up, excited that he was finally agreeing with me.

“Or the time we did it three times in forty-five minutes?”

“Yes!”

“Or the time we had sex in the backseat of my car parked on a side street in Westwood?”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about!”

“Baby, those all happened in college.”

I looked at him, keeping his gaze, trying to remember if that was true. Was all of that in college? How long ago was college, anyway? Seven years ago.

“I’m sure we’ve done crazy stuff since then, haven’t we?”

Ryan shook his head. “Nope, we haven’t.”

“Surely we have,” I said, my voice still sounding upbeat.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said, grabbing the remote and turning the TV back on. “We’ve been together for almost ten years. We were bound to stop having sex all the time.”

“Well,” I said, talking over the TV, “maybe we should spice it up.”

“OK,” he said. “So spice it up, then.”

“Maybe I will!” I said, joking with him and turning off the light. But . . . you know, I never did.

A YEAR AGO

I
t was a Friday night in the middle of the summer. We were in the height of long, sunny days. I knew Ryan was meeting a few friends after work and wouldn’t be home for a while, so instead of going straight home, I drove into Burbank and went to IKEA. I had been meaning to buy a new coffee table. Thumper had chewed through a leg on our old one.

After picking out a new table and paying for it, it was later than I thought. I got on the freeway to head home and found that it was backed up for what looked like miles. I flipped through the talk-radio stations until one of them announced that there was a three-car accident on the 5. That’s when I knew I’d be there for a while.

It was about forty-five minutes until traffic started to pick up, and when it did, I felt my mood markedly improve. I was flying across the freeway when I saw a number of cars in front of me hit their brakes. Once again, traffic came to a complete stop.

I slowed down just in time, and then, instantaneously, I felt something slam into me. The entire car lurched forward.

My heart started to race. My brain started to panic. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw, in the twilight, a dark blue car veering away.

I started to pull over to the side of the freeway, but by the time I got there, the car that hit me had sped down the shoulder, out of sight.

I called Ryan. No answer.

I got out and stood on the shoulder, slowly maneuvering my way to look at the back of my car. The entire back right half had been smashed. My brake lights cracked, my trunk crumpled in.

I called Ryan again. No answer.

Frustrated, I got back into the car and drove home.

When I got there, Ryan was sitting on the couch, watching television.

“You’ve been here the whole time?” I asked.

He turned off the TV and looked at me. “Yeah, we rescheduled drinks,” he said.

“Why didn’t you answer the phone when I called you? Twice?”

Ryan made a vague hand gesture to his phone across the room. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess the ringer must be off. What’s the matter?”

I finally put my purse down. “Well, I was hit in a hit-and-run,” I said. “But I’m fine.”

“Oh, my God!” Ryan said, running toward the window to take a look at the car. I’d said I was fine. But it still bothered me that he didn’t run to take a look at
me
.

“The car is in bad shape,” I said. “But I’m sure insurance will cover it.”

He turned to me. “You got the license plate of the person who hit you, right?”

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t. It all happened too fast.”

“They aren’t going to cover it,” Ryan said, “if you can’t tell them who did it.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Ryan!” I said. “I’m sorry someone slammed into me and didn’t bother to hand me their license-plate number.”

“Well, you could have gotten it as they sped away,” Ryan said. “That’s all I meant.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t, OK?”

Ryan just looked at me.

“I’m fine, by the way. Don’t worry about me. I was in a car accident, but who cares, right? As long as I can square it all with the insurance company.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I know you’re OK. You said you were OK.”

He was right. I did say that. But I still wanted him to ask. I wanted him to hug me and feel bad for me. I wanted him to offer to take care of me. And also, deep down, I was truly, truly pissed off that he had been sitting there watching a movie while I stood on the shoulder of the 5 South, not knowing what I should do.

“OK,” I said, after it was quiet for a while. “I guess I’ll call the insurance company.”

“Do you want me to do it?” he asked.

“I got it, thanks,” I said.

The woman I filed the claim with asked me how I was. She said, “Oh, you poor baby.” I’m sure that’s just what they say to everyone in an accident. I’m sure they are taught to act very concerned and understanding. But still, it felt nice. After I reviewed all of the information with her, she told me that the insurance company would cover it after all. We just had to pay the deductible.

When I got off the phone, I walked into the living room and joined Ryan.

“They will pay for it,” I said. I was trying to keep my tone polite, but the truth was, I wanted him to know that he had been wrong.

“Cool,” he said.

“We just have to pay a deductible.”

“Got it. Sounds like it would have been better if we’d gotten the license plate. I guess we know for next time.”

It took everything I had not to call him an asshole.