The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner Page B

coming home from work, immaculately dressed in a suit and tie, setting his combination-lock briefcase down by the door and holding his arms open. “Wife!” he would call, and my mother would drop whatever she’d been doing and find him. They would stand there in the hallway next to the washer and the dryer, sometimes for just an instant, sometimes for much longer, holding on to each other at the end of the day.
    They’d loved each other. They’d loved us, too, I thought, smoothing the pillows, remembering all of us sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, eating potato salad and barbecued chicken off the red plastic dishes my mom used in the summertime. My sister would be tanned in her white T-shirt, and Jon would be handsome in his baseball cap, and my mother and father would hold hands and laugh at my jokes. Now our father was gone. None of us had heard from him in years. Mom didn’t appear to care about much besides her daily swim and Leon. I rolled over again, pulling the covers up to my chin. What if there was no such thing as happily ever after? What if Walt Disney and every romantic comedy I’d ever seen and all the novels I’d loved had gotten it wrong? What if . . .
    “You know why I’m so angry?” Nicki asked in a hollow voice. I shrieked and almost fell off the bed. My sister didn’t notice. “Because we got cheated,” she said.
    “Because Dad left?”
    She didn’t answer, but I imagined I could hear her Well, duh hanging in the air, just beneath the fringes of the canopy.
    “Well, okay, it was hard, but we all pulled through. We all went to school. We’re all doing okay.”
    “Mom is dating a teenager. Jon doesn’t talk.”
    “Well, Jon’s always been, you know . . . he’s a guy. They’re different. And Mom’s . . .” I let my voice trail off. I still wasn’t sure what to say about our mother. “And then there’s me,” I said. “I’m okay, right?”
    Nicki said nothing.
    “And you’re doing fine.”
    “None of us are fine, Josie.”
    In the darkness, her words had the ring of prophecy. Outside, the wind rocked the big panes of the windows, and I could hear rain pattering down on the empty streets.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    No reply.
    “What do you mean that none of us are fine?” She rolled over, sighing. I held my breath and then reached for her, gathering her scrawny shoulders in my arms . . . and, for a brief moment, she let her head fall back against my chest and let me hold her.
    “Go to sleep,” she said gruffly, wriggling away.
    “Big day tomorrow,” I replied, rolling back to my side of the bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the rain, imagining I could also hear the clicks of the digital clock ticking off the minutes until my wedding day.
    I remember everything before the vows in snatches: the flower girl sobbing after a hot roller burned her cheek; my mother and Leon holding hands on a bench while the caterers bustled around them; David smiling at me as I made my way down the aisle with my mother on my left side and nobody on my right. In that moment, with two hundred and twenty guests looking at me from their ribbon-bedecked chairs, with tears on my mother’s cheek and our announcement in that morning’s Times, I wasn’t thinking about love or happiness or how this was the ending the fairy tales had promised, the reward for theprincess who survived the enchantment or the wicked stepmother or the hundred years’ sleep. I was thinking, I guess if this doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.
    •   •   •
    Our first dance—per David’s request, to Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight”—went off without a hitch. David’s father’s toast was heartfelt, if a little generic. The salad plates appeared and then were replaced with the main course. David and I visited the tables, smiling, accepting congratulations and good wishes, thanking our parents, cutting the cake. Then it was midnight. The last guests collected their coats and