In Five Years(25)

“I guess I’ve had you all to myself for a really long time,” I say. “It’s not fair, but the idea of you being with someone for real makes me feel, I don’t know.” I swallow. “Jealous, maybe?”

She sits back, satisfied. Thank god I came up with something. Bless me for being a lawyer. She buys it. This makes sense to her. She knows I have always wanted the space closest to her, front position, and she has given it to me.

“But you have David, and it’s fine,” she says.

“Yeah. It’s just always been that way, so it feels different.”

She nods.

“But you’re right,” I say. “It’s dumb. I guess emotions aren’t always rational.”

Bella laughs. “I genuinely never thought I’d hear you say those words.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Nothing is going to change, I promise you. Or if it does, it’ll be for the better. You’ll see me even more. You’ll see me so much you’ll be sick of me.”

“Well then, cheers—I look forward to being sick of you.”

Bella smiles. We clink glasses. Then she waves a hand back and forth in front of her face. “So you like him, sorta. Maybe. You’re jealous. We’ll leave it there. Okay?”

I shake my head. “Sure.”

“But he really is—” She starts, and her voice trails off, her gaze with it. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I finally get it, you know? What everyone always talks about.”

“Bella,” I say. “That’s wonderful.”

Bella wiggles her nose. “What’s new with you?”

I take a deep breath. I blow some air out of my lips. “David and I got engaged,” I say.

She picks up her water glass. “Dannie. That’s decades-old news.”

“Four and a half years.”

“Right.”

“No, I mean. We’re going to get married this time. For real. In December.”

Bella’s eyes widen. Then they flit down to my hand and back up again. “Holy shit. For real?”

“For real. It’s time. We’re both just so busy and there’s always a reason not to, but I realized there’s a really big reason to do it. So we will.”

The waiter comes over, and Bella turns to him abruptly. “A bottle of champagne and ten minutes,” she says. He leaves.

“He’s been asking me to set a date for a long time.”

“I’m aware,” Bella says. “But you always say no.”

“It’s not that I say no,” I say. “It’s just that I haven’t said yes.”

“What changed?”

I look at her. Bella. My Bella. She looks so radiant, so high on love. How can I tell her that it’s her? That she’s the reason.

“I guess I just finally know the future I want,” I say.

She nods. “Did you tell Meryl and Alan?”

My parents. “We called them. They’re thrilled. They asked if we wanted to do it at The Rittenhouse.”

“Do you? In Philly? It’s so generic.” Bella wiggles her nose. “I always saw you doing something very Manhattan.”

“I’m generic, though. You always forget that.”

She smiles.

“But no Philly,” I say. “It’s just inconvenient. We’ll see what’s available in the city. “

The champagne comes, and our glasses are filled. Bella holds hers to mine. “To good men,” she says. “May we know them, may we love them, may we love each other’s.”

I swallow down some bubbles.

“I’m starving,” I say. “I’m ordering.”

Bella lets me. I get a Greek salad, lamb souvlaki, spanakopita and roasted eggplant with tahini.

We sink into the food like a bath.

“Do you remember the first time we came here?” Bella asks me. We rarely make it through a meal without her repurposing some memory. She is so sentimental. Sometimes I think about our old age and it seems intolerable to have to sift through that much history. We have twenty-five years now, and there’s already too much to pull from, too much to make her weepy. Old age is going to be brutal.

“No,” I say. “It’s a restaurant. We’ve come here a lot.”

Bella rolls her eyes. “You had just moved down from Columbia, and we were celebrating your job with Clarknell.”

I shake my head. “We celebrated Clarknell at Daddy-O.” The bar off Seventh we used to frequent at all hours of the night for the first three years we lived in the city.

“No,” Bella says. “We met Carl and Berg there before we came here, just you and me.”

She’s right, we did. I remember the tables all had candles on them, and there was a bowl of Jordan almonds by the door. I scooped two handfuls into the pouch in my purse on the way out. They don’t keep them stocked anymore, probably because of customers like me.

“Maybe we did,” I say.

Bella shakes her head. “You can never be wrong.”

“It’s actually part of my job description,” I say. “But I seem to remember a night in late two thousand fourteen.”

“Way before David,” Bella says.