You Think It, I'll Say It(30)
“You’re younger than I am, aren’t you?” I said. “Weren’t you the year behind me in school?”
“Oh, that’s right.” Ashley laughed. “It’s funny because I remember us as classmates, but I must just be thinking of volleyball.”
Behind her on the trail, I couldn’t help sneering. That she “remembered us” in any particular way seemed ludicrous, given that we’d hardly spoken besides the day in the locker room when she’d asked me to tie her shoe. We’d ridden together in the volleyball van countless times, but I had always sat in the first row, and she, Suzanne Green, and Tina Millioti had sat in the back. Once, after we lost to a team at a school on the West Side, when we were still in the parking lot outside their gym, Ashley, Suzanne, and Tina had begun chanting, “That’s all right, that’s okay, you’re gonna work for us someday!” Our coach had been so mad that when we stopped for dinner at McDonald’s, she made them stay in the van.
“Wasn’t high school miserable?” Ashley said then, and I wondered if I’d heard her correctly, or even, perhaps, if she was making fun of me.
Neutrally, I said, “How so?”
“We were all so insecure, right? It was like this seething mass of hormones and nervousness.”
I said, “You never seemed like a particularly nervous person.”
She turned her head, smiling. “Yeah, well, I played it cool, but I threw up every morning before school for most of freshman year.”
Was she serious? If so, this would have once been a fascinating tidbit, it would have forced me to reexamine my entire worldview, but what was I supposed to do with it now?
“So Jason’s super-cute,” Ashley said. “How’d you meet?”
“At law school.” This response was true enough, and easier than going into detail. And I can’t deny that I derived a certain pleasure from Ashley Frye—Ashley Horsford—affirming my husband’s cuteness, but again, I kept my tone noncommittal. “What about you and Ed?”
“I roomed with his sister in college. I first met him when I was eighteen, but we didn’t reconnect until Kate’s wedding.”
“Is Ed older or younger than his sister?” I tried to act as if the question had just occurred to me.
But Ashley sounded cheerful as she said, “Older—Ed’s thirty-four, but he looks like an old man, doesn’t he? And he acts like one, too. He gets all cranky if he can’t take a dump at the same time every morning, or if I make him try anything new. He’s never even had sushi.”
Thirty-four? So Ed was my age exactly, and a year younger than Jason.
“He was really traditional about proposing, too,” she said. “First I was dropping hints, then I was asking him straight up what the deal was, and finally I was like, ‘Okay, you don’t even have to do anything formal, but can we just say we’re engaged?’ He’s like, ‘Calm down, Ashley.’ Turns out he wanted to ask my dad first.”
Ashley, and not Ed, had been the one pushing for marriage? Shouldn’t he have been pursuing her? Although I didn’t find her appealing, I’d seen no evidence that he had more to offer. That morning, when we’d met in the lobby and walked to the parking lot, he’d said to Jason, “You catch that shitty pitching in the Rockies game last night?” and he hadn’t initiated any other conversation during the half-hour drive to the Moose Lake trail.
“Your engagement ring is gorgeous, by the way,” Ashley said. Apparently she’d taken note of it earlier, because she didn’t turn around as she spoke.
“Thanks.” I couldn’t remember what hers looked like, so I didn’t reciprocate the compliment. Instead, I stepped off the trail and peered toward our husbands, wondering if they’d pause so we could catch up.
* * *
—
Although Moose Lake turned out to be as beautiful as promised, a glassy blue expanse that showed the upside-down reflection of the mountain, I still felt distracted by our companions; Ashley’s personality overrode the mountains and the water and the meadows of yellow and purple flowers. When we posed for pictures, Ashley put her arm around me, so I reluctantly put my arm around her. Would she post this on Facebook? Before we hiked back, we sat by the lake and ate sandwiches we’d picked up at a bakery on the way out of town. In the car, as soon as I could get a signal, I checked my BlackBerry.
Back at the resort, before we parted ways, Ed said to Jason, “Call me after dinner,” and Jason said, “Will do.”
“Oh, fun,” Ashley said. “Are we meeting up for a drink?”
Ugh, I thought.
“For cigars,” Ed said. “Men only.”
“Thanks a lot,” Ashley said. “Not like it’s our honeymoon or anything.”
Jason and I looked at each other, and he said, “I’ll be in touch, Ed.”
As Jason and I walked out the rear exit of the lobby and toward the path leading to the cabins, Ashley called after me, “I say we crash boys’ night, if only to punish them.”
Once we were outside again, the late afternoon smelled clean and sweet and piney, and the sunlight was mellower than it had been during the hike. It wouldn’t get dark until nine-thirty. I said, “Since when do you smoke cigars?”