It didn’t sound like the most promising idea.
“Anyway,” he went on, “all my sisters arrive tomorrow.”
“All your sisters? How many do you have?”
“Four. It’s going to be mass chaos—grandkids and dogs everywhere—and the whole family’s counting on this party to be the thing that turns everything around—and I’m going to be the guy to ruin it and break my mother’s heart because she’s expecting me to bring my girlfriend, Amy—but I haven’t told her yet that we broke up.”
“Wait—what? You have a girlfriend?” I’d never heard anything about a girlfriend. In all this time, the concept of a girlfriend had not even occurred to me. But my voice had sounded way too shocked at the idea. Calmer, more like we were just making conversation, I added, “Named Amy?”
“Had,” he said. “We dated for two years. My family loved her. Polite. Well groomed.”
“You make her sound like a poodle. Hey—whatever happened to that puppy you got?”
The rookie grinned. “The Poo-huahua?”
I shook my head at him.
“I gave him to my mom,” he said. “She named him Valentino and bought him a little sweater. He pines for her when she walks out—even just to get the mail.”
I shook my head again. “Everything works out for you.”
“Not everything,” the rookie said. “Not Amy.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“Nothing. She was fine. Perfectly acceptable. Just a totally vanilla, garden-variety girl.”
“She sounds awful.”
“My mom really, really wanted us to get married. So did my sisters. So did my dad.”
“But you broke up.”
“There’s not much I wouldn’t do for my family,” the rookie said, “except possibly marry the wrong girl.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“But it was complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
The rookie frowned down at the city below, like he wasn’t entirely sure what to say next. “I used to have five sisters. My sister Jeannie—the second youngest—died about four years ago from a viral infection in her heart.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked down. “She was twenty-three. I was twenty-two. Irish twins.”
I let out a slow breath.
“Amy was my sister’s best friend when we were growing up, and when I ran into her one night a year or so after Jeannie died, we felt this instant connection and started going out right away. We were both living in Boston, and it was all easy. But it turned out to be kind of like when an old song comes on the radio, and you think, ‘I love this song!’ but then as you keep listening, you remember you never really loved it—you were just excited for a second because you recognized it. That’s how it was for me with Amy. But by the time I figured it out, my mother was already planning the wedding.”
“You stayed with Amy because you didn’t want to disappoint your mother?”
He gave a little shrug. “In a way. But, yeah—I think everybody in my family thought that if I married Amy, it would be the next best thing to getting Jeannie back.”
“You do a lot of overly nice things for your family,” I said.
He nodded, like he’d never noticed that. “I guess I do.”
“That’s some pressure.”
“You know that feeling you get about people sometimes when it’s like they’re on some important edge—and even the tiniest breeze could tip them over?”
I nodded.
“That’s my mom, ever since my sister died. She acts all bossy and practical with us, but then she goes back into the kitchen and her hands are shaking.”
I got that.
“We all want to go easy on her. But no way was I marrying Amy. I didn’t feel…” He paused. “I wasn’t in love with her. I liked her. It just wasn’t—the kind of feeling you marry someone for.”
“So you broke it off?”
“Just as I was gearing up to end it, my dad had the heart attack.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. Exactly. So I got busy with my dad, and Amy and I hung on a little longer, and it was fine. But then one night Amy sat me down and gave me the shit-or-get-off-the-pot ultimatum. She wanted to get married.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘I just don’t think I can marry you, Amy.’ And she said, ‘Ever? Or right now?’ And I said, ‘Ever.’”
“That was it?”
He nodded. “She left. That was six months ago. I haven’t seen her since. She was pretty pissed.”
“I bet.”
He shook his head. “And then I just never told my parents. They thought we were dating long distance, with her still in Boston. It turned out to be so easy to just never bring it up.”
The rookie took a deep breath and then sped through the rest. “Anyway, my sister Shannon called last night and told me our mom is expecting me to bring Amy to the party, and she’s even hoping that all the romance of the lights and the flowers might inspire me to propose. Which of course I won’t do because not only did we break up, she moved to California. And Shannon thinks it’s too late to come clean to my parents, but that I also can’t show up at their party alone, and that my only option for not ruining their thirty-fifth anniversary at this point is to find another female I can bring to distract my mom and cushion the blow, but the problem is, I don’t really know very many females right now. I’m in a phase of my life that’s kind of female-free.”
I waited.
And so did he.
Finally, I asked, “What’s the favor?”
“So I don’t want to piss off my sister Shannon—’cause, trust me, you never want to piss off Shannon,” he said. “And I’m scrolling through my phone trying to think of somebody to ask to this thing when something shocking occurs to me.”
“What?”
“You’re a female.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
I put my hands out like I was trying to soothe an unpredictable animal. “I am a female, that’s true. But I’m not that kind of female.”
“What kind?”
The kind who gets dressed up. The kind who goes on dates. “The kind who’d say yes to that.”
“We wouldn’t have to stay very long. Just long enough to distract my mom.”
“There’s no way I can go with you. That party will be lousy with firefighters.”
“But all from Boston. Not from Lillian. My dad doesn’t know these guys.”
“He knows Captain Murphy.”
“True,” the rookie conceded. “But Captain Murphy already RSVP’d no.”
I shook my head. “It would be all kinds of suicide—career, personal, emotional…”
“We wouldn’t tell anybody who you are. You’d just be a mystery girl I brought with me.”
“We’d get caught.”
“I’d make sure that didn’t happen.”
“Rookie,” I said, shaking my head, “don’t ask me.”