On the other side of the table sat Ruby, Sarah’s stepdaughter, and Ruby’s pandemic boyfriend, Gabe. Sarah supposed she should just call Gabe a boyfriend, minus the qualifier, but the way his romance with Ruby had been fast-forwarded thanks to COVID meant that, in her mind, Gabe would always have an asterisk next to his name. Gabe and Ruby had been together for just six weeks in March of 2020 when NYU shut down and sent everyone home. Ruby had come back to her bedroom in Brooklyn and, after lengthy discussions, Sarah and Eli had agreed to allow Gabe, who was from California, to cohabitate with her. The two had been inseparable that pandemic year, all the way through their virtual graduation, snuggling on the couch bingeing Netflix or taking long, rambling walks through the city, holding hands and wearing matching face masks, or starting a container victory garden on the brownstone’s roof deck that eventually yielded a bumper crop of lettuce and kale, a handful of wan carrots, and a single seedy watermelon （“Next year will be better,” Ruby promised, after posting a series of photos of the melon on her Instagram）。
Ruby and Gabe had stayed together through the summer, into the winter, and, after the New Year, when the pandemic had finally loosened its grip, they’d gotten vaccinated, gotten jobs—Ruby as assistant stage manager in an independent theater company in Jackson Heights; Gabe as a proofreader—taken several of their favorite plants, and moved out of Brooklyn and into a tiny studio in Queens, where they’d been living for just over a month.
Sarah finished the blessing over the wine and the bread. The platters of food had made their first trip around the table （Ari, Sarah noticed, helped himself to the largest chunk of white meat）。 She’d just finished reminding Dexter to put his napkin on his lap when Ruby, beaming blissfully, took her boyfriend by the hand. “Gabe and I have some news,” she said.
Sarah felt a freezing sensation spread from her heart to her belly. She shot a quick, desperate look down the table, in Eli’s direction, hoping for a nod, a shared glance, any kind of gesture or expression that would say I understand how you feel and I agree or—even better—I will shut down this foolishness, don’t you worry. But Eli was looking at his plate, completely oblivious as he chewed. Big surprise.
Sarah made herself smile. “What’s that, honey?” she asked, even though the icy feeling in her chest told her that she already knew.
“Gabe and I are getting married!” Ruby said. Her expression was exultant; her pale cheeks were flushed. Beside her, Gabe wore his usual good-natured, affable look. His dark hair was a little unruly; his deep-set eyes seemed sleepy; and his posture was relaxed, almost lazy, as Ruby put her arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. Sarah liked Gabe, but she’d always felt like he was a boy and not a young man, a mature adult, ready to take a wife and, presumably, start a family. Not that Gabe wasn’t a good guy. He was. He was well-mannered and considerate, supremely easygoing. He never got angry. He almost always looked pleased. Or maybe he just looked stoned. Sarah had never been able to tell, and these days, with pot being legal, she couldn’t complain about the smell that had sometimes seeped down the stairs from the attic when Ruby and Gabe had been in residence. It’s no different from having a beer, Eli had told her, and Sarah agreed intellectually, but somehow it still felt different, illicit and wrong.
“Way to go!” said Ari, extending his hand across the table so Gabe could high-five him. “Up top!” he said to Ruby, who grinned and slapped his palm.
“Can we be in the wedding?” asked Dexter. Dexter looked like his father, tall and lanky, with curly dark-blond hair, pale, freckly skin that flushed easily, and elbows that always seemed to find the nearest pitcher or water glass.
“We can be best men!” said Miles. Miles was more compactly built than his brother, with Sarah’s heart-shaped face and fine brown hair. If Dexter was an exuberant golden retriever, Miles was a small, neat cat, his movements careful and precise as he maneuvered his silverware and dabbed at his lips with his napkin.
“We’ve got an even better job for you guys,” said Ruby. “We’re going to get married in July, on the Cape. I already asked Safta, and she says it’s fine. She knows it’s my favorite time of year there.”
“So soon!” Sarah blurted, then gulped at her wine. Ruby had always been a determined girl. She hated to be thwarted; despised hearing No, or Let’s think it over, or worst of all, Slow down. Even a whiff of a hint that her stepmother opposed this match, or thought that Ruby, at twenty-two, was too young to marry anyone, would have Gabe and Ruby at City Hall by the end of the week with a marriage license in hand. And what was worse, Sarah thought, was that Ruby had told Sarah’s mother before she’d told Sarah herself. She felt a clenching toward the back of her throat, a feeling that had become all too familiar during the pandemic, as she choked back what she wanted to say.