I don’t need to specify who I mean when I say my friends. I have work friends—people I brave the Sweetgreen line and trade bits of office gossip with—and I’m happy to double-date with David’s college friends from NYU, but I’m always relieved when their wives or girlfriends don’t follow up on their promises that we have to make plans to hang out without the boys. “My friends” will always refer to Finn, Priya, and Theo.
David gets along with them well enough, but not so much that he’s part of the group. Not that there was much of a group to be part of when we started dating. That was the year Finn and I weren’t speaking. But even so, we have too much shared history for someone new to catch up. When David joins us, we’re constantly having to stop and explain that Elise is Priya’s monstrous ex-boss, the one who laid her off at Refinery29, or that one time Finn cajoled us into playing beer pong with gin and tonics and none of us have touched gin since, or that Theo’s mother was in a terrible art house movie in the eighties, a contemporary remake of Madame Butterfly called Ms. Butterfly, and we laugh hysterically whenever anyone says the word “butterfly” in any context.
“Is it someone’s birthday?” David asks.
“No?”
“Oh, I just thought . . .” He trails off. “Never mind me. Pre-coffee brain.” He pours a splash of half-and-half into my coffee and sets it down on the counter in front of me.
Even though he didn’t mean anything by it, his comment bristles. The implication that we need a reason to get together. But if I’m honest, it’s been a while since we’ve had plans as a foursome.
“No occasion, really. Just catching up.”
“Well, can you pencil me in for tomorrow night?” he asks.
“Tomorrow night? I thought you were going to your brother’s apartment to watch the game.” David’s brothers and a few of their childhood friends have a fantasy football league they take way too seriously. They get together on Thursdays to watch whatever game is on and talk strategy. David is their de facto statistician. At the end of the season, whoever loses has to fulfill a silly bet, which is how David ended up sitting for the SATs last spring. He actually enjoyed brushing up for it, going so far as to buy a stack of test prep books. I teased him mercilessly when he brought SAT Prep for Dummies to bed with him, but he was the one laughing when his score went up by twenty points since he took the test in high school.
“I can skip this week,” he tells me. “I’d much rather spend time with you.”
I stand on the footrest of my stool and lean over the kitchen island to catch his lips with my own. “Yes,” I tell him. “Don’t pencil me in. Use pen.”
* * *
? ? ?
?That night, I’m the first to arrive at Rolf’s. In December, there’s a line around the block, but in mid-November, it’s me and a skeleton crew of regulars.
The regulars at a Christmas-themed bar are a quirky bunch: women in their sixties who look straight out of the SNL mom-jeans sketch with feathered hairstyles and sweatshirts with applique flowers. They gossip at length about their husbands while throwing back glasses of merlot and eating from party-sized bags of Lay’s potato chips they’re inexplicably allowed to bring in, even though Rolf’s is also a German restaurant.
I claim a stool in the middle of the bar—close enough to eavesdrop, but far enough away not to seem nosy—and order a warm spiked apple cider. I watch the bartender, a bored-looking kid in his early twenties, fix my drink in a goblet the size of my head.
The women remind me of how my mom was with her friends. What would she be like if she were still alive today? I count the years on my fingers to figure out how old she’d be: fifty-seven. Fifteen years since she died. This Christmas she’ll have been gone for as many Christmases in my life as she was alive for, and the thought makes me unbearably sad. Over time, missing her has softened to a dull thrum in the back of my chest, but every once in a while, like now, it floods through me at full volume.
I still picture her as she was before she got sick: smiling out from a sign on a bus bench advertising her as edison’s favorite real estate agent. She wanted the ad to say “top real estate agent,” which wasn’t technically true. However, she was the undisputed queen of the town’s gossip mill, which made her a favorite with certain types. The year of her diagnosis, she got the Rachel haircut, which even then she was a few years late to—Jennifer Aniston was already onto her sleek flat-iron phase—but she was incredibly proud of the haircut nonetheless. I imagine she’d have updated it by now if she were alive, but my mental image of her is frozen in time. An eternal Rachel Greene.
Rolf’s is like that, too; never changes. Year-round, every available square inch of ceiling and wall space is covered in faux pine and dripping with Christmas ornaments and fake plastic icicles. Rolf’s found its niche and sticks with it. I respect that.
I check my phone to see if anyone has texted, and I find a message from Finn: Running late. I have news!
With Finn, “having news” could be anything from seeing Timothée Chalamet on the subway to meeting the love of his life to discovering a sandwich place with a really good buffalo chicken wrap. Everything is news with him. But spotting Priya and Theo enter the bar, chatting animatedly, puts a pin in my speculation.
* * *
? ? ?
?An hour later, Finn bursts through the door in a cloud of apologies for his lateness and makes his way to the booth where we relocated to spare Theo the flirtations of the women at the bar.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Finn clucks as he unwinds his scarf and hangs it on a hook at the end of the booth. He leans in and gives Priya a double cheek kiss and then scootches into my side of the booth. He finds my hand on the bench and gives it a squeeze. I always breathe easier when the four of us are in the same place.
“So, you have news?” Theo prompts him.
“Big news!” Finn looks around the table to make sure everyone is giving him their undivided attention. “I got a new job! At Netflix! Working on shows for actual fucking adults!”
Priya shrieks and leaps out of her seat to wrap her arms around Finn’s neck.
“This calls for champagne!” Theo announces.
“This is incredible! You’re incredible!” I tell him, my excitement rendering me unable to find words other than “incredible.”
“This isn’t exactly the side of the entertainment industry I envisioned for myself, I was picturing myself more as the talent, but it’s still a step up. So that’s something.” Despite his dismissive comment, Finn is beaming at our reactions to his news.
Finn has worked as an associate development executive at ToonIn for the past three and a half years, helping to select which shows get picked to air and shepherding them through the production process. For the better part of that time, he’s been locked in a heated rivalry with Sparky MD, a cartoon puppy who is, for reasons that are never explained, also a doctor for humans. Finn passed on a pitch for the show six months into his tenure, and Sparky MD went on to become the number-one show at their rival network.
These days, Sparky has a ubiquitous presence, popping up on billboards and children’s backpacks. Once we were picking up my birth control prescription at Duane Reade when Finn spotted Sparky MD Band-Aids next to the register. He marched outside in a huff. I found him pacing on the sidewalk out front. “It doesn’t even make sense!” he raged. “Sparky can’t talk! How does he tell people their diagnosis?!”