Short story

London Is the Best City in America — a book by Laura Dave

Here’s the thing about going home again.

You don’t always know what you’ll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that—if you paid close enough attention—you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. There had been at least a dozen times over the course of my childhood that I had gone with my brother Josh to the Scarsdale Pool to watch the fireworks on July 4. If you wanted to watch Independence Day fireworks in my hometown, there weren’t a whole lot of other options. But tonight, from the moment we arrived, it felt different. We were sitting in our usual spot on the hillside—looking down over the main pool, a little outside of the main crowd—when everything started moving into this bizarrely sharp, almost etched focus. And suddenly I felt oddly aware of how clear the sky was, how blond and happy the family on the blanket next to us was, how everything was bright and fluid even while it was happening—already existing closer to memory than reality. It was like a warning shot that something intense was coming.

And even though I had agreed to go to the fireworks—had agreed to sit on that small hill and eat hot dogs and watch the bright colors in the sky—part of me wanted to suggest we leave right then, get out early and beat the crowds to the parking lot, head home. Because given the right set of circumstances, given an intense moment, those things can certainly mess with you— fireworks and clear air and happiness—can make you think the world is a way it isn’t, can make you say things that, on another night, you would never say.

That Josh would never say. Such as: “I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. You know, getting married this weekend.”

I turned and looked at him in disbelief. He was staring straight ahead, taking a bite of his hot dog. It was enough to make me think I’d imagined what I’d heard. That I’d made it up. I mean—who would eat a bite of hot dog right after saying something like that? A crazy person. My brother wasn’t crazy. At least I hadn’t thought so.

But then it happened again.

“Emmy,” he started—using my name this time, emphasizing the “m” sound the way he’d always do, turning my name into one small letter. “Are you going to just pretend you didn’t hear me?”

“You were chewing,” I said.

“Not until after. Don’t ignore me.”

One of the first things Josh ever taught me, maybe the very first, was that you absolutely had to ignore everything you weren’t ready to deal with. It was your only shot of keeping it at bay. Like the first day of school, for instance. This was his favorite example. If no one talked about the first day, he’d say—if no one planned it or agreed to it or worked toward it—it couldn’t happen. How could it happen? What a little genius he’d been! If everyone had just shut up about school starting, it could have stayed summer forever.

I put my hot dog down, wiping my hands on my jeans. “I’m not ignoring you, Josh,” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Because there might be a problem here,” he said. “I love Meryl and everything, but there really might be a big problem.”

In demonstration, he made a “big” rectangle sign with his hands, his hot dog in one of them, a large Coke cup in the other. The little girl from the blond family was staring at him. I wondered what she thought she saw—this child-man in his dirty baseball cap, white button-down shirt, bare feet. My big brother. Best friend since birth. Childhood hero. Huge baby. He was going to be thirty-one next month. In less than seventy-two hours, he was supposed to be someone’s husband. Someone who, even if it wasn’t the point, I really loved.

“Does this problem have a name, Josh?” I asked.

He was quiet for a long minute in which I got to imagine that my instinct was wrong. Maybe this had nothing to do with another woman. It would be easier if it didn’t. I figured that he’d be more likely to get married this weekend if it didn’t have something to do with that.

“Elizabeth,” he said.

My heart dropped. I could actually feel it—the hollowing out of it—until it filled my whole stomach, like a drum. I couldn’t remember having heard about anyone named Elizabeth from him, not during the year he’d spent alone in Boston, not since I’d been living in Rhode Island. The fact that he’d kept her to himself made her seem bigger, somehow, more important.

“Elizabeth?” I said.

“Elizabeth, yes. Elizabeth.”

I couldn’t look at him,.
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About the book:

The first novel from the acclaimed author of Eight Hundred Grapes and Hello Sunshine Emmy Everett is reluctantly heading home to New York for her brother Josh’s wedding. She has spent the last three years in a fishing town in Rhode Island and, having little to show for it, she doesn’t particularly want to answer the questions she is sure to face about her (ex)-fiance, her (questionable) career choices, her (unknown) future. But she is still shocked when her typically resolute brother Josh confesses he is having doubts about his imminent marriage – and he asks Emmy the hardest question of all: what do I do now? With seventy-two hours until the wedding, Emmy embarks with Josh on a road trip to help him find a mystery woman, and to answer some long overdue questions about who he wants to spend his life with. It isn’t only Josh who has some lessons to learn. Along the way, Emmy discovers some undeniable truths about what she wants from her own life; and she begins to realize that perhaps her own happy ending is not as far away as it seems.

Genres: Humor