The First Husband

by Laura Dave

  I looked up at him, confused. “Excuse me?”

  “Melinda Martin. You work for the newspaper, I assume.” He pointed down at my copy of the Guardian. “I won’t tell.”

  “Who are you?”

  He reached out to shake my hand. “My friends call me Aly,” he said. “I was going to try and talk to you that night, but you were outside on your telephone. And you looked pretty miserable. Even more miserable than now.”

  “At least I’m improving,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  I shook his hand. “What do you do for the paper?”

  “Nothing. I’m an environmental lawyer, actually. For the good side though,” he said. “You know, the misunderstood corporations.”

  I laughed, picking up my drink. “Making the world a better place?”

  “Doing my share.”

  “What were you doing at the party, then?”

  “My wife works for the newspaper.” He paused. “Well, ex-wife, more accurately.”

  I gave him a curious look. “If you don’t mind my asking, why were you going with your ex-wife to a work function?”

  He took a long sip, considering.

  “Life is messy,” he said.

  “Is that your mean law firm’s slogan as well?”

  “Could be,” he said. “Could be. . . . But how about you? Have you ever been married?”

  I nodded, as he looked down at my empty ring finger, which I felt the need to cover up. “And now separated. But that’s not why I’m not wearing the ring. My nephew ate it.”

  He tilted his head. “I’m going to let that go,” he said.

  “Probably a wise move.”

  Then he gave me a smile—a very kind smile. “I’m sorry, though,” he said. “It’s hard. But it gets less hard.”

  “You sure about that?” I said.

  “Very sure,” he said. “Being in a city as great as London helps . . . being near cities as great as Dublin and Edinburgh and Rome help. The rosemary potatoes here really help.”

  As if on cue, my double order of rosemary potatoes arrived—piping hot and smelling a little like heaven.

  I looked from the potatoes to him. “Did you plan that?”

  “Afraid I don’t have that kind of power,” he said.

  Then Aly—my new friend, apparently—reached for one of my potatoes. And looked back down at his paper, flipping to a new page.

  “So you can eat in peace now,” he said. “But I wanted to say hello first . . . and get you a decent drink . . . and steal a potato . . . and talk entirely too much, apparently, without even hearing you say your name. . . .”

  “Annie,” I finished for him.

  “Annie.”

  He handed me his business card. “You can hang on to that if you like, for whenever you want a break from work, or a break from your typical breaks from work . . .” he said. “I’ll take you potato hunting. No strings attached.”

  “Potato hunting?”

  He pointed at my double order of rosemary goodness. “I assume you’re a potato woman,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure what kind of woman I was, but a potato one didn’t seem like a bad place to start. Another evening as nice as this one was shaping up to be didn’t seem like a bad place either.

  So I looked down at his card.

  It had the name of the place he worked—not a massive law firm, but rather . . . BECKETT MEDIA.

  It also had his name, just sitting there: CALEB BECKETT.

  I looked back up at him. “You’re Caleb Beckett?”

  “My friends call me Aly, remember?”

  I held the card up, like proof. “But I’m not your friend,” I said. “I’m your employee.”

  He shrugged. “Not a very immediate employee, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you? Or we wouldn’t just be meeting now,” he said. “If you want to play it that way though, I’m going to have to advise you against wearing rhinestones to work.”

  I pulled the coat more tightly around me. “But why don’t you have an Australian accent? Do you really have an ex-wife? And what kind of nickname is Aly? And why lie?”

  He started counting down on his left hand, holding up all four fingers.

  “I haven’t had an accent since I was in my second year at Yale,” he said. “And I only get to wish my ex-wife was part of a made-up tale. Aly is quite a common nickname for Caleb, where I come from. And I kind of thought that if I lied, I had a better chance of getting some potatoes.”

  Then he took another, and I slapped his hand away. “This gets worse and worse,” I said.

  “Not worse and worse,” he said. “Better and better.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Now you get to go home happy that the guy you are finding yourself attracted to isn’t some terrible lawyer utilizing his overpriced skill set to protect brutal corporations hurting the environment,” he said. “But just someone you know from work. What’s the big deal about that?”

  “First of all, I am not attracted to you.”

  “No?” he said, smiling.

  “No,” I said. “And, second of all, if you keep talking to me, I’m going to tell everyone at work you read the Guardian.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll get my own potatoes, then,” he said. “Since you’re intent on ignoring magic.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.” He was smiling bigger.

  He motioned for the waitress to bring him his own order, and turned back to his paper. And I turned back to mine, the two of us eating, side by side, like that, paper by paper.

  And when I got home that night, I opened up my heart-shaped pocket to find the business card inside of it. On the back, Caleb had written Aly, and a phone number that didn’t match the others.

  Oh, and also the following: You are attracted. 97%.

  35

  For the first two years of “Checking Out,” I had an epigraph that ran underneath my byline—a quote from Ernest Hemingway. A simple one-liner that read, “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

  I thought it was a great quote about travel, but ultimately Peter removed it. Not because we were receiving many letters finding fault with the sentiment. (Most of the readers who wrote in commented on their own personal nightmare tales of traveling with someone they didn’t know well enough.) But Peter didn’t care about the horror stories. He thought traveling with someone you didn’t love—traveling with someone who was a stranger, even—provided its own set of treasures. That it gave a trip a certain dramatic energy.

  And he was right. But what Peter was missing was what I loved about what Hemingway wrote. It wasn’t about the terrible stories, the miscommunications. Those happened, often during travel, with people who loved each other too. The bigger point for me was that if you were on a trip with someone you didn’t love, at the end of it you’d only get to remember what you remembered. But if you went with someone you loved, you’d often get more than that. You’d get to share it with them. You’d get to remember what they remembered too.

  The next day at work, almost as soon as I got to my desk, I heard a knock on the desk’s high wall and looked up to see Melinda in that day’s polka dots, which were a bright and friendly purple.

  She gave me a big smile and before I could even say hello, she was sitting on the edge of my desk, her hand over her mouth.

  “What?” I said.

  “What, nothing? ” she said. “Someone just made quite an impression on my cousin, that’s all.”

  I looked down at my work, trying not to blush.

  “He really is a good man,” she said. “Despite my jokes about the subject. And he rarely takes a shine to anyone.”

  I rarely do too, I started to say. But the sentiment that came to my head on the heels of that, and far more loudly, was: And I already know a good man. I already know a really great one.

  “Well, in any event, I’m sure it will pass,” I said. “I often make a great impression when I’m not trying to.”

&n
bsp; “And then what happens?”

  I shrugged. “I start to try and pretty much blow the whole thing up,” I said.

  She laughed. “Well, then,” she said, “we better hurry and move forward with my excellent plan before that happens . . .” she said. “To a million first impressions!”

  “I’m not following,” I said.

  “We have a plan. How to tell your one, big story,” she said. “Ready for it? We are going to start vlogging you.”

  “That sounds dirty.”

  She patted my cheek, leaving her hand there. “Vlogging means we’ll be filming you on each of your locations,” she said. “A video column, if you will. And we’re going to call it ‘Checking In’!”

  “‘Checking In’? ”

  “Yes! It will explore the one thing that defines each city you visit. Plus, because it’s only one thing you are focusing on, it will keep expenses down. Brilliant, no?”

  She gave me an enormous smile, which, I guessed, was her way of answering her own question. Then she made a marquee sign with her hands. “Annie Adams: Europe’s number one travel expert.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says us!” she said. “It’s part of Beckett Media’s new synergy plan. This is the branding opportunity we were looking for. You’ll be going on the local morning talk shows, news shows, et cetera. And eventually, when you are more comfortable, we’ll go global. What do you think?”

  “I think . . .” I looked right at her. “I’m a little confused. This will be in addition to writing ‘Checking Out’? ” I asked. “Like an in-depth video tour companion?”

  “No no no. No companion. In place of,” she said.

  “In place of?” My eyes got wide. “I don’t write anything anymore? There won’t be a column?”

  She clapped her hands together. “Exactly,” she said. “And would you smile, please? What happens when I actually have to give you bad news one day? This is fabulous!”

  “And I’m really grateful, Melinda, don’t get me wrong . . .” I said, trying to figure out how to explain it. “But since we’re talking about doing something new with the column, I actually had a different idea in mind.”

  She waved her hand in the air. “Well, have at it,” she said. “I’m always open to ideas.”

  It was now or never, so I took a breath, trying to go for now.

  “I’ve taken a lot of photographs during the years I’ve been working on ‘Checking Out.’ Pictures of people’s homes, and I was thinking there was a story to tell around them? The way people live in different places. What that says about how we travel.” I paused. “How we stay.”

  Melinda looked thoughtful for a minute, taking it in. “You know, I like it,” she said. “I really like that.”

  “You do?”

  She nodded. “I can picture you standing in front of a different home every month, vlogging with the people inside.”

  She really needed to stop saying “vlogging,” but I was trying to focus on the positive. She liked the idea.

  “You think there’s something there?” I said.

  “Absolutely,” she said. “And this isn’t an empty promise I’m making you. We will incorporate your vision into this. I want to do that.”

  I could tell that she meant it. I could tell that. And then, less than a minute later, I could tell she didn’t care anymore. At least not in terms of where she felt that she needed to go next.

  “But, the thing is, Annie, we have a great living and home expert. I need a travel expert. So let’s keep that other idea on the back burner for now. And really enjoy this!”

  Really enjoy this. All the signs were telling me to—to invest in my new life here, to move forward toward something entirely new. To move toward this bright new world waiting on the other side of my misshapen marriage, on the other side of a false start. This was the plan, wasn’t it? To figure out how to be brave enough to find the life I wanted. To hold it, once it was found.

  Melinda leaned in closer to me, jumping back in. And helping me to take it. The first step.

  “So, in the interest of really enjoying this, you pick it,” she said. “Anyplace in the world to do your first ‘Checking In.’ And I mean any place in the world. Where do you want to check in first? Where do you want to go most, Annie?”

  Where do I want to go most in the world? The choices were piling up in my mind. Didn’t I just hear an argument for Dublin and Edinburgh and Rome? Couldn’t I make my own, solid argument for any of those places? For the hundreds of other places I was hoping to see?

  Except what happened was, I couldn’t. When Melinda actually presented the question to me, I couldn’t make an argument at all. Or at least, not one I believed. Not when I knew there was one place I wanted to go. The one place I wanted to stay.

  The one place I’d seen that felt different than the rest—right from the start. From the first time I drove down its sleepy Main Street, past the church steeple and the post office, all the Christmas trees still standing, light snow falling onto the remnants of a previous day’s thick snowfall. And suddenly I knew why. Why I’d felt so content that day. It hadn’t been about finding someplace new to explore, or escaping to a new life. It was about the person beside me. It was about what happened when we were together—what had been happening, for me, from the very start.

  Which is when I stood up.

  “Melinda, thank you so much for this opportunity,” I said. “It is so generous, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”

  She gave me her smile, beaming it right up at me.

  “But I quit.”

  “What?” she said. I thought she was going to fall right out of her ballet slippers.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You deserve a better explanation than this, but I can’t give it to you right now.”

  I started picking up my things as fast as I possibly could. Because that was the other thing. When you saw where the truth was, you wanted to get there as quickly as you could, before you lost sight of it again.

  “Annie, do you know what you’re giving up?” she said. “If we move forward, by this time next year you’ll be a household name. Who wouldn’t love that?”

  Only the person who doesn’t want this anymore, I thought. That person. That person was perhaps the only one who wouldn’t see this as the next step forward. Toward wherever forward was.

  “A crazy person, I would guess,” I said. Then I shrugged, apologetically. “ I have to go.”

  Five minutes later I was outside, running toward Regent Street—my phone to my ear—as I tried to make my way closer to the one person I had to tell: what I’d figured out, what I wanted most.

  In the meantime, I was making a phone call. I was making a call that needed to be made. But I was relegated to voice mail. I was relegated to the voice mail of the one person I most needed to reach first.

  “Hey Nick,” I said, after the beep came on. “Can you give me a call when you get this? I need to talk to you. I think I should talk to you in person, probably, but either way I need to ask you something. . . .” I started to hang up. “Oh, and it’s Annie, by the way.”

  Then I went to hail a cab—to get me to my flat, and then to Heathrow Airport, to fly to Logan Airport and get myself to western Massachusetts, exactly where I needed to go—but before I could, the phone rang.

  The phone rang and the number I couldn’t believe I was seeing right then—a number I was so happy to be seeing right then—came up, and then a voice I couldn’t believe I was hearing was there, talking to me, too fast.

  “Annie, you need to come here, okay?” he said. “You need to get on a plane and come home.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Then, as time stopped, Jesse told me.

  36

  If my life depended on it, I don’t think I could tell you how I managed to get to the airport (I assume a taxicab), or onto the plane at Heathrow (I must have shown my passport, but did I have it with me? I don’t recall having it with me), or ho
w I got from Logan Airport in Boston to the emergency waiting room at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. I probably couldn’t tell you, and wouldn’t want to see a video of the evidence.

  But somehow I ended up there, in the cold, badly lit emergency waiting room, looking around until I spotted Jesse slumped in the corner with a woman I’d never seen before. A woman I’d never seen before with bright red hair I had seen twice before—on Sammy and on Dexter. Cheryl.

  They jumped up out of their chairs, out of their stupor, Jesse throwing his arms around me, seemingly relieved to have something to do, even if it was as useless as letting me know what was going on.

  “It’s called status asthmaticus,” Jesse said.

  My heart was pounding—I could actually feel how hard—now that I had stopped moving.

  Cheryl turned toward Jesse. “Jess, don’t scare her,” she said. “Talking like that is going to scare her.”

  I almost folded right there, at such a small and necessary kindness.

  “Basically,” she said, keeping her voice soft and low, “it’s a serious asthma attack.”

  “How serious?” I said.

  “We don’t know yet,” Jesse said.

  I looked down and away, as if not looking at Jesse would manage to make that part less true.

  “His chest closed down,” Jesse said. “He was out cold when someone found him, in the back of the kitchen.”

  “At the restaurant?”

  Jesse nodded. “And the question is how long he was like that before we got to him,” he said. “We don’t know for how long. He’s been working all the time, and he just forgot his inhaler. If he’d had it . . .”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “He hasn’t done that since he was a kid,” he said.

  “They’ve got him on a mechanical ventilator,” Cheryl said. “And he has tubes and a mask on. You should know that too. Before you go in . . .”

  Then she touched my arm gently, like we knew each other. And I guess, in a way, we did.

  “Is that your way of telling me it looks worse than it is?”

  “That’s my way of telling you it still is worse than it is,” she said. “The doctor said we almost lost him. We don’t know the repercussions yet.”