The Edge of Always

we wanted to visit.”

I take another sip and set the bottle on the bar top. “Worried about me? Well, that’s nice of her and all, but I hope we don’t go up there and I find myself in the same situation as I’m in with Natalie here.”

Andrew shakes his head. “Nah, Michelle’s not like that.” He backtracks that comment to put more emphasis on just how true it is. “Michelle is nothing like Natalie.”

“That’s not what I meant, Andrew.”

“I know, I know,” he says, “but really, she’s all right.”

Knowing Michelle enough myself, I know he’s right.

Then that pill hits me out of nowhere, and suddenly my head feels like it’s sort of loose on my shoulders. My whole body from my toes to the center of the top of my head is tingling, and it takes me a second to straighten my vision. My hand comes down on the edge of the bar instinctively to hold myself up.

“Whoa.” I swallow and blink my eyes a few times forcefully.

Andrew looks at me curiously. “You OK?”

A smile stretches so far across my face I feel the air from the room hit my teeth. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”

He tilts his head to one side. “Well, I haven’t seen you grin like that since I slid that ring on your finger.” He’s vaguely smiling, too, but his curiosity dominates it.

I bring my finger up into view and admire my engagement ring, which cost under one hundred bucks and probably isn’t considered an engagement ring by brides-to-be all over the country. I saw it in a little shop in Texas one day and just briefly mentioned how pretty it was:

“I love this,” I said, holding it up to the sunlight at just the right angle. “It’s simple and there’s something special about it.”

I handed it back to the woman behind the makeshift booth, and she placed it back in the glass case between us.

“What, you’re not a diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend type of girl?” Andrew asked. “No wedding rock so big you have to carry your ring hand around in a wheelbarrow?”

“No way,” I said and laughed. “Nothing meaningful about a ring like that. It’s usually about the price tag.” We walked out of the jewelry shop and along the sidewalk. “You said so yourself once, remember?”

“What did I say?”

I smiled and slipped my hand into his as we came to the street corner and took a left toward the cafe. “Simple is sexy.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That day in your dad’s house when you were preachin’ about why I shouldn’t spend an hour on makeup and hair, or whatever.”

I looked up to see him smiling, lost in the memory of that day, and then he pulled me closer.

“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? ‘Simple is sexy.’ Well, it is.”

“It’s also beautiful,” I said.

The day after that, Andrew came home with that same ring and held it out to me. Then in proper Andrew style, he got down on one knee and old-schooled it, except a little more dramatic than how it usually goes:

“Will you, Camryn Marybeth Bennett, the most beautiful woman on the planet Earth and the mother of my baby, do me the honor of being my wife?”

“I grinned and looked at him in a suspicious, sidelong glance and replied, “Just planet Earth?”

He blinked and said, “Well, I haven’t seen the chicks from other planets yet.”

Neither of us could resist a laugh. And so we laughed together. But then he became very serious, and his mood shifting like that only made mine do the same.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

The tears streaming down my face. The long, deep kiss I gave him, which caused us both to fall over onto the carpet, said yes a million times over.

Sure, he had asked me to marry him that day I told him I was pregnant, but on this day he did it right, and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.

“Are you alive in there?”

Andrew waves his hand in front of my face.

I snap out of the past and wake up back in the present, high as a fucking kite from that pill. And I realize immediately how fast I need to gather my composure so he doesn’t know what’s going on.

12

I guess the mood swings hang around even after… well, after pregnancy for a while. Camryn flip-flopped from average to frolicking in La La Land in under an hour. But she’s happy, it seems, and who am I to judge her on how she chooses to express it?

But the fact that she suddenly wants to leave Raleigh and go somewhere entirely different, even just for a weekend, is strange to me, and I just have to ask, “Why so soon? I mean I’m all for going if you want to, but I thought you wanted to be here, find an apartment and all that?”

“Well, I do…,” she says unconvincingly. She’s still vaguely smiling, which is so damn odd to me. “I just think we should go visit while we have the chance, because once I get a job here, finding free time on a weekend will be hit or miss.”

She brings her hands up near her stomach and folds them together, her fingers moving over the tops of her knuckles like she’s fidgeting.

“Are you—” I stop myself. I’m not going to do exactly what she said she wanted all of us to stop doing: worrying constantly about her and asking if she’s all right all the damn time. I smile instead and say, “I’ll call Aidan back and tell him and Michelle that we’ll be there this weekend.”

I wait for her to agree to the time frame, or not, and when she doesn’t say anything, I add, “So this means there’s no point in me going back to Texas for our stuff until after we get back from Chicago.” It was really more like a question. I have to admit, all of this uncertainty about where we’re going to be the next day is starting to make my head spin. It’s different from when we were on the road, living in the moment and defining the word spontaneous. At least then it was our goal to not know what the next day would bring. Right now, I’m not sure what’s going on.

She nods and pulls out a kitchen chair, where she never sits unless she’s eating breakfast. It just seemed like she needed to sit down.

“Wait,” I say suddenly. “Are you OK with getting an apartment? We can get a little house somewhere.” I guess this is my way of probing for answers as to what might be wrong with her without actually saying: What’s wrong with you?

She shakes her head. “No, Andrew, I don’t mind an apartment at all. That has nothing to do with anything. Besides, I’m not gonna let you spend your inheritance on a house in a state not of your choosing.”

I pull out the chair next to her and sit with my arms across the table in front of me. I look at her in that you-know-better-than-that way. “I go where you go. You know this. As long as you don’t want to buy an igloo in the Arctic or move to Detroit, I don’t care. And I’ll do what I want with my inheritance. What else would I do with it anyway, besides buy a house? That’s what people do. They buy the big stuff with the big stuff.”

We’re sitting on $550,000 that I inherited from my father when he died. My brothers got the same. That’s a lot of money, and I’m a simple guy. What the hell else would I do with money like that? If Camryn wasn’t in my life, I’d be living in a modest one-bedroom house somewhere in Galveston by myself, eating ramen noodles and TV dinners. The small bills I have would stay paid, and I’d still work for Billy Frank because I happen to like the smell of an engine. Camryn is a lot like me in this frugal sense, and that makes our relationship kind of perfect. But it does bug me sometimes how she just can’t seem to accept the fact that my money is her money, too. She wouldn’t even let me pay off the credit card she used on her bus trip when we met. Six hundred dollars on a card