Landline Read online

  Georgie was bad at all shopping, but bra shopping was the worst. You couldn’t do it online, and you couldn’t have somebody else do it for you.

  Bra shopping had always been the worst—even when her breasts were still young and lovely. (If only Georgie could figure out how to call herself in the past, she’d tell herself how young and lovely she was. “This is the ghost of bra-shopping future: Everybody’s a little lopsided, roll with it.”)

  She closed the washing machine lid, set the dial to GENTLE, then sank down on the floor in front of the dryer and leaned against it. It was warm and humming, and Georgie felt like one of those rhesus monkeys who preferred the cloth mother.

  It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

  Everything had seemed so good when Georgie fell asleep last night. Better than good. Maybe better than ever . . .

  Which was weird. When she was talking to Neal in the past, they got along better than they did in their shared past or their shared present. Maybe these were the versions of themselves that were meant to be together—mature Georgie and mostly unjaded Neal. Too bad they couldn’t go on this way.

  How long could this go on?

  It was December 23rd.

  Georgie knew what happened back in 1998: Neal ended up on her doorstep on Christmas Day. That meant that Neal—landline Neal—would have to leave Omaha tomorrow morning, in the past, to propose to her.

  Would that still happen . . . Would Neal still propose? Or had Georgie screwed that up an hour ago, in one fell swoop of Seth?

  Maybe she’d screwed it up the very first time she called Neal in the past.

  Yesterday, Georgie had wondered if she was supposed to talk Neal out of loving her—if that was the point of this magic, to save him from her. But what if she’d talked him out of it just by opening her mouth?

  She was thinking in hot, helpless circles when Heather walked down the back steps into the laundry room. She was carrying one of those Campbell’s soups that you can heat up in the microwave, then drink out of the can. Chicken & Stars.

  “Do you ever feed yourself?” Heather asked. “Or does Neal just set out a dish for you every morning?”

  “Sometimes I order things,” Georgie said.

  “What do you feed the girls?”

  “Neal feeds the girls.”

  “What if Neal isn’t home?”

  “Yogurt.”

  Heather handed Georgie the soup, a peace offering, then sat down next to her, against the washer.

  “Thanks,” Georgie said.

  Heather still looked wary of Georgie. She took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. “I know something’s going on, so you may as well tell me—are you sleeping with Seth?”

  Georgie took a sip of soup and burned her mouth. “No.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend who sort of sounds like your husband, but isn’t your husband, but is also named Neal?”

  “No.”

  “Is something really weird going on?”

  Georgie turned her head toward Heather and tipped it against the dryer. “Yeah . . .”

  Heather mirrored her, laying her head against the washer. “I can’t even remember you without Neal,” she said.

  Georgie nodded slowly, then took another, more careful, drink of soup. “You were in our wedding, you know. Do you remember?”

  “I think so,” Heather said, “but I might just be remembering the photos.”

  Heather was supposed to be the flower girl, but none of Georgie’s friends had been able to afford the trip to Nebraska, so Heather became her only bridesmaid—besides Seth, who just assumed he’d be standing up for Georgie.

  Georgie wasn’t even sure she should invite Seth (because the wedding was in Omaha, and because Neal), but Seth started calling himself Georgie’s best man, and she wasn’t sure how to argue. . . .

  He wore a brown three-piece suit and a pale green tie to the wedding. Heather wore lavender shantung and a green cardigan. Seth carried her down the aisle.

  And he insisted that Heather come along for Georgie’s bachelorette party—a “bridal-party only” dinner at some thousand-year-old Italian restaurant near Neal’s house. They ate spaghetti with sugar-sweet tomato sauce, and Seth talked nonstop about the sitcom he was working on, the one he’d just convinced to hire Georgie. Georgie drank too much Paisano, and Heather fell asleep at the table. “Good thing I’m the designated driver,” Seth said.

  There was a photo from the next day, at the ceremony, of Seth signing the marriage certificate as Georgie’s witness. Heather was standing on tiptoe to watch. Seth in his brown waistcoat. Georgie in her white dress. Neal beaming.

  Georgie took another gulp of soup. “You were adorable,” she told Heather. “I think you thought it was your wedding—Neal danced with you, and you blushed the whole time.”

  “I remember that,” Heather said. “I mean, I’ve seen the pictures. I looked just like Noomi.”

  Georgie and Neal hadn’t had a traditional church wedding—or much of a reception. They got married in Neal’s backyard. The lilacs were in bloom, and Georgie carried a handful of branches that his mom had gathered into a bouquet.

  Everything was on the cheap. She and Neal had both just graduated, and Georgie didn’t start on the sitcom until they got back from their honeymoon. (Five days in rural Nebraska, in a cabin somebody owned on a muddy river.) (The five best days.)

  They’d tried to pay for the whole wedding themselves; her mom and Kendrick were already digging deep to buy plane tickets, and Georgie didn’t want to ask Neal’s parents for help.

  Georgie was the one who suggested they get married in Omaha. She knew Neal would like it. Their breakup, their almost breakup, was still fresh in her memory, and Georgie wanted Neal to look back on their wedding day and feel happy—about all of it. She wanted him to be happy that day, to be completely in his element.

  Neal’s family ended up helping out anyway. His parents bought the cake, and his aunts made cream cheese mints and sandwiches. The pastor who’d baptized and confirmed Neal was there to marry them. And after the ceremony, Neal’s dad moved his stereo out onto the patio and played deejay.

  The only song Georgie insisted on was “Leather and Lace.”

  That had started out as a joke.

  “Leather and Lace” was playing in a restaurant on one of their first dates, and Georgie cracked herself up telling Neal that it was “our song.” Then they both tried—and failed—to think of a more ridiculous “our song.” (Neal suggested “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”; Georgie pushed for the theme from Taxi.)

  After that, “Leather and Lace” kept coming on the radio at significant moments in their relationship. . . .

  Once when Neal was kissing her in the car outside her mom’s house.

  Once on a road trip to San Francisco.

  Once when Georgie thought she was pregnant, and they were waiting in line at Walgreens to buy a Clearblue Easy. (Neal with his hand on her back. Georgie holding the pregnancy test like it was a pack of gum. Stevie Nicks crooning about having her own life and being stronger than you know. At some point, “Leather and Lace” just became their song. For real.

  When it started to play on their wedding day, on Neal’s parents’ patio, Georgie got all choked up.

  Was that the moment she realized she was actually getting married?

  Or was it just the moment she realized she’d landed a guy who would dance with her, totally sincerely, forehead to forehead, to “Leather and Lace”? (“Stay with me, stay-ay.”)

  After “Leather and Lace,” Neal danced with his mom to “Moon River.” (The Andy Williams version.) Then Georgie danced with Seth, and Neal danced with Heather to “Both Sides Now.” (The Judy Collins version.)

  A few hours later, when everyone else had gone or gone inside—Seth left for the airport right after the cake—Neal and Georgie stayed out on the patio, slow-dancing to whatever came on the oldies station.

  They’d never really danced together before that day. Or since.
And, truthfully, they weren’t doing much dancing even then. . . . Neal held Georgie with one hand on the small of her back and one on the back of her neck, and Georgie leaned against him with both hands on his chest, and they swayed from side to side.

  It wasn’t dancing. It was just a way to make the wedding last. A way to stay in the moment, rolling it over and over in their heads. We’re married now. We’re married.

  You don’t know when you’re twenty-three.

  You don’t know what it really means to crawl into someone else’s life and stay there. You can’t see all the ways you’re going to get tangled, how you’re going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten—in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.

  She didn’t know at twenty-three.

  That day, out on the patio, it just felt like the biggest day of her life so far, not the biggest day of her life from now on. Not the day that would change everything. That would change her, at a cellular level. Like a virus that rewrites your DNA.

  That day, that evening, out on the patio . . .

  Georgie pretended to dance. She clung to Neal’s shirt. They rubbed their noses together. “You’re my wife,” Neal said, and then he laughed, and she tried to catch his dimples with her teeth. (Like if she caught them, she might get to keep them.)

  “Yours,” she said.

  Maybe Georgie had gotten a glimpse of it then, the way infinity unspooled from where they were swaying. The way everything she was ever going to be from then on was irrevocably tethered to that day, that decision.

  Neal was wearing a navy blue suit, and he’d waited to get his hair cut until the day before the wedding, so it was a little too short.

  “Yours,” she said.

  Neal squeezed the back of her neck. “Mine.”

  The dryer stopped.

  “I’ve never been in love,” Heather said. “I don’t think I’m susceptible.”

  Georgie set down her soup can and pushed her glasses up to rub her eyes. “How could you possibly know that?”

  Heather shrugged. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet, has it?”

  “Maybe you haven’t ordered enough pizza.”

  “I’m being serious, Georgie.”

  “Okay—seriously, Heather, you’re only eighteen. You have plenty of time to fall in love.”

  “Mom said she’d been in love three times by my age.”

  “Well”—Georgie frowned—“she’s unusually susceptible. She’s got a compromised immune system when it comes to love.”

  Heather played with the drawstring on her sweatshirt. “I haven’t even really dated anybody yet.”

  “Have you tried?” Georgie asked.

  Her sister wrinkled her nose. “I don’t want to try.”

  “It’ll happen in college.”

  “You dated in high school,” Heather insisted. “Did you fall in love before Neal?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Because I need to talk to somebody,” Heather said, “and Mom is aberrant.”

  “Can’t you talk to your friends?”

  “My friends are at least as clueless as I am. Did you fall in love before Neal?”

  Georgie thought about it. There was a guy in the eleventh grade who’d been something more than just another moving target—for a few weeks, then it passed. And then there were the years she’d sat on the couch with Seth.

  “Maybe,” Georgie said. “Maybe I came really close to falling in love, cumulatively, over two or three relationships.”

  “But not like with Neal.”

  “Not like with Neal.”

  “How’d you know he was the one?”

  “I didn’t know. I don’t think either of us knew.”

  Heather rolled her eyes. “Neal knew—he proposed to you.”

  “It’s not like that,” Georgie said. “You’ll see. It’s more like you meet someone, and you fall in love, and you hope that that person is the one—and then at some point, you have to put down your chips. You just have to make a commitment and hope that you’re right.”

  “No one else describes love that way.” Heather frowned. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”

  “Obviously I’m doing it wrong,” Georgie said. “But I still think love feels that way for most people.”

  “So you think most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they’re feeling is real.”

  “Real isn’t relevant,” Georgie said, turning completely to face Heather. “It’s like . . . you’re tossing a ball between you, and you’re just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn’t love each other, you wouldn’t be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other—and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.”

  “What’s the ball a metaphor for?”

  “I’m not sure,” Georgie said. “The relationship. Marriage.”

  “You’re really depressing,” Heather said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be talking about marriage to someone whose husband just left her.”

  “He didn’t leave you,” Heather said. “He’s just visiting his mom.”

  Georgie looked down at the empty soup can in her lap.

  “I keep waiting for you to say that it’s all worth it . . . ,” Heather said.

  Georgie swallowed. “That’s a meaningless thing to say.”

  They sat quietly for a minute until one of the pugs—the bulging pregnant one—scuttled down the stairs into the laundry room. Watching a pug run down stairs is a lot like watching a pug fall down stairs. Georgie winced and looked away. It ran over to her and froze, barking aggressively.

  “I don’t like you either,” she said, turning back to the dog.

  “It’s the shirt,” Heather said. “She hates that shirt.”

  Georgie looked down at the pug that was BeDazzled on her borrowed shirt.

  “They’re very territorial,” Heather said. “Here, move—let her climb into the dryer.”

  “I may not like her,” Georgie said, “but I don’t want to cook her.”

  “She likes it,” Heather said, pushing Georgie over and opening the dryer door. “It’s warm.” She lifted the dog into the dryer, on top of the clothes.

  “What if it’s too hot in there?”

  “Then she’ll jump out.”

  “This is so dangerous,” Georgie said. “What if you don’t know she’s in there, and you start the dryer?”

  “We check first.”

  “I wouldn’t have checked.”

  “Well, now you will. Look—she likes it.”

  Georgie watched the little dog settle down on a pile of darks, glad that her own clothes were still in the washer. She frowned at the dog, then at Heather. “Remind me never to ask you to babysit again.”

  Georgie’s bra fell apart completely in the washing machine. Her mom had a Speed Queen with an old-fashioned agitator, and the loose underwire had wrapped around the center and caught on something inside the drum. Georgie yanked the wire free.

  It hadn’t even been ninety minutes since Neal hung up on her. He might not have made it to his aunt’s nursing home in Iowa yet. Georgie couldn’t just sit here, waiting all day. She should go to work. . . . God, no, she couldn’t deal with Seth right now.

  She held up the bra, trying to decide whether she could get by on one underwire, then shoved it into the dryer with the rest of her clothes (dislocating the pug first) and ran back into the house.

  Heather was sitting on the couch, messing with her phone.

  “Do you want to go to the mall?” Georgie asked.

  “On the day before Christmas Eve? Sure, that sounds like a great idea.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Heather was already narrowing her eyes; she narrowed them to a squint. “Aren’t you going to
put on a bra?”

  “I’m going to the mall to buy a bra.”

  “Why don’t you just go home and pick up some clothes?”

  Georgie thought of her house. Sitting dark and too far away, almost everything just as Neal had left it. “I need to get back here before Neal calls.”

  “So take your phone with you.”

  “He’s calling here—are you coming?”

  “Nah,” Heather said. “I’ll stay. That way there’s somebody to answer the phone when Neal calls.” She put his name in air quotes.

  They frowned at each other.

  “Come with me,” Georgie said. “I’ll buy you something.”

  “What?”

  “I might have to go to the Apple Store.”

  Heather leapt up from the couch, then froze. “I can’t be bribed; I won’t keep your dirty secrets.”

  “I don’t have any dirty secrets.”

  Georgie’s cell phone was still plugged in to the car lighter and woke up as soon as she turned on the car. She had seven missed calls and four voice mails from Seth, plus two missed calls and one voice mail from Neal’s cell. Georgie stopped—halfway in her mom’s driveway and halfway in the street—to play that voice mail. She held her breath, waiting to hear Neal’s voice. To hear now-Neal’s voice.

  “Mom?” It was Alice. “Grandma wants to know if we’re allowed to watch Star Wars, Episode Five. I told her yes, but she said there’s a lot of violence. And Daddy went to see Grandpa at the cemetery, and he didn’t take his phone, so we can’t get his permission. I told Grandma it’s okay—that we just close our eyes when Luke cuts Darth Vader’s head off—but she doesn’t believe me. So call us back, okay? I love you—” Alice kissed into the phone. “—bye.”

  Georgie set the phone down on the dashboard and backed into the street.

  “Are you okay?” Heather asked.

  “I’m fine,” Georgie said, shoving her glasses up and wiping one eye with the back of her hand.

  “’Cause we just left the house, and you’re already driving like an asshole.”