Hosting my husband’s 40th birthday party in our backyard seemed like a great idea right up until I was standing in the middle of it with a stack of napkins in one hand and my phone in the other, trying to simultaneously locate my four-year-old, answer a question about dairy in the dip, and determine whether the music was too loud for the neighbors. And in the middle of all of it was Brad. Forty looked unfairly good on him.
He was standing near the fire pit with that easy posture he had always had, laughing at something, and even after nine years of marriage I sometimes still caught myself looking at him like that, thinking about luck and how I had it and how I needed to remember not to take it for granted. I know now that I was the only one in the marriage who thought about gratitude. Someone asked me again about the dip.
I pointed them toward the label. A child began crying somewhere near the chairs. A small blur shot past my legs and I looked down just in time to see my son Will sprinting under the nearest table with a cake pop gripped in one fist.
“Will. Honey. We don’t throw cake pops.”
“I wasn’t!” he shouted back, which at four years old reliably meant either that he had just thrown one or was in the process of reconsidering it.
Ellie appeared at my shoulder. Ellie and I had known each other since second grade. We had been through everything together, the particular everything of three decades of friendship that includes bad breakups, career changes, family losses, the kind of accumulated history that feels like a second skeleton.
She was in my wedding. She was in the delivery room when Will was born. She was family in every way except blood.
She leaned in and said I was doing too much. I laughed. She smiled.
I let myself feel grateful she was there. Somewhere under a table, Will shrieked. Later, I spotted him crawling out from beneath a tablecloth with two other children, his knees grass-stained, his hands the color of the garden.
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