London Is the Best City in America by Laura Dave Read Free Book Online Page B

hotel restaurant for dinner—that was how they met—and, the way the story went, Berringer asked her to marry him that very first night, in the alley outside. This wasn’t confirmed for me until their actual wedding ceremony the next December—when it was confirmed, again and again, usually along with the expression: When you know, you just know.
    The wedding took place in Katonah, a quiet town thirty miles north of Scarsdale, at an inn on a farm. It was a small wedding, but my whole family went. I hadn’t wanted to go because I was in the middle of finals. “Since when do you study?” my mom had asked. It wasn’t a bad point. Josh was the best man and had to read this long poem about roses. Beautiful Naomi wore no shoes.
    Now I stared at Berringer’s reflection in the rearview mirror, his eyes hard on the road and both hands on the wheel, and I wondered, with Josh’s looming nuptials, if Berringer was thinking about Naomi, if he still often thought about Naomi. They’d moved to New York after that year in Paris when Berringer got an assistant chef position at a new restaurant on the Lower East Side. And it was three years later, closer to four actually, that Naomi asked him to quit and find a job in London instead because she was homesick. Because she wanted to go home again.
    But less than a week after they arrived in London, she woke up next to him in their new apartment and said that it turned out she hadn’t been homesick after all—she just didn’t want to be married anymore.
    That was the last I heard about Berringer for a long time. He disappeared into the recesses of northern California by way of Santa Fe, New Mexico, by way of Austin, Texas. Josh would give me updates occasionally, but I was too wrapped up in my own thing to pay good attention. That same summer, the one that Naomi asked Berringer to leave, was the one that Matt asked me to marry him. It was the day after my college graduation—a few days after Matt finished his first year of architecture school—and we were driving down south to spend a couple of days with my father’s family in Savannah. We spent the first night camping outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and, right before we fell asleep, we thought we heard a bear outside the tent, rummaging through the trash. It turned out be a raccoon that—through a mix of shadows and strange moonlight and too much dinner tequila—seemed bigger than he was. And when we figured out what was really going on and stopped laughing, Matt asked me. Right then. In the midst of the imaginary bear. He just pulled the ring out of his bag and said he didn’t want to wait for the special dinner he had planned for us in Savannah. That he didn’t want to wait. Did Berringer even know that? I doubted it.
    I doubted that Berringer knew the first time Matt and I talked about marriage seriously was all those years before while staying at his apartment in Paris. That that very first morning we were there, we had gone to see the Eiffel Tower, and that was when he brought it up. He had said he could imagine the two of us taking a lifetime of seeing places like this—wanted a lifetime of that—that the best part of being in France was seeing how happy it was making me. I started crying, right beneath the Eiffel Tower. Because I knew he meant it, and it was how I felt about him—how I’d felt since the minute I met him—the best part of everything was watching him enjoy it too.
    Part of me wanted to tell Berringer that story now, though I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t sure what I thought that was going to do.
    “Do you guys know anyone who is in a happy marriage?” I asked instead, sitting up taller. “A really happy one?”
    Josh turned around and looked at me from the front seat. Berringer met my eyes in the rearview mirror.
    “I was just thinking,” I said.
    Josh turned back around, away from me. “Well, think about something else.”
    I looked into the rearview mirror to see if Berringer was still