When Bess and I were little we'd watch television together, on couch cushions on my aunt's living room floor. I didn't have any siblings and she didn't have any either and we were like sisters.
One of our favorite shows was the old Patty Duke show. We'd sing the theme song together. Identical cousins. But she and I were never, had never, and could never be identical. We weren't even mistaken for family, even when my aunt and uncle would take the two of us out. Bess looked far more like our third musketeer and best friend Nancy, than she would ever look like me.
And Bess, Bess loves; she loves intensely and passionately and at a first glance, first word, first shared song. She falls head over heels and spends every minute with or thinking about that one special guy. Blonde and blue and curvy and every minute of her life is dramatic and intense and never, ever boring. She'd rather paint her nails than play tennis, she'd rather sunbathe than swim. Her name says it all, short and sweet, smooth and cute.
And I was christened George.
George is cute, but only the first five times; after that, it's all just trouble. Passports and trips to the DMV and hotel reservations, those are agony. Who wants to be set up with a girl named George? Not Georgia, Georgina, Georgianna, Georgette, there's no way to lengthen it and soften the blow. Just short and brusque. I'm the tall one with short dark hair and dark eyes. I don't have a compact in my purse, I have a tube of chapstick in my pocket and a pair of tennis rackets in my trunk.
I don't fall in love. I drift very slowly and reluctantly and with total denial into relationships with guys, and I'm never the first to call, the first to make a move. I'd rather climb a mountain using only a single rusty nail than ask a guy for a date.
Which is why, when Kevin happened... he happened. And I fell in love the way Bess fell in love.
Our best friend Nancy was in the hospital. Ned, her husband and the already doting father of their unborn child, was busy sponging Nancy's face, and after twenty hours of labor the doctors were swearing that the baby would come anytime. But the baby was stubborn.
I stood and pulled off the flimsy little paper half-mask. "I'm going for coffee."
Ned looked almost as tired as Nancy. He gave me a smile. "I don't blame you."
"I'll bring you back some, you look like you need it."
Bess caught up with me in the elevator and linked her arm over mine. "Any luck yet?"
"At this rate I'll have a baby before Nancy does," I told my cousin.
"You excited about tonight?"
"Other than that our best friend is, if we're lucky," I glanced at my watch, "going to have her first child, you mean?"
"Of course!" Bess's eyes were sparkling. "He's a great guy. Absolutely amazing. I'm glad you decided to meet him."
"I didn't decide, so much as agree only because you threatened to never speak to me again."
Bess shrugged. "Same thing."
When I came back with the coffee the nurse was telling Nancy to push and Nancy was screaming and ten minutes later, the baby was born.
Bess had picked, for my "blind" date, a tiny European cafe on a busy street in downtown Chicago. She did my hair and makeup and picked my outfit and kept telling me that he was sweet and charming and wonderful and cute and sophisticated and, and...
and, eventually, forty-five minutes late.
I checked my watch one last time, then pushed away from the table and walked out into the street. But one can never waste a total Bess makeover by going home, peeling off the pantyhose and watching a Lifetime movie. I saw a sports bar across the street and headed inside.
A guy was sitting at the bar watching the game.
I watched him for a long minute. He was glancing up between the television and the bartender, dressed in a beaten leather coat and jeans, not winking at the other girls. When I slid onto the seat next to his, he glanced at me in the mirror, but didn't come onto me. Only the hint of a smile on his face.
After a few beers and two random comments about the game, he reached over and offered a hand. "Kevin."
"George."
And all he did was smile.
During the course of our conversation, I discovered that he had everything against him. Divorced, eight years older than me, and he was in a bar on a weeknight.
"I think I've seen you before," he said, after he bought me another one. "Did you run the marathon? Earlier this year?"
"Yeah, I did." I tapped my beer to his. "You?"
"Every year."
After an hour of talking and laughing at his easy jokes and nursing our respective beers, he threw some bills on the bar and gave me a polite smile. "George... George. It's been a pleasure."
"Yeah, it has," I told him. I gave him my best smile, not quite knowing why.
Bess called, as she always did, the next morning. "So? How was it?"
"That was the best blind date you've ever set me up on, Bess," I told her. "And he didn't even show up."
"Who did? What happened? Tell me everything," Bess demanded.
"His name is Kevin. He's..." And I trailed off, playing it over in my head. A divorcee who's eight years older than me and I met him in a sports bar and he likes to run marathons.
"That good, huh."
I laughed a little. "Right."
"So when are you going to see him again?"
"I can't," I heard myself say. "I don't even know his last name."
It's supposed to start slow. With me, at least. Bess is the one who's picking out a diamond and naming their first three children after the second date. I'm the one who'd rather go white water rafting than talk about my feelings. Which is why I am never the one who does what I did that night, walked back into that bar with a smooth easy smile and just the right casual tone in my voice.
"You know that guy I was talking to last night?"
"Kevin? Oh, he'll be here. Give him about fifteen minutes."
It started there, ten minutes later, when Kevin came in again. With that and his very tentative suggestion that I might join him for a hockey game and a hot dog. It started there and soon it was three days a week, four days a week, every weekend. Even the obligatory double date with Bess and her boyfriend of the record-setting six months, which he passed with flying colors.
"He's cute," she said, as though I didn't know.
"I hope so," I laughed back.
Which is why I'm sitting in this very nice restaurant, in a green velvet dress Bess picked out for me, minute diamond studs in my ears. My shoulders are bare and Bess insisted on high heels. Very high heels.
He's nervous for the first time since I've met him. He slides in across from me. I kick off my heels and rub my silk-clad feet together. The detritus of our meal has been cleared away and his fingers drum on the table, and I think I've seen this look before. The look of a sinking heart.
"You okay?"
He smiles. "I'm great." And then he reaches across the table for my hand and I feel almost all right again. "I love you."
I've said those words to three guys in my life. I think he's said it to as many women. But I've never been married, either.
"I love you too."
He knows about the others, but they don't seem nearly as important now. He knows about the high-school boyfriend and the college boyfriend. We talked about it, that and his wife and my cousin, how she's the one who falls in love like this, all while we rappelled up a mountain in Washington, camped in a thin blue tent in separate sleeping bags. Over the howl of the wind we talked the way Bess and I used to talk, that lifetime ago, on identical couch cushions in front of the flickering television set. The way I'd never even known it was possible to talk to a guy.
Kevin shakes his sandy blond hair. Eyes the color of caramel. He wears glasses when he does a lot of reading and he keeps his garage full of sports equipment, a kayak, skis, tennis rackets and volleyball nets, because he would go to the sporting goods store and buy something new every time he and his wife had a fight. He's never touched a gun and he always thought he'd have a child and he wants to see the world, all the places I've seen, the Parisian museums and Venetian palazzos I ducked through while trailing suspects for Nancy.
But in those stories, she's not the central character, the star of the show. He only wants to hear about me.
"Let's get out of here."
"Dessert?"
He shakes his head. "If we could go anywhere tonight, where would you go?"
I smile. "Back to your place," I say. Where we've made dinner a hundred times and fallen asleep on his couch over a bottle of wine, a thousand.
Kevin smiles. The flash of gleaming teeth, ducked head. "I said anywhere."
"Anywhere with you. That's it, that's all."
"Let's do it. O'Hare, right now. You trust me?"
"Of course. You know I do."
He releases my hand and reaches into his pocket. "I've never felt this way about anyone else," he begins, but I've heard this before. The little black box he reveals, however, that's new. The ring is beautiful.
"You said you never wanted to get married again," I say, because that's all I can think. He spent so long convincing me of that. "You said it was one shot."
He plucks the ring from the box. "Just because I tried with the wrong one," he says. "We can get on a plane tonight, and go anywhere. Start our life together. If you want that..."
"I do."
It's hard to catch a cab at this hour, but we rush out of the restaurant anyway, through a sea of faces that seem to be smiling at us, only us. Kevin practically runs out into the street to flag one down, my right hand in his, and I keep staring at the ring, telling myself that this is real, this is true.
"Taxi! For the love of God!" He turns to me, laughing, and then sweeps me up into his arms. "Come on!"
Finally one stops, despite the spectacle he's making. "O'Hare," he says, and once we're on our way I realize that in our rush out the door I left my high heels behind, and he's laughing.
"What?"
"You said yes." He gets the cabbie's attention. "She said yes!"
The cabbie flashes a brief grin. "Congratulations!"
I have never been happier than I am in this moment. The clock glows on the dash. "Kevin, it's after midnight," I tell him, pointing.
"So it is," he says, and the city is full of fairy lights, thousands of people making their way home to their families. And my cousin, my opposite, she was the one who would be in a cab speeding toward an airport, with a brand-new ring on her finger. She and I were never the same, and I never wanted to be the same, never wanted to be the one with my heart out there, so open, so ready to be broken. Not until tonight, when I have everything I want right here.
"Merry Christmas, George." He can't stop staring at me either.
"Merry Christmas."