Free Keep Calm and Carry a Big Drink by Kim Gruenenfelder Page A

looks great, lounging on a beach chair with a martini glass in her hand, and donning a fabulously stylish hat. But …
    “Her eyes look so sad,” I almost whimper.
    “They’re supposed to. The person looking at this will hopefully have a whole group of questions in his or her head: Why is she unhappy? Is she a mistress? Is she a beautiful woman who won’t let anyone in? Is she unable to have children? Secretly in love with another? What is it?”
    “It’s really good,” I tell him, haunted by her green eyes. I wish I had his passion and talent. I’d love to be able to communicate with people with nothing more than a picture. “What are the Six-Word Memoirs ?”
    “You’ve never heard of the Six-Word Memoirs ?” Scott says, visibly surprised. “Seems like the kind of book you would have bought. Huh. Well, anyway, these editors at Smith magazine, Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, asked people to write their lives in exactly six words. They put the best six-word sentences into a book called Not Quite What I Was Planning . It was on The New York Times bestseller list for a while.”
    “Hmm,” I say, still looking at the girl. “So why is she so unhappy?”
    Scott looks at his picture, purses his lips, thinking. “Not sure. I suppose that’s up to the person looking at her.”
    He slowly closes his pad, looks up at me, and forces a smile.
    “Are you unhappy?” I finally ask him.
    “No,” he says immediately. Then he’s quiet for a while. “I’ll admit, this whole ‘combining of our lives’ thing has been way more stressful than I thought it would be. Seema has so many ideas of what she wants, and sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little lost among the details. But it’s fine. I can ride the wave for a few more weeks.”
    “Have you told her how you’re feeling?”
    He lets out a mild chuckle. “Yeah, the groom’s feelings? Not something a bride really wants to hear about right before her wedding. Trust me. We’ve been mildly fighting since I put the ring on her finger. Not fighting, that’s the wrong word. It’s just—you know—she knew what cake she wanted, she knew what she wanted the invitations to look like, she knows exactly how her mehndi ceremony is going to go…”
    “So you’re just fighting about wedding stuff,” I say, relieved.
    “Well, it’s a little more than that. It’s little things. Like, she knows I hate going to Burbank because I don’t trust the cops there, but she books our tickets through the Burbank airport anyway just to save money. Or I really didn’t want the sheets that we registered for. But we looked at so many sheets. I mean, seriously, we looked at literally a wall of sheets at the store where we registered. And then she picked, like, the third ones from the top, which were beige, and I wasn’t crazy about them. But she seemed to care so much about those sheets, and I wasn’t willing to die on the hill over linens, so we picked the ones she wanted.”
    It doesn’t feel as if we’re just talking about sheets, so I say nothing and wait for him to continue. Scott takes a moment to have a sip of his coffee, then gets into the deeper issues. “And I want kids. Soon even. Like, maybe start trying in a year, give us a little time to be Mr. and Mrs. James before jumping into ‘Mommy’ and “Daddy.’ But she wants to start trying the minute we get married. And … I guess that’s fine. But it’s like, wow, okay, I guess we’re jumping right in. And then we had this huge fight about my loft.…”
    “I heard.”
    “And I’m sure I came off as an asshole.”
    “No,” I quickly assure him.
    “Yeah, I’m sure I did. Because Seema has no problem telling people what’s bothering her. But I don’t like doing that—I like to be a little more chill, a little more private. But then people hear about our fight from her point of view, so she looks good, and I’m the thoughtless jerk. But just because I don’t get riled up about every little