Free The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta Page B

you know it.”
    Dave felt a headache coming on. Faster than he'd ever imagined, the wedding had installed itself as a dominant presence in his life, this giant looming cloud of unmade decisions. It turned out to be far more pressing and complicated than the smaller cloud it had displaced, the one emblazoned with the single, no-longer-eternal question:
Marriage?
    “You know what?” she said. “I bet Leonard Nimoy
is
gay.”
    “Really?”
    “Who knows?” She held her left hand in front of her face, as if trying to imagine the ring onto her finger. “After a few years in a spaceship, we'd probably all start rethinking our options.”
    Dave Couldn't remember the last time they'd spent an afternoon like this—a picnic on a blanket in the shade by a lake, Julie stretched out beside him, eyes closed, maybe sleeping, maybe not, nothing unpleasant hanging over their heads, no fights or disappointments or lurking grievances. It almost seemed to him that they'd managed to return to an earlier time in their relationship, as if they themselves had been rejuvenated.
    He sat up on the blanket and looked around. Over in the parking area, shirtless teenage boys were waxing muscle cars while girls in tight jeans looked on, smoking with the squinty-eyed concentration of beginners. In a grassy clearing nearby, three teenage boys with flannel shirts tied around their waists were showing off with a Frisbee, catching it between their legs and behind their backs, popping it in the air over and over again with one finger. On a picnic table to their right, a couple of high-school kids were making out as though their faces had been stuck together with Krazy Glue, and they were trying every trick they could think of to pull them apart. In the lake, a black lab with a blue bandana collar swam regally toward shore, a fat stick jutting from its mouth. Somewhere across the water, “Sugar Magnolia” was blaring from a radio.
    It really could have been 1979, he thought, except that he and Julie would have been the teenagers with adhesive faces rather than the adults who had just spent more than they could afford on an engagement ring. There were days when a realization like that would have struck him with sadness, days when he ached to be sixteen again, but today wasn't one of them. Today he felt richer for possessing a past, maybe even a little wiser. They had had their moment; they hadn't let it pass. That was the most anyone could say.
    He looked down at her, the halo of dark outspread hair fanned out around her peaceful face. She wasn't seventeen anymore, but she was still beautiful. He thought about Phil Hart and his wife, the fact that they'd managed to stick it out for more than a half century. Did he look at her on the morning of his death and think,
Well, she's not sixty-five anymore, but she's still beautiful?
Was that a way it could happen?
    “Heads up, dude!”
    Dave turned toward the voice, just in time to see an orange Frisbee slicing toward his face. Reacting with the grace born ofself-preservation, he ducked out of the way while simultaneously reaching up with his right hand to snag the errant disc. In a surprisingly fluid motion, he rose to his feet and zipped the Frisbee back to the long-haired Chinese kid who had yelled out the warning, not with the cumbersome cross-body discus hurl of the neophyte, but with the precise, economical flick of the wrist he had perfected during countless lazy spring days like this when he was flunking out of college.
    Acknowledging Dave's membership in the elite, wrist-flicking fraternity, the kid jumped up and caught the Frisbee between his outscissored legs, then fired it off to one of his friends before his feet even touched the ground.
    “Thanks, dude.”
    “No problem,” said Dave. He felt deeply pleased, as though he'd just proven something important to himself and the world.
    Julie was stirring when he sat back down. She yawned and opened her eyes, blinking a few times to readjust to the