Page 21 of This Is How It Started
I clutch the phone between my shoulder and my ear while scooping beans into the grinder. “So, Jessica Simpson, huh?” That’s her name, I kid you not. Jessica. Freaking. Simpson. She even looks a little like the real Jessica Simpson. “When? Where?”
“Don’t know yet. But save the date.” He laughs, and I’m suddenly transported back nineteen years when that laugh filled me with an impossible giddiness.
“I’m really happy for you,” I say, and I am. Everyone should be as in love as Josh and me.
“Thanks, Rach. Everything good with you?”
“Everything is great. A big restaurant group just hired Josh to do the plans for three new restaurants in the city. One’s at the Embarcadero with incredible water views. He’s over the moon.”
“Very cool,” Campbell says, but I detect something in his voice, something that saysI wasn’t asking about Josh.“What about you, Rach? What do you have going?”
“Same old,” I say cheerily. Too cheerily. “You know, working on a couple of deals.”
“Yeah, anything interesting?”
“Just the uzhe.” I try to sound as if the usual is juggling a dozen listings at a time, while brokering a sale between a Russian oligarch and the Zuckerbergs. “How ’bout you? I mean workwise.”
“I’m doing the kitchen cabinets for this sick apartment in Russian Hill and a built-in entertainment center in the Castro. Other than that, working on some furniture. I guess you can sayjust the uzhe.” His voice is teasing.
In reality, I think he finds my shortening of words annoying, even childish. But Josie and I have been doing it since we were thirteen. Old habits die hard.
“Jess and I want to do some sort of party in a couple of weeks to announce the news. We’re still working on the details, but I want you there, Rach. You, Josh and all the Golds.”
“Of course,” I say. “Just give me a day and time. I’d offer up Dad’s house but...well, you know how that is.” If anyone deserves to have a party at the house on Vallejo, it’s Campbell.
For more years than I can count, his father tended my parents’ gardens. While his landscaping company had grown to the point that Mr. Scott rode a desk more than a tractor mower, he still saw to every detail of our gardens until the day he retired.
As a boy, Campbell used to come with him and do his homework in our kitchen. He and Adam were the same age, and an everlasting friendship grew out of those days Campbell waited for his father. I, of course, followed them wherever they went, having decided even as young as thirteen that Campbell was my destiny. It took him a little longer to come to that conclusion, regarding me for the most part as a tagalong pest.
I don’t know exactly when or how it happened, but as the both of us got older, he started spending more time with me and less time with Adam. First, it was longing looks when Adam wasn’t paying attention. Then it was kisses. Then clandestine meetings whenever and wherever we could. In my junior year of high school, I got pregnant. We were always careful but apparently not careful enough. And for seven weeks we kept it a secret, plotting our future with all the naiveté of children.
“Yeah, don’t sweat it,” he says. “We’ll probably do it at Jessica’s folks’. Or maybe at a restaurant. Nothing too fancy.”
Campbell eschews all things fancy. He plays up his blue-collar roots like a Bruce Springsteen song.
“I’m so happy for you,” I say again. Yet I feel ambivalent about his news. It’s just that there is so much history between us, and Jessica, who I actually like, feels like a trespasser.
“Thanks, Rach. It means a lot to me.” He pauses for a beat, then says, “I’ll let you and the rest of the Golds know as soon as we hammer out a party date.”
“What was that about?” Josh asks after I hang up with Campbell.
“Campbell’s getting married.”
“To the blonde? What’s her name?”
“Jessica. Jessica Simpson.”
Josh laughs. “That’s right. How could I forget that name?”
“They’re planning an engagement party. We’re invited.”
“Okay,” he says but is sorting through the mail, his attention already on something else.
Josh pretends to like Campbell, and Campbell pretends to like Josh. But the two of them are like oil and water. The logical reason for that is me. But even without me as the common denominator, Josh and Campbell are polar opposites. The best way I can describe it is Campbell leads with his heart, which bugs the shit out of Josh, and Josh leads with his head, which bugs the shit out of Campbell.
It’s one of the things I loved most about Campbell, his passion, his fire, his constant desire to create and build things with his hands. I think that’s why as kids he and Adam became best friends. As different as they are—Adam a computer nerd and Campbell a master carpenter—they’re both dreamers. Together, there isn’t anything they can’t do, like the tree house they built in the towering oak in our backyard on Vallejo that they even wired for internet.
It’s still there.
