SETH AND ANDIE

GABY’S ONLY SON, Seth, was singing before breakfast that morning:

“Are you loving this dumb song like I’m loving it?” Seth said to Andie.

Andie just smiled.

They were sitting on a lumpy green sofa that she’d tried to spruce up with orange plastic pillows from a dollar store in Chinatown. But Boston didn’t have a very big Chinatown, and Boston’s Chinatown didn’t have very exciting pillows for a buck. And obviously, Seth and Andie didn’t have a lot of spare bucks for decorating, or much of anything else.

“I know the song you want,” Seth said. Then his fingers attacked the three-octave keyboard on his lap as he sang:

Now Andie smiled again, and this smile was wide, toothy, totally irresistible. Whenever Seth told her that, she answered, “I’ve spent my whole life saving my smile for someone like you.” And Seth knew that was the truth. Andie’s parents had died in an auto accident when she was twelve. She recalled her teenage years as a wasteland of loneliness—not bad, not cruel, just achingly lonely. So when she met Seth, and when it was clear that he loved her, she decided to enfold him with all the caring and love she’d been keeping inside since her parents’ death.

“C’mon,” he said. “You like ‘Wedding Bell Rock’ better.”

“It’s not that I like it better, Seth. It’s just that I think it works better with my visual.”

She held up her sketch—a charming, funny, and irreverent cartoon of Gaby and ten unidentifiable men disguised by ski caps and scarves, all riding in an open sleigh.

Right behind them in a wacky convertible was a couple—obviously Seth and Andie—chasing after them like the Keystone Kops.

Seth slid the keyboard off his lap. Then he leaned over and kissed her.

“We’ll go with ‘Wedding Bell Rock.’ That’s the best.”

“You are the nicest boyfriend,” she said, and she kissed him again. This time the kiss lasted longer. “And the best roommate ever.”

“Should we finish up the song and the card or should we…you know,” he asked, “before we have to go to work?”

Andie slid over on top of him. “You know?”

“You know,” he said. “It’s good we sit around in our underwear sometimes. That way we’re ready to seize the moment. Among other things.”

“You remember what your mother said—that time she paid a surprise visit in the middle of the afternoon?”

“‘You two always walk around like you’re in a French movie’?”

Gaby had also told them she thought it was adorable. They were adorable—both so slim and tall, and obviously head over heels in love with each other.

But Seth hadn’t told Gaby what was on their minds lately. They were a big bundle of nerves and anxiety, actually. Because—

The prestigious New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf was considering Seth’s novel The Dream Chasers. The book had been passed around for six weeks, and now Seth checked his e-mail about every fifteen minutes. He was getting as jumpy as his sister Emily, the lawyer in New York.

But he still hadn’t heard from Knopf. So that meant he was still the most overqualified receptionist at Arnold Worldwide, a Boston ad agency at Center Plaza.

Meanwhile, a few floors and offices away at Little, Brown, Andie was busy doing illustrations for children’s books. “Toddler books, not teens or tweens or chapter books,” she would say, using the lingo of the trade. “I am the perfect visual communicator with the under-three crowd.”

“So, what’s it going to be?” Seth said, gently rubbing the sides of her arms and hips and legs.

“We should get this card done,” she said as she kissed him. “Gaby’s a bride, oh, my, what a shock!”