Melissa Senate (2 page)

I
SMILED MY WAY THROUGH THE CROWD ON THE DECK, DESPERATE
to be alone, to think, to chant my way out of this: Tom, good. Nick, bad. Tom, good. Nick, bad. But someone grabbed my hand. It was Tom’s sister, Caroline, who’d shown up at our house with a stack of bridal magazines the day after we’d gotten engaged. She was saying something now about pink satin, and how it complemented every woman’s skin tone—if it was the right pink, and she knew her pinks. How many bridesmaids did I envision, she wanted to know. I vaguely realized that there were ellipses involved, that she was waiting for me to ask her to be in my bridal party. A moment later, her six-year-old daughter, Bree, ran over in hysterics because her hair wasn’t long enough for a French braid like her sister was now sporting.

Pink bridesmaids are good. Tom is good. Nick is bad.

I offered her a rueful smile and slipped inside the house and headed to the bedroom, where I found Stella staring at herself in the full-length mirror attached to the closet door, checking herself out from every conceivable direction. She usually made kissy faces at herself in mirrors, pouting her lips like Anna Nicole Smith. But now she just stared at herself as though she didn’t like what she saw.

I wished I could tell her what just happened on that swing, but she’d steamroll me before I had a chance to think, to process. She might even walk out into the living room, say she had an announcement and declare to everyone:
I am ending the engagement between my sister and Tom. She is in love with another man, who’s here, by the way, and who has just told her that he’s always thought about them! Please take back your toasters and crystal vases and go home, people!

I tried to think, tried to process, but Stella was distracting me with her restlessness. She’d moved from the mirror to my bed, where she was now flipping through a
People
magazine she’d grabbed from my nightstand. She’d been in and out of my bedroom all afternoon, barely mingling, politely excusing herself from anyone’s attempt to engage her in conversation, which was usually,
So you’re Ruby’s twin! You look nothing alike! You’re fraternal twins, right?

She flung aside the magazine, then went over to my dressing table and started brushing her hair with my fake brush, the antique meant for decoration. I’d always been envious of Stella’s hair, which was long, dark, glossy, and straight-wavy. I’d inherited my mother’s fine blond hair, which looked thin if it got too long, so it was a sort of non-length just above my shoulders. Stella opened my jewelry box and pawed through it. She fastened our mother’s heart locket pendant around her neck, the delicate gold chain pretty against her tanned skin. She went back to my bed and the
People.

“Stella…you can’t keep that,” I said. We’d gone through our mother’s jewelry box the weekend of her funeral two years ago. Surprisingly, neither of us had reached for the same pieces. “You know how I feel about that necklace.” It had been a gift to my mother from my father on one of their very early anniversaries. I would never wear it, since it hardly seemed to mean anything, but the sentiment in which it was given had meant something. Did mean something. It was that sentiment I wanted.

She didn’t say anything. I realized she was staring at my engagement ring.

“Does it bother you?” I asked, glancing at the one-carat round diamond, which had also been my mother’s.

She shook her head and swept her hair up into a bun, then let it cascade around her shoulders. “Whoever gets engaged first gets the ring. That was Mom’s deal. But there should have been conditions, Ruby. Like marrying someone you actually love.”

Whoa. Current situation aside, what did Stella know about how I felt? I hadn’t seen her since early December, six months ago. And before that, Thanksgiving, but before that, it had been our birthdays last July. Stella was a flitter. She barely e-mailed, either.

“I do love Tom,” I said, staring at the ring. That
was
the truth. I did love him. I just was sort of maybe in love with someone else who was now telling me, at this eleventh hour, that he
thought about us.

“You
said
you didn’t, Ruby. And you don’t.”

“I said I didn’t two years ago. On the worst day of my life.”

She shrugged and flipped another page.

What I said I’d said on the deck of my mother’s house, late at night after her funeral. It had been cold for early December, barely twenty degrees, which was cold even for Maine that early in the winter. Stella and I were sitting on the wooden slats, looking out onto our mother’s favorite place of all, her gardens, which in summer were ablaze with color. We were bundled up in down jackets and sipping at the harsh liquor someone poured for us, whiskey. We also had a tin of blueberries, our mother’s only addiction.

Our mother, all we had in the world aside from each other and Grammy Zelda, had been in a car accident. There’d been a deer and someone stopping short on a rural highway, someone in a huge SUV. My mother’s little car hadn’t stood a chance behind that truck. Its driver had, though, barely. Forget the deer.

The cards from my students, still so new to me then, made me cry. The kids and their parents knocked on the door with quiches and pies, and I accepted each with half a thank-you before I burst into tears, leaving them to stand there not knowing what to say, what to do. And then Tom, who I’d been dating for only three months, would appear behind me, graciously thank the visitor, to their immense relief, and lead me into my bedroom for a good long hug.

The day of the funeral, Tom spent hours at my side, politely making small talk to strangers, mostly my mother’s friends and co-workers at the library, then cleaned up the living room and kitchen of her house, Saran-wrapping casseroles and cakes and replenishing boxes of Kleenex while I sat on the deck with Stella, who I’d seen only three times that year. That was Tom Truby at three months.

What I’d said, what I’d whispered to her between the whiskey and the blueberries, my voice cracking, was: “Despite all this, I still can’t work up any
love
for him. If
only
I could love him.”

I’d wanted to love him then. I’d worked so hard at it since our third date, when I’d realized that Tom and I were headed for a relationship. Being with him, talking to him, was effortless. And the way he looked at me made up for my lack of passion for him. He would look at me—whether from across a romantic, candlelit table or while I was down with a cold and had a red nose and watery eyes—with true desire, which was a first for me. It always surprised me, made me feel so…sexy. Tom was easy to love.

But Stella had been throwing my words in my face ever since that night on the deck. At every occasion, few and far between—our birthdays, Thanksgiving, then the anniversary of our mother’s death. No matter our cold wars or where she was at the time (one year she was living in Ireland), she came to Maine for all three. Thanksgiving was our mother’s favorite holiday, and now that it was down to me and Stella and Grammy Zelda, it was written in stone that Thanksgiving would be at my house. As for our birthdays, my mother had always insisted we celebrate together, even when we were teenagers who fought even more bitterly than we did now.

And we grudgingly continued the tradition as adults, ostensibly for the sake of our mother and Grammy Zelda, who made such a fuss every year. When we lived in New York City as little kids, we always celebrated our birthdays at the famed Serendipity 3 for frozen hot chocolate. In Maine, it was a working farm that sold ice cream on an old caboose, the most incredible ice cream we’d ever had and ever would have. We’d sit in the gazebo, whether we were newly seven or newly seventeen, with Mom and Grammy Zelda, our grandmother there for a small portion of those years. And then Stella and I would go check out the bunny hut and the pigs and the billy goats, which were my favorite. There was a moratorium against fighting for those hours, difficult to stick to, but we always did manage it. I would say,
Don’t you wish we could take these adorable little goats home?
And instead of telling me that the stinky goats would actually improve the smell left in our bedroom by my best friend, Liza, who was a runner, Stella would just nod.

The birthday celebrations always undid our problems until at least the next morning or next phone conversation, when we’d go back to not speaking. Stella was easy to not speak to.

The problem with me and my sister was that we seemed to understand each other’s truths, but then threw that truth in the other’s face without a care to the other’s feelings. And the truth was the truth. I would not tell Stella that I hesitated—for just a minute in both head and heart—about saying yes to Tom. I would also not share with her that my first thought wasn’t yes or no, but
Nick.
The good guy had won, the
right
guy, as he should. But somehow, based on one whiskey-induced comment two years ago, when I’d been in despair, Stella
knew.
She didn’t know how I felt about Nick, though how my feelings didn’t show was beyond me. But she knew I didn’t love Tom the way you might love someone you were going to marry.

“Two years is a long time, Stella. Six months is a long time, too. You have no idea how I feel about
anything.
I see you a few times a year, you make some rude comments, and then you leave again.”

“Whatever,” she said, flipping another page. “I can stay here for a few days, right?”

Sigh. Of course she could. Because what happened when Stella came home was what always happened: I felt an incredible sense of relief, of
rightness,
despite everything, despite our differences. “You can stay in the guest room for as long as you want. But keep your comments about Tom to yourself. He proposed, I said yes, we love each other, and we’re getting married.”
I will not think about what Nick said. I will not put any stock into it. I’m just one of the few women in Maine who he hasn’t slept with. I’m a conquest.
“If you don’t want to be my maid of honor, fine.”

She rolled her eyes.

“No, actually not fine,” I said. “You will be my maid of honor whether you like it or not. Whether you like Tom or not. And you’ll smile down the aisle. Got it?”

She finally cracked a smile. “Got it, got it. But I thought you always said you wanted to elope to Las Vegas, like Mom and Dad.”

I stared at my shoes. “I don’t know about that anymore.” Tom wasn’t really an eloper. Not with all those Trubys expecting a big wedding and pink bridesmaid dresses.

The thought of Las Vegas, with all its mystery and hard-edged glamour, the glittering lights of the strip and the strange cacti of the desert, the drive-through wedding chapels—if they really existed—had always seemed so strangely romantic to me. But mostly because our parents had eloped to Las Vegas. Because they’d been in love once. Our father had even uncharacteristically written his own vows, albeit scribbled in crayon on the back of a children’s menu at Denny’s, which I had now in my mother’s hope chest.

Stella shut the door. “If you’re going to marry Tom, despite what you said two years ago, let’s drive down to Las Vegas and plan you a beautiful wedding in a nice chapel and book you a beautiful dinner reservation. And I can give you a bachelorette party the night before. And then Tom can fly down, and I’ll be your witness. It’ll be like our last hurrah.”

I burst into tears. Stella might have been easy to not speak to, but like Tom, she was easy to love.

“Is that a yes?” she asked, handing me a tissue.

It wasn’t a yes. I couldn’t last thirty minutes in a car with Stella, and Las Vegas was a forty-two-hour drive. I knew this because she spent the next hour on Google Maps, printing out the driving directions (Stella had become deathly afraid of flying in the past few years). Every minute or so, she’d come find me chatting to a colleague or one of Tom’s many relatives and whisper something in my ear like, “The outlaw trail where Jesse James and his gang hid would be on our route—well, it’s a slight detour. I wonder if the Grand Canyon is,” and then with lit-up eyes she’d disappear back to the laptop in my bedroom.

I headed there now to get away from the nonstop talk about “the wedding.” About how many kids we wanted. I’d gotten so many horrified looks when I said I wanted just one child that I started saying
four,
just to get the smile so I could move on instead of having to defend myself.

Why did you have to defend your own feelings?

I shut the door behind me and took three quick deep breaths. Stella lay on her stomach on my bed, her legs crossed in the air behind her, the Google maps spread out in front of her. She pointed her pink highlighter at me. “That’s going to be your life. For the next sixty years or so.” She gestured at the pillows by her feet, at some envelopes lying on top. “That hot friend of yours left that for you,” she added. “He said he had to go. Oh, and the Grand Canyon wouldn’t be on the route. But we could take a detour if you wanted.”

During one of Stella’s holiday visits, “that hot friend of mine” had asked me if she was off-limits, and I said she was, and he’d respected that. If Nick and Stella had ever hooked up (to borrow a phrase from my students), I would have spontaneously combusted.

I glanced at the envelopes. One fancy, one plain, both in Nick’s terrible handwriting. The fancy one was addressed to me and Tom. I opened it; it was an engagement present, a very generous gift certificate for a weekend at a famous seaside inn not far from here. The second envelope, the one addressed only to me, sort of rescinded the present. It was a note on plain paper:

Deep breath. I folded the note to a tiny square and put it in my wallet.