The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (32 page)

“No. What if there
was
something going on between us?” he asked quietly. “For real. Not just on-screen.”

“But there’s not,” she replied nervously.

“But what if?” Billy demanded.

She shifted her weight. “I’m sorry, what was the question again?” Mom may have been a big advocate of clear and honest communication when it came to other people, but when it came to herself? Not so much.

He stared at her.

“I don’t want to have this conversation in front of Annabelle,” she sniffed.

“Fine.” He turned to me. “Annabelle, do you think I could speak to your mother alone?”

I turned to go.

“Annabelle, stay here,” she ordered, grabbing my arm.

He sighed. “Really? This is how you’re going to play it?”

Mom looked like a bug-eyed kitten hanging on to a tree. If the kitten had some piecrust in the corner of its mouth. “Well, you do know something about
players
.”

He looked at her like he couldn’t believe what she had said. Which made sense because I felt the same way.

“
Mom
—” I knew it was none of my business, but I couldn’t help myself.

Billy held his hand up. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. There’s obviously nothing to talk about,” he said as he turned on his boot and started to leave. “See you around.”

After he left, she turned to me. “Can you believe he just left like that?”

“Can I believe it?!” I said angrily. “I can’t believe he didn’t leave any earlier! What was that about?”

“You’re taking
his
side?!” she demanded.

“You mean the side of the sane person in the equation? Yeah.”

“You didn’t even want me
talking
to him, Annabelle. And what, now you’re rooting for us to end up together?” She shook her head. “Make up your mind here,” she muttered.

She was right. I hadn’t wanted her talking to him in the beginning. Mostly because I was afraid that if they had gotten together, I’d have to sit back and watch as the same thing played out the way it always did. She’d fall madly in love and throw herself into the relationship, and then, as time went on, he would see that the real Janie Jackson wasn’t the beautiful, sexy, kooky, fun person from talk shows and magazine articles. She was difficult and moody and needy, and that need would start to suffocate him—just like it suffocated me.

But the difference was, once he got sick of her craziness,
he
could bolt—I could not. I had to stay and pick up the pieces of her heart like I always did when it got smashed—a heart that she always gave over too quickly, to men who weren’t worth the gift to begin with. I would have to help put her together again, listening to her vows about how next time it would be different; next time she’d pick someone who could be there for her—for us—and we’d live happily ever after.

If, like they said in meetings, the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then my mother had pretty much spent my entire life totally insane. But what I had witnessed since she had met Billy was that things had shifted.
She
had shifted. I had watched as she and Billy had become friends and gotten to know each other. He had seen her when she was happy and on. But the difference was that this time she had also allowed him to see her on her not-so-good days. The days when the sadness wasn’t just confined to her eyes but bled out into all of her. Not to the point where she took to her bed and stared at the wall, but when she got quiet and didn’t try to snap herself out of it. And the difference with Billy, unlike the others, was that it didn’t scare him. He didn’t act like somehow the fact that she was human was some betrayal, like she wasn’t holding up her end of the deal. If anything, in those moments, as I watched him watch her being human, holding my breath to see if that would be the thing that made him pull back and leave her—leave
us
—he seemed to like her more. More than when she was up and on and acting as if she was still the star of a sitcom.

I never loved her more than when she was like that—when she was being real—and I realized right then that Billy did, too. Loved her. Loved her not in a Hollywood way, but in a true way—the kind of love where you let someone have their moods and their moments, but you’re also not afraid to call them on it.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I’m rooting for you guys to end up together.”

Had I just said that aloud? From the shocked look on Mom’s face, I guess I had.

“But—”

I held up my hand. “Hey, I’m just as surprised as you are,” I said. “But he loves you, Mom. I can see that. I mean, he’s totally willing to put up with you. And before you go getting all offended, I mean that in the best possible way.”

“But what about the age thing?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “He may be a lot younger than you, but he’s pretty smart about a lot of things.” I walked over and took her hand. “He’s a good guy, Mom.”

She squeezed mine. “I know that,” she sighed. “That’s what’s so terrifying.”

“Maybe it’ll work out and maybe it won’t,” I said, “but it seems like, if you’re going to shake things up, you may as well go full force.”

She wrapped her arms around me. “Oh, Bug—how’d you get so wise?”

I shrugged as I hugged her tight. “I don’t know. Trial and error.”

“I love you, Bug.”

“I love you, too.”

I waited for her to ask me how much, but she didn’t.

Maybe she finally knew.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The thing is, once you start going outside your comfort zone and taking risks (some people would probably call that living life), a weird thing starts to happen. Something gets flipped, and soon enough the thing that keeps you up at night and reaching for your notebook to make a list is the fear of not taking one. Once you’ve accumulated experience that shows that not only does the risk taking not lead to your world blowing up, but it actually makes your world bigger, it feels more uncomfortable to stay small.

So after my talk with Mom, I finished listening to the CD, and she drove over to Billy’s house to apologize and who knew what else. (While I may have been okay with their being together, I wasn’t at the point where I could deal with an actual visual of what might be occurring along with that without getting creeped out.) But even after listening to the CD a second time, I was no further along in my quest to figure out what Matt was trying to say or how he felt about me or what had happened that made him zip himself back up during the car ride home from his house.

I woke up to a buzz at around two a.m., on top of the covers with the lights still on, and immediately grabbed my phone. I felt myself relax a bit when I saw through half-open eyes that there was a text, only to come to full attention when I saw that it wasn’t from Matt—it was from Mom, saying that she was spending the night at Billy’s.

I felt the familiar whir as the adrenaline started to rev up inside of me—yes, I had essentially given her my blessing, but it didn’t mean she should actually go and do it. But just as quickly as it started, it slowed down. Why shouldn’t she give Billy a chance? Getting all mad at her for doing what I said she should do was just a way to avoid feeling bummed about the fact that Matt was acting weird and hadn’t called or texted. I waited for the anxiety to rev back up, but it didn’t. Instead, it conked out completely.

One of us should be happy
, I thought as I turned out the light and got under the sheet.

I was at the kitchen table, eating pancakes—pancakes I had cooked in a pan on the stove instead of in the microwave—when I heard the door open.

“Bug?” she called.

I braced myself. It was too early to deal with her manic chatter that happened after she hooked up with a guy and was first in love. Especially when I was wallowing in Bumville because I had woken up to zero texts or e-mails from Matt.

“In the kitchen,” I called out.

I heard the sound of Billy’s footsteps following hers.

“Hi, honey,” she said as they walked in.

I studied them to see what was different, but other than Mom’s hair being a little messed up, they looked the same.

“Hey,” Billy said.

“Hey.”

He pointed to the pancakes on my plate. “Mind if I have some?”

And obviously nothing had changed with him. “Sure,” I replied.

He went to the drawer and took out a fork. Instead of breaking off a piece, he took an entire one.

Yup. Still the same.

“So what are you going to do today?” Mom asked as she poured herself some juice.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I saw there’s some new shows up at some of the galleries on Warren Street,” Billy said as he polished off the pancake.

This was how it was going to be now that they were together? So . . . normal?

“Maybe I’ll check them out.”

“I’m going to shower,” Mom said.

After she left, Billy grabbed some iced tea and joined me at the table. He pointed at my iPad. “Mind if I check the baseball scores?”

I pushed it toward him, amazed as he skimmed the sports page of the
New York Times
as if this was just another morning and not the one after the first night that he and my mother had probably had sex for the first time.

“You okay?” he asked as he looked up to find me staring at him.

“Uh-huh.”

“Is this weird for you, the fact that your mom spent the night at my place?”

“A little weird.”

He nodded. “I can understand that.”

“But not a lot weird,” I said.

A few minutes later Mom came back, showered and dressed. “Okay, Bug—we’re off,” she said, kissing me on top of my head. “I’m speaking at a meeting tonight in Hudson, so I’ll be home around nine.”

Billy stood up. “I think I’m done on set around five, so if you want to go catch a movie or something, text me.”

Things seemed exactly the same. Who would have thought?

Obviously, there was a new world order in place.

I could have just waited for Matt to get in touch with me, and then, when he did, pretended that everything was cool and not bring it up for fear of somehow making him uncomfortable or, even worse, mad. That’s what the old me in the old world order would have done. But the new me—the me who was getting used to taking risks; the one who, as much as I tried to hold back and not fall for a guy who in three more weeks would live 2,886 miles away from me, I had totally fallen for—couldn’t just sit back. The new me in this new world order wasn’t going to count on waiting for Matt to maybe feel like talking at some point in time. This version of me was going to point-blank ask him what was going on. And not via text. But by calling. On the phone. Right after I went to Stewart’s to fortify myself with an iced coffee.

Once back home, slurping the last of my iced coffee while watching George the goat (Matt and I had named him after watching a George Clooney movie on cable one afternoon) nuzzle Mabel the cow (had everyone around me hooked up?), I clicked on Matt’s number and prayed for voice mail.

No luck.

“Hey, I was going to call you,” he said.

Uh-oh. It was not a happy, excited “I was going to call you.” It was the kind of “I was going to call you” that you’d get from a doctor right before he told you that you had three months to live.

“You were?” I asked nervously.

“Yeah, I feel like I owe you an apology.”

“For what?” I asked innocently. I wasn’t earning any points in the point-blank event for that one, but whatever.

“For how I got all weird when we got to my house.”

“Oh. You weren’t—” I stopped myself. “Yeah. That’s actually why I was calling you. To see what that was about.”

He sighed. “I feel like I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

Oh, God. That was even worse than the “I was going to call you.” Hadn’t we already been through this with the girlfriend thing? In movies, that was the kind of sentence that was usually followed by “I have a wife and three kids.” At least it was in the Lifetime one Mom and I had watched together the other night in her bed when she couldn’t sleep because she was nervous about the scene she had to shoot the following morning, which took place in bed after she sleeps with Billy’s character for the first time. (“Thank God you didn’t make me sell those arm weights at the estate sale, Bug,” she had said.)

“See, my mom . . . she’s got . . . some issues,” he said.

That
was the big deal? “Join the club,” I laughed.

He didn’t. “No, I mean it,” he said seriously.

“What kind of issues?”

“I’d rather tell you in person. Meet me at the waterfall in an hour?” he asked.

On the drive over, I decided I wouldn’t do what I usually did, which was play out all the different scenarios of what Matt might say, and how I would feel when he did, and what I would say in return, so that I showed up having had the experience way before it happened and acted according to my version rather than the real one. Instead, I took what they called in meetings “contrary action,” and called Walter.

“What’s the matter?” he asked suspiciously when he answered.

“Nothing. Why would you think something was the matter?”

“Because now that you have a boyfriend I barely ever hear from you.”

“Okay, (a) he’s not my boyfriend, at least not officially,” I replied, “and (b) that’s not true! We talked two days ago.”

“No—
you
talked two days ago,” he replied. “About him. And then when you were done, you said you had to go.” I was used to Walter getting all grumbly and complain-y, but this was different. Underneath the grumbling I could hear the hurt. Which made me feel awful. I had become his Maya.

“Walter, I’m so sorry—”

“Whatever.”

“No, it’s not whatever,” I said. “You’re right—I’ve been a shitty friend, and I’m sorry. I’m glad you told me.”

“Apology accepted,” he sighed. “Just try not to be that girl, okay? I
hate
when people ditch their friends when they start dating someone.

“So what’s going on?”

“Not much.” Sure, it was a lie, especially in light of Mom and Billy hooking up, but I didn’t want to talk about that. “What about you?”