The Status of All Things (9 page)

“I have to do something about this,” I whisper to myself as I open the door and place Max’s phone back on the dresser and grab mine. “Right now.”

I climb back into bed, the sound of Max’s breathing comforting, reminding me that what I’m about to do is for
us
. Courtney needs a distraction. And I have the power to give her one.

I gulp my tears away as I pull up Facebook. I had always believed Courtney was a true friend—someone I could trust with
anything
. But now I knew she should never have been given that kind of access to my private thoughts. To my life. To my fiancé. And I couldn’t allow her to take another step toward the line I knew she’d eventually cross with Max.

I think back to tonight—how she’d talked over me as I’d tried to share something funny our wedding planner had said, how she’d stolen glances at Max when she thought I wasn’t looking. And then I remember a remark she made to me after Max sent me chocolate-covered strawberries to the office a couple of months ago with a note that said,
just because.

“How did you find such a great guy?”
She’d sighed as she slid the card back into the envelope.
“I hope you know how lucky you are!”

How long had she plotted to take Max from me?

Finally, I type the words and let the tip of my index finger linger over the post button before closing my eyes and pressing it down hard, feeling a sliver of relief that Courtney will never read it because the status will disappear like all the others, but my heart still pumping in overdrive because I’ve just wished for the one thing that Courtney
and I
fear most.

It’s so sad that Courtney can’t get off Magda’s shit list no matter how hard she tries.

CHAPTER NINE

I feel the jersey fabric of the sheets, still warm after Max has left for his run the next morning, and silently pray that ours will be the only bed he will sleep in again. At least a hundred times, I’ve considered wishing for Max to be hopelessly in love with me—to have not one single doubt about spending the rest of our lives together—but I don’t want to use my power to
make
him feel that way. I want his heart to lead him there on its own. Because if it’s not his decision, then I’ll always be left wondering—had he been given the choice, would it have been me?

My head throbbing from the mojitos last night and the text exchange I’d discovered between him and Courtney, I grab my laptop and head to the kitchen to take care of a few chores that have fallen by the wayside since I traveled back in time. With a few clicks of my mouse, I wish for the laundry that is piled high next to the washing machine to be washed, dried, folded,
and put away
; for our dry cleaning, which had been sitting across town for a week, to be picked up; and for my upper lip to be waxed—
without pain
and without leaving the embarrassing red mark that taints my fair skin for hours afterward and screams to the world,
yes, I just got hair removed from my upper lip
,
how are you?

But as I pull the plastic off Max’s freshly pressed shirts and slacks that are now hanging on the back of the chair next to me, I wonder—no,
I know
—that I’m being too frivolous with my wishes, that I should probably be helping others, not just myself and Jules. I could hear my mom scolding me now.
Why didn’t you wish for a cure for a disease or to end hunger in third-world countries?
And she’d be right. Why hadn’t I?

I think back to last Christmas, when I’d found so much joy from adopting a family in need, spending hours carefully choosing their gifts and wrapping them beautifully with the biggest bows I could find. Or when I’d given up a chance to attend the live
Survivor
finale to stay home and care for Max when he threw his back out playing flag football. Sure, I’d been known to forget to replace the toilet paper roll on more than one occasion, but I was definitely someone who always wanted to do right by other people.

Like right now. Excitedly I type,
I can’t believe they’ve found a cure for cancer,
and hit post. I click over to CNN.com, expecting the website to be flooded with the news.
Nothing.
So I try again. This time I ask to end hunger in the world. But still,
nothing
. I quickly delete them both off my page before anyone can start peppering me with questions about why I’d write such a thing. It didn’t make any sense. I could give Jules a flatter stomach and eff with Courtney’s hair, but I couldn’t help starving children in Africa? Why do certain wishes come true and not others?

The sound of the front door opening startles me. I hear Max walk in and quickly slip the dry cleaning into the front closet, not prepared to lie about how it had ended up in our house. It was the same reason I wasn’t wishing to win the lottery or for a new car. After Max questioned me about my instantaneous blowout,
I realized how hard it would be to explain even the smallest of things, especially when I had always been a terrible liar.

“How you doing?” Max says, kissing my cheek and grabbing a carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator. He pours himself a glass, then leans back to drink it, his quads showing the results of running over ten marathons. It was Max who’d introduced me to running, although I’d never felt as passionate about it as he did, only running occasionally, barely completing one 5K last year. Maybe I should start being more consistent? See if he wants to help me train?

“I’m okay, how are you? How was your run?”

“Really good,” he says, rinsing his glass out in the sink and putting it directly into the dishwasher.

As I watch Max put detergent in the tray and push start on the machine, Courtney’s text to him crosses my mind for the thousandth time.

I hope she appreciates you.

I need to show him that I do. I need to prove that I value his opinion and care about the things that matter to him. Maybe that’s what’s making him feel connected to Courtney. I think back to the analytical questions she’d asked Max when he was talking about his job—the thoughtful follow-up questions that would never have crossed my mind. Magda has always said Courtney and I worked well as a team because Courtney was OCD and I was ADD. And interestingly, I have always had a similar dynamic with Max—our differences seemed to smooth out each other’s edges. But now I wonder if he has been craving someone more like-minded.

“Hey, so I was thinking about the wedding—”

“Oh?” Max smirks. “I know that look,” he says, stepping closer to me. “What is it? You want to switch out the color of the flowers again?”

“No! God, you make me sound so frivolous,” I say, hoping he’ll correct me. But instead he pulls a container of cottage cheese out of the refrigerator and starts to spoon it into a bowl.

I shake off his silent agreement and continue. “Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the gerbera daisies, silly. I was thinking about you. I feel like I’ve been planning this without you and it’s something we should be doing together. I want it to feel like
our
day, not just mine.”

Max offers me a small smile. “It
is
our day. And it’s fine that you’ve taken the reins. You know what you want and I want you to have that—I want you to be happy.”

“Great. Then you want to know what will make me happy?” I press on before he answers. “Let’s call Stella and toss out everything and start over. Let’s plan this party together.”

“You feeling okay? First you had that crazy dream and now you want to scrap the ideas you’ve been planning for a year and start over? With only”—Max looks at his phone—“twenty-seven days to go? Is that even possible?”

Yes, anything’s possible when the rest of your life depends on it.

“Don’t worry about that. Just tell me, what would
you
do if it were up to you?” I walk over and kiss his neck. “Because your wish is my command,” I say with a smile, Max having no idea how true that statement really is.

“You really want to know?” he says, frowning slightly and studying my face.

“Yes,” I say, excitement brewing inside of me as I watch his eyes start to animate.

“Okay. Here it is. I don’t want to wear a suit. And I don’t want
the groomsmen to either. It’s too stiff for Maui. Let’s be casual. Maybe even wear flip-flops.”

Oh, gawd.

“Okay,” I say, forcing my head to bob up and down.

“And forget the hoity-toity rehearsal dinner on the roof—let’s have a pig roast with a couple of guys juggling torches. That will be much better on my parents’ budget too.”

I’m beginning to remember why I didn’t push him to be involved.

“Great.” I smile.

“Really?” He squints at me.

“Really,” I say firmly. If buying some linen pants and burying a pig in the ground is going to get my man back, then so be it.

• • •

I nearly collide with the UPS deliverywoman later that morning as I’m rushing out the front door, digging through my cluttered purse for my sunglasses, worried I’ll be late for my meeting with Magda. I bend down to pick up the boxes that dropped and read the Williams-Sonoma return label.
Our wedding gifts are arriving.
Our eyes meet as I stand back up and I realize she looks familiar, her caramel-colored curls sparking a memory as they glisten in the morning sunlight. But I’m sure she’s never delivered anything here before. “Tom out sick?” I ask, still trying to place her face.

“Something like that,” she answers cryptically as she readjusts the packages in her hand.

“Wait! I know. You work at Starbucks, right? Remember me?”

She tips her chin toward me. “How could I forget that loud sigh of yours, Kate?”

Something about the way she says my name makes me pause
as I awkwardly hold an unusually heavy box to my chest—
could it be the ice cream maker I couldn’t wait to try out?
Finally, she adds, “In fact, not only did I make you a kick-ass latte, I also gave you the power to change your life.”

I take a step back and stumble over a Macy’s box I hadn’t seen resting at my feet, the stranger grabbing my elbow before I fall. “H-how . . .” I stammer. “. . . how do you know about that?” I whisper, glancing back toward my front door, not wanting Max to overhear us. Knowing I’ll never be able to come up with a believable story to explain why I’m in a heated discussion with the UPS driver.

She smiles, revealing a small gap between her front teeth. “You’ve just found the person who holds the key to all the questions you have, and
that’s
what you want to ask me?” She leans her head back and laughs before glancing at her watch and heading back toward her truck.

“Hold on!” I cry. “I have a better one. Why me?”

“You needed help,” she says simply as she hops behind the wheel and begins to buckle her seat belt, extending a handheld computer toward me. “I’m going to need you to sign for those right here.” She winks.

I scrawl my signature. “Why do some come true and not others?”

She smiles sweetly. “You want to bring peace to the world?”

I nod.

“One thing you must understand, Kate. All wishes must lead back to you and your journey. So no wishing for the cure for cancer or for the end of poverty, even though that would be nice,” she says, and turns the ignition, which comes alive loudly. “And remember, every choice has a consequence,” she calls out over the engine. “So be careful.”

“What does that even mean?”

“You’ll see,” she says cryptically as she taps her watch. “Gotta run. These packages won’t deliver themselves!”

“Wait,” I ask, feeling desperate for her to stay a few minutes longer. “What’s your name? And how will I find you again?”

“I’m Ruby. Don’t worry, I’ll track you down,” she says right before pulling away from the curb, the exhaust choking me as she speeds down the street.

• • •

“Come in and shut the door,” Magda says as soon as I arrive at the office, still reeling from my run-in with Ruby.

“Good morning,” I say, and smile. “I love your necklace,” I lie, the large baubles looking far too big around her birdlike neck. But flattery goes a long way with Magda.

“Thank you,” she says briskly, and then waves me toward a white leather chair in front of her desk. “Have a seat.”

“What’s up?” I ask casually while wiping my wet hands on the cushion, wondering why she called me at home to ask me to meet her, praying she’s just going to unleash one of her usual rants, like I’d used the wrong font in an ad or she hadn’t liked the outfit a model had been wearing in the proofs she’d seen.

“I’m having a lot of problems with Courtney’s work,” Magda says plainly, and I hold my breath as she rattles off a series of mistakes she thinks Courtney’s made. She tells me she woke up that morning with a change of heart about Courtney’s attention to detail and work ethic. Everything Magda says sounds nothing like the Courtney I’ve worked with for five years—who may be the kind of woman who would steal your fiancé, but at work, always played by the rules. She worked hard to make sure every
I
was dotted and every
T
was crossed.

My first instinct is to defend her, but I remind myself that I wished for this. And maybe struggling at work was just what Courtney needed. She’d been spending far too much time focusing her attention on Max and needed to pour more of herself into her job. And if there was one thing that would capture Courtney’s full attention, it would be attempting to please Magda.

I nod as Magda tells me she’s going to call Courtney in next and tell her how disappointed she is and shift her responsibilities until she feels she’s worthy of managing an important client again.

“So you’re talking to me before her?” I ask. “Why?”

“Because I need you to take over Calvin Klein.”

I swallow hard. Courtney had been working on landing that account for almost a year. She’d wined and dined them until they’d finally signed on. This would devastate her, and possibly them. They adored her. The part of me who understands how hard this job is, who gets just how important it is to have an account like Calvin Klein on your résumé, starts to protest. But I think of Max—how Courtney had pretended to be my friend until the very end, even texting me the day of the rehearsal dinner to tell me she couldn’t wait to see me. Even when she knew what was about to happen. No, she doesn’t deserve my sympathy. Maybe it was time for her to lose something she loved too.