Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (34 page)

He reached for the glass of water Nancy had given him and swallowed half of it, forcing the carrot down his throat.

“Sure.” His voice seemed to belong to someone else. Someone stupid enough to agree to this. Someone too flayed to figure out what to say or how to say no.

What had happened to him? He’d started this thing on a whim, trying to be nice for a day, and then he’d kind of fallen into it. Fallen into May, because it was easy to do that. She was easy to be with. Easy to like. Easy to get lost in.

But this wasn’t easy. This was a rock and a hard place and him getting pressed hard between them, and it was his own fucking fault.

There was simply no way he could go now. Not if it meant leaving her here to deal with this—her sister’s wedding, her mother’s expectations, Dan—when she seemed so ill-equipped to handle it.

Christ. Evidently you couldn’t just play at being a white knight. Once you put on the armor, you had to carry the fucking lance.

“Great!” Nancy said. “We’ll tell her that I insisted you stay, okay? That way, you can be here the next couple days, and we’ll work on her together. When Dan gets here on Saturday for the ceremony, we’ll have her all primed to fix things.”

Ben managed a wan smile and asked, “What did you want me to do next?”

“Well, you’ve got enough carrots now, I think. Want to put together the macaroni salad?”

He glanced at the ingredients arrayed over the countertop and realized what she had in mind. Overcooked macaroni, mayonnaise, a bit of crunch from celery and carrot, a dash of vinegar and sugar.

Ben could pretend to be a glorified personal secretary. He could keep his mouth shut while Nancy sang the praises of Thor as a life mate for her daughter. He could even stand there and listen while she told him about May in words that didn’t make any sense.

He could not make terrible macaroni salad.

“I used to work at a restaurant that made great macaroni salad. Do you mind if I do my own thing?”

She smiled at him. Her newest ally. “What did you have in mind?”

“I’m willing to consider pickles, but you don’t put lemon juice in macaroni salad.”

Nancy’s voice carried through the open kitchen archway into the living room, where May and Allie were sitting on the floor, surrounded by five hundred fake Gerbera daisies in various hues of pink, orange, and yellow. They were arranging them into metal buckets for centerpieces while the miniature dachshund nosed through the piles of supplies and generally made a nuisance of himself.

“It’ll make it zingy,” Ben said. May could hear the low thump of a bowl hitting the countertop. The fridge door opened.

“It’s already going to be zingy from the vinegar.”

“Vinegar is too harsh. Lemon juice is a better zing. Plus, with the pickles, you get this great harmony of zingy lemon and crunchy pickle and—look, you have to trust me on this.”

“May?” her mom called, her voice full of exasperated amusement. “He’s trying to tell me how to make macaroni salad.”

“Let him make it his way, Mom,” May shouted back. “He knows more about food than all of us put together.”

“I will not.” She sounded huffy now. “I thought you loved my macaroni salad.”

May’s father pushed his way through the front door with an arm full of plastic-wrapped pink and orange packages. Back with the linens.

“Hey, Scooter,” he said mildly.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Everything all right?”

“Sure.”

“Is that Bill?” Nancy called.

“The one and only.”

“Okay, here’s the plan,” Nancy said, appearing in the kitchen doorway. “Ben will make his, and I’ll make mine—just a small bowl of each—and then you can decide which kind is better. And then we’ll do that one with the whole big pot of macaroni.”

“Who’s Ben?”

“He came with May.”

“Oh. And I’ll decide what?” Dad looked cheerfully befuddled. It was his default expression when he wasn’t at the office.

“You’re going to judge a macaroni salad contest,” Allie reported. “Mom against Ben.”

“I like your mother’s macaroni salad.”

“That’s right,” Nancy said as Dad made his way into the kitchen. May could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m going to kick your tush, boyo. Don’t think I won’t.”

“We’ll see.” May heard a cupboard door close.

“What’s that? What are you getting out?”

“Never mind.”

“Is that honey? You can’t put honey in macaroni salad.”

“I can put whatever I want in
my
macaroni salad. Attend to your own macaroni, Mrs. Fredericks.”

May smiled, knowing exactly how they both would look if she could see them. The smug expression Ben wore when he knew he was right, and her mother’s pursed mouth, belied by the enjoyment in her voice.

Mom loved being teased this way, however much she protested. It surprised May that Ben seemed to know it—but then, he was always surprising her.

The fact that he was still here surprised her.

Not that he’d had much choice. Once Allie’s lie about his identity received his blessing, his fate had been sealed. He was May’s savior, the Good Samaritan who had taken her in at her darkest hour, so naturally he’d have to stay for lunch.

Now that Mom had drafted him for Team Dan, he’d be lucky if he ever managed to escape.

Maybe he’ll never leave
.

The fantasy had been stalking her all morning, sneaking into her consciousness whenever she wasn’t vigilant about warding it off. The fantasy where she told Ben that she wanted him to stay in Manitowoc for a while—two weeks, two months, two years—and he smiled and said,
Sure
. And then he just up and moved into her house, and they shared the bathroom every morning while they got ready for work, the smells of brewed coffee and fresh-baked biscuits wafting from the kitchen. They shared the shower, the bed, the dinner table.

The fantasy was about forty percent sex and sixty percent
How was your day, honey?—
and it was the latter part that shook her out of it, every time. The realization that her dippy brain had cast Ben as a hotter modern-day Ward Cleaver, despite his complete lack of fitness for the part.

Even dumber, now she had New York fantasies, too. The way he’d talked about his honey earlier had made her imagination fire right up and start creating the ad campaign for the business he could start.
Like one of those shops where you can buy fancy olive oil and imported crackers and capers, but with a honey-tasting counter and lots of different samples out. Worn floors with wide, scarred planks of reclaimed barn wood. Rustic shelves with his hand-lettered Ball jars labeled by neighborhood
.

He can do the beekeeping and work at Figs, and I can do the sales end and—

Then she’d checked herself.

No fantasies
.

But whether she let her imagination run free or focused on what was going on in the room, she felt equally distant from reality. It had been a fantasy to sit with Ben and her mom and her sister, gathered around open jars of honey, every spoon and fork she owned piled in mounds of clean and dirty utensils.

It had been a fantasy to have him tell her,
Close your eyes
, and to put an upside-down spoon in her mouth. To run her tongue across the thick, sticky surface and taste something dark and herbal, a rich sweetness, a peppery kick.

The very worst kind of fantasy, really, because he was
lying
for her. He was pretending to be Andy’s PA, and May was letting him.

She knew she ought to feel guilty, but the camaraderie at the table had suffused her with sticky, golden sweetness instead. She felt too good. Too pleased.

She still hadn’t called Dan.

“What are you thinking about, Zombie McStare-a-lot?” Allie asked.

“Nothing I ought to be.” May grabbed two orange daisies, two pink daisies, and a length of brown raffia ribbon. The playful argument in the kitchen simmered down to the occasional jibe drifting over cooking noises—the faucet running, water bubbling on the stove, wooden spoons clicking against the sides of bowls.

Ben passed through the room and went out to his van. He returned with his toolbox of
knives.

“Ooh, this is getting serious.”

He winked at her and went back in the kitchen. After a few minutes, the sounds of chopping resumed. She pictured his hands, all scarred and nicked, guiding the knife.

Her father came through the room with a coffee cup and a newspaper, mumbling some vague excuse as he disappeared into the basement. May guessed he wouldn’t come back until someone else had been found to judge the macaroni salad war. He knew how to avoid making waves.

Allie pulled together raffia from five different-colored bundles and cut off an arm’s length, which she tied around a miniature galvanized bucket in a bow. The dog nosed her thigh, looking up at her with yearning in its liquid black eyes, but she ignored it.

Something was off with her. Even her frizzy hair was flat today, ceramic-ironed into submission.

“Are you excited for Saturday?”

“Sure.” Allie looked down at the bucket she’d been holding, her expression missing. May realized that her sister had jeans on—that, uncharacteristically, Allie’s clothes could actually be called boring.

Allie’s clothes were
never
boring.

May plucked another daisy from a pile and tied her bundle together. Her fingers were already aching, and the number of finished buckets beside her was far smaller than the number still waiting to be beribboned and filled with green florist foam and fake flowers.

“Is Ben staying for the game?” Allie asked.

May wanted him to, even though it would be weird. Games were always a little off these days. It felt strange to watch them in the basement, on the screen, instead of at Lambeau in the box Dan had shared with a few other players. Stranger to see Dan play in a Jets uniform.
Deeply
strange to sit behind the wrong team while the Jets played the Packers in the Super Bowl. But watching the Packers and the Jets play in New Jersey on TV with Ben here pretending to be an employee of Dan’s agent? It was like a whole new category of strange.

And still, she wanted it. She wanted Ben around, however she could get him.

“I don’t know.”

Another long silence, and then Allie inhaled suddenly and said, “He looks at you, May.
And the way you look at him … I just keep wondering, what happened to my sister this week, you know? What are you doing? Because I thought I understood what you were up to, but now I’m not so sure.”

May reached for another daisy as her stomach did a pitch-and-roll. She didn’t know what to say. She had no explanation to offer. No story to tell that would make her sister say,
Ahh, I see. How very May
.

All she had was this restlessness inside her. This feeling of wrongness, this cast-up hopelessness. All she had was this need, even now, to be with him, instead of stuck on the living room floor stuffing daisies into buckets.

Because
he
knew. Ben understood what had happened to her in New York. If she could simply be with him, talk to him, maybe she could understand it, too.

“Are you okay?” Allie asked.

May choked back a laugh. “Yeah. I mean, yeah, I’m okay. Or I will be.”

“Are you moving back home?”

“I guess so. New York wasn’t really …”

Wasn’t really for her?
Was that true?

“It wasn’t permanent.”

But she couldn’t be sure. Everything was so unsettled. Part of her wanted to grab Ben, to steal him from the kitchen and take him somewhere and—she didn’t know what. Ravish him. But then what?

That was the problem. She had no solution to offer, no magic wand to wave, and another part of her just wanted to punch something, hard. To bang her head against a wall until she stopped feeling pulled in so many different directions.

Her allegiances were divided, and she was a coward. She was afraid.

Allie tied raffia ribbon around buckets.

May stuck daisies in them.

The phone rang, and Nancy answered it.

Ben came out, asked where the bathroom was, left, returned, disappeared.

It was all very ordinary and very strange, and no one said any of the things that needed to be said.

Even before the kickoff, Ben knew there was going to be trouble.

Everyone had assembled downstairs, where Bill had both a workshop and, paneled off on the finished side of a full basement, a bar, complete with the obligatory elk heads tossed up on the wall alongside some Packers paraphernalia. The TV screen was huge, the couches comfortable.

It was the crowd that worried Ben.

There had to be fifteen people in the basement, if not more. Neighbors, relatives. He couldn’t keep them straight, but they sure all knew who he was. Or who he was supposed to be. Nancy pointed him out to everyone who came in the room.

That’s Ben. He’s a friend of May and Dan’s. May was hiding with him in New York to keep away from all the reporters after that unpleasantness last week. And May’s home now, too. May? Get over here, hon! You need to see Andrea’s new haircut!

After that, the inquisition would begin. May seemed to disappear a little more with every introduction, every awkward pause or lame joke about keeping her away from the utensils, and he began to wonder if the woman he’d met and spent time with in New York—if the woman he’d taken to bed last night and the night before—was a mirage. A vacation version of May who couldn’t exist outside of New York.

The version of May who lived in Manitowoc wore that goddamn Packers jersey with Thor’s number on it, and she agreed with everything everybody said, even when he knew she didn’t really.

He didn’t like her like this.

And he hated that so much, he channeled his aggression into the production of a lot of flamboyantly cheerful bullshit. When Nancy introduced them, he answered all the questions, inventing the sort of stories he thought Dan’s agent’s PA would tell without worrying whether they made any sense in the context of everything else he’d said. He wouldn’t be around long enough to have to care if people compared notes and found he didn’t add up.