Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (36 page)

“There’s no fucking way I’m doing that.”

“I broke up with him,” she said.

“I know, but you didn’t break up with him
enough
.”

“I get it. I’m sorry. I promise, I’ll—”

Mingled voices rose from the living room. Allie and Matt. The front door opening. One of their friends leaving or arriving.

“I’ll fix it,” she said.

But she didn’t know how to fix it.

“I miss you, May.” His voice had a roughness to it, emotion she hadn’t heard. Not like this. “I haven’t even left yet, and I already miss you.”

“Stay a while.” She held on to his arms and kissed his forehead. “Just stay.”

The bottom riser of the upstairs staircase creaked as someone put weight on it. She heard Matt laugh. A dog barking.

“They’re coming.”

She couldn’t move. Her heart felt too full, her throat closed with emotion, choked up with feelings she couldn’t put words to.

“May?” he asked. “You with me? We have to move. Quick.”

She managed a nod, and then when he smiled, she looked away. Better to focus on the moment—his withdrawal, the condom disposal, the arranging of their clothes and their faces, the unlocking and opening of the door. Better not to think about what was happening to her.

What he meant to her.

What she felt when he looked at her that way.

By the time the wiener dog burst into the room, Ben looked like nothing had happened, but May still felt as though she’d been ripped into tiny pieces and scattered all over the place.

Allie knelt at the apex of the horseshoe-shaped table and committed murder with a staple gun.

Her victim was a wad of gauzy pink and orange and white ribbons, which she was supposed to be forming into some sort of rosette to adorn the head of the reception table.

T-minus five hours until the wedding, and the whole family was at the National Railroad Museum, decorating the reception hall. The room was high-ceilinged, with a warehouse feel and six neat rows of enormous train cars—engines, sleeping cars, cabooses—lined up like, well, boxcars. Toward the front of the room, the museum staff had arranged tables and chairs in a large space crowned by a horizontal reception table. There were twinkling lights on the engines and a decorative archway for leaving presents underneath. A temporary dance floor and a space for the DJ to set up.

Anybody could have a reception at Brett Favre’s Steakhouse or the Holiday Inn. It took a couple with a little verve to throw a party at the train museum.

Plus, Matt was kind of a train nerd.

Her mother was determined to turn the assembled plastic tables and chairs into a romantic getaway for two hundred and fifty people. Allie had to applaud her dogged determination, however misguided.

A bright pink and orange decal on the entry door said ALLIE AND MATT in flowing script, and the tables were covered with linens in matching orange, pink, and yellow. May and Ben had beheaded hundreds of fake daisies and scattered them artfully around the white china. Mom had made a garland of daisies for the gift-gazebo-thing, which she was fastening in place with twist ties. Allie was stuck with rosette-making duty.

The stapler struck the ribbons with a satisfying
bang
.

Rosettes were for women who gave a damn about beaded bodices and lemon-chiffon frosting. They were for giggling girls who fainted with happiness at the idea of hundreds of guests clinking their champagne glasses with forks, demanding that the Princess and her Prince Charming engage in PDA.

Allie was not one of those girls. She didn’t care about ribbons. She cared about dogs and long hikes in the woods and Matt. She cared about him deeply, but she didn’t love him the right
way.

She’d thought May would tell her that was okay. That sometimes love wasn’t balanced. That passion never lasted, and stability mattered.

She’d thought May would say that Matt was good and lovable and he’d treat Allie well for the rest of her life.

But she hadn’t said it. She hadn’t said anything.

May’s loud laughter echoed through the reception hall. She and Ben were on the other end of the room, setting buckets of daisies on the tables. The laugh was new—since she came home, May had been quiet the way she got when something was eating at her, and Ben was as tightly wound as he’d appeared in the cell phone picture May had snapped for her.

But they had this heat between them. Allie didn’t get how it was possible that nobody saw it but her.

Maybe they did see. Seeing but not speaking was how her family rolled. They needed a Latin motto that meant
If we ignore it, maybe it will go away
.

“Don’t forget the medallion, hon!” her mom called from across the room.

Allie picked up the shiny silver circle from the table and sneered at it. It said “Allison and Matthew” in black script, and it was supposed to go in the center of the rosette.

Brandishing the only weapon she had, she stapled the living shit out of it.

“How’s that coming along?” Mom asked.

“Great!” she shouted. “You’re going to love it.”

Her mother would be appalled. All the guests would look at Allie’s misshapen, mangled rosette and wonder what had happened, but no one would say anything, because she was The Bride. She’d discovered that the status gave her an odd sort of power.

It’s your day
, her mother kept saying.
Whatever you want!

She wanted doughnuts for breakfast.

Sure! You’re the bride. I’ll send one of the boys to pick them up
.

She wanted to do her own hair, because when she’d suggested at the wedding-hair practice session that she was thinking of wearing it in a beehive for the ceremony, the stylist had looked at her with actual pity.

Allie didn’t want to be pitied. She wanted a beehive.

Of course, darling!
her mother had said.
You’re the bride. I’ll cancel the appointment
.

Allie was starting to feel invulnerable. Maybe even invulnerable enough to say something to May.

Hey, May? Is Ben planning to stick around for the wedding? Because that will get a little awkward, what with Dan flying in a few hours from now, plus the pack of lies we told Mom and all. I think you’d better send the boy toy on his way before your ex arrives in his monkey suit, is all I’m saying
.

But May knew the score. She just didn’t care. Or she did care, but not enough to do anything about it.

And meanwhile Mom wouldn’t shut up about Dan. When Dan was coming. How May really needed to talk to him
—Have a nice long talk, okay? Okay, May?

May kept saying
I’ll talk to him, but don’t get your hopes up
. Only Mom wasn’t really listening. And when Mom pleaded with Allie to step in and say something to her sister?

She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t, even though the definitive end of Dan-and-May rang in Allie’s head like the death knell of Allie-and-Matt.

She wasn’t mad at May. Not really. She had been, briefly, when she’d realized it was too late for her to sequester her sister somewhere for the heart-to-heart conversation that would somehow effect the rescue Allie needed, liberating her from her own feelings.

May couldn’t save her from this, and Allie didn’t want to burden her sister with it anyway.

It was only that she was so angry, and she needed someone to pin it on, because pinning it on herself wasn’t getting her anywhere. She wanted to feel different. She wanted
not
to feel this raw pain in the center of her back, as though someone had stabbed her and now they wouldn’t quit screwing with the hilt of the knife.

She wanted not to know that she was making a terrible mistake, but she did know. She did.

She’d made the mistake the first time she let him kiss her. He’d been wanting to for years—she knew that.
Everyone
knew that. But when she handed him the kiss, she’d also been handing him her capitulation, and that was what it had taken her some time to see: that from there forward, they were always already heading toward this moment.

It hadn’t been a surprise when he’d dropped to his knee and offered her a tiny, beautifully wrapped box last Christmas. It had been inevitable, the choice already made.

She could keep her house and her dogs and the comfortable domestic thing she and Matt had going—the Sunday morning newspaper, the doughnuts he always drove to pick up, their shared semi-ironic obsession with the weekly Jumble puzzle, the reliable twice-weekly sex and Matt’s eager, friendly face between her legs—or she could ruin it all forever by saying no.

She could break Matt’s heart.

Allie hadn’t hesitated.

She wouldn’t spoil this for him. She couldn’t. With the possible exception of her sister, he was the single loveliest person she’d ever met—beautiful and good all the way through—and he deserved to have everything he wanted.

He wanted her, so she’d handed herself over.

She just wished she weren’t so fucking angry.

May laughed again, and the sound drew Allie’s gaze across the room. Ben was giving her that look, and she was giving it back. Like they were the only people in the room. Like all the air in the world was exclusively for them, and everyone else could suck it.

That kind of passion didn’t last. Everybody said so. Five years down the line, ten years, and everybody started changing their clothes for bed with their backs turned.

But you were supposed to feel like that when you walked down the aisle.

And Matt looked at her that way. Just that way.

Allie searched for something else to staple.

“Where are we going with these?” Ben asked.

“Over by the train.”

May pointed, and Ben hoisted the cardboard box full of daisy buckets higher in his arms. His biceps flexed. A corded forearm muscle made its presence known and momentarily distracted her from her preoccupation with her sister’s solitary performance of unhappiness on the other end of the room.

“Lead the way,” he said.

She did, and he followed. “I need to find a way to talk to Allie,” she said.

Ben glanced toward Allie wielding her staple gun. “If you just tell me whatever scheme you’ve got in your head for what goes where, I’ll finish this, and you can talk to her right now.”

“No, I couldn’t. It would be weird.”

“Weird how?”

Ben set the box on the floor and lifted out four buckets, two dangling from each hand. May grabbed another two, and she scanned the flowers and tables quickly, deciding on the arrangement that would look best. “Put that all-orange one on the farthest table,” she directed. “And the mostly pink one on the table right next to it.”

“Is this the mostly pink one?”

“Yes. It would be weird to leave you here doing this by yourself.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “It just would.”

“You’ve noticed what I’ve been doing the past few days, right? Cooking with your mom? Picking up the U-Haul with your dad? You know he didn’t say a word to me all the way from your house to Green Bay?”

“He’s not a big talker.” May walked away from Ben to put a group of mixed daisies on the table near the stage.

“You might have warned me,” he said when she returned to the box.

Disconcerted by his tone, she checked his expression. Not joking.

“It’s not like he
told
me he wasn’t going to talk to you. He probably didn’t know what to
say.”

“Neither did I. Forty miles is a long way to ride without talking. He didn’t even turn on the radio.”

“Sorry.”

“I handled it. I can handle putting these on the tables, too, assuming you tell me what your secret scheme is. Can’t I alternate pink and orange and yellow, and then put the ones that are both kind of wherever?”

“I want it to look more random than that. But not really random. Artfully random.” In demonstration, she put a bucket of pink daisies on the table right next to the same thing. The effect would be an intensification of pink in this spot. She’d balance it out with more orange nearby, and a dash of yellow.

“Control freak.”

There was nothing sweet in the way he said it. He was ticked, probably at her, but whenever she tried to talk about it he kissed her, and she let him. It was so much easier to lose herself in the meeting of their mouths, their bodies, than it was to deal with how complicated everything had become.

“Maybe a little bit. It’s my sister’s wedding.”

“About that.”

“What?”

“I think I’d better get out of here soon. Your mom said you’ve got hair appointments and putting on the dress and all that coming up after lunch. I’ll just be in the way.”

May forced herself to let go of the bucket and step casually away from the table. She lifted an arrangement from where she’d temporarily stashed it and walked toward the next table, leaving Ben behind her. “Couldn’t you stay for the wedding?”

“Dan’s coming to the wedding.”

“Yeah.”

“Your universes would collide. Can’t have that.”

Yeah. He was really mad at her, and she deserved it.

“I’m sorry about this whole thing with Dan.”

He looked at her, accusation in his eyes and the planes of his face. “I am so fucking sick of hearing about Einarsson. This ‘whole thing’—” He made air quotes with his fingers. “—it has
nothing to do with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you were done with him the minute I met you. This is about
you
, May. Letting people push you around. Just because your sister says, ‘Ben has to stay, Ben has to be Andy’s PA,’ you think that means shit? I didn’t do it because she said I had to, I did it for
you
. I thought—”

Nancy tapped into the room with an armful of tulle, and Ben abruptly stopped talking. In the silence, May heard train noises. A puff of vented steam. The hiss of the brakes. A low whistle. The museum must pipe the sounds in over loudspeakers.

Last night, she’d lain awake in bed, listening to him breathe and thinking
Maybe he’ll stay
.

She despised that thought. That small, desperate hope that if Ben stuck around long enough, he would find life in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, utterly irresistible. He would stay with her.
Choose
her.