Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “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.

  Ha.

  One more fantasy. May’s disease. Every time life presented her with an obstacle, her mind took flight and soared over it on a magical path of twinkling stars. Ben doesn’t have to leave! He’ll stay forever and live in your house! He’ll start
a little restaurant downtown, and it will be a smashing success! Your parents will forgive him for lying to them and embrace him as their own! He’ll never be angry again, the sex will always be fantastic, and everything will be woooonderful!

  Last night, she’d pressed her palms against her ears and whispered, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up,” over and over into the darkness until all that hopeful nonsense suffocated, because it was a cheat. It cheated her of the enjoyment, the anger, the frustration that came with really being alive.

  She’d sworn an oath. When it comes, you’re not going to fall to pieces, and you’re not going to try to pin him in place with crazy dreams. You’re going to be honest and real, and you’re going to tell him how you feel.

  But it was easy to make promises to yourself in the night. The trick was figuring out how to keep them. What was she supposed to do, tell him she loved him? Now, in the reception hall of the train museum, when he was pissed at her and Allie was two degrees away from losing it and Dan was on his way? What good could it possibly do?

  “I’m worried about Allie,” she blurted.

  Ben rubbed a fake daisy petal absently between his fingers, frowning at her radical change of subject.

  May raced ahead. “I think she doesn’t want to go through with this. I keep waiting for her to say something, but she hasn’t said boo to me since I’ve been home. It’s going to be too late if I don’t ask her soon.”

  She’d allowed this to happen. Yesterday had been so hectic. She’d spent most of the morning trying to recover from losing her purse—visiting the DMV to get a new license, changing her online passwords—and what time was left she’d wasted running all over town on her mother’s errands.

  She’d let it be hectic. She’d broken her promises to call Dan, talk to her mother, be honest with Ben. She’d lost her courage, left it behind in Manhattan, and life without it was even more suffocating than she’d remembered.

  “It’s her wedding day. Maybe the last thing she needs is you telling her she doesn’t want to get married.”

  May snuck another peek at her sister. Allie still had the staple gun in her hand, and she looked homicidal. It seemed possible that if May walked over there and suggested Allie consider calling off her wedding, her sister would staple her to the wall and leave her hanging.

  “She won’t be mad at me for asking,” May said.

  “If you’re sure.”

  She wasn’t, though. May felt like one of those cartoon characters who ran off a ledge and then windmilled her legs in space, unaware that the earth had dropped out beneath her.

  Those cartoon characters always kept running. As long as their legs were moving and they didn’t look down, they wouldn’t fall.

  “Go on,” he said. “When you get back, we can go to lunch or something. Take a walk.”

  Say goodbye. That was what he meant.

  “Okay.” Now or never. Keep windmilling. “I’m going in. Stick the buckets wherever. It doesn’t actually matter all that much.”

  “Good luck.”

  Allie didn’t look up when she approached.

  “You need help?” May asked.

  “No.”

  Bang went the stapler.

  “You’re mad at me,” May said.

  “No, I’m not. Why would I be mad at you? You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re perfect. You’re always perfect.”

  Ah. The accusation Allie had been flinging in May’s direction since they were eight and ten years old, respectively. It seemed particularly unfair at the moment.

  “What are you talking about? I’m a national joke. Mom is one conversation away from realizing she hates me for ending things with Dan. Ben is leaving any minute, and I’m wigging out. I’m not perfect. I’m a catastrophe.”

  “You love him.” Allie said it with a sneer on her lips. “You broke up with Dan and fell in love.”

  Uncomfortably aware of her sister’s rising volume, May looked toward Ben, but if he was listening, he gave no sign. “What makes you say that?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s so obvious. You’re like a goopy toasted marshmallow for this guy.” She made her voice dopey. “ ‘Stick a fork in ’er, folks. She’s done!’ Except I guess it’s not a fork, it’s a dick.”

  May crossed her arms to tamp down a rush of incoherent fury. Allie only ever got this offensive when she was madly deflecting. “I’m sorry I’m such a disappointment to you.”

  Another bang from the stapler. “You were never this pathetic about Dan.”

  “Would you put that thing down?”

  Bang. Allie’s answer. Bang Bang Bang. The staples went through the table linens and right into the tabletop. No decorations anywhere nearby.

  “I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “You want to ask me about Matt.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Allie—”

  “You think I’m not excited enough, and you’d so hate for me to make a mistake on something important like this.” Bang.

  “Look—”

  “You’re worried I’m not thinking of Matt. That I’m not thinking at all. You’re so concerned, you just have no choice but to say something.” Bang. Bang.

  “Come on, Allie. Don’t—”

  Allie spun around, and whatever words May had planned to say, she lost them. She had expected to see anger in her sister’s expression—her lips white around the outside the way they got when she was too furious to speak. Instead, she saw the same naked fear that was in her own body. The windmilling legs. The shoulders hunched in defense against such dangerous exposure.

  “I already got the lecture from Mom a month ago, okay?” Allie said. “Do me a favor and consider me forewarned. Your big-sister duty is done. You can go back to Ben now.”

  May wrapped one arm across her stomach, needing to bolster herself against the swimmy untrustworthiness of her knees. “If that’s what you want,” she croaked.

  “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

  “It always matters.”

  But her sister had already turned away again. May couldn’t reach her.

  When she scanned the room, seeking reassurance in the shape of Ben’s inept arrangement of daisy buckets on tables, she found her mother and Matt in the doorway.

  “May?” her mother called. “Dan wants to speak to you.” She held up Matt’s cell phone.

  May’s eyes found Ben. He was wearing the same aloof, uninterested expression he’d had that first afternoon at Pulvermacher’s, when she’d asked him his name at the bar and he’d tried to brush her off.

  Not the kind of guy a woman wants to pin her hopes and dreams on.

  Fear bloomed in the pit of her stomach.

  Her mother pushed the phone into her hand. “Take it somewhere else,” she whispered. “Somewhere private.”

  May pressed it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  The vast hall swallowed her voice, and Ben watched her with eyes that said I don’t even know you.

  I can’t trust you.

  She’d forgotten that wary look. The man she’d met that day—the feral creature she’d shared tacos with—that wasn’t who he’d been this past week. She hadn’t realized that Ben had lost so much of his armor until he put it back on.

  You waited too long. You had a chance, and you missed it.

  Her mother shoved at her shoulder. “Take it in the corridor.”

  “Hi,” Dan said.

  May let herself be pushed. Out of the room. Away from Ben’s accusing eyes, her sister’s anger, Matt’s bewildered posture in the doorway. Her mother closed the propped-open door to the reception area so that May was alone with the water fountain and the oil portrait of a woman in pearls.

  Alone with her cowardice. And Dan.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Dan said again, and then he chuckled, embarrassed.

  “Where are you?”

  “At home.”

  “Oh. You’re not coming?”

/>   “I … no. I can’t leave town. The GM basically ordered me to stay put. I feel bad, though. I want to see you.”

  “Don’t feel bad. We broke up.”

  “You broke up with me, May. I didn’t break up with you.”

  It actually only takes one person.

  Cold air blasted onto her shins from a vent, and cold shame made her wrap her arms around herself. She pushed her way into the women’s bathroom, seeking enclosure. Warmth.

  “You played a good game on Thursday.”

  He made a noise, blowing air out through his nose. “Nah. I didn’t have my head in it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “S’okay. It’s my fault, May. I know I already told you I’m sorry about the charity lunch thing, but maybe I didn’t tell you right. I botched that proposal, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s all on me, what happened. But I don’t care about what you did and all the stuff people are saying about you and me. I’m not sure what else you need me to say, but just tell me, and I’ll say it.”

  “There isn’t anything you can say.”

  “There has to be.”

  “No. There doesn’t.”

  The bathroom was white-tiled, empty, the beige stall doors all partially or completely open. There was no comfort in this room. No easy way to say what she needed to say.

  The problem, Dan, is that you don’t know what you said wrong. You can’t know, because I’ve only ever shown you one version of me, and it’s the wrong one.

  The problem is that he sees me—the person I truly am—and you don’t. Because I let him see. I never let you.

  And even if he leaves for good, I have to learn to be that person he sees. I have to decide whether I’m going to be her all the time, or whether I’m going to settle for less, even knowing I could have had more.

  That’s the lesson of New York. That I get to choose. Not whether to walk off the cliff, but whether to fall. Whether to believe I can hold myself up.

  “I met someone,” she said, and it felt terrible to say it. Scary in a way that nothing had ever been. “Someone important.”

  “What do you mean? Who?”

  “His name is Ben.”

  “How’d this—what are you saying?”

  “I met him at a bar. After I left the apartment. I got mugged, and he bought me a drink.”