In Twenty Years: A Novel

by Allison Winn Scotch

  Even with all this . . . no, he still wouldn’t chase her down the street. That’s just how it is, that’s just how it will always be. She’s not the type of woman who gets chased down the street. Well, Baxter had chased her in their early days, but that was years ago.

  xo

  The sign-off worms its way into her mental space—disruptive, unwanted, but there all the same. She cracks her thumb knuckle, then the other one. He couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. She must be reading more into it than it really is. It’s two stupid letters, just a casual way of saying good-bye. She pops her index fingers, then her pinkies. Her pulse accelerates with each delicious pop. She couldn’t have missed it again, the signs, his distance, not now that she was sober, coherent! She cradles her head in her hands and twists, squeezing out something unfamiliar, something unsettling: rage.

  POP.

  She rolls her neck back and forth across the pillow, breathing deep yoga breaths.

  She thinks of her favorite website, CitiMama, where loads of anonymous women post questions like this: My husband got a text that was signed with “Xo.” What would you do?

  She already knows what they’d say. She spends enough anonymous hours of her own on there to know they’d pile on Baxter like a pack of rabid wolves: shredding him until there was nothing left that Annie recognized.

  She pinches her thigh, then pinches harder. She doesn’t like being angry, she doesn’t like these strange roots of fury blossoming into something bigger, something real. She digs into her flesh until she snaps out of it.

  At 2:15 a.m., she turns off her light and tries to settle into her old bed. Or whoever’s bed this is now. She waits three beats, three breaths, then decides it’s no use. She’s not going to be able to sleep at all, and then she worries what she’ll look like in the morning: ghastly! Gruesome. With ogre-size bags under her eyes. With blotchy skin that even the best foundation might not be able to conceal. What will Colin think?

  She clicks the light back on and checks her e-mail on her phone. No one is e-mailing Annie at 2:20 a.m., but she holds out hope. Maybe someone on the West Coast is awake, even though she really doesn’t have friends out there.

  Annie rereads her text to Baxter from earlier in the night—right after Colin bolted down the block after Lindy, and after she and Catherine had shared all the pictures of their kids from their phones, and after Annie had peppered Catherine endlessly with questions on how she conceives all of her magnificent (truly magnificent!) ideas for The Crafty Lady. Eventually, she could tell that Catherine was growing weary of the subject, so they retreated to bed.

  She reads the text once more.

  I love you! I miss you! Give Gussy ten big kisses for me!

  Baxter hadn’t written back until nearly midnight. He must have fallen asleep on the couch again, waking to pee, checking his phone. He’d replied with a solitary emoji thumbs-up.

  She rolls onto her side and stares at their text exchange, with the pseudo–Ralph Lauren sheets around her shins, and the pine-beer scent wafting all around her and the familiar creaking of the stairs as Catherine paces around her bedroom down the hall and her own history here, and she thinks, xo.

  Why couldn’t he at least say that?

  She props up on an elbow, considering. Who showed Baxter how to use emojis? Baxter’s a dinosaur about these things. No social media. No clever smiley faces or winks or frowns fashioned out of punctuation marks. She hadn’t shown him emojis. Maybe Gus. Gus knew how to do all sorts of things that his old-fart parents didn’t understand. Annie always tried to keep up, but it was like quicksand. Gus must have shown Baxter.

  Or maybe, a surprising voice clatters deep in her cerebral space, it was Cici. Annie swallows hard, like she can literally swallow the thought, but Cici lingers, like a rotten aftertaste, like regret over a bite you thought would go down easy but in fact, might turn your insides green.

  Catherine knocks on the door, and Annie starts, dropping her phone like it’s evidence of a murder.

  “You still up? I saw the light on.” Catherine pokes her head in. “I can’t sleep. It’s too weird to be here again.” She musses her hair. “God, I haven’t thought about this place in forever.”

  Annie thinks about this place more often than she wants to admit, even to herself. She still Googles all of them (well, except Lindy). She still sometimes flips through her photo albums stacked in their den-library, the ones chock-full of collages and cut-out sentimental quotes like, “A Friend Is Someone Who Knows All About You and Loves You Anyway!”

  “I know what you mean. Why look back when you can look forward?”

  Catherine chews on her fingernail. “I don’t know. Maybe I should be more sentimental about college.”

  “Well, it is where you met Owen!”

  “It is,” Catherine says. “But that was forever ago.” Then she asks, “So things never got better with you and Lindy? That was never resolved?”

  Annie instinctively sits up straighter, her shoulders arching back, her chin pushing forward. “Oh God. Oh, that was ages ago. I mean, we never actually resolved it, I guess. But . . . you know.” She shrugs, then fiddles with a loose thread on the duvet.

  Catherine purses her lips, puzzled. “I guess . . . well, I feel bad about it. How I acted at the wedding. That we managed to turn . . .” She pauses. “Well, that we managed to turn Bea’s funeral into a fight.” She sighs. “Not that I’m being good about it now. I should. I need to be nicer to her.”

  “You’re so nice!” Annie says.

  “Not to everyone. Not anymore.”

  “I think you’re too hard on yourself,” Annie offers.

  “Hmm.” Catherine considers this. “So you and Lindy never—”

  “Oh.” Annie jitters her hands. “Well, I have Baxter now, and life is so busy and great that I don’t dwell on all that stupid stuff from before. Like, I truly just feel fulfilled now, so . . . why dredge up all of that stuff?” She retrieves her phone. “I was just texting him, actually. Saying good night. He texted me back an emoji.” Annie smiles and hopes that it’s convincing. “I mean, how cute is that?”

  Catherine laughs.

  “Cute, I guess! The only thing Owen texts me about is why I’m not coming home for dinner.”

  “Oh, stop. That can’t be. You guys were always the epitome of happiness.”

  Catherine shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. I work a lot.”

  “Well, I quit as soon as I got married. Working was never for me, not once Gus came along anyway.” Annie instantly regrets her honesty, worried she’s offended Catherine. Idiot! What a stupid thing to say to Catherine Grant of all people! “I didn’t mean . . . I think moms who work outside the home are great! I think what you do . . . it’s amazing! I’ve already told you that a million times!” She overcompensates: “I’m very active, though. All sorts of jobs at Gus’s school! And I’d like to volunteer more. And of course, until recently, Baxter was almost never home. I was practically a single mom! No, no, I don’t mean that how it sounds. He’s a wonderful father.” She catches her breath. “Anyway, now I’m vice president of the PTA!” She claps her hands together, like a cymbal, like this is the apex of her aspirations.

  “Well, that sounds pretty wonderful. As long as we’re happy.”

  “It does seem like we’re all really happy,” Annie says, regretting blathering on like the chatterbox her mom always told her not to be. “Like, flash-forward from graduation, and we’re living the lives we should be!”

  “Not Bea,” Catherine offers quietly. “Shit. Sorry. That was terrible. God, do I ever know how to kill the mood. I should go back to sleep. I never have enough sleep. Never.”

  Annie smacks her palms against the duvet.

  “Let’s go out,” she practically sings. “Why are those guys out while we’re staring at our belly buttons?”

  What she really means is, Let’s go
find Colin. Then what she asks herself is, Why are you thinking about Colin? Then, she reminds herself: xo.

  “I guess we could go out . . . ?” Catherine sounds unconvinced. “Owen left me a fairly incomprehensible voice mail a while ago . . . I think they’re getting cheesesteaks.” She checks her Cartier watch. Baxter gave Annie something similar for her thirty-fifth birthday when she noticed that all the moms at school had one. She stopped wearing it within a year when the moms had moved on to something else, an Hermès bracelet. She didn’t ask Baxter for that too because she was doing her delicate dance of trying to remain utterly unassuming to her husband, as if her undemanding nature would get him to notice her, get him to come back to her. In some ways, it worked. In some ways, he did.

  “We should definitely go out!” Annie is already on her feet. Why did she practically have to make herself invisible for her husband to fall back in love with her? Colin would never ask this of a woman! Annie shimmies into her shoes, clopping down the hallway and then the steps.

  It’s only as she’s reapplying her matte peach lipstick over and over again, ironing out the wrinkles in her linen capris with her sweaty palms, that she realizes that maybe she’s already invisible to Colin. At least Baxter noticed her in the first place. At least that’s something. Maybe she should be grateful for that.

  Annie lasers in on Colin in one of the back booths as soon as they step inside Pat’s. He’s got an arm slung around Owen with an effortlessness that reminds her of how easy he was to love: his casualness, his lack of pretense. Of course, Annie was never anything close to casual, which is why she knew he’d never love her in return.

  Colin leans a little closer to Owen, saying something with intensity. Owen shakes his head and shoves the remains of a hoagie, with meat and peppers and some sort of processed filler they claim is cheddar cheese (but Annie never believed it) into his mouth. Cheesesteaks, the infamous after-hours ritual of Philadelphia college students (particularly inebriated college students), were never really Annie’s thing. As a kid, she’d survived on enough crap—hot wings left over from her mom’s waitressing shift, Pop Tarts and Hi-C for breakfast, state-supplemented school lunches—to appreciate the benefits of not inhaling various artery-blocking, chemically preserved, shriveled-up meats as dawn rounded the bend.

  Colin raises his eyes and spies Catherine and Annie in the doorway and waves them over. Catherine sighs loudly when she catches a glimpse of Owen’s state of drunkenness, and then kisses him perfunctorily and recoils. Annie can only imagine his breath.

  “Cathy!” he shouts. “Oh my God, Cathy! I’m sooooooo happy you’re here. Come have a cheesesteak, you have to have a cheesesteak.” He tries to pull her onto his lap, but she swivels her hips just so, and his arm flails and thuds on the table limply.

  “Well, this is lovely.” Then to Annie, “I can’t imagine your husband would stuff himself with cheesesteaks and an entire keg at two in the morning.”

  “It was not an entire keg,” Owen says, while Annie stutters.

  “Oh . . . well.” She doesn’t want to insult Catherine, make her feel bad, because Owen is indeed a bit of slob right now. Fairly disgusting, actually. And no, Baxter would certainly not stuff himself with cheesesteaks at two in the morning. “He’s sort of vegan, so that’s all.”

  Annie contorts her mouth into a sympathetic smile, all the while lodged in the memory of that stupid raw-food diet Baxter had insisted on. She had willingly obliged, recreating uncooked carrots in as many ways as she could find on The Crafty Lady. She’d taught herself how to cook after they got married, thinking it was the sort of thing a good wife did. Her own mom had never cooked, never done much more than bring home drive-through fast food or heat up a can of beans and hot dogs. In the sixth grade, for a school fundraiser, other moms had baked lemon tarts and peanut-butter blondies and coffee cakes with mouthwatering brown-sugar crumbles on top. Her own mom sent her in with two boxes of Twinkies and a bag of doilies. Twinkies. Annie walked into the gym where the other parents had laid their lovely handcrafted treats full of love on silver platters, and quickly spun around, shame rising up her neck like a heat rash, and dumped the Twinkies and the cheap drugstore doilies into the trash. When her mom asked later that night if they sold quickly, Annie pressed back tears and simply said, “Yes.”

  No, she was not the woman her mom was. She’d vowed not to be since the sixth grade. Even if it meant recreating carrots. She’d recreated herself, after all. Carrots weren’t the most challenging things in the world.

  At the booth just behind them, three kids with backward baseball hats and skin that still shone with the glory of youth start pounding on their table.

  In metered time, they shout, “Stuff it, stuff it, stuff it!”

  Lindy, who’s been distracted with her phone, swivels her gaze upward, delight spreading across her face in the form of a lopsided grin. She cackles and joins in with the three of them. “Stuff it, stuff it, stuff it!” Her fists shake their own table. Owen mistakes them as chants for him, as if they’re a cheerleading squad there to buoy his bingeing. He swallows the remaining half of his second cheesesteak without so much as taking a breath.

  “Stuffed it!” he shouts, like he just scored a touchdown.

  Lindy breaks out in furious applause and gives him a standing ovation. Owen tries to bow but just sort of tilts over, his reflection shining in the metal table, until his forehead falls all the way down in near slow motion, thumping down on its surface.

  Colin pats him on the back. “It might be time to get you home, man.”

  “I think it is time to get him home,” Catherine says, not particularly warmly. To Annie she says, “He’s on Lipitor. So this is really wonderful. Really smart. Gorging on cheesesteaks.”

  “It’s just one night. He’ll be OK! I mean, there are worse things.”

  Like ridiculous raw-food diets. Like texts that end in xo.

  Catherine shakes her head like she’s not an idiot, that it’s not like he’s going to have a heart attack right then, right there on the linoleum floor that’s pocked with melted cheese and meat residue.

  “It’s the principle.”

  “You only live once,” Lindy says, overhearing. “So screw principles!”

  “You would know,” Annie snaps, before she can censor herself. Her forehead furrows as if chasing the surprising sentiment. What compelled her to say that? (Other than the obvious fact that Lindy does often screw principles, not to mention the love of Annie’s life.)

  Owen finds this to be the most hilarious thing he’s ever heard and flattens himself against Colin, who nearly has him upright now and is attempting to ease him out of the booth and safely out into the night, away from these murderous cheesesteaks, out of the immediate withering gaze of his wife.

  “So we’re still being pissy from before?” Lindy says to Annie.

  Annie has no idea if she means from a decade ago or from their earlier dustup in the living room of Bruiser, so she simply says, “I didn’t mean it!”

  “Oh, you did mean it!”

  “I think you were the one who was pissy before,” Colin says, over his shoulder to Lindy, and Annie relaxes just a bit because they’re not all referencing that disastrous night of Catherine and Owen’s wedding when Lindy and Colin screwed each other (and subsequently, Annie).

  “Fine,” Lindy concedes. “I’m sorry. To everyone. OK?” She doesn’t sound particularly sorry, but Annie is too caught up stumbling around her own thoughts to push it. Not that she’d push it anyway. She can’t believe she pushed it just a second ago by firing back at her.

  “Hey, Catherine, I’m sorry! OK?”

  Annie sees Catherine debate it, wrestle with her grudge and the complications of the past. Then, because she is kind, and Annie knew it, Catherine nods. “OK.”

  “But you.” Lindy pokes Annie’s arm. “Don’t take that back, don’t say you didn’t mean it. Scre
w principles. Fair enough. You got your jab in. We’re even. Can we move on now?”

  Her eyes meet Annie’s, and this time it’s clear she does mean from a decade ago.

  Can we move on now?

  Lindy glides past her like that’s that, they’re square, even-Steven, as Annie would say to Gus.

  Annie loses her breath for a moment and sinks back into the booth.

  Can we move on now?

  That’s it? Is she just supposed to let go because Lindy has?

  Is forgiveness that easy? Is it easier with old friends because you’ve known them forever? Or is it harder for those same reasons? What about yourself? What about the fucking world? What about Bea? Would she forgive them for not keeping their promises to her—that they’d always be family, always be a six-point star?

  Annie inhales and exhales in the revolting, filthy booth at Pat’s, watching her old friends shuffle out the door single file. She wants to get a grip, she needs to get a grip, and let the bruises of the past fade into nothingness like everyone else seems to. She breathes deeply once again, then pulls her phone from her purse and angles her arm and then her cheek just so, and captures the moment with a quick snap of a button.

  It’s not the best selfie she’s ever pulled off, but she looks pretty decent for 2:45 in the morning, and with the Amaro filter, she can pass for thirty. Twenty-eight, maybe.

  2:45 a.m. and back in the old haunt! Can’t remember the last time we had this much fun. #penn #lovinglife #oldfriends #thebest

  She debates adding an emoji of a wineglass or maybe a martini, but she doesn’t want to overdo it. She’s not an undergrad, after all.

  It does the trick. Annie gets a grip. And yet, by the time she posts the picture and scampers toward the street, the four others are halfway down the empty, litter-clogged block, darkened shadows underneath the streetlights heading toward home. She has to squint to eke them out.

  Finally, she sees them, and rushes to catch up, cursing herself for always being one step behind.