You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

  My mom does what appears to be an impression of Pietra trying to figure out where the “on” button of an invisible vacuum is, and Pietra lets out a sharp laugh, saying, “Mags, you jerk.”

  I watch, riveted. My parents tease each other, but not like this—not this lawless, almost teenage banter, the kind of shit I would get away with saying to Connie or Leo in full awareness that I could never say it to anyone else.

  Pietra leans over the table and sips some of my mom’s wine in what appears to be retaliation. My mom lets her, easing back with a smug look on her face. “At least you were a quick student.”

  Pietra rolls her eyes, returning the wineglass. “I was managing the place within the year. I was your boss, if you recall.”

  “Hmm,” says my mom, glancing up at the ceiling. “And yet your lattes were never so good that you had lines out the door to order them.”

  “Puh-lease. The boys who were mooning over your lattes were just trying to get in your—”

  “Is everyone ready to order?” asks the waitress, saving me from nearly choking on my Sprite.

  The waitress takes down everyone’s dinner orders and flits off. I’m afraid there’s going to be a lull, but Pietra jumps right back in, her cheeks flushed from the wine and her voice giddy in that way adults are when they’re talking about something they almost forgot about from a long time ago.

  “I worked there for years. Long after I made up with my parents. Your grandfather started letting me work with local artists. We featured some of their pieces in the shop.”

  “You’re the one who started that?” I ask.

  My mom nods. “It was more than that. There was Bean Well After Dark, for a little while. Open mic nights and mini art shows. We even had a few poetry slams.”

  “It was all very late nineties,” says Pietra, sharing my mom’s smile. “And Maggie had this idea…” She nods over at my mom.

  “It was around when I was studying for the LSATs, and interning downtown at the women’s shelter. I knew I was going to be working with families, and I—well, we came up with this idea for a hybrid art gallery café.” My mom’s voice is lower, self-conscious. It occurs to me this is probably the first time she’s talked about this in years. “We’d have classes there. For art and photography. And offer free classes to families in adjustment periods, just so they’d have something fun to focus on, a place they could be together.”

  “We were going to call it Magpie.”

  A quiet settles over the table. Savvy’s looking over at me, but I can’t quite bring myself to look back. Bean Well isn’t really a part of her history the way it’s part of mine. She didn’t grow up scarfing Marianne’s scones, or letting Mrs. Leary’s dog fall asleep in her lap by the window, or getting free life advice from the string of college-age baristas who came and went and still visited whenever they could. She doesn’t have scratches in the doorframe of the supply closet marking her height every year, or a favorite chair, or a sunny spot in the back she used to tease Poppy for taking naps in. She never called it home.

  My mom leans across the table and picks up Savvy’s charm, dangling it so it spins and catches the light. “I didn’t realize you’d kept yours,” she says.

  “I didn’t, actually,” says Pietra. She clears her throat. “It was still on my keys to Bean Well when I sent them back to Walt. After everything that happened, I … didn’t feel right having them anymore.”

  The table is at once tense enough that it feels like there is something seismic underneath us, something that will either rumble or explode. I watch my mom nod quietly, watch Pietra’s eyes dim. There’s a second when I think this is all going to come unraveled again. But Pietra reaches across the table and takes my charm, holding it up next to Savvy’s.

  “About two years after Savvy was born, Walt sent it back to me,” she says softly. “He said he respected that we wanted a clean break, but he wanted Savvy to have something in case we told her the truth. He told me to give it to her. To help explain everything when she was old enough.”

  “My dad told me to give my charm to Abby, too.” My mom’s voice is shaking. “He said he thought she should have it, since it was a symbol of how we all brought each other together. But he didn’t say anything about telling her.”

  I stare down at the napkin in my lap, fighting the smallest smile. I’m almost certain Poppy knew our parents weren’t going to tell us the truth. This was a seed he planted to bring me and Savvy together. The idea is comforting, and for a moment, it feels like he’s here, listening in, chuckling at handiwork sixteen years in the making.

  “He also sent me a picture,” Pietra says quietly. “Of Abby’s birth announcement.”

  My mom’s hand grazes her mouth, like she’s trying not to choke up again. “I didn’t know.”

  “We were still so angry. But we—we were happy to hear about her. About you,” Pietra amends, shooting me a wry look.

  My cheeks flush, embarrassed to have four pairs of adult eyes suddenly on me. I’m relieved when Pietra continues.

  “If things had been different…”

  Savvy and I might have grown up together. Might have had a lot of dinners like this, ones where we sat back in our chairs and laughed without looking over our shoulders. Might have shared much more than the unexpected things we do now.

  “I know I’ve said it before,” says my mom, addressing Dale and Pietra both. “But I really am sorry.”

  Pietra’s lips thin into her teeth, like she’ll never be quite ready to accept the words fully, even if she understands them. She sets the charm back down and rests her hand over it. “Love makes you do things you never thought you would.”

  Pietra carefully reaches out and puts the magpie charm back in my hand. My fingers curl around it, feeling a new warmth at its edges. “What did you mean before … about you guys bringing each other together?” I ask.

  “Oh, he probably meant us,” says Dale, with an exaggerated lean back in his chair.

  My dad is also sporting a knowing look. “I wondered if our names were ever going to come up.”

  “Really is just like the good ole days, huh? Your wife forgetting you exist, my wife forgetting I exist…”

  “Excuse you,” says Pietra. “What Walt meant is that if it weren’t for us, neither of you would be married in the first place.”

  I blink at the four of them. “Uh. I mean, isn’t that … how deciding to marry each other works?”

  Dale’s eyebrows shoot up, excited to be a part of the conversation. “No, she means—your dad was taking an art class with Pietra—”

  “To impress some other girl, it turns out,” my mom cuts in.

  “I hadn’t met you yet!” my dad protests.

  Pietra’s eyes are gleaming. “You and that other girl would have been a disaster, but the moment I saw Tom I knew he was Maggie’s. So I brought him over to the coffee shop—”

  “She told me there was a student discount.”

  “There wasn’t,” says my mom, leaning toward me and Savvy conspiratorially.

  “And when I got there, she just—poof!—disappeared. Left me in that café all alone with Maggie, who took one look at my John Grisham paperback and started talking my ear off about how secretly reading her parents’ ‘murder books’ as a kid is what first got her interested in law.”

  “Lucky you.”

  My dad’s smile softens. “Lucky me.”

  “And lucky us, because Maggie paid back the favor. I mean, it was a little less romantic and definitely not intentional—”

  “Uh, Dale, it was completely intentional,” my mom cuts in. “I’d been talking to Pietra about you for weeks.”

  “Wait, what? Then why did you wait until we were in the middle of a training run on the hottest day of the year to drag me into Bean Well for free water?” He leans over to me and Savvy for context, adding, “Maggie and I were in the same running club.”

  “Because you seemed like the kind of guy who would, I don’t know, overthink the wh
ole thing completely and come off way too strong.”

  “Instead he came off as kind of smelly,” says Pietra, looking over Savvy to tease him with a smile.

  “Anyway,” says my dad. “That’s how we met.”

  There’s this lull where nobody says anything, until Savvy asks, “So you two kind of … picked each other’s husbands?”

  “No,” says my dad, without missing a beat. “They picked each other.”

  My mom and Pietra both get so immediately teary-eyed that there is no mistaking it for nostalgia, or that specific brand of weepy you get when you’re thinking about your best friend. It’s quiet and ancient. It’s years of regret and grief, and an entire lifetime buried under it—a lifetime where my mom and Pietra were two entirely different people, on some entirely different plane. A lifetime where they teased each other and dreamed each other’s dreams and willed each other’s happiness into existence.

  And no matter how messy it turned out, it’s still there, I realize. That happiness. It’s in every part of my world—the old things, like walking hand-in-hand with my parents to get ice cream as a kid. The new things, like making massive Oreo towers with my little brothers. Even the newest, sitting across from me right now, blinking back with eyes like mirrors, the two of us coming to the same understanding.

  Their friendship may have ended years ago, but it’s lived on in us all this time.

  My mom reaches her hand across the table at the same time as Pietra, and they squeeze, and there is something so powerful in the pulse that it feels like some kind of spell is broken. It’s a thank you every bit as much as it’s an I’m sorry, the weight of it without the words. We hold our breath in the aftermath, like they were all bound to something for so long that they don’t know how to move themselves without it holding them back.

  And then my mom looks at me and Savvy and says, “Seems like they did, too.”

  thirty-three

  Only after we’re all fed, watered, and deposited in our respective hotel rooms does it occur to me how strange it is, being with my parents on my own like this. I’ve gotten so used to my brothers’ footsteps darting up and down the hall, the clanging of things that probably shouldn’t be clanging, the unsteady soundtrack of our steady lives. In the absence of it—in the just me, Mom, and Dad of it—I feel inexplicably littler and older at the same time.

  We end up sitting in the same configuration we did the last time I was here, them on the couch, me on the chair. I sensed A Talk long before we drifted into position for it, but this one already feels different. We’re looser. Lighter. A lot fewer secrets and, for the adults at least, a lot more wine.

  There isn’t exactly a silence to break, only a contemplative quiet, but my mom is the one who interrupts it.

  “I know the last few days have been rough on all of us. And there’s a lot to process and decide on, regarding how we’re going to move forward. But before we get to that, we wanted to talk to you about—”

  I shake my head. “You don’t have to.”

  “No,” says my dad, “we really do. What you were saying, about feeling like the…” He winces.

  “The replacement kid,” I supply, wincing right back. “And I—”

  “It couldn’t be further from how we felt, how we feel.”

  “I know—”

  “What we went through was—unimaginable. Even now. But when you were born—”

  “I know,” I say, firmer.

  Even if I didn’t know it in my bones, I can see it in their faces. I don’t need an explanation, because it isn’t an explanation, really. It’s a lifetime. It’s sixteen years of never having to wonder who to call or how long it will take for them to pick up. It’s looking at them and knowing I’m every bit as much theirs as they are mine.

  “Do you?”

  I look at them, and at my lap, considering. It feels important to say the right thing here, like the result of this conversation will mean more to them than it does to me. So I have to let them say it. I have to let them get this off their chests if I’m ever going to get anything off mine.

  I lean back, feeling the way I sometimes do when I take that first step off the ground—up a tree, or a rickety old ladder, or someone’s car. That sense of pushing off of something solid, leaving something behind, and thinking, No going back now.

  My mom takes a breath, and when she speaks, it sounds like she’s been waiting to say the words a lot longer than I’ve been waiting to hear them.

  “When Savvy happened—we were young, and confused, and … I honestly can’t remember a lot of that time. It’s murky to me still. Sometimes it’s easier not to think about it too much.” She clasps her hands together, like she is trying to press the words into the feeling, leaning forward so I can feel it, too. “But with you—I remember every moment. You were ours. Before you were even real.”

  She’s getting teary-eyed, and I go completely still, wondering if I should say something. But my dad is watching me over her shoulder, and something in his expression tells me to wait.

  “We decided on you together,” says my mom. “The day you were born was the happiest day of our lives. Like … something had lifted, maybe. Out of all the darkness. The thing we’d been waiting for.”

  I blink back my own tears. It’s not that I have trouble believing her. But it’s overwhelming, hearing it all like this. I think in life you can know you’re loved without peering too closely at the edges of it. It’s almost scary, seeing that there aren’t any—it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It just kind of is.

  My mom lowers her voice and says, “But if I were in your shoes, thinking what you thought, I’d be upset, too.”

  They’re both watching me—no, waiting. This is the part where I’m supposed to say my bit. Put it all out there. Talk to them the way Savvy told me I should, the way I haven’t, really, since Poppy died and everything felt like too much of a mess to untangle from the outside.

  But it’s one thing to finally have the resolve. It’s another thing entirely to find the words.

  “I think I was—surprised, is all.” I clear my throat. “And mad, maybe.”

  They nod, in sync the way they always are. I wait for one of them to say something, to give me an out so I don’t have to dig any deeper than that, but neither do.

  So I dig.

  “There was this big, giant secret that I didn’t see coming. And I know there were good reasons for why everything shook out the way it did, but it rattled me.” I look away so I don’t lose my nerve. “And I know you don’t think of me as—a replacement. But the other thing that I can’t stop thinking about is how Savvy’s kind of—well. She would have been a lot easier to handle than me.”

  My dad almost starts to laugh, but when I look up sharply and meet his eye, he blows out air instead. “Why would you think that?”

  It feels pathetic to say it out loud—worse, maybe, that I have to explain it to them. My parents and I have barely even discussed Savvy’s existence, so the jump from “I found out I had a sister” to “I might have a complex about how inadequate I sometimes feel compared to my sister” is justifiably more jarring to them than it is for me, having had a full month to marinate in it. But I feel like it’s something I have to say now, in one of these rare moments when there’s nothing to interrupt us, and real life seems suspended somewhere outside the rainy windows.

  “She’s a lot more—on track than I am, I guess. And sometimes with everything the way it’s gotten … the tutoring, and the extra prep courses, and everything being so intense … it kind of feels like you don’t think I’m on one.” I think I’m finished, but the last part slips out unbidden: “Like I’m letting you down.”

  Neither of them jumps in right away, and I feel my face burn. I don’t want to accuse them of anything, or blow this out of proportion. People have worse problems than their parents harping on them about their grades.

  But it feels bigger than that. Like it’s not rooted in my grades, but something deeper—the way S
avvy’s parents and their worries about her health were. And when my parents exchange this pointed glance, like they’re trying to decide which one is going to answer me, I’m pretty sure that hunch is right.

  “First of all,” says my dad, “we’ve never felt like you’re letting us down. Everyone needs extra help sometimes.”

  I fidget, shifting my weight on the seat and working up the nerve to keep meeting their eyes.

  “I’m just not sure if I … need that help.”

  I straighten my spine, channeling my inner Savvy. Channeling something that I must have been born with too and am only just figuring how to use. “Honestly, it just made things worse. I’ve been so busy that I don’t even have time to catch up after all the tutoring. And like, here—we had all this time. Free time. And I kept up with everything. I’m actually doing well.”

  They don’t seem wholly convinced of my theory, but receptive. Enough that my dad says, “Victoria mentioned that.”

  “She did?” I wasn’t aware that I was on her radar for anything other than gum smuggling and sneaking out before sunrise.

  My dad adds, “She also mentioned you’d made a lot of friends here.”

  “I have.”

  It’s not an attempt to stay. All things considered—the lying, the broken wrist, the still very confusing aftermath we all have to navigate—I’m lucky to be having a conversation this calm at all. I’m not going to try to take advantage of it by angling to go back.

  “And that’s been great, too. I don’t think I’ve made a lot of friends outside of Leo and Connie for … a while, really,” I say. My throat tightens, thinking of them both, but that is its own volcano of issues that I am not touching with a ten-foot pole tonight. “It made me feel—I don’t know. Excited for what comes after high school. I don’t think I’ve really even thought about it much, but it was nice, to meet new people. See new things. And I think … I want more time to do that. Not just when senior year is over.”