Track 7 Veronica
Track 7
Veronica
Veronica
“I don’t get why you are going. I never even heard you mention these people before.”
Veronica (Silver) Morgan looked up over her suitcase and grimaced at her husband. It was an absurd thing to say. Veronica may not have detailed her sordid past to Larry over their twenty-year marriage, but he certainly knew plenty about it. And if he wasn’t listening, which was often the case, there was a New York Times bestselling novel that included enough barely disguised detail about Veronica to raise eyebrows. The tell-all of sorts, chronicling one summer in the small beach town back East where Veronica and her sister Beatrix had come of age, didn’t cause as big a stir as when Charles Webb turned Pasadena upside down with his “fictional” account of a recent graduate’s affair with Mrs.Robinson. But it got people talking—especially the ones from their little sliver of sand who had always wondered what had come between the two Silver sisters, whose rift had become fodder for small-town gossip.
Larry knew Veronica wasn’t an angel before he married her. He used to joke that her fiery red hair was sourced from the fire in her belly. But years later, when the local writer’s book had made quite a point of sullying her reputation, he learned more than he had previously imagined. So did Veronica. The author, her dad’s neighbor at the beach, let her read a chapter or two in advance and asked permission not to change her (maiden) name. “It’s the least you could do for your sister,” he said. Shocked that the reason her sister didn’t speak to her was revealed in its pages, she agreed. She had hoped that the sacrifice would encourage Bea to forgive and forget. It did not.
Veronica knew she had hurt and betrayed Beatrix in the worst way possible, but until then, she didn’t know the repercussions of her betrayal. She signed the author’s release, only asking that he change the name of her town and her husband’s line of work. The author moved them to Palo Alto and wrote that her husband had made his fortune in tech when in truth they lived in LA, where he had got in early with crypto.
The discussion had reminded her of the sidewalk game she and her sister would play at the beach, back when they were young and still thick as thieves.
“V my name is Veronica and my husband’s name is Vance and we come from Venice where we sell vaginas.” They would fall to the ground laughing.
It may have been the last time they’d laughed like that together, certainly the last time they laughed like that together on the subject of Veronica’s vagina.
She moved to the bathroom to pack up her makeup and toiletries. Larry followed.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said, pouting.
“Well then, you will know how I have felt for most of our marriage.”
She stopped to look at herself in the magnified mirror. Just last week she had noticed the appearance of jowls. They were ever so slight, but they were there, on either side of her mouth, threatening a perpetual droop. You couldn’t get filler for jowls. No dermabrasion or Fraxel or cream made from the womb of an octopus would counter the gravitational pull of time. Veronica’s usual expectation of being the prettiest woman in the room would not hold up well with jowls. Jowls were next-level aging. She was not ready for next-level aging.
She finally answered her husband, as best as she could.
“You don’t get it, Larry. All these years I’ve felt like a pariah at the beach, and they’ve finally included me. I am invited to Renee and Jake’s wedding and I’m going, with or without you.”
“That last part is funny, V, because I don’t remember you inviting me to come with you,” Larry quipped.
She stopped packing up her toiletries and asked, “Larry, would you like to come with me to Fire Island to stay at my dad’s house and attend a wedding on a boat?”
She knew it was an empty invitation. Among other things, Larry got seasick on a float in their pool.
He rolled his eyes. “You know how busy I am at work right now.”
“That’s what I thought,” she scoffed. Larry was always busy at work these days.
“What about the kids?” he tried.
“The kids? They’ll reach out if their debit card balance gets low. Beyond transferring money, you should be fine.”
She was being sarcastic, but it wasn’t far from the truth. Like most parents of college-age kids, the only way she got hers to call her was by emptying their accounts or changing the Netflix password. Her daughter was OK enough, an emerging filmmaker who still said “I love you” before hanging up the phone, but her son hadn’t offered her a kind word in years. He was emerging, too, she feared, an emerging a-hole.
Veronica’s role as a mother, the one she previously touted as the job of a lifetime, was barely a walk-on part anymore. Her status as a wife felt equally nonexistent. V had no idea what she would do with the rest of her life. She didn’t play golf or tennis or cards. She had no hobbies beyond stealing a Marlboro Light from the pool boy every week and sneaking out behind her prized rosebushes and forsythia to smoke it.
“Will your spinster sister be there?”
“That’s not nice, Larry. And she is no longer a spinster.”
“It’s funny to me that you jump to defend that woman when she blew off our wedding and never met our children.”
For a long time, Veronica had considered that last part unforgivable, but their mother’s death had left a void that only her sister could fill.
“Blood is thicker than crypto,” she retorted, proud of her comeback.
Even though she might not speak to Bea, she would still walk through fire for her. She was pretty sure the reverse was true as well. That familial obligation to go to bat for a sibling had been drilled into them by their parents. Despite all the trouble they’d had, remnants of that early training still existed.
Maybe this invitation, given that the bride was Bea’s best friend, meant that her sister was ready to talk. To forgive. Hope springs eternal, Veronica thought, before wondering if she was reading too much into the situation. Her stomach filled with knots as she placed the last packing cube in her Louis Vuitton suitcase and zipped it shut.