Chapter Seven #2
"You took her to taste our cake." My voice broke and climbed and I let it.
"I missed it because I was killing myself on a job your own family was catering—the one she was supposedly running—and you took Lola to taste it instead, and then the two of you decided together not to tell me, like I'm somebody who has to be managed—and now she 'accidentally' lets it slip in front of everyone, isn't that convenient, isn't that just—" I rounded on the family, on all of them, because some insane part of me still believed that if I laid it out plainly enough they'd finally see it.
"He skipped my father's first birthday since his heart stopped—for her.
He comes home at one in the morning—for her.
He believes every word out of her mouth over mine, every single time.
I watch the back of his head at every party we go to, because he's always turned toward her—fetching her a drink, checking she's all right, hanging on her every joke—like she's spun glass that'll crack if he looks away too long, while I stand there holding my own plate and pretending not to notice.
People have started saying it to my face—half this town, asking me at the Bluebird how I 'put up with it'—and I defend him, every single time, I tell them he's only being kind.
And today she handed me the wrong timeline and stood there and watched me take the fall for it, and every one of you watched her do it, and you think I'm the one who—"
"Beth." Rafael, low, embarrassed for me. "Mija, come on. That's enough now."
"She has nobody," Mari said, quiet, looking at me like I'd kicked a dog. "Her parents are dead, Beth. They were like family to us. Alonzo's known her since they were babies. You're really standing here accusing her of—over a cake?"
"It's not about the cake—"
"Then what is it about?" And that was Pilar.
Pilar, who calls me her daughter. She came and stood in front of me and took both my hands, the way she'd taken Lola's at that Sunday table, and her face was so kind and so certain and so completely, catastrophically wrong, and she said it gently, the way you'd tell a girl a hard truth for her own good:
"Listen to me. Mija. When you've been married as long as I have, you'll understand something.
Jealousy is poison. It is. It gets into a marriage and it eats it from the inside, and the only cure—the only one—is to decide, every day, that you trust your husband.
You are about to marry a good man. The best one I made.
" She squeezed my hands. "Don't let this little green thing in you grow.
You'll look back and you won't even recognize the woman who made all this noise over a friend and a cake. "
And that was the moment I stopped being hot and went cold.
I looked around the circle of them—really looked, slowly, one face at a time.
Rafael, who'd carved me the crackling before his own sons at a dozen Sunday dinners, staring down at the grass now, embarrassed on my behalf.
Mari, who I'd let myself believe was turning into a sister, looking at me like I'd kicked something small and defenseless.
Pilar's kind, certain, devastating face, still holding my hands, still waiting for me to come to my senses.
And Alonzo—my Alonzo, the man I was supposed to stand up in a church and hand my whole life to in March—standing a full step back from me, on their side of the air, his palms open and useless, saying nothing that meant anything at all.
I waited. I'll admit that to you. I stood there one second longer than I needed to and I waited for just one of them—any single one—to say hold on. Beth doesn't lie. Beth wouldn't make this up. Let her talk.
Nobody did.
And I understood it then, all at once and all the way down to the floor of me: I was alone in this.
Not lonely. Alone. There's a difference between those two things, and I learned it standing on that lawn in a dress I'd sweated through, in front of my own arch.
For two years I had folded myself into these people—learned their recipes, their inside jokes, the Spanish words for the things they loved.
I had given up my own family's Sunday table for this one.
I'd skipped my own brother's birthday, left my mother eating across an empty chair more nights than I could count, my father still mending—because I thought I was building something, because I thought that when the day finally came I'd be standing inside the circle and not out here on the wrong side of it.
And when it came down to the bone, when it actually, finally counted, not one of them was on my side of the line.
Not one. The parts had been cast a long time ago—the grieving orphan and the jealous girl—written in all those gray months I'd spent two hours away in a hospital with my back turned to this town, and there was no fact I could produce now, no timeline on my phone, no amount of simply being right, that would ever recast them.
The harder I pushed, the more I proved their point.
And the man I loved was going to stand there with his hands hanging open and let me lose, alone, in front of his whole family—rather than say my name, one time, on the right side of it.
Alonzo finally found his voice. "Beth, can we please just—let's go somewhere and talk, you're upset, this isn't—"
"No." I took my hands back from his mother. I was very calm now, and the calm scared me more than the shaking had. "No, you're all right. I'm being ridiculous. I'm sorry I made a scene at Brooke's wedding."
I picked my shears up off the linen table where I'd set them down a lifetime ago.
"You don't need me here," I said. I wasn't only talking about the wedding and I think, for one second, every one of them knew it. "You never have. Lola can handle the rest of the timeline—she's so good at timelines. You won't even notice I'm gone."
And I walked back across that beautiful lawn I'd spent a week building, past my own arch, past the white aisle, and I left.
? ? ?
I made it to the gravel lot before my hands started shaking too hard to find my keys.
The thing about a wedding is that it's nothing but witnesses.
Two hundred of them, half the town in their good clothes, and I'd done my coming-apart in a place with the acoustics of an amphitheater.
Sherry Dukes was near the lot having a cigarette she didn't want her husband to see, and her thumbs were already moving over her phone before I'd even reached my van, and she gave me a look—that oh, honey look, wet with delight pretending to be sympathy—that told me the Hartsong Buzz would have a post up before the bride and groom finished their vows.
By Sunday the Pinch sisters would have me throwing a tantrum and hurling flowers.
By Monday I'd be the woman who couldn't handle her fiancé having friends.
I sat in the hot van and I did not cry, which surprised me.
What I felt instead, under the shaking, was something clear and cold and almost like relief, and the clarity of it lifted the hair on my arms, because I recognized it as the first honest thing I'd let myself feel in months.
They thought it was jealousy. Pilar had looked me dead in the eye and named the green thing in me and warned me to starve it before it grew.
But I knew the difference. I have always known the difference between being jealous and being right, and somewhere on that lawn, with a tablet held toward everyone but me and a secret detonated at exactly the perfect moment, I had stopped being able to pretend I didn't.
I started the van.
I didn't know yet what I was going to do. I only knew that I was finished being told I was crazy by people who'd never once looked behind the curtain—and that I'd spent two years taking everyone's word for who Lola was, and not one hour finding out for myself.
That, it turned out, was about to change.