Chapter 12. Lenore #2
“It would be easier to tell you what isn’t wrong with it.”
“I’m listening.”
“The potatoes,” he says. “Though arguably, potatoes should never be served cold.”
I shake my head, but I’m smiling. “All right,” I say. “So I botched this whole thing, but that’s a little bit your fault.”
“I didn’t say you botched it.” His hand finds my knee beneath the table, stilling the leg I didn’t realize I was jiggling. His touch is like a bolt of lightning, fizzling through my body in every direction, discharging where my feet are planted on the ground.
After the hamburgers, we sing “Happy Birthday” and eat slices of devil’s food cake.
We watch the birthday girl open her gifts, including a remote-controlled Dilophosaurus with my name on the gift tag.
“Thank you, Uncle Cal and … Lenore,” Avery reads out.
Uncertain green eyes look up from the tag to search the various faces gathered around the table, because she doesn’t know who the name belongs to. She doesn’t know me.
I feel a twinge of resentment that Callan has been here—resentment not directed at anyone in particular, but rather at the situation as a whole, that I was excised from their lives while he was allowed to stay. He was allowed to be Uncle Cal, and I’ve been relegated to stranger.
Avery is already opening the next gift. I take a slug of wine and rise from my seat. “Restroom,” I mutter in response to Cal’s questioning look, and excuse myself from the table, taking my glass with me.
My glass isn’t even empty, but I stop in the kitchen to top it off and then wander the first floor in search of the bathroom. I stick my head inside the laundry room, the dining room, and a home office without luck.
Maybe it’s upstairs? I hesitate with one hand on the banister at the bottom of the staircase, where the wall is hung with family portraits: matching sweaters on a checkered picnic blanket, surrounded by crunchy autumn leaves; a black-and-white wedding portrait; Avery in a school photo, missing her two front teeth.
My feet seem to move of their own accord, taking the stairs one step at a time to look at the next picture, and then the next, glimpsing into the eight years that I’ve missed out on, until I find myself on the second floor.
A long hallway is lined with identical white doors, some cracked open, others shut tight.
Now that I’m here, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to poke around for the bathroom.
I ease open the first door on the right, hinges whining.
It reveals a cluttered, vibrant bedroom.
The walls are draped in circus-tent wallpaper, the twin bed unmade, a short bookshelf cluttered with colorful spines.
There are still signs of the whimsical nursery it had been, in the vintage-style jointed teddy bear that rests against the pillows and the pennant flags strung above the window, but they’re drowning in the noise of the girl that Avery has grown into.
Cartoon posters. Plastic animal figurines. A baseball bat leaning in the corner.
Behind the headboard, in a rustic wooden frame, a tiny watercolor of a rabbit in a hot-air balloon hangs crooked. I stand at the foot of the bed and sip my wine. I suppose she wouldn’t even know who painted it, my signature in the bottom corner near illegible.
“What are you doing in here?”
I yelp, wine sloshing in my glass but thankfully not splashing over. Shelby stands in the doorway with one hand resting on the brass handle, her expression unreadable.
“Shelby, I’m so sorry,” I say emphatically. “I wasn’t trying to be nosy. I was looking for the bathroom and then I just kind of—”
“It’s through the laundry room,” she interrupts.
I pinch the spot between my eyebrows. My entire body is aflame, immolated on a pyre of shame. “I assumed that was a closet.”
Shelby shrugs. “Old houses, you know.”
Yes, I do know. Plumbing wedged into odd corners, because there wouldn’t have been bathrooms when it was first built.
“I’ll, um—” I point past her head, and she steps aside. Her hand remains on the handle, like she’s waiting to make sure I leave so that she can shut the door tight behind me, make sure no one else makes the same mistake.
Mistake isn’t even the right word. A mistake would be poking my head through the door, recognizing that it’s the wrong room, and moving along. Not wandering inside to stare wistfully at something I painted more than eight years ago.
Without really meaning to, I linger in the doorway, staring into my wineglass. “Why did we stop being friends?”
The question is met with silence. After a split second’s hesitation, I lift my gaze to meet hers. Her expression is cagey—hazel eyes darting around my face like she’s searching for answers of her own.
I want to ask: What could you possibly want to know?
I wasn’t the one who stopped answering texts, who made excuses not to call.
I tried to be understanding, even then—she had a new baby, and was short on sleep, and didn’t have time for our weekly catch-ups anymore.
Still, as time wore on, it became clear that it was more than that. Our friendship no longer suited her.
“You didn’t know what I was going through postpartum,” she whispers.
It’s such an underwhelming explanation that a wet laugh bubbles out of me. I don’t even know when I started crying. Maybe when I saw the painting, still displayed above the bed, the same way it once hung expectantly over an empty crib. “I wanted to be there for you. You wouldn’t let me.”
“You were gone,” she says. “You couldn’t be there.”
“I tried,” I say, voice crackling. “I was coming home for Christmas. I was going to come see you and meet Avery, but you said you didn’t want to see me. I spent that whole winter break holed up with my grandmother, less than two miles away, and you want to claim that I wasn’t there?”
“I don’t know!” she cries. It’s the first real emotion I’ve dragged out of her, a fissure in her stony exterior, and it’s a relief, even for her to be frustrated with me.
It’s better than her not speaking to me at all.
“That’s what you don’t get. I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I was going stir-crazy, stuck at home in that apartment with this endless parade of people who wanted to see the baby, and no one, not a single person, thought to ask how I was doing. ”
“I would’ve asked,” I say weakly.
“I know. I know, but I needed—” Her eyes flutter closed, and she takes a shuddering breath. “I needed time. You wanted me to be the person I was before Avery, but everything had changed overnight. I had changed. I didn’t know how to be that person anymore.”
Understanding slams into me. “You cut me out so that you wouldn’t have to be.”
We’re silent for a moment.
“I am sorry,” she says, uncomfortably. “For what it’s worth.”
A wistful melancholy settles between us, the sense that if we could’ve said the right thing, put the right words to our feelings, maybe everything would’ve been different.
It can’t be, of course. There’s no erasing the past, but maybe there’s finding a way forward. “I’m sorry, too,” I say.
Shelby shakes her head, eyes glistening, not quite looking at me. “I should probably get back to the party.”
I nod. “Of course. And I still have to pee.”
A feeble laugh. “Come on,” she says. “I’ll make sure you don’t get lost.”