Chapter Thirty-Five Maddie
Chapter Thirty-Five
Maddie
I think I killed the tofurkey,” my sister-in-law, Bee, announces from the kitchen while Mom hovers over her simmering homemade cranberry sauce like a witch closely monitoring her brew.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, babe, but it was never alive,” my brother says as he runs in from the backyard where he’s been frying a real turkey with Bee’s moms, who are visiting from Texas.
Bee lets out a fretful whimper, and from where I’m setting the table I can see the tears brimming.
Nolan drops the utensils and serving platter in his arms and rushes over to coo at Bee, who is in her third trimester.
Apparently, a few months ago, her pregnant body decided that she could no longer stand to eat meat, citing the texture.
Bee, who loves a Thanksgiving spread, was determined to make the best tofurkey of all time.
As I lay my last utensil, I make my way into the kitchen and hover behind Mom to get a whiff of all the various sides she has waiting in the wings.
“The sides are the best part of Thanksgiving,” I assure Bee. “One year when we were kids, the only thing I ate was Mom’s rolls with homemade cranberry sauce and little molded pieces of butter in the shape of corn, and you know what? Best Thanksgiving ever.”
Bee takes a deep breath as Mom turns and gives me a soft kiss on the cheek.
LA has been good to my mother. She’s thriving in her little studio apartment behind Bee and Nolan’s house, and when I flew in on Monday, she walked me through her garden, pointing out all the different things she would be using for Thanksgiving dinner.
It made me think of Bram, and that made me cry.
It only took a split second for Mom to get over the shock of seeing me cry before she was pulling me into her arms and rocking me against her chest.
“You’re r-right,” Bee says as she absentmindedly strokes her belly and Nolan cradles her hips.
It’s sort of gross to see your brother be so physically affectionate, but goddamn is he happy. It’s actually a little painful to watch at the moment.
Bram and his snakes rallied together and got me moved into one of Sloane’s apartments above The Dry Bean. In fact, I can see my cozy patch of sidewalk where a very amused Leo and a stern Bram found me on Halloween night.
Bram insisted on getting the place ready for me while I stayed with the girls. When Junie and I drove over later that night with the rest of my belongings and a hot pizza, I found the kitchen stocked with the essentials and my cactus on the windowsill with handwritten instructions from Bram.
I cried. It was the first time since I’d ended things with him, and those tears broke some sort of seal, because over the course of the last two weeks I have cried more than I have in my entire life.
It didn’t help that I’d also just learned that Gentry won his election within thirty minutes of the polls closing.
It was a blatant confirmation that everything people like Penelope Pike and Veronica Balentine preached was true.
The focus groups mattered. The donors mattered.
Getting into office required the right package, and there wasn’t much room to veer from the plan.
So maybe ending things with Bram really was the only choice I had if I wanted to keep hope alive for a future of my own.
I wanted Bram to hate me. I wanted it so badly. In fact, I was angry at him for not hating me. How could he not see how much easier this would all be if he could just hate me?
Junie stayed with me for a while that first night. She turned a movie on and didn’t mind or push too hard when I spent most of the evening just staring at that prickly pear cactus.
At first, Bram’s gentle demeanor felt like a game to be won. Who could out-polite the other? But after a day or two, I remembered the way he’d described his divorce from Sara and how, for him, the end of a relationship required just as much care as the relationship itself.
It was healthy and good, and when I got over the urge of wishing he would just scream at me, it began to hurt.
Truly hurt. The immediate moments and days after the breakup were full of me appearing overly confident in my decision in an attempt to convince myself that I’d done the right thing.
And then came the hollow sadness as I began to realize that the choice I made wasn’t just about ending something I’d sworn was only physical.
It was about choosing between two very different lives.
The life I thought I should want and the one that took me completely by surprise.
I don’t know how long it will take me to decide if I’ve made the right decision, but what I do know is that after living so long in the service of someone else’s ambition, I have chosen a future that belongs to me. At the very least, I can say that.
Nolan heads back outside to monitor the turkey with his mothers-in-law while Mom takes over the job of salvaging the tofurkey and I help Bee on drinks.
She pauses for a minute and sets the water pitcher down while she presses a hand to her stomach.
“Everything okay?” I ask. I am totally good with kids, but I don’t know the first thing about being pregnant, so as far as I know Bee could turn to me and say she’s going into labor.
She nods once and then lets out a long burp followed by a happy sigh. “Sorry, my whole life is basically a Russian roulette of bodily functions right now.” She frowns. “I almost peed my pants last week.”
“That sounds terrifying,” I tell her.
“It is . . . humbling, and I say that as someone who actually got stuck while filming a stuck porn.”
That makes me laugh for the first time in weeks. Bee is a semiretired sex worker turned bona fide Hollywood actress and is way too good for my brother, but at least he knows it.
“The dark hair is a good look, by the way.” She nudges me with her elbow. “Your mom actually cried when you sent her a selfie from the salon. You just look like you.”
Mom tried to hide her worry when I began to change into this predetermined person whose purpose was to complement Gentry, but the blond hair really bothered her.
She tried to disguise her concern and tell me that it was a nice change or that it was good to be adventurous, but I felt angry with her for not seeing that this was what I’d wanted.
Of course, my mother knows better than anyone else that I have to make my own mistakes. Even if that mistake cheats on you after encouraging you to turn into a person you hardly know, only to dispose of you for never quite fulfilling their vision of the ideal partner.
The rest of Thanksgiving Day is a rotating door of familiar faces from the life Bee and Nolan have built here. There’s a FaceTime call from his best friend, Kallum, his wife, Winnie, and their ever-growing brood, who are back in Kansas City visiting family.
Bee’s best friend, Sunny, swings through with her husband and Nolan’s former bandmate, Isaac (who also holds the honor of being my first crush—along with that of many other girls, except I had to suffer the pain of him witnessing me hit puberty).
They only stay for a moment on their way to spend a month visiting every Christmas market they can manage in search of the perfect hot nuts and with a scheme to hit as many photo booths as they can.
Their oddly specific plan feels like an inside joke that none of us are privy to.
The monthlong journey will culminate in their meeting up with Isaac’s old bodyguard, Krysta, and her wife, Addison, while the four of them hole up for the holidays in Edinburgh.
They are very adamant that I one day visit their favorite hotel there, The Balmoral, and say hello to their favorite whisky ambassador, Fraser.
I nod along and jot his name down in my phone.
I smile and pretend like there will ever be a time when I might want to go on a grand adventure like that with someone I love.
Around dessert, we are treated to a parade of Bee’s former colleagues from her adult-film career.
There’s Luca, the costume designer, and his animator husband, Angel.
They tell us about their (really, Luca’s) plans to host a New Year’s party while in LA that would make Martha Stewart jealous.
And then there’s Steph and her husband, Teddy, the sometimes porn producer and the current name in the Christmas movie biz.
I remember meeting him as an older teenager and him always slipping me hard candy and five-dollar bills like I was still young enough to believe in Santa Claus.
He and his wife leave early because they have to get home to the two absolutely unstable German shepherds they have recently adopted before they both escape their crates and eat the couch for the second time.
By the time the house is quiet and free of visitors, Bee’s moms are yawning from the two-hour time difference and excuse themselves to bed for an early night.
In a totally out of character move, Mom leaves the kitchen full of dirty dishes for tomorrow. “All I want is for the four of us to sit down with some hot cider and turn on the fireplace,” she says.
“Mom, it’s seventy-four degrees out,” I tell her as my body melts into the velvet sofa that is flush with beautiful throw pillows as well as slightly disturbing embroidered ones with a focus on eyeballs that speak to Bee and Nolan’s offbeat style.
“Don’t tell Greta Thunberg,” Bee says as she flops down across from me and adjusts the air-conditioning app on her phone to an obscenely low number that would definitely piss off Greta.
Nolan flicks on the fireplace and Mom bustles in with a tray carrying four steaming mugs.
Sitting here in this dark room, surrounded by the three closest people in my life, I’m able to inhale deeply for the first time in weeks.